Silicon Florist

Looking to beat the heat with your friends this July 4th? Send out a Beer Signal

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:54:04 +0000

There’s no doubt that Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beer-o-phile-ish towns in the world. We’ve got our bevy of microbreweries, our randomly stocked beer groceries, our brewers’ festivals, and any number of folks working to keep us informed about just what’s happening in the world of beer.

That said, there’s always room for more beer-oriented stuff around here. Enter Portland’s own Taplister’s new iPhone app Beer Signal—an app that could have more of those beer discussions happening in person.

How’s it work? Beer Signal lets iPhone users check out their favorite watering holes to see what’s on tap, using data gathered from Twitter, everybody’s favorite microblogging platform. That’s right, Twitter. Beer afficianados can send Taplister the current beers on tap by tagging the message with #ontappdx. That information, in turn, is slurped into Beer Signal, so that you’ve always got the latest and greatest crowdsourced tap information.

But what about the friends part? Well, Beer Signal also ties into email, Twitter, and Portland-based Shizzow, the service that lets you alert friends as to where you are at any given moment. So once you’ve selected the location you’ll be quaffing your favorite brew, you’re just a couple of taps away from broadcasting that information to your friends.

But don’t just take my word for it. Willamette Week likes the local flavor of Beer Signal:

This app stands out from other beer-related iPhone programs because it uses a list of Portland pubs. Beer Signal’s site says there are 50 venues and 400 beers listed and up to date. It also includes listings of beers on tap (if provided by the pub) and the ability to tweet which fine brew you are drinking.

And as Beervana reminds us, only you can help prevent outdated tap lists in the app:

And now, with the app, you can instantly update taplists while you’re drinking in a pub. The more people who use it and participate in keeping it updated, the more it will function properly. I’ve no doubt that the early weeks will be rocky, but I’m prepared to do my bit and keep it updated when I hit the pubs.

Need more details the iPhone app? Shizzow has a great interview with Ken Baer, the guy who developed it.

Don’t have an iPhone? Don’t worry. I can find a bunch of beer drinkers for you. How? Well, Taplister is having a launch party on Monday evening at Eastburn.

Rest assured, Taplister is much bigger than the iPhone app. And while I’m sure I’ll write more about them later, for now all you need to know is that Taplister is the passion project of Ken Baer, Kerry Finsand, Kevin Scaldeferri, and Scott Wray, built with the hopes of providing more community resources to help Portlanders find the beers they love—and to share those loves with their friends.

For more information, visit Taplister or Beer Signal. To RSVP, see the Taplister launch party on Upcoming. And, of course, have a happy and safe 4th of July.

Peat Bakke joins OpenID proponent JanRain

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:49:07 +0000

While there was big national news for Portland-based JanRain and OpenID that broke yesterday—with Sears stepping up to adopt OpenID by using JanRain’s RPX—today marks some big JanRain news for us here locally.

You see, Peat Bakke has joined the JanRain team.

“JanRain and I have been flirting for a while,” said Peat in an email. “They have a great team here in Portland, and their products lend themselves to the kind of integration and custom development work that I enjoy. We’ve worked together on some big projects, the business is growing, and the timing was right… so on July 1st we sealed the deal, and I’m heading up the professional services group.”

Peat will be tackling any number of duties with the OpenID provider, including technical sales support, proposals, and day-to-day communications—all while “still getting to keep my hands dirty with the code.”

Aside from just being a terribly nice guy, Peat is a great technologist and fixture of the burgeoning Portland startup scene. And it’s always nice to see great connections like this happening in Portland.

For more, you can follow Peat on Twitter or check out his personal site. For more on his new employer, visit JanRain.

(Self portrait by Peat Bakke. Used under Creative Commons.)

Silicon Florist sucks

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:13:30 +0000

Silicon Florist sucks doesn’t it? I mean, let’s be honest. It’s not perfect. And even though it’s completely a side project, that’s no excuse for it being half-ass. In fact, to quote a good friend, I want to be “using my whole ass.”

And I know you. You’ve got opinions. Ideas about what could be done better. Gripes about what I’m not doing terribly well. Things the blog could do that it doesn’t. Things the blog does that it shouldn’t.

While I’m always open to your feedback in this regard, I wanted to make a formal plea for your input. It’s half way through 2009. It seemed like a good time to do it.

And it can be about anything. The blog. Me. My responsiveness. The writing. The frequency. My availability. My areas of coverage. My mom. Okay, wait. Maybe not my mom. Aw what the heck. You can make comments about my mom, too.

