Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge opens for entries

Entrepreneurs, please don’t let the name of our contest scare you.

As we launch our 15th annual Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge today, we are putting out our annual call for entries. But we aren’t looking for long, laboriously detailed business plans. Quite the contrary.

More and more, today’s investors in very early stage companies want to see a succinct presentation of your concept and how you plan to turn it into a success. We do, too.

If you have a business idea or an operating startup that is less than two years old, you can enter the Challenge, our annual celebration of South Florida entrepreneurship. Sponsored by the Pino Global Entrepreneurship Center at Florida International University, our contest has three tracks — a Community Track, open to all South Floridians; an FIU Track, open to students and alumni of that university; and a High School Track, co-sponsored by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

Your entry may be up to three pages and you may attach one additional page for a photo, rendering, diagram or spreadsheet if you wish. Think of it as a meaty executive summary. Experts in all aspects of entrepreneurship — serial entrepreneurs, executives, investors, advisors and finance specialists (see judge bios on MiamiHerald.com/challenge) — will judge your short plan. In doing so, they will be looking at your product or service’s value to the customer, market opportunity, business model, management team and your marketing and financial strategies. See the rules on page 22, which also include tips on preparing your entry.

Your entry is due by 11:59 p.m. March 11. Entries should be sent to challenge@miamiherald.com, fiuchallenge@miamiherald.com or highschoolchallenge@miamiherald.com.

Don’t worry, we’re here to help!

“Frame your business from your customer’s perspective and not yours. Rather than diving into a detailed explanation of your product or service, a more compelling way to tell your business story is to clearly share the problem that you are solving for your customers and how your business is different, better, faster, cooler, cheaper, smarter,” says Melissa Krinzman, managing director of Venture Architects and a veteran Challenge judge.

On Feb 26 at 6:30 p.m. at Miami Dade College, we’ll host a free Business Plan Bootcamp, where you can bring your working plan with you for advice from experts, including Krinzman. Find the sign-up link on MiamiHerald.com/challenge.

And each week in Business Monday and on MiamiHerald.com/challenge, we’ll be bringing you advice and answering your questions. You can post your questions on the Q&A on MiamiHerald.com/challenge or email your questions to me at ndahlberg@miamiherald.com. Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter.

The top six finalists in the Community and FIU Tracks will present their 90-second elevator pitches for our popular video contest. Last year our People’s Pick contest drew more than 18,000 votes.

On May 6, in a special section of Business Monday, we will profile the winners — the judges’ top three selections in each track plus the People’s Pick winners. Along the way, we will unveil semifinalists and finalists to keep the suspense building.

Today, though, we are looking back on the entrepreneurial journeys of our 2012 winners. Funding was a nearly universal challenge, and many faced setbacks in developing their platforms. Throughout the entry period, we’ll also look back on other winners from the past 14 years.

Show us what you’ve got. Let’s make this the best Challenge yet.

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Free-market conservative leads Gov. Rick Scott’s jobs agency

TALLAHASSEE --
The Department of Economic Opportunity is one of the most critical agencies in Gov. Rick Scott’s administration, and it has run through four directors — two permanent, two interim — since it launched 16 months ago.

After the fleeting tenures of three bureaucrats and a banker, Scott’s handpicked director, Jesse Panuccio, began his term as the agency’s fifth director three weeks ago.

Panuccio, a 32-year-old attorney, is an outside-the-box choice for jobs chief. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2006 and has been on Scott’s legal team since 2011, becoming the governor’s chief litigant last year.

After defending some of Scott’s most controversial laws in the courtroom, Panuccio faces the crucial task of executing the governor’s job-creation strategy from the state’s official boardroom.

“I chose Jesse for three reasons,” Scott said in a statement. “He is a problem solver, he is a skilled manager of people and he is experienced at holding people and organizations accountable.”

After graduating from Harvard Law, Panuccio clerked for a federal judge and then joined a boutique law firm in Washington, D.C. The New Jersey native said he took the Florida Bar Exam after spending much of his childhood vacationing in the Sunshine State, and was drawn to Scott’s campaign message in 2010. He left Washington and joined the governor’s transition team as deputy general counsel in January 2011.

Throughout Panuccio’s brief professional career, he has fought legal battles in support of conservative causes ranging from gun rights to traditional marriage to state’s rights. His new position will require a full embrace of Scott’s conservative job-creation agenda: less regulation, taxation and litigation.

“My overall view is that the economy, the free market flourishes when government gets out of the way,” he said.

