Livin' La Vida Boca

Jeff Bonar could be considered the personification of South Florida's future -- or the future of the Internet itself. Or he could just be one of those people with a good idea that never catches on, living and working somewhere out on the periphery.

He spent most of last year creating a new wireless software program out of a spare bedroom in his home in Delray Beach, Florida, anticipating the need for venture capital, and hoping to change the world -- though maybe not in that order. He shares these ambitions with a cadre of entrepreneurs in the region: technologists, visionaries, sun worshippers -- people living the good life.

Bonar knows that his future is anything but assured, yet he believes that he's in the right place at the right time: Palm Beach County, where elections stall and electronic startups can still bootstrap small fortunes out of great ideas. Consider what passes for a high-tech conference room in Florida on a November day: an umbrella table, a few chairs, a swimming pool, a blue sky, and a hummingbird hovering around the purple flowers by the pool (all in an affordable neighborhood). The temperature is well into the 80s. Inside, in a spare bedroom, Bonar's wireless firm, Mobilelements Inc. (formerly JumpStart Wireless Corp.), was headquartered until a few months ago when the company moved to offices in the area.

Like Bonar, the entrepreneurial horde in this region believe that they are perfectly situated: They live at the epicenter of a new age in computing, one that will arrive when Web-based application services, fiber-optic networks, and wireless technology create universal connectivity with nearly total freedom of movement and virtually unlimited bandwidth. "The real wireless revolution hasn't even begun," says Bonar, 45. "It's 5 to 10 years away. In the wireless world, we don't even have the equivalent of DOS."

Bonar earned his chops as a software wizard for IBM. Now a free agent, he is selling a monthly service to small businesses that uses cell phones to link frontline employees -- maintenance workers, delivery people, anyone who travels a lot -- to an Internet application that guides and tracks their workday. If Bonar is right, this strip of Atlantic coastline may become the very last Best Place to Live and Work -- before wireless technology makes where you live and work irrelevant. The future may have its address here in South Florida.

Home of the Internet Future

Boca Raton, best known as a retirement community for New York snowbirds, is an unlikely place for the future of technology to take up residence. And yet, for more than two years, South Florida has been scrambling to position itself for explosive growth, hoping to emerge over the next decade as a major global center for wireless computing, software development, and Internet traffic. This positioning -- driven mostly by a self-organizing volunteer movement of nearly 2,000 business leaders who have branded themselves and their region as the Internet Coast -- is more than just a logo. A genuine potential for major growth has emerged, along with the fiber-optic infrastructure to make it possible. The three most notorious counties in Florida -- Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach -- have put aside partisanship and joined together to create what they hope will be the site of technology's future.

The signs are already there. In 1995, almost single-handedly, Citrix Systems Inc. helped originate a new model for computing. Based in Fort Lauderdale, Citrix began selling software that paved the way for i-mode technology with Web-based application-service providers (ASPs). The company now has more than 100,000 customers, including 90% of the Fortune 500.

Qtera Corp., a small startup founded in Boca Raton in 1998, was sold to Nortel Networks for $3.25 billion before it ever earned a penny. Qtera owned an unmarketed technology that enabled fiber-optic transmissions to cross 2,500 miles without regeneration -- nearly 10 times the range of previous fiber-optic signals.

In 1995, Scott Adams founded Hiway Technologies Inc. in his home in Boca Raton. In three years, it became one of the world's largest Web-hosting companies, with 240 employees and 150,000 customers in 135 countries. In 1999, Adams sold the company to Verio Inc. He now runs Cenetec LLC, one of the most respected high-tech incubators in Florida.

And it's not just hot startups. Motorola's pager division is headquartered in Boynton Beach. Siemens has a large presence in the area. Hundreds of multinational companies have Latin American headquarters in South Florida, including AT&T Corp., LM Ericsson Ltd., Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Qualcomm Inc., and Tellabs Inc.

All of this growth and development is in the service of a much larger strategic theater. In less than a year, South Florida will become one of the world's five largest and most powerful Internet hubs, connecting four continents with massive fiber-optic installations. If everything develops as expected, South America will become the next China, the Internet Coast will become the next Hong Kong, and South Florida will be an Internet beehive, where North American organizations network themselves into the entire Southern Hemisphere -- primarily South America, but also Africa and the Caribbean, as more and more of those populations go online.