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Month: September 2007

Portland pairing: Using Attensa and Jive Clearspace in tandem

Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing at Portland-based Attensa, will be presenting at the Office 2.0 conference, this afternoon. He’ll be describing how to use Attensa’s product in combination with another Portland startup’s product, Jive Software’s Clearspace.

You can get the high-level gist of his talk—how using these tools in combination can be an effective way of streamlining the information flow in your organization—from the presentation embedded below on Attensa’s blog. (Unfortunately the embed doesn’t play nicely with WordPress.)

At the very least, I wanted to highlight this pairing of complementary technologies from the Silicon Forest.

Goboz launches Digg for Portland

Portland-based Goboz, which has been available to a closed group of beta testers, has officially gone live, today, as promised.

Goboz features Citysearch-like functionality for reviewing and rating business. And the company has been working to position itself in this light. I mean, it’s Portland. We like to chat about our restaurants and bars. And, continuing down that path will likely be Goboz’ best means of supporting the site with local advertising revenue.

And, it’s true: Citysearch is horrible. It’s an easy target. No argument there.

At first blush, the easy Goboz brush-off could be “Another Digg clone?” or “Is this another Pligg site?” Do we really need another way to rank restaurants and bars in town?

Maybe not. But Goboz has something we do need. I’m thinking there’s some real potential here. That, if Goboz plays their cards right, they could fill a very interesting niche for the Portland Web community.

I think the true utility of Goboz is its ranking engine. Not for businesses, necessarily, but for Portland-based news and blog entries. And currently, that sort of activity is vastly under-served in our beloved Rose City.

I mean, as far as locally focused news-ranking services go, there’s The Oregonian reddit. And then there’s…. Well, that’s about it, actually.

So, while Goboz seems to want to lump themselves in with the Citysearch crowd, I’m going to advise you head over to the Goboz site with “Portland’s Digg” in mind. There could be some real value to the blogging community in that type of service.

In fact, I’ve added this post to Goboz, and we’ll see if you agree.

Breaking News: SplashCast to release fullscreen player

We all know that Portland-based SplashCast has been hinting at some interesting stuff in the works. It appears that one of the features in the offing is a fullscreen version of the SplashCast player.

Well, It’s big. I’m not seeing any content Now, I’m seeing content.

I’ve no idea how long this link will be live. But give the SplashCast fullscreen player a shot.

[Update] In other news, it appears that SplashCast has revamped their landing page, giving visitors direct access to SplashCast channels. Another welcome change.

Uncloaking: LUNARR

Apparently, Wednesday is the “Announce the events I’d really like to attend yet upon which I will inevitably be forced to bail” Day at Silicon Florist. Here’s another one:

Portland-based LUNARR, which has gotten quite a bit of press for a company in stealth mode, is disengaging its cloaking device on September 17 at CubeSpace.

LUNARR was founded by wildly successful Japanese entrepreneur Toru Takasuka of Cybozu fame:

LUNARR was founded in January of 2006 in the high tech corridor of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. The brainchild of Toru Takasuka, one of Japan’s foremost technology entrepreneurs, LUNARR was founded on the idea that every knowledge worker in an organization has the potential to be a creative contributor, one who can have a significant impact on the organization’s success by sharing his or her unique ideas and perspectives through collaboration.

What do they do? Do you not understand the concept of “stealth”? I don’t know. We’ll just have to go to the launch party, won’t we? And by “we,” I mean “you.”

For information on the launch party, see the Upcoming page.

(Hat tip to Dawn Foster)

Reminder: Digital Identity and OpenID, tonight

Just a reminder that Jive Software will play host to the Portland Web Innovators [Update: The Portland Web Innovators’ Web site is currently suffering from a bit of “digg effect,” but all of the details you will need are on the Upcoming page]  event, tonight, entitled “Digital Identity and OpenID.” Scott Kveton will be speaking. The event starts around 7 PM.

Digital identity promoter Scott Kveton will talk about his experience with OpenID and the future of digital identity on the web. He worked at JanRain (creators of MyOpenID) as CEO and helped it reach Business 2.0’s list of Startups to Watch. Now Scott consults and speaks on identity and open source.

Portland WikiWednesday, you’re invited (tonight)

The gang at AboutUs is hosting a WikiWednesday. Today. At 6:30 PM.

On short notice, the AboutUs team is partnering with some Portland, Oregon area wiki enthusiasts for a WikiWednesday event also tomorrow at 6:30. The event will be held at the new AboutUs office at 107 SE Washington St, Suite 520, Portland OR 97214. We’re planning on having the usual social meetup fair with the hopes of organizing a BarnRaising to build out some articles for WikiHow.com — a cool wiki that’s a source of “how-to” information. If you’re in the Portland area you’re warmly invited to drop by and join in the fun. We’ll also try to monitor the AboutUs IRC channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/WikiWednesdayPortland so that people in other locations can maybe “drop by” as well.

Sorry for the last minute notice, but I just stumbled upon it myself.

Oregon Startups finds 37, asks for more

[Editor: Ah good. The long weekend is over. Now, we can get back to the news. I’ve been holding this one for you, waiting for you to get back to your computer. Because that’s just how I am, gentle reader.]

There’s a great list of Oregon-based Web 2.0 companies posted on Oregon Startups. It’s currently sitting at 37 companies:

Expanding the focus to Oregon (not just Portland) I’ve been putting together a list of Oregon Web 2.0, building on the inputs from Michael and Ryan. And I’m up to 37. You can certainly argue that some of these are “Web 2.0 technology companies” as opposed to “Web 2.0 companies” (e.g., JanRain with their Open ID technology) — so yes, I’m being flexible. I will argue that all of these companies have a very strong plug-in to web 2.0!

Is your startup there? Is your friends’ startup there? Check the list and do your part to help it grow.