The Department of Economic Opportunity, or DEO, is 1,600-person agency responsible for overseeing many of the state’s economic development initiatives. Created by Scott in 2011, DEO runs Florida’s unemployment compensation system, collaborates job training efforts with regional workforce boards and oversees business incentives programs. As the $140,000-a-year director, Panuccio leads efforts to coordinate local and regional job-creation efforts, and implement an overarching economic development vision for the future.

He shares Scott’s small-government approach to creating jobs, and embraces using taxpayer incentives to draw companies to Florida.

“I do think incentives, especially in a recessionary period like this, are a targeted way of reducing taxation and enhancing the business climate for competitive projects,” he said. “It is a reality right now that we’re competing with other states and other countries for these companies.”

So far, Scott’s approach on jobs has had mixed results. Florida’s economy has improved in the last two years with a rapid decline in unemployment, but job growth is considerably slower than the national pace and wages continue to lag.

Meanwhile, DEO has come under fire — and a federal probe — for restricting access to unemployment compensation benefits, making Florida one of the least generous states in the nation for those who are eligible for aid.

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Vine Has a Porn Problem Because Of Course It Does

It’s actually pretty surprising that it took everyone three days to figure out that Twitter’s new cell phone camera-powered video sharing app, Vine, is perfect for porn. Vine has it all. It can record reasonably high quality videos of anything you want, on-the-go, and post it publicly for all the Internet to see. You add hashtags so that people can easily find special interest content. There’s even a little comments section so that you can share your thoughts about the distinctively addictive six-second loops. Heck, we’d be surprised if people didn’t immediately start to post pictures of their genitals doing what genitals do. They probably did, actually. Everyone else was just too busy watching pictures of their friends pets and children to notice.

RELATED: The Chinese Want to Know Why Their News Is on Twitter and They Aren’t

But alas, by Sunday everyone had noticed. Although it had already been mentioned on smaller tech blogs, the Vine porn problem started to become widely known after New York Times reporter Nick Bilton tweeted, “Friend: ‘So are people using Vine for porn yet?’ Me: “‘Nah, I don’t think so.’ Friend: ‘Check the hashtag #porn.” Both: “Holy ****!’” And the thing is, he’s totally right. TechCrunch published a post on the NSFW trick — #NSFW works for porn seekers, too, by the way — broaching the topic of Apple‘s App Store coming down hard on the adult-only content. It’s against the rules, see, and Apple has a history of yanking apps that become magnets for all things naughty. The Verge followed up a few minutes later with the headline, “Apple has a porn problem, and it’s about the get worse.”

RELATED: How Not to Get Censored on Twitter

This got us thinking: These App Store restrictions on pornographic content have been around as long as the App Store. Surely in the past five or so years, the moderators know a porn magnet when they see one. Vine is hardly the first video-sharing app to make it through the approval process, not to mention the many photo-sharing apps. (And Apple’s certainly not afraid of enforcing those rules, as we learned when it yanked the 500px app after it started to become home to “pornographic images and material.”) It’s no anomaly that Vine made through, though. As virtually every new video- or photo-sharing service has shown us since the dawn of the Internet, from Flickr to ChatRoulette, it’s very difficult to keep these sites or apps G-rated. So the companies either learn how to police it well, like Flickr does, or they wither and die, as ChatRoulette did.

RELATED: Twitter’s New Hashtag Project Sounds Risky

So it’s hard to believe that the App Store didn’t consider the fact that people might upload pictures of their penises to Vine. It’s more likely that they did and decided to see how Twitter would deal with it, when it became a problem. After all, Vine is not going to be the last video-sharing app to be built and it certainly won’t be the last porn-friendly app to be built either. So Twitter gets to play guinea pig and navigate the tricky terrain of moderating user-generated content in real time. It’s a good thing they already have a boatload of experience doing that on Twitter! See, look how fast they came up with a solution. A company statement reads:

RELATED: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy of Twitter’s New Censorship Rules

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

Twitter being Twitter — that is, big proponents of the free flow of information — they stop short of defining “inappropriate” in Vine’s terms and conditions. Unlike Twitter, which has been free to operate on the whole of the Internet, however, Vine lives in Apple’s house now. If Twitter’s hands off policy doesn’t do enough to keep smut off the iPhone, Apple will surely pull the plug, and then, well — then we’ll be back to where we were last week.

