Mark Wyllie was 50 in November when he found himself without a technology job for the first time in almost three decades.

When he lost his job as COO at a mid-size value-added reseller in Doral, he turned to Enterprise Development Corp. of South Florida for help in starting his own computer business.

Wyllie has plenty of company in starting a business amid the recession.

Nearly 900 new business licenses are being taken out each week in South Florida – the third-highest total among 40 U.S. markets tracked by American City Business Leads.

The average market is down 20 percent in the volume of licenses since 2007, but South Florida is only down 15 percent, despite being one of the epicenters of the real estate downturn.

As it has helped many other science and technology startups through the years, Wyllie said the nonprofit EDC aided him by housing his Flagship Solutions Group at its technology business incubator site located at the Florida Atlantic Research and Development Park, adjacent to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. The rent for Wyllie’s software solutions company was nominal, and he gets the benefit of routinely rubbing elbows with other tech entrepreneurs, he said.

Now in its 15th year, the EDC is “seeing an increase in entrepreneurial activity as many people who find themselves without work decide to start their own businesses,” said Jane Teague, the EDC’s executive director for the past five years.

Teague said EDC has worked with close to 300 companies in fiscal year 2009 (which ends June 30), compared with 280 last year and 270 in 2007.

Teague said 19 young companies are housed at the incubator site; the other companies get EDC’s help with everything from working on a business plan to networking to finding venture capital.

EDC works with businesses leaders, investors, colleges, government and other groups. The organization does not charge the startup companies for its help.

Along with six similar organizations statewide, Florida created the EDC in 1994 as a public-private partnership. The mandate was that the organizations would eventually become self-sustaining, but the EDC was the only organization that survived a cut in state funding that came in 1999, Teague said.

EDC’s state support is limited today, although it has received substantial grants this year from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. The rest of the money comes mostly from private donors, many of whom give $5,000 to have a board seat, Teague said.

The current budget is $470,000, up from $400,000 last year, she noted.

Jaime Borras turned to the EDC after his longtime job as a Motorola engineer and manager in Plantation was eliminated in the spring. Borras started a company called the Wireless Silicon Group, based in Fort Lauderdale, to design next-generation mobile technologies such as longer-living batteries.

Borras said the company has already applied for six patents, and he’s hoping the EDC’s help looking for venture capital will pay off.

“When you’re starting something new, it’s always good to have someone to guide you in those beginning steps,” he said.

While the EDC is definitely seeing more new companies because of the recession, another factor may be South Florida’s growing technology and science clusters, Teague said. She pointed to Scripps Florida and the Max Planck Society in Jupiter as examples.

Prior to the recession, the EDC helped Deerfield Beach-based Myxer connect with critical funding. In 2005, the year the mobile device content delivery company was launched, EDC helped it find an investor that put about $300,000 into the business, founder Myk Willis said.

Formerly employed as a software developer by Citrix Systems and an engineer by training, Willis said he and the handful of ex-Citrix developers who founded Myxer were somewhat in the dark when it came to growing a concept into a business. They knew there was a future in delivering ringtones and videos to cell phones, but finding startup capital was a different story.

Thankfully, the EDC was there.

Myxer was able to grow from about eight employees in 2005 to 42 today. And Willis predicted the company would be profitable later this year.

“To someone starting with an idea for a business, you just don’t know where the entrance is, so those pointers were extremely valuable,” Willis said.