Tech.Co’s Startup of the Year Competition and Mixer, celebrated in Miami Beach Thursday, showcased an intriguing, wide-ranging mix of ideas and products.

There were apps to connect users through sports (SportsBuddy); offering face-to-face video messaging (Tracks) and helping people donate to their favorite charity (Traca); sites connecting patients and dentists (123 Patient Portal) and to help physicians educate their patients about their health concerns (VideoMD).

Listenup.to offered a Web service that turns written articles into audio. There were projects focusing on political and social principles, such as Apretaste.com, which aims to connect Cubans to the Internet; but also startups offering eminently practical business solutions, such as Liveanswer.com, an answering service software presented as “the Uber of call centers,” Metricsco, an analytics service, and uxgofer.com, a tool for user experience research. And not everything was software.

Nawboi Technologies presented what they call “a revolutionary” camera mount. HFactor, offered a product that infuses hydrogen into water to increase hydration and recovery, while GenSmart exhibited a battery-like, small hybrid power system, on a drone.

A crowd estimated at 170 people had a chance to explore the products up close and ask questions of the principals of the 13 competing startups, which were set up expo-style at WeWork, the new co-working space in Miami Beach. They then heard short-and-to-the-point pitches from each startup. The event was part of a 10-month-long series of regional startup competitions and mixers, hosted by Tech.co., formerly Tech Cocktail, which launched its Miami branch in 2013 with the support of Knight Foundation. 

Other stops for the Startup of the Year Competition and Mixer have included Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and New York, and the tour will continue in Chicago (Aug. 20), Southeastern Virginia (Aug. 27) and Washington, D.C. (Sept. 9). The selection process includes both online startup competitions and regional pitch events. Tech.co readers and live audiences then vote for their favorite startups. Thursday, those in attendance selected Liveanswer.com, while the online audience chose Tracks.

Both get to participate in Tech.Co’s Celebrate 2015 in Las Vegas Oct. 4-6. Prizes include an opportunity to be accepted into a top business accelerator program and a Consumer Electronics Association package including floor space at its annual show.

Increasingly, Miami has been recognized for its growing startup community. In June, the Kauffman Index, a measurement released annually by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, ranked Miami second nationally in startup activity, only behind Austin, Texas. Last week’s showcase put Miami’s entrepreneurial spirit on display with a range of innovative businesses.

Albizu Garcia and Rafael Torres, co-founded listenup.to as a way of “scratching a personal itch,” said Garcia, taking a moment from pitching to visitors. “We wanted something like this, and it simply wasn’t available. What started as a side project became a real product that actually has a lot of traction.”

But while, if by Thursday’s sampling, the budding startup ecosystem continues to encourage local entrepreneurs, some challenges remain. Most notably, the issue for some remains finding the investors educated in the process, risks and rewards of startups.

Veteran successful entrepreneurs Joaquin de Soto and Jorge F. Miranda, who co-founded GenSmart, are in no rush to look for capital. “We basically have been using or own money,” said de Soto, an MIT grad, engineer and inventor whose previous startups “combined sold tens of millions of copies of software with cumulative sales of more than $500 million.”

“We’ve had enough success that we can use our own money,” said de Soto. “We would like the right investment partner. The biggest issue [with investors in South Florida] is they want revenue before they invest. We are not that kind of company. We want an investor before we have revenue because when you are doing hardware, one of the first capital-intensive parts is manufacturing. So you have to build inventory and you have to build up the company, the team: sales, support, and logistics.”

“We would like to stay [in South Florida],” he said. As for the startup ecosystem in South Florida, “There are a lot of people trying, but I haven’t seen a lot of companies that I would call up and running.”

From her vantage point at the edge of the room, Jacqueline Stetson Pastore, founder and CEO of UX gofer, observed the proceedings with a distinct, and different, perspective. Born and raised in Miami, Stetson Pastore who has been a user experience consultant for companies such as Fidelity, Staples and H&R Block as well as the Federal Reserve Bank, Boston, said that when she returned to South Florida five years ago, “I could not find work here. All my clients were somewhere else. It’s only been in the past few years that technology has started blooming here; people started to know what user experience is and how important it is; there are events like this. It’s night and day. It has expanded tremendously and it’s exciting.”

Fernando González is a Miami-based arts and culture writer. He can be reached via email at [email protected].