.

Month: January 2008

Portland Startup Weekend, May 23 – 25, 2008

I am happy to report that details on Portland Startup Weekend have just been announced. The event will be held May 23-25, 2008, at SMtvMusic.

Portland Startup WeekendNow, that’s not only Memorial Day weekend, it’s also pretty darn close to WebVisions 2008, which runs May 22-23, 2008, in Portland.

Oregon-native and Startup Weekend organizer, Andrew Hyde, has promised that he has a few surprises up his sleeve for this one.

I, for one, am looking forward to doing whatever I can to make this event a success for Startup Weekend—and Portland. And I hope you’ll join the fun.

(To help promote this event, feel free to use the Startup Weekend