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PICS: Winners of the 2013 SAG Awards

PICS: Winners of the 2013 SAG Awards

Some of Hollywood's biggest stars gathered Sunday night to honor acting achievements at the 2013 Screen Actors Guild Awards. Anne Hathaway -- winner of the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role for Les Misérables -- kicks off our gallery of the stars accepting their handsome statuettes!

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Singer sewing change

Paul Singer appears to have changed his tune on Argentina.

After a decade of aggressively pursuing $1.44 billion he claims the country owes him and a group of bondholders, including successfully pressing Ghana to seize a locally docked Argentine naval vessel to help pay down the debt, the billionaire New York hedge fund mogul is sounding like Bobby McFerrin in “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Singer’s Elliott Management now feels Argentina will do the right thing, according to recent court filings.

It’s quite a change from last fall’s legal arguments, in which Singer urged a federal judge to hurry up and force Buenos Aires to put some of the monies owed into escrow, citing the country’s president’s plot to avoid the debt payment.

Such a move would have put Argentina into default.

Now there’s nothing but love and trust. Well, at least trust.

“It is hard to believe that Argentina will needlessly trigger yet another default and cause the acceleration of tens of billions of dollars in principal repayment obligations” to a second, rival group of bondholders, Elliott’s lawyer, Ted Olson, told a federal appeals court, according to a filing late Friday.

Elliott and Argentina have been sparring in court for almost a decade over defaulted debt Elliott purchased at a steep discount. The $21 billion hedge fund demands to be paid in full, with interest. About 92 percent of the bondholders entered an exchange offer and accepted a 70 percent haircut.

A dozen of these rival, so-called exchange bondholders, including such names as BlackRock, Alliance Bernstein, Gramercy and Perry Capital, have asked the appeals court to throw out a lower court ruling that would force Argentina to pay the Elliott group each time it makes a payment to them.

The rivals have argued they won’t get their money if that happens because Argentina President Cristina Kirchner has vowed the country will never pay so-called “holdout creditors” who refused to go along with two separate debt restructurings in recent years.

Kirchner’s comments led to speculation the country was devising a way to pay the other bondholders outside of the US, which would create a technical default. Elliott repeated those speculations in several briefs recently.

Singer’s change of tune comes after an appeals court temporarily overturned part of the lower court ruling ordering the escrow payment.

An appeals court hearing is scheduled for Feb. 27.

mcelarier@nypost.com

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Miami Lakes company growing its brand of skin care products

For decades, Vivant Skin Care has formulated creams, serums, cleansers and tonics to treat such dermatological conditions as acne, aging and hyperpigmentation.

Family owned and linked to Dr. James E. Fulton, who co-developed the anti-aging formula Retin-A, the company built its reputation with medically tested therapies aimed at improving skin.

Now, like a complexion that has undergone the metamorphosis of time, Vivant is altering its manufacturing and sales structure and adding products, emerging from the economic downturn with a new plan for the future.

“Now we’re stabilized and looking forward to growth,” said Fulton’s daughter, Chief Executive, Kelly Fulton-Kendrick.

Founded in 1990, Vivant produces a line of 30 skin care products, all formulated in-house, and priced from $15 to $100. The products target both females and males, ages 13 and up.

“Our target market is people who have serious skin care problems and need solutions,” Fulton-Kendrick said. “Vitamin A is the best for affecting change in the skin.”

The clinical skin care products, packaged simply in white bottles and amber glass containers, have remained the company’s mainstay, as the business has transformed.

In mid-2011, Vivant decided to adjust its sales structure, to sell, for the first time, to online retailers like DermStore.com, SkinCareRX.com and amazon.com, as well as to make its products available on its own website, vivantskincare.com. It was a major change in course after more than 20 years of having its products sold only at spas and doctors’ offices.

“So now, we’re a mix of wholesale to skin care professionals and Internet retailers, and we’re selling directly to consumers through our own website,” Fulton-Kendrick said.

Mike Nelson, marketing manager at SkinCareRx.com, said Vivant, which it has sold since November, has “done very well for a new brand to our site,” surpassing some brands that have been on its site for over a year. He declined to provide figures.

SkinCareRX took on only 5 percent of the brands that approached it last year, he said, and had undertaken a rigorous review of Vivant.

“They have a good loyalty base and get great reviews,” Nelson said.

Along with changes in its sales system, in January 2012, Vivant moved from Medley to Miami Lakes, doubling its space to 11,000 square feet to accommodate manufacturing, which it brought in house to reduce costs. It had outsourced manufacturing to a lab in Costa Mesa, Calif., that it had previously owned and later sold.

