Silicon Florist

Hugs and kisses and lots of love: XOXO festival sells out pretty much immediately

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:05:54 +0000

What a difference a day makes. Around 24 hours ago, I was busy stumping for XOXO, which—at that point—was a pipe dream of a festival event here in Portland.

Now? Thanks to Kickstarter, XOXO is fully funded, sold out, and over subscribed.

And the cofounders? A little stunned.

According to project cofounder Andy Baio:

The reaction was explosive and immediate. In fact, I’d fully intended to write about the launch on Tuesday morning, but within 30 seconds of posting the Kickstarter project, my inbox exploded. I knew that Kickstarter’s new social features were powerful, but this was intense. Before I’d even tweeted it myself, 20 people backed the project.

As far as I know, XOXO is also the biggest event ever funded on Kickstarter. When I first started working with Kickstarter in 2008, the idea of funding events came up regularly. Kickstarter was originally inspired by a concert that Perry wanted to throw in New Orleans back in 2001, but didn’t want to deal with the up-front risk. I’ve always thought it was a perfect use for the site, but up until this point, barely anybody’s tried to fund their entire ticket sales on it. I think this really validates Kickstarter as a tool for funding events.

In a little over two days, the Kickstarter community gave Portland an amazing conference. How much luckier could we be?

Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.

Portland’s XOXO festival hopes to feel the Kickstarter love

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:40:30 +0000

Portland has found Kickstarter to be an amazing source of crowdfunded capital for any number of creative projects.

But what about crowdfunding an event? Well, if anyone is going to make that happen it’s a Portlander who knows Kickstarter, inside and out. And if early funding is any indication, the XOXO festival—a celebration of disruptive creativity—is well on track to hit its goal.

Andy Baio has joined forces with Andy McMillan to build an incredible conference—and fringe events—that are going to showcase the people creatively using technology to create new opportunities. They are, that is, if their project gets funded.

Looks like September in Portland has the chance to be incredibly awesome with your help.

Plus, if Andy’s video doesn’t make you fall in love with Portland all over again, I don’t know what will.

For more information or to back this project, visit XOXO on Kickstarter.

Digging into diversity: Willamette Week takes a look at the number of women in the tech startup scene

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:07:15 +0000

I’ve been lucky enough to get the chance to work with some amazing developers, CEOs, investors, and leaders in the Portland tech community. And, in my experience, some of the strongest voices have been women. But my experience belies the ratios that drive the businesses of our community.

So just how many women are there in the Portland tech startup scene? For such a loaded question, Ruth Brown at Willamette Week has managed to take an objective look at the diversity in the Portland startup scene.

A survey of 11 recent Portland tech startups, ranging from companies with four employees to 80, reveals that their total workforces were typically 70 percent to 80 percent male, while their development and engineering teams—i.e., the people who write the actual code—have even fewer women. In many cases, none.

Females are even scarcer in the open-source software community—people who work on free and open projects like Linux and Firefox—which is particularly active in Portland and which the Portland Development Commission cites as a major “strength” of the local software industry. According to a 2006 study funded by the European Union, about 1.5 percent of open-source contributors are women.

This is why it’s important to have more traditional media interested in what’s happening in the Portland startup scene. Because they have the time to dig into these stories.

Is it perfect? No. Is it inflammatory? Possibly. But long story short, this is a solid piece of journalism. And I’m interested to see the conversations it starts.

I’d encourage you to read the entire article.

[Full disclosure: I am working with Willamette Week on the Portland Digital eXperience event, this September.]

Make mine Titanium: Geoloqi powers battery efficient geolocation for Appcelerator Titanium

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:01:56 +0000

Geoloqi, the Portland startup that’s making location based tools easier for developers to adopt, has been strangely quiet lately. Too quiet.

And today, it became obvious why. The company has just announced a Geoloqi module for Appcelerator Titanium.

If you’re not immersed in the mobile market, that might have come off as a bit of gibberish. What’s Appcelerator? Well, it is the “first mobile platform to combine the flexibility of open source development technologies with the power of cloud services.” Pretty cool right? Well, now it’s even cooler. Because it’s been Geoloqized.

Don’t believe me? Fine. Maybe you’ll believe some of these folks.

VentureBeat: Better location tools for more apps: Geoloqi is now on Appcelerator Titanium

The two companies have been cozied up for a few months already. Now, they’re giving devs a two-month trial to test drive Geoloqi on Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. In a word, this means better location tools will be available for more kinds of apps, and they’ll be easier to use for a wider range of developers.

