Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
This is both a geek alert and a time-waster alert, but it’s official: Google Maps now contains street views of Portland, Oregon.
It appears that the street views are confined to more of Portland-proper, with the cameras stopping short of the west-side suburban sprawl growth. The east side looks to be well covered. And they’ve wandered around the ‘Couv a bit, as well.
To begin the time suck, visit Google Maps.
Portland-based SplashCast, the media player that allows anyone to pretend they’re a high-powered media exec, continues its quest to become the leading media player for actual high-powered media execs in the recording industry.
SplashCast has now released artist-branded channels for 3 out of the 4 major recording labels.
If you’ve been following SplashCast news, you may know that we’ve already done a lot of work with Sony through their other labels, including Zomba Music Group and Columbia Records. The addition of EMI’s Capitol Records and Universal’s Geffen means that we are now partnering with 3 of the 4 major music companies in the world.
More information on this news as it becomes available. For details on the artist channels, visit SplashCast.
If you, like I, were unable to attend the Portland Web Innovators‘ get-together with StepChange, last night, fear not, gentle reader.
Justin Kistner of Metafluence has provided a thorough recap of the PDXWI event for your reading pleasure.
My biggest take away is that widgets are not just a fad, but rather an important stratification of content and services that will reshape the future landscape of the web.
For more, see Metafluence.
To support the monthly Rails Hackfest, Portland-based Planet Argon has offered a six-month Boxcar account to 1st place winner for October.
Boxcar is a pre-configured virtual server for hosting your business-level Rails applications and was designed to support the best-practices for Rails deployment.
The Rail Hackfest was designed to further the development of Ruby on Rails source code through good-natured competition. Contributions are rated and charted throughout the month, with the top contributors walking away with prizes.
For more information on Boxcar, see the Boxcar site. For more information on the Rails Hackfest, visit the Working with Rails site.
[Editor’s Note: Extending the Silicon Florist urban-growth boundary a touch, I wanted to include Corvallis-based MyStrands in the coverage. They’re doing some cool stuff and some of their folks are very active here in Portland. It’s a stretch, but a reasonable one.]
partyStrands, the newest offering from the MyStrands team, takes the ever-popular backchannel concept and makes it an interactive component of parties, concerts, and other gatherings. It’s a Twitter-on-the-big-screen sort of concept that makes every partygoer with a cell phone part of the action. And I mean, seriously, are you a partygoer without a cell phone? Not likely.
What’s more, partyStrands promises the ability to bring the party to you, whether you are “in the house” or not.
partyStrands allows you to join in on the party where your friends are even though you are somewhere else. Imagine tonight you stay at home, you can partake in the party from your room and interact with your friends at the party, by sending messages and pictures, all from MyStrands.com or m.MyStrands.com. Of course, you can read, see, and “hear” what they are doing and the music that is being played.
(Imagine staying home tonight? Not a huge leap for me.)
To see images of partyStrands in action, check out the recent Paul Van Dyk concert at the Crystal Ballroom.
For more on partyStrands, see the MyStrands blog post. For more information, visit MyStrands.
MyStrands develops technologies to better understand people’s taste and help them discover things they like and didn’t know about. MyStrands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.
Join the Portland Web Innovators for their monthly gathering, tonight. The topic? Portland-based StepChange will be presenting on their experiences developing widgets, like CLIQ. The meeting begins at 7 PM and will be hosted by Nemo Design.
For more information on the event or to RSVP, see the Upcoming page. For more on the group, see Portland Web Innovators.
As Lao-Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” So began the journey for Walker Tracker, a Portland-based community site for pedometer fans to log and track their steps.
One billion steps later, that journey continues.
To see how that total number of steps breaks down into the people who have taken them, try starting at the Walker Tracker Hall of Fame.
SplashCast hits one million. Walker Tracker hits one billion. Do I hear one trillion? Anyone? Anyone?
Portland Small Business, a burgeoning social network for members of the Portland small-business community to go for peer advice and network, has announced a planned site makeover. And, they’re looking for your feedback to help guide their development efforts.
This is the your opportunity to get in on the ground floor and have a real impact on this site. PortlandSmallBusiness.com is 6 weeks old and we are planning to retool and polish up this site by Oct. 23. I’m looking for as much feedback as I can before then. So, if you have any suggestions, please share them. With your help, we can make this site a useful tool for all the small businesses in Portland.
For more information or to provide feedback on future direction, visit Portland Small Business.