How to do it? You’ve got any number of choices. Comfortable airing your views in public? Comment below. Want to rip me to shreds in private? Send an email to siliconflorist at gmail dot com. Or keep your constructive criticism to 140 characters and send some tweets to @turoczy on Twitter.

What about Silicon Florist sucks? What could be better?

Looking forward to hearing your feedback. And, as always, thanks in advance for taking the time to share it.

Not using OpenID? Sears and Kmart are more Web 2.0 than you, thanks to JanRain

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:33:23 +0000

If you haven’t started to implement OpenID yet, you may be falling a bit behind the curve. You see, thanks to the efforts of Portland-based JanRain, even the good old—and I do mean old—brick and mortar companies like KMart and Sears are jumping on the OpenID bandwagon. Or, as Mike Rogoway at The Oregonian’s Silicon Forest blog put it, “Old economy stalwart Sears announced this morning that it’s adopting OpenID.”

That’s big news for JanRain and for OpenID in general. And as the de facto hub for OpenID, it’s big news for Portland, as well.

The Sears and KMart implementations are a combination of Chicago-based Viewpoints an JanRain RPX, a series of services that allows organizations to implement OpenID more quickly and easily.

Built on web 2.0 open standards including OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and Microformats, and leveraging related technologies such as Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, and MySpaceID, JanRain’s RPX solution is able to deliver and sustain market leading functionality for its customers and partners. This is a rapidly evolving space where identity providers, services, and technical protocols are expanding and improving daily. By partnering with the pioneer and leader in third party authentication and profile management solutions, Viewpoints can continue to deliver best of breed capabilities to its clients now and in the future.

Given that KMart and Sears have already implemented OpenID, maybe you should get around to doing that too, don’t you think? It’s the Portland—and Silicon Forest—thing to do.

For more information on the collaboration, read the joint release from Viewpoints and JanRain. For more on the technology behind the solution, read about JanRain RPX or OpenID.

Contenture introduces microsubscriptions to help you monetize your blog

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:20:44 +0000

When it comes to figuring out how to make a living off of producing content—especially online content—everyone is scratching their heads. Newspapers, television stations, and of course bloggers. One thing is for sure: ads aren’t quite cutting it, these days.

What to do? Well, the folks over at Portland-based Contenture have been offering up some other ideas for bloggers to get reimbursed for their efforts—by making it up on volume. Today, they’ve launched their latest feature: microsubscriptions.

Contenture’s first offering—which I’ve been testing on Silicon Florist—involves passively dipping into a reader’s monthly Web stipend as they swing by the site. I pay a flat fee per month. When I visit participating sites, they get a little payment each time I hit their site.

How much? Well to date I’ve made $8.36 on Contenture micropayments. Which, while it isn’t a ton, is $8.36 more than I would have made otherwise. Without selling ads or gumming up the site with a bunch of hoohah. So that’s not bad. And I have to assume that some of the other sites using Contenture are getting better results than that.

But what about folks who want a more consistent and repeatable payment for their efforts? Well, that’s where Contenture’s microsubscriptions come in.

Any site can use microsubscriptions. Contenture lets you set the monthly price for your premium content at a minimum of $0.10 per month. You can also implement more than one subscription on your site (e.g. a web service with different paid plans).

With microsubscriptions you can deliver premium content to only those folks who pay for it. What content? That’s up to you. It could be special articles, reports, or your whole darn stream of content, for that matter. You decide. And your readers decide whether you’re worth the price.

What’s more, sites can offer as many different subscriptions as they want.

What’s the catch? Well, you have to pay to play. At least a buck a month. But really, how hard is that? I mean, I’ve got an eight month subscription purchased with my Contenture earnings already. The other cost? Contenture is going to take 10% of your earnings to cover their service.

Well, and for folks to pay for subscriptions, they have to be Contenture members, of course.

Users must be Contenture members to pay you for microsubscriptions, so we are lowering the cost of a Contenture account to $1 a month.… This covers our transaction costs, and lets you charge as little as you want to for your service or website. In addition, you still get paid when other Contenture members visit your website, even if they don’t subscribe to your premium services.

I haven’t figured out any sort of content to test the subscription model yet. But I’ll keep thinking. And I’ll keep you posted about the kind of revenue I’m seeing from Contenture.