Titanium lets devs work quickly to get apps live on Android and iOS devices natively, as well as on the mobile web. With Geoloqi plugged in, devs will also have a complete location toolkit (including true geofencing), battery management features, and real-time data storage and analytics.

GigaOm: Geoloqi’s location tracking now available to Appcelerator devs

For example, apps with Geoloqi can understand when someone has entered or left a predefined geo-fence — say, a coffee shop — using carrier signals, GPS, Wifi and indoor tracking systems. The apps can track a person’s location and push out messages or trigger actions based on where they are. Geoloqi can also provide app developers with location and dwell-time analytics on users.

Geoloqi made its first iOS and Android SDKs available in February, but the integration with Appcelerator opens up the service to a large existing community of developers who use Titanium to speed up their app development efforts. Appcelerator is giving new Titanium developers a two-month free trial when they register and download the Geoloqi Titanium module before the end of June.

Programmable Web: Geoloqi Adds Powerful Location Module to Appcelerator

The Geoloqi Geotrigger module for Titanium Appcelerator provides a complete toolkit for real-time tracking, messaging, battery management, geofencing and storage. It performs battery management through its algorithms that know how to turn GPS on and off, thereby preserving battery life. It provides a facade over location sources like GPS, Carrier Signals and Wifi to provide you with tracking, coupled with a cloud storage solution to track all the location data. One of the key features here is defining geo fences that can then be configured to push messages to your application, once the target goes in and out of the geo fence.

Digital Trends: Geoloqi and Appcelerator join forces for location app development – minus the battery suck

“Battery life: The other big piece thwarting the mobile location puzzle; namely, how much these apps suck the life out of it. Geoloqi has made battery life an evolving priority. “We don’t take the approach it can be solved — we think it can be improved over time,” says Case. “We use an algorithm that gets more and more complex to help this. It’s all these discrete pieces that when you add them up gets you better battery life. It’s all about intelligently handling the various factors.”

Along with the new partnership, customizable geo-triggered events will now be available from Geoloqi. This means developers can implement push messages to users when they cross a geofence — or a location that triggers an action — as well as a variety of other location-based notification actions.

Inside Mobile Apps: Advanced location-based services come to Titanium 2.0 with Geoloqi partnership

Although Appcelerator already offered some basic location-based services like check-ins through the company’s new Appcelerator Cloud Services, developers using Geoloqi’s API can set up pre-determined location zones called geofences and enable location-triggered events in their Titanium-built apps. This enable apps to perform more sophisticated location-based tasks, such as sending a registered customer a push notification with a coupon attached as soon as they enter a store.

TechCrunch: Appcelerator Partners With Geoloqi To Bring Location Services To Its 1.6 Million Developers

Thanks to the new Geoloqi module, developers can now create geo-triggered events in their applications. This, says Appcelerator, will allow its developers to create apps that make use of geofencing and can, for example, send users a push notification when they cross the border into or out of a geofenced zone. In addition, Geoloqi offers standard location tracking features as well as location analytics. While the company’s partnership with Appcelerator focused on these areas, Titanium developers will also be able to use Geoloqi’s other features, including, for example, its Wikipedia layers.

Appcelerator tells us that it also chose Geoloqi because it can smoothly transition between different location sources like GPS and WiFi triangulation, relatively conservative battery use and also because it features sophisticated privacy controls for users.

Need more details? I’d suggest heading over to hear Geoloqi’s description of the partnership.

REMINDER: Mobile Portland discusses what happens when the robots win

Rick Turoczy — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:10:47 +0000

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: Mobile Portland is the best thing going around here, right now. And now, Mobile Portland is even more mobile. They’ve moved the gathering to tonight, because the last Monday of the month is Memorial Day.

And what better topic than discussing how your smart devices are more sentient than you think?

Ken Westin, founder of GadgetTrak, will be revealing more than you want to know about that robot in your pocket. It’s not quite SKYNET, yet. But it’s getting close.

Every day our smartphones, laptops and other devices transmit invisible bytes of data across networks around the world, leaving a deep and permanent digital footprint. Some of this data we are aware of, such as information we post on social networks, or sharing GPS coordinates with a mapping app to locate the nearest restaurant. However, there is a less visible layer of data that at first may seem innocuous, but once aggregated can provide fragments of data that can be reticulated to unveil information regarding identity, location and other potentially invasive and incriminating evidence. This information can be used to solve crimes, as well as abused. Technology is rapidly increasing the rate at which this data is being used by law enforcement, governments, hackers and advertisers alike, with many surprisingly taking advantage of the hazy gray area where antiquated laws and advanced technology meet.

