Silicon Florist

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for December 04

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:02:11 +0000

Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious? - ReadWriteWeb

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Thanks to the Vidoop crew for the conversation this morning that inspired this post.”

Layoff watch: Iterasi - Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway writes “In the long run, though, Pete’s still optimistic. His company, founded in May ‘07, helps users capture Web pages as a snapshot in time — preserving an archive of the way a site looked at a given moment. Customers remain enthusiastic about Iterasi, Pete said, and his advisers and investors forecast better times in about a year.”

Panic - Coda 1.6.1

Via Panic ” Coda 1.6.1 is now available for download from our web site. Full release notes for this version are also available. This is a free upgrade for all Coda owners. We encourage all Coda users to upgrade to this latest version. “

State of Portland Tech | PDX Web Innovators

Adam DuVander writes “It’s been quite a year for the Portland tech scene. Web Innovators itself has gone from cozy gatherings around a table to much larger events. Last night we had more than 40 people together at CubeSpace to talk about 2008 and look ahead to what we need to do in 2009.”

Looking Forward: Hillsboro, Instantiations, OpenID, more - Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway writes “‘Whatever happened to OpenID?’ Here are two takes, from CNET and Wired, on the future of OpenID, a platform developed by Aloha High’s own Brad Fitzpatrick (who now works at Google). OpenID remains a big deal in Oregon, where JanRain and Vidoop are building their companies around it.”

Recommended follow: Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian

Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian and the Silicon Forest blog is now on Twitter. Follow him, won’t you?

WordCamp Vegas Agenda Announced (Hotel Discount Ends Soon) » Another Blogger

Portland WordPress types and OurPDX writers Aaron Hockley and Geoff Kleinman will be speaking at WordCamp Vegas. Hockley writes “I’m excited to see that VegasGeek has announced the agenda for WordCamp: Las Vegas. It’ll be great to have blogging ‘celebrities’ such as Matt, Lorelle, and Liz together in one place. Lorelle’s energy at WordCamp Portland was amazing. It’ll be great to meet the woman who called me an SOB in July 2006. And that Matt guy? I’m a big fan of his work.”

JanRain’s RPX in Action

Peat Bakke writes “This morning I converted the OpenID Foundation’s membership website to use RPX, and ditched the old plugin I hacked up to support the OpenID 2.0 features. If you’re interested in seeing it in action head on over to their site: https://openid.net/foundation/members”

Twitter / Stephanie Stricklen: if the boss says yes…

Yet another reason to attend Beer and Blog tomorrow. KGW folks may be swinging by. All thanks to the Blazers game giving them the night off.

Does Your Company Have Friends? It Should. | Positively Glorious!

John Metta writes “Now, I know exactly why this hit me the way it did, but it’s important to discuss. Here’s a company that I have no financial stake in and have never visited. I’m a marginal- at best- user of their product, and I don’t even know anyone who was laid off. For this company that is tangentially related to my life- however brief the emotion was- I would actually shed a tear? Yes. Why? Because sometimes a company is not just a company. Sometimes, it’s a friend.”

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Beer and Blog & Open Source Bridge: Two great tastes that taste great together

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:06:30 +0000

Last night at the Portland Web Innovators presentation, I got the chance to laud compliments on Beer and Blog, an event that has really helped solidify the Web and Open Source startup community in Portland—and now Corvallis. A little later, I got the chance to share some of the early thinking on what will be the biggest volunteer event for Portland in 2009, Open Source Bridge.

Well, as luck would have it, whether you’re interested in Beer and Blog or Open Source Bridge, you can kill two birds with one stone this week. Because Beer and Blog this week will feature none other than Open Source Bridge:

Hi friends! Rick Turoczy asked me if he and the Open Source Bridge crew could lead some discussion tomorrow @beerandblog. I think what they are up to is valuable to the Portland community and her tech scene, so I said yes. If you’re not yet familiar with Open Source Bridge, they are a group of local techies that want to continue OSCON now that they are not coming back to Portland. But, they’re growing into much more than that.