Strands personal finance paying dividends, ING joins the roster

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:13:01 +0000

Corvallis-headquartered Strands has always had a definitive focus on the power of recommender technology—a technology that use an amalgamation of personal actions, actions of like-minded individuals, and inferences from those actions to make recommendations. But they’ve struggled a bit finding the appropriate and market worthy applications of that technology. They’ve pursued music, lifestreaming, and—most recently—exercise.

However, if this recent news is any indication, it’s their personal finance recommender pursuits that may be paying off. You see, Strands just signed ING.

Now, Strands is proud to announce that ING has launched TIM for their customers in the Netherlands. The Dutch bank has chosen Strands technology to offer new services to their customers that allow them to better manage their expenses and income.

Strands first unveiled its personal finance service as Money Strands, a service built on the combination of Strands technology and the acquisition of Ryan Williams’ NetworthIQ.

More recently, they’ve been exploring the opportunity to partner with banks like BBVA in Spain. And those banks are seeing noticeable results.

Financial services companies that offer personal finance solutions increase their customer retention by up to four times.… In Spain, BBVA was the first to implement Strands’ technology last November and to launch the Tú Cuentas service. A month after it’s launch, more that a 130,000 users had already tried the tool and to this day, more than 250,000 customers have already improved their personal finance management.

ING is the latest bank to sign on for the service.

Who is ING? I’m glad you asked. ING is a Dutch financial institution that offers everything from banking to insurance. They offer those services to “more than 85 million private, corporate and institutional customers in Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Australia.” The Strands service is currently in private beta with ING’s Dutch customers.

What is Strands providing? Much like typical personal financial software, Strands will help users better understand where their money is going, analysis of spending habits, and—drawing on Strands recommender expertise—comparisons with other uses.

For more on the deal and the details on the features, see the Strands post on the ING deal.

They’re in Oregon? 17+ projects that don’t get the Silicon Forest cred they deserve

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:15:29 +0000

While a number of the folks in the Portland tech community spend time getting together on a regular basis at things like Beer and Blog and Ignite Portland, there are still any number of wildly successful startups, blogs, and companies here in town that rarely get the Oregon cred they so richly deserve.

They’re doing good work. They’re garnering national—and sometimes international—recognition. And they deserve all the Silicon Forest love we can dish out.

So who are they? Let’s take a look. (Listed by the number of times people looked at me with incredulity when I told them they were headquartered in Oregon.)

1) Metafilter

One of the first—and easily still the best community blogs around—Metafilter is run by Matt Haughey who describes his location at Portland-ish.

Metafilter is a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.

2) SurveyMonkey

Arguably, the premier survey tool on the Web. I’m always amazed at how many people know about SurveyMonkey—and how few of them know that it’s headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

Started in 1999, SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool that enables people of all experience levels to create their own surveys quickly and easily. Every day, SurveyMonkey gives thousands of people the feedback they need to make more informed decisions, including more than 80% of the Fortune 100. SurveyMonkey’s offices are located in Portland, Oregon USA.

3) Eleven Wireless

If you’ve used wifi in a hotel, it’s likely you’ve used Eleven Wireless. And if you’ve ever been to NedSpace you’ve likely met the founder of Eleven, Josh Friedman.

Eleven Wireless has been providing high quality software and services to leading hotel properties in the United States and around the world for more than seven years.

4) Panic

People talk about Portland being a Mac town. But it’s surprising how few folks know that Panic—makers of some of the most beautiful and useful products for the Mac—are right here in town.

When you’re a small software house, you pretty much work in vacuum. So, when Apple chooses your software out of an avalanche of entries to receive not one, but two Apple Design Awards, there’s not much you can do besides pretty much totally freak out. And boy, did we ever.

5) Parent hacks

Who knew that one of the best parenting sites around was here in Portland? Well not enough of you, clearly. So Parent hacks made the list.

Parent Hacks is a collaborative website that collects and publishes parents’ tips, recommendations, workarounds, and bits of wisdom – their hacks – in a single pot so we can all partake. Here’s the stuff that would have been left out of the instruction manual…if there were one.

6) Digital Trends

What if I told you that there was a gadget blog here in town that got upwards of two million visitors a month? Well, Digital Trends is such a gadget blog—and they’rein the US Bank Tower.

Digital Trends helps people make the most of the hi-tech lifestyle by providing sneak peeks, one-of-a-kind reviews, editorials and news about trendsetting consumer technology products and services. By focusing on products that incorporate style along with cutting edge functionality, Digital Trends has become an indispensable resource for people who embrace the best of what technology can offer.