And if anyone is willing to take their device one step closer to sentient, Ken is looking for volunteers.

As always, the event begins Monday at 6PM and is hosted at Urban Airship.

For more information or to RSVP, visit Mobile Portland.

Bend startup accelerator VentureBox graduates first class

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:17:16 +0000

One of the first accelerators to join the statewide bootcamp program was a new accelerator out of Bend called VentureBox.

Well, three months tends to fly by. And now, VentureBox has graduated its first class.

What’s VentureBox’s focus, you ask?

VentureBox supports our entrepreneurs with a top quality program curriculum based on best practices from the world’s leading startup programs. Fundamental to our vision are the principles of the “Lean Startup Process” originally conceptualized by Steven Blank serial entrepreneur and award winning professor at Stanford University, these principles form the foundation upon which all of the VentureBox’ contributions are built. Working with Luxr Inc in San Francisco, VentureBox has developed a Lean Startup curriculum that helps startups effectively structure, plan, develop and launch their businesses with agility and customer centered design.

So who made it through the gauntlet? Six new companies are now part of the Bend startup scene.

CiviData

CiviData maintains a rapidly expanding collection of local government and publicly regulated enterprise data. Initial data includes various utility rate schedules, and related information of hundreds of utility systems operated by municipalities and special districts throughout the United States.

JettStream

JettStream minimizes asthma attacks and ER visits for children by providing a superior delivery system for nebulized medication. In addition, JettStream provides an educational system for parents and pediatricians treating childhood asthma.

Pocket Bounty

Schools fundraise with low effort. Parents get deals while they fundraise. And businesses get the right type of customers while contributing to local schools.

Finally, a fundraiser for the 21st century.

The Social Business

The Social Business is an organization that helps small businesses adapt to a fundamental change in customer communication that has emerged through the social web. With over 25 years of collective experience in marketing, web design, product strategy and management, we have developed a blueprint for organizations to embrace the new ways customers are engaging with their business and a set of tools and techniques to ensure growth and success.

Vizme

At Vizme we focus on engagement. It’s too easy to make bad websites, blog, and social media pages and too difficult to make great ones. We’ve set out to change that by creating the Vizme platform, which anyone can use to enhance their websites, blogs, social media pages, and soon mobile apps as well. Whomever your audience, Vizme will help you create the kind of engaging digital experiences that get you noticed.

ZiPede

ziPede helps moms, dads and doctors take care of kids, better. A new web based communication tool. Better visits = Better care.

For more information, visit VentureBox.

Send me an Angel: Oregon Angel Fund applications close May 22

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:46:45 +0000

So you’ve convinced friends and family to invest. You’ve had an Angel or two contribute to your efforts. And you’re driving a little revenue. What next?

Well, Oregon Angel Fund could be just the thing your startup needs. And they just so happen to be taking applications.

The online application draws from an executive summary to highlight the most important details about the business in a straightforward manner. Entrepreneurs post additional supporting documents; an executive summary or short business plan is required. They may revise and add documents at any time during the review and due diligence process. Useful documents include, but are not limited to: the full business plan, a financial plan, investor and customer presentations, term sheets, investment subscription docs, company updates, customer letters, and anything else that may aid OAF members in their due diligence.

Who has benefitted from OAF? Well, local startup favorites Meridian and CrowdCompass are among the most recent companies to received investment from OAF.

Your company could be next. But you can begin the process if you don’t apply. And you better hurry. You’ve only got a few days left. Applications are due by May 22.

For more information or to apply for the next round, visit the Oregon Angel Fund.

Meet the Startup: Portland’s next mayor

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:03:25 +0000

Given that it’s ballot day in Portland and we know you’ve been busy working on your startup, we thought we’d rerun the mayoral episodes of Meet the Startup.

That way, you get to meet the candidates and it serves as reminder to get your ballot submitted. Win win.

Eileen Brady

Charlie Hales

Jefferson Smith

For more interviews, subscribe to Meet the Startup on YouTube, follow @MeettheStartup or like Meet the Startup on Facebook.