So why not take some time out of your busy schedule of attending holiday parties to hang out with the Open Source Bridge team at Beer and Blog? Not interested in Open Source Bridge? Come on over anyway. You might find yourself having such a good time that you wind up wending your way over to the CyborgCamp pre-party at Vidoop.

RSVPs abound: Beer and Blog and the CyborgCamp pre-party.

I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

More sad news: Iterasi layoff

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:14:31 +0000

Ugh. I hate this stuff. But I’d rather that people know what’s happening for the sake of those seeking new gigs.

I’m sad to report that Portland-based Iterasi has had to layoff employees. They fall into the group of angel- and VC-backed companies who are forced to make preventative cuts in an effort to conserve cash.

As many of you know, I’ve had the opportunity to consult with Iterasi on an ongoing basis. Like many Portland startups, they had assembled an amazing team. It’s sad to hear that the team is going to be smaller, now.

To our teammates who are leaving, you will be missed. We were a small team of star performers that made great products in a great company. We are a smaller team now and better off for having had you on our side. I am sure the Portland community will gobble you up quickly. Talent like you guys is hard to find.

For more information, see Iterasi’s post. And, if anyone has gigs for these folks, please by all means, speak up.

Portland Web Innovators: Portland Tech 2008 in a word? Community

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:16:22 +0000

This evening, I had the honor to take a little walk down memory lane with the folks at Portland Web Innovators as we took a little time to reflect of the cool accomplishments of the Portland Web and Open Source startup community over the last 12 months.

It was kind of like signing yearbooks. A lot of nostalgia and a lot of kind words. And—of course—a lot of tweets.

I wanted to thank everyone who took time out of their schedules to come hang out and chat about our past and our future. And to those who took the opportunity to hang out online.

Here’s a quick round-up of what I’ve got at this point. I’ll add more as it rolls in, and as always, your comments are welcome.

Slides

2008 Portland Tech Recap

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: pdxwi tech)

Video

Thanks so much to Bram Pitoyo for streaming this video and moderating the chat room. (NOTE: There’s a bit of a hiccup at about 90 seconds into the presentation. If you wait, it comes back. Or you can click into the timeline to kickstart the video again.)

I’m holding a contest. Count how many times I say “amazing” during this presentation and post it in the comments. You could win… um… I don’t know. Something.

Online video chat by Ustream

Twitter stream

We managed to accumulate quite a few tweets. You’ll be happy to hear that I managed to resist the urge to tweet during the presentation.

In reverse chronological order: #pdxwi 1, #pdxwi 2, #pdxwi 3, #pdxwi 4, #pdxwi 5, #pdxwi 6, #pdxwi 7, #pdxwi 8, #pdxwi 9, and #pdxwi 10.

Sites I mentioned

Posts

And some folks have already taken the time to post about the event:

State of Portland Tech - Web Innovators Live Stream and Event Recap
“Rick Turoczy (Silicon Florist) lead a discussion about the Portland tech scene heading into 2009. Where are we now, how did we get here and where do we want to go?”
Portland Tech Community
“Over the last year, I’ve written several emails to people moving here describing different events to attend and at those events introduced people new to the area to others in the Portland Tech Community. Despite the fact that I had found myself doing that multiple times, I never really thought about it as a need. I just considered it some ways part of being a good host for the town I grew up in…. But there is a clear need. If someone doesn’t know to ask or whom to ask, they may never find their connection.”
The Year in Retrospect, the Year to Come
“One of the things Rick declined to do was talk much about the ‘why’ - what’s the secret sauce that makes the Portland tech community a community and not some loose aggregation of companies and coders? Why is there such a drive to connect here, while other communities with equal opportunities just don’t work as hard? And most importantly, why is community so important to Portlanders, and what are local companies of all types and from all industries doing to connect and generate a sustainable economics through close attention to community members, the locality, the exigent needs of the people? What does innovation look like in tough circumstances?”