7) ExpressionEngine

Did you know that one of the most popular content management systems around is out of Bend, Oregon? That’s right. EllisLab brings us on ExpressionEngine, a flexible and customizable CMS designed to help folks make the most out of their Web presence with the least amount of effort.

ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website.

8) CodeIgniter

ExpressionEngine is followed immediately by CodeIgniter, another project out of EllisLab in Bend. What’s CodeIgniter? Well, if you’re a PHP coder, it’s a framework that—in EllisLab’s words—is going to help you “kick ass.” Need something more than that. Oh okay. How about this?

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

9) fmyi

Chicago has Basecamp. Us? We’ve got fmyi, a service that helps teams collaborate by facilitating thoughts and discussions—especially as they apply to creativity and innovation.

FMYI [For MY Innovation] is an online workspace you can use to bring your team together to store and share information securely with each other. Each person gets their own social networking-style profile page, and each team can have a page too. Then, anyone can create a workspace page to post messages, share files, add links, set tasks, and more.

10) Discogs

If you’re ever looking for information on random music—or mainstream music for that matter—look no further than Portland. Discogs has got a huge reference library of practically any album you can recall.

According to Wikipedia:

Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about music recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are located in Portland, Oregon, USA. Discogs is one of the largest online databases of electronic music releases and is believed to be the largest online database of releases on vinyl media. Across all genres and formats, 1.5 million releases are catalogued, featuring listings for nearly 1.25 million artists and over 125,000 labels. The site has around 200,000 visitors a day.

11) Get Rich Slowly

This may just be me, but I have to imagine that I’m not the only one of the 65,000 subscribers who didn’t realize that Get Rich Slowly was a Portland blog.

Get Rich Slowly — recently named most inspiring money blog by Money magazine — is devoted to sensible personal finance. You will not find any get-rich-quick schemes here. Nor will you find multi-level marketing fads or hot stock tips. I am not pitching any product or book. Instead, you’ll find daily information about personal finance and related topics.

12) COLOURlovers

Now, I’ve managed to cover COLOURlovers a few times, but there are still those instances where I mention them as a “Portland company” in passing and get quizzical looks.

Does it come as any surprise that a design community focused on color theory would be from Portland?

COLOURlovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

13) Clicky

Portland is a Web analytics town (see below), so it should come as no surprise that we’ve got a number of analytics tools here. But did you know that super simple yet super powerful Clicky was an Oregon company?

Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg.com, you would see the traffic spike in Clicky immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation.

14) One Inch Round

While they’re not a tech company per se, One Inch Round plays an important role in the tech community: giving us cool buttons that we can use as tchotchkes. Plus, if you’re in Portland, you can always save on shipping costs by picking up your pins at their shop. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about these folks.

Since 2000, One Inch Round has been “sending buttons ’round the planet” providing superior quality custom button manufacturing services to the masses. From the expert designer to the pixel impaired, our intuitive website lets every customer enjoy the most convenient online customized buttons ordering experience. We back that with good old fashioned customer service. If you call, you’ll get a human on the other end, and a friendly one at that.

15) Second Story

This one is an oldie but a goodie. Regardless of your opinions of Flash, one of the most successful and humane implementers of Flash is right here in Portland: Second Story.

Since 1994, Second Story has conceptualized, designed, and developed interactive media experiences in diverse formats that enchant, inform, and entertain—pioneering ever more effective ways to inspire wonder and connect audiences to ideas and information.

16) TeamSnap

I’ve heard that one of Portland’s per-capita claims is more recreational league sports teams per capita than anywhere in the US. If that’s true, it makes sense that TeamSnap, a service that helps you manage your rec league teams is from Portland.

The idea for TeamSnap began in 2002 when Sparkplug Creative Director Matt Triplett agreed (or was it condemned?) to be the manager of his soccer team. Quickly, the problems with keeping his team on track became apparent — too many emails back and forth, too many Excel spreadsheets, and too much frustration. It was at that point that Matt decided that there had to be a better way. So he spent several weeks putting together a very rough version of what is now TeamSnap. It was so successful with his team that he realized the TeamSnap concept could really take off.

17) Webtrends

Up until a few months ago, Webtrends was much higher on the list. But thanks to their re-engaging with the Portland tech community, more and more folks recognize them as an awesome Portland company.

But our love of numbers hasn’t blinded us to their limitations, their ability to sometimes obscure the truth when viewed in isolation or used incorrectly. That’s why we founded the web analytics industry in 1993: To help organizations like yours uncover the truth within the numbers generated by your web site and other business systems.