Marcus Welby & Steve Jobs: Tips for Gov. Kitzhaber to save billions on healthcare

Guest — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:14:19 +0000

[Editor: If there's any market that's primed for a startup to disrupt it, it's healthcare. That's why it's nice to see another guest post from Dave Chase, providing some guidance on what Oregon could do to take a lead in the healthcare market.]

Not a week goes by without seeing some headline about deficits pushing municipalities to desperation or Bill Gates describing state budgets using accounting techniques that would make Enron blush. The common culprit? Healthcare costs with Medicaid being the biggest driver.

Oregon will be watched nationally with the recent $1.9 Billion agreement with the Obama Administration and has an amazing opportunity to lead the nation in an approach that has produced the biggest cost savings AND received customer satisfaction that exceeds Google and Apple. Sound too good to be true? Read on…

Fortunately, there is a solution that has bipartisan support and has shown to reduce healthcare costs by 40-80% (e.g., Seattle-based Qliance). It can be described as two parts Marcus Welby and one part Steve Jobs. The federal health reform bill included a little-noticed clause allowing for Direct Primary Care (DPC) models to be a part of the state health insurance exchanges. That little-noticed clause (Section 1301 (a)(3) of the Affordable Care Act and proposed HR3315 to expand DPC to Medicare recipients) should have the effect of massively spreading the DPC model throughout the country.

The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed. – William Gibson

A common myth is DPC is the same or similar to their more expensive cousin—concierge medicine. Not so. Typically one-third of DPC practices are uninsured people.

AtlasMD in Wichita, KS is run by Dr. Josh Umbehr who recently mentioned to me one of his patients. Due to tough economic times, she’s living in a storage unit. Her monthly fee ($50/month which is inclusive of all fees) is less than she was paying in co-pays at the local public health facility.

Another is MedLion. One of their recent clinics is in Salinas, CA (a farming community) and caters to farm workers . The waiting rooms are nicer than a public health facility because can put their resources towards a more pleasant experience than billing systems and personnel. AtlasMD has 2 MDs and one NP. No admin staff. Zero. Zip. Nada. Everything is low cost software, etc.

DPC organizations such as WhiteGlove Health and arriveMD have even lower overhead as their practice are run as a clinic on wheels. The most successful DPC models such as Iora Health have made the most inroad with unions yet it’s a model that the most conservative members of Congress love. [Disclosure: Two of the organizations mentioned, arriveMD and MedLion are customers of my software company, Avado.]

Let’s break down how it’s possible to provide such a high level of service at such an affordable price (i.e., less than a typical cable bill). It’s simple: low overhead.

It’s not unusual for a primary care practice to have 3-5 administrative staff for every doctor. This is necessary to deal with the myriad insurance billing schemes that can best be described as a Gordian Knot designed by Rube Goldberg. Smart utilization of affordable technology (often in the low hundreds of dollars per month vs. many thousands and ongoing headaches) is at the heart of it. This allows the doctor to practice medicine the way they were trained, rather than pulling their hair out dealing with insurance for the medical equivalent of a trip to Jiffy Lube.

In other words, the practices run similar to the fabled Marcus Welby, MD, days. Yet, they are improved upon with a dose of Steve Jobs enabling enhancements that weren’t possible in the past such as virtual house calls. In anticipation of the rapid expansion of these models, entrepreneurs such as BJ Lawson, MD of Physician Care Direct have developed software to run the business side of these practices. (See more on how practices are overcoming obstacles to switching to Direct Primary Care.)

Thus far, DPC has had success in the private market. I put the question of why not use DPC for the Medicaid population (reportedly that is in the works in West Virginia) to DPC practitioners. The response below is a summary of their perspective. It is estimated that if DPC was scaled nationally it could save 20-30% off of overall healthcare costs. That would be the difference between states defaulting and sustained balanced budgets.

The issue of using DPC for the poor is from my point of view a no brainer. Why use the most expensive inflationary system available (by which I mean the insurance system, whether public or private) to take care of those with the least money and most in need of basic services?

The structure that makes sense to me is to create a thriving marketplace in direct primary care, competing on price, access and quality—and working exclusively for our patients. Then add a fixed monthly stipend for primary care for every Medicaid patient in the United States—a stipend that covers the lowest priced/highest functioning primary care available.

This could be a voucher or credit card account for each Medicaid patient. The allowance could only be spent on primary care and the patients could buy up to higher priced practices if they saw value worth purchasing. That would convert the Medicaid patient from being a low paying, high utilizing patient to a valued customer who can pay cash for care at a reasonable price.

This makes all kinds of sense economically:

No government management system to control or manage care—it manages itself with the patient at the helm.
Converting dependent impoverished citizens into patients with economic clout and respectful treatment.
Eliminating the cost overhead of insurance billing on both the MD and the government side.
No more barriers to basic care for Medicaid patients—they can use all they need.
Eliminating the fee-for-service incentive disaster that produces massive over-utilization and huge downstream expenses.
Financially stabilizing the primary care world with consistent monthly fee payments to cover our fixed costs while allowing those docs with better ideas or higher prices to go for the upscale patients or those wanting better art work and longer visits.
Free up primary care docs to further improve their quality, access and patient centered services – not their billing savvy.
If the government wanted to regulate, they could demand an annual report on each patient they support, giving the actual utilization, health care outcomes and proof of appropriate management of common illnesses, immunizations and cancer screening. The government could actually pay for results, not process. Primary care practices would have to be certified as producing an acceptable level of results and patients would have access to our success profiles both in terms of cost and quality when selecting their doc for next year. [Note: A standard is being defined by the Healthcare Delivery Innovation Alliance which is seeking outside input.]
The government could track the overall costs created by each practice and make those numbers public as well. The high cost practices would eventually lose certification, particularly if the money ended up in the hands of their employer (hospitals, big multispecialty clinics).
If the government wants to tackle the HotSpotters patients, they just need to up the monthly ante for the sickest patients—they will get their money back with huge interest from the reduced downstream costs and reduced transaction costs that these folks generate. With the big fees they will also be able to require more complete reporting of how their chronic illnesses are being managed.

Medicare should do the same—stop paying fee-for-service for Primary Care and start paying a fixed monthly fee (allowing patients to buy up if the government gets the price wrong, as it almost certainly would). The patient should have total control over which primary care doc gets the money – remember, we want to work for the patient, no matter who pays the bill.

So that’s the solution—a simple system where the patient is in charge, the government buys good basic care and the patients can buy up. The system itself is created within a free market structure which the government is simply choosing to ride (like food stamps and grocery stores) with patients running the show, so service and quality could go up every year while prices remain stable or decline—like any real functioning market system in the world.

Direct Primary Care is the only available model that could accomplish these goals. Everyone else is still trying to figure out how to “work” the insurance system. However, if the government has wisdom, they would also make the monthly fee deal available to prior fee-for-service docs—to boost competition and to accelerate the conversion to Direct Primary Care models. The right incentives produce the right results.

Dave Chase is the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

REMINDER: Join the WebVisions crew for the Hackathon for Social Good, Tuesday

Rick Turoczy — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:52:54 +0000

With great power, they say, comes great responsibility. And while that applies to superheroes, it also applies to developers, too. Because you’ve got the power to change things.

So why not use a few of your coding superpowers to help out with Hackathon for Social Good on Tuesday?

Join web and mobile experts on Tues., May 15th in an all day Hackathon for Social Good. Hackathons are events when programmers and designers meet to work collaboratively to build programs and applications.

The day will begin with short presentations by educators and non-profit organizations, followed by informational sessions on building sites and web applications to help benefit non-profit organizations.

If you have a great coding and design mindset, put your talents to the task and help create tools to solve local community needs.

What kind of organizations? Well, My Way Home Dog Rescue, Nursing Mother’s Counsel, and p:ear to be exact.

The event will be hosted at ISITE Design. Things kick off around 9AM and will continue throughout the day.

For more information or to RSVP, visit Hackathon for Social Good.

Silicon Florist

Hugs and kisses and lots of love: XOXO festival sells out pretty much immediately

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Make mine Titanium: Geoloqi powers battery efficient geolocation for Appcelerator Titanium

VentureBeat: Better location tools for more apps: Geoloqi is now on Appcelerator Titanium

GigaOm: Geoloqi’s location tracking now available to Appcelerator devs

Programmable Web: Geoloqi Adds Powerful Location Module to Appcelerator

Digital Trends: Geoloqi and Appcelerator join forces for location app development – minus the battery suck

Inside Mobile Apps: Advanced location-based services come to Titanium 2.0 with Geoloqi partnership

TechCrunch: Appcelerator Partners With Geoloqi To Bring Location Services To Its 1.6 Million Developers

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ZiPede

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