Inside its warehouse space in a commercial business complex, a small staff handles manufacturing, shipping and packaging. All orders are taken by customer service and fulfilled onsite. A room used as an educational center allows vendors and aestheticians to learn about the products.

Martina Echeveria, international trade specialist at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Miami U.S. Export Assistance Center, who is helping Vivant get a distributor in the Dominican Republic, said she recently nominated the company for a South Florida Manufacturer of the Year award. The awards are given by the South Florida Manufacturers Association.

“Their products are good and 100 percent U.S. made,” she said.

At Vivant’s offices, a lab area is used by Dr. Fulton for research and development. He also maintains a practice at Flores Dermatology in South Miami.

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Miami city manager will be out recovering from knee surgery in early February

Who is going to fill in for Miami City Manager Johnny Martinez while he is recovering from knee surgery in early February?

The honors will go to Assistant City Manager Luis Cabrera, according to a Friday afternoon memo from Mayor Tomás Regalado.

Under the city charter, the mayor is responsible for appointing an acting city manager. But the commission has the power to override Regalado’s pick.

“Anyone who is up in that chair needs to be ratified by this commission,” Commissioner Frank Carollo said at a meeting Thursday.

That could present a challenge. There are no commission meetings between now and Martinez’s surgery.

At Thursday’s meeting, Martinez said he had spoken to Regalado, and recommended rotating the job among Cabrera, Assistant City Manager Alice Bravo and Chief Financial Officer Janice Larned.

Regalado wasn’t in the commission chambers during the discussion.

Carollo, using the language in the city charter. raised questions about Regalado naming “a qualified officer” to the post.

“This is the city of Miami,” Carollo said, referencing criticism that high-level employees have been hired without meeting the minimum qualifications for the job.

City Attorney Julie O. Bru said commissioners could convene a special meeting if they had any qualms.

It wasn’t clear if any planned to raise objections.

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Google reportedly ‘actively exploring’ the smartwatch market

In October, Google (GOOG) was granted a patent for a smartwatch with a flip-up display, however it was assumed that the concept, like most patents, would never move beyond the drawing board. A new report from Business Insider claims that the company is now “actively exploring” the idea of producing its own smartwatch and is even looking into ways it could market such a device. Information is slim and it is unclear what size the device would be or if it would even run the company’s Android operating system. Business Insider cautioned that the project is still in a “very early stage” and “it remains to be seen if Google will actually end up bringing a smart watch to market.” As the Pebble has shown, however, there is clearly a market for smartwatches.

[More from BGR: Unlocking your smartphone will be illegal starting next week]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Exclusive PIC: 2013 SAG Awards Seating Chart GigaPan Photo

Where the stars will be sitting at this year’s SAGs?

You don't have to wait until Sunday to see which celebs will be seated together! ET has your first look at the 2013 SAG Awards seating chart.

Pics: The 10 Best SAG Awards Dresses of All Time

Explore our exclusive interactive GigaPan (high-res panoramic photo) below!

Related: Pick The Winners with ET's SAG Awards Ballot!

Don't miss the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, airing Sunday, January 27 at 8pm on TNT and TBS.

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Dress up, dudes

Young men starting their first jobs and veterans who’ve recently been promoted or switched to working in an office with a different dress code could all use some style guidance, particularly if their attire is supposed to fall under the nebulous “business-casual” category.

Trunk Club will help sartorially challenged guys get the high-end clothes they need without having to go shopping.

After you sign up online, a stylist will contact you to provide a consultation. In addition to basic information about your body type and hair and eye color, you can tell your stylist what situations you need clothes for (e.g., a new job, important meetings with clients) and what types of clothes you want.

You can also negotiate a budget for the clothes that will be shipped to you.

A trunk of roughly 10 items, along with a hand-written note about why the enclosed clothes were chosen, will be sent to you for free.

You have 10 days to try on your prospective duds, and you can return any items that you don’t want, also for free, courtesy of a prepaid FedEx return label. You only have to pay for the clothes you keep, and the price tags are on all of the items.

You can then talk to your stylist about subsequent trunks whenever you need some new gear.

Although Trunk Club focuses on business-casual attire, if you need some suits, they can provide those, too.

A typical trunk will have roughly $1,500 worth of merchandise, and customers usually keep about a third of that, so your first shipment of clothes will likely end up costing you $500. The pricing for individual items is similar to that of upscale department stores.

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