Bonus: Companies with an Oregon footprint

And then there are those companies who have a substantial footprint in Portland—or whom we adopt as our own regardless of how many employees they have in town.

ReadWriteWeb has a bunch of Rose City contributors, including VP Marshall Kirkpatrick and writers Doug Coleman, Frederic Lardinois, and Steven Walling.
Kongregate strives to be the YouTube of online games. They have a development office in Portland.
Pheedo is one of the leading resources for RSS-based advertising. They have an office in Portland.
CoolerEmail is the leading provider of HTML-based email. The CoolerEmail Northwest offices are located in Beaverton.
Vimeo is one of the best sites on the Web for sharing HD footage. Their community director, Dalas Verdugo, lives here in Portland.
Twitter, one of the Portland tech scene’s favorite ways of staying in touch, has a Portland connection, as well. By way of acquisition, Twitter’s UX engineer, Rael Dornfest is in Portland. And for some additional trivia: he’s married to Asha Dornfest, the founder of Parenthacks.

And I’m sure I’ve missed some

I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to recognizing famous Oregon companies out in the wild. So if I’ve missed any obvious ones, please let me know.

(Image courtesy Modified Enzyme. Used under Creative Commons.)

eROI expands its offerings with a simple and elegant event registration service

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:41:20 +0000

When it comes to managing small events, finding a capable event registration system can be a bit of pain. There are any number of systems that provide the features you need but there’s always a drawback. Maybe you can’t muck with the design. Maybe you have problems with your own merchant account. Maybe it’s just a bit too wonky.

Whatever the case, there’s room for improvement. Enter Portland-based eROI with eROI Event, a simple, straightforward, and skinnable event registration service that lets you manage people, pricing, discounts without all the usual headaches.

eROI Event gives you the ability to build events—either for free or for pay events—quickly and easily. And it’s got a really thoughtful interface that lets you control everything from the questions you’re asking attendees to discount codes for that special someone. It even helps you manage event locations that only have a limited amount of space. All without having to touch one line of code.

Want to get your hands dirty? Fine. eROI lets you muck around with theming too. Skin the event container however you want. Make it a seamless part of your site. All with a little CSS hacking.

All that and they’ve managed to help with one of the biggest headaches for most of us: merchant accounts.

eROI Event online event registration and management software has been designed to easily and seamlessly integrate with many major payment gateways such as VeriSign, Authorize.net, and PayPal. This allows event organizers to accept all major credit cards when selling tickets online, with the added bonus of knowing the transactions will be secure.

Don’t believe me? Oh I get it. You’re one of those “seeing is believing” types. Well, the folks over at eROI spent a few minutes skinning up an event site for Silicon Florist. Just for you—yes, you—to take for a test drive.

And once you’ve got folks showing up? You’ll also gain access to reports on event registrations, a dashboard tracking your revenue, and quick access to details on each and every attendee.

Sound interesting? Well why not try it then? I mean, they’ve got a free account for test driving it. Or get some more information on all eROI Event has to offer. Or if you’re ready to pull out the big guns, you can go ahead and sign up for $50 a month—which you’re going to need to do if you want to get fancy with credit card processing and rule-based discounts.

I’ll look forward to registering for your next event. Who knows? If you’re using eROI Event, I might even be willing to pay a buck or two.

Open Source Bridge: Looking back, literally

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:04:50 +0000

It’s just a bit shy of two weeks since we launched the first ever Open Source Bridge—an entirely volunteer run conference for open source citizens—here in Portland. While it was a great event, it was also a bit of a whirlwind. And I wasn’t even terribly involved. I can only imagine how it felt for folks who were presenting and participating.

But that’s why we hire people like Aaron Hockley to take photos. So that we can remember all of those moments.

As usual, he did an amazing job. Here are Aaron’s shots from the show.

Silicon Florist

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They’re in Oregon? 17+ projects that don’t get the Silicon Forest cred they deserve

1) Metafilter

2) SurveyMonkey

3) Eleven Wireless

4) Panic

5) Parent hacks

6) Digital Trends

7) ExpressionEngine

8) CodeIgniter

9) fmyi

10) Discogs

11) Get Rich Slowly

12) COLOURlovers

13) Clicky

14) One Inch Round

15) Second Story

16) TeamSnap

17) Webtrends

Bonus: Companies with an Oregon footprint

And I’m sure I’ve missed some

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