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for December 03

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:02:08 +0000

Ain’t No Party Like A Cyborg Party

Via PDX Pipeline “Come to the official CyborgCamp pre-party and partake in drinks and festivities before the conference in the morning! Special guests Cami Kaos and Mike (Dr. Normal) will be live-broadcasting Strange Love Live. There will be great conversations and (hopefully) drinks!”

The OpenID Foundation Needs You - ReadWriteWeb

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Do you think that open standards, data portability and questions of online identity are important? We do; we think these issues are the foundation upon which many of the most exciting and important online innovations are being built.”

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Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for December 02

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:01:56 +0000

A Matter of Days | raven.me

Raven Zachary writes “Today marks the end of Obama ‘08 for iPhone as the application has been marked for removal from the App Store. The application had a lifespan of just 61 days, 32 of those pre-election, the period of time that really mattered. Unlike the vast majority of iPhone applications available in the App Store, Obama ‘08 was tied to specific time-based goal - supporting the election of Senator Obama. It had a defined objective with a clear timeframe.”

New Hires at Stepchange

Via RWW Jobwire “Kevin Tate of Stepchange sent us an email to announce that they have made a couple of recent hires. The Portland, Oregon based online strategy, design, development and marketing firm has hired Crystal Beasley as Designer & Interactive Brand Manager and Jessica Swan as Sr. Account Executive. Tate also reported that business is good and that Stepchange is moving into a bigger office.”

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Birds of an OpenID feather: Vidoop, MySpace, and Flock together

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:45:40 +0000

Portland-based Vidoop has been working on a project they’ve been calling “Identity in the Browser” (IDIB), a means of employing an intelligent browser control that recognizes OpenID enabled sites and allows users to access those sites without having to jump through the often-confusing hurdles of relying party redirects.

Relying party redirects? Who duh how du wha? If you’ve ever used OpenID, you know that there’s a little dance that takes place: you provide your OpenID, the site then redirects you to your OpenID provider to confirm that you are you, you confirm—maybe view some images along the way, and are transported back to the original site to do whatever it is you came to do.

Vidoop (and a number of others) thought it would be easier to skip all of that and let your browser handle some of the heavy lifting.

The concept was solid. And a prototype Firefox extension had been created. But what Vidoop really needed was one of the popular browsers to step up and promote OpenID to its users.

Today, that happened. And how. Vidoop has announced that OpenID for Flock is now available, a joint project among Vidoop, Flock, and a little social network you may have heard of called MySpace.

IDIB OpenID for Flock from phatbuddha on Vimeo.

It’s big news for OpenID and for Vidoop. And a number of people are taking notice:

ReadWriteWeb: Vidoop and MySpace Bring OpenID to Flock
“While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.”
The Social: MySpace helps develop OpenID extension for Flock
“The OpenID Flock extension allows for easier credential management within the browser and makes it more apparent when a site will accept an OpenID login. A handful of OpenID extensions already exist for the open-source Flock, but this one’s got the seal of approval from some big names.”
O’Reilly Radar: Getting OpenID Into the Browser
“Imagine if your web browser really knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said “Hello Dave” and asked you to “unlock it” as well (Chris Messina was quite influential in my thinking about it this way). In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider (or maybe more than one of them) and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID. Argue as much as you want about the details in making this happen, but I think it’s hard to disagree that making it easier for people to manage and use their identity (or identities) online is a bad thing.”
ComputerWorld: MySpace, Flock, Vidoop unveil prototype for storing OpenID credentials
“OpenID for Flock is now available to all users of Flock 2.0 as an alpha extension to the browser. The tool automatically notifies users when they surf to a Web site that supports the OpenID framework. The framework, supported by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., allows people to use a single username and password to enter sites that support it.”
CenterNetworks: Flock Partners With MySpace and Vidoop on OpenID Browser
“Just a month after the public launch of the Flock 2.0 browser, Flock has announced the addition of OpenID to the Flock 2.0 browser today. I’ve been saying for a long time that if OpenID wants to succeed, they have to get it into the browser so when you hit a site that offers OpenID login, it could be as close to seamless as possible.”
Mashable: OpenID Management Comes to Flock
“MySpace, Flock and Vidoop have developed OpenID for Flock. I’ll skip the talk about standards which you don’t care about, cut to the chase and tell you what it does.”
Download Squad: MySpace, Flock and Vidoop release OpenID for Flock plugin
“OpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn’t gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn’t easy to use OpenID — or even find out if a site supports OpenID — on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they’ve come across a solution: let the browser handle it.”
Social Times: MySpace Teams with Flock, Vidoop to Push OpenID
“MySpace announced its support of OpenID earlier this year, with certain hopes for its potential alongside its own Data Availability initiative. Such an integration makes sense, especially in light of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to become the central platform for online social interaction. So how can MySpace hope to stay ahead? Deeper OpenID integration.”
Ars Technica: Flock OpenID support a small step for slow-moving standard
“The potential of a ubiquitous online login is slowly being realized with emerging identity systems like OpenID. With one username to rule them all and broad industry support from companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and VeriSign, users may finally be able to simplify their online presence and save a few post-it notes—if OpenID can be made simple and easy to manage for the general consumer. Amid a confusing array of options for creating and using OpenIDs, MySpace and Vidoop have partnered with Flock, the social web browser, to create an open source implementation of OpenID in a browser.”

For more on the the browser extension, see the post on the Flock blog.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for December 01

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:01:49 +0000

Clearwire coming to PDX this month (updated) - Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway writes “Talked to Clearwire VP Susan Johnston this afternoon about the Portland rollout. Clearwire doesn’t have retail locations open yet, she said, and won’t until sometime early next year. But the Portland network is up and operational. So customers hungry for service can sign up today on Clearwire’s Web site.”

Response to Wired Blog on Facebook Connect

Via the JanRain blog “While it is true that Facebook has done a lot of great pioneering work with user experience and data management, the open source community has been systematically working to enhance and extend the functionality and intuitiveness of OpenID, Open Social, OAuth, Portable Contacts, hCards, etc. Google’s work with the LSO user interface and JanRain’s work with the RPX user interface are examples of approaches aimed at improving the ease of use of OpenID.”

Yahoo Pipes Video: 2 Minute Quick Vanity Feed Demo

Dawn Foster writes “This quick vanity feed demo builds on the concepts learned in the introduction with a practical example of how to create a quick and dirty vanity feed using Yahoo Pipes.”

The five ages of vendor-led open source revenue strategies

Via The 451 Group ” hereby present the five ages of Vendor-led open source revenue strategies, which takes us through the evolving revenue strategies of vendors that dominate their own open source-based products. Some vendors may stay longer at one stage than another, or even skip a stage entirely. I don’t claim this to be perfect, and it doesn’t necessarily work for vendors that build a business around community-led projects (I’ll come back to that), but I think it is essentially accurate….”

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Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for November 28

Rick Turoczy — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:02:00 +0000

Can Panels.net Make Useful, Real Time Pop-ups?

Marshall Kirkpatrick on Portland-based Panels “Panels is a very good idea. If it can be executed upon well, and overcome the kinds of obstacles listed above, then we think this just-launched startup has as good a chance as any. We want it to work better than it does today, but we’re sure it will.”

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Thank you

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:42:32 +0000

I try to say it as often as I can, but I still don’t think that I say it often enough.

So, thank you.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for being part of the community. Thank you for being in the Silicon Forest—or interested in the Silicon Forest.

Today is a day for many of the readers to give thanks. And I’m reminded, yet again, how thankful I am for you.

Thank you. And the happiest of holidays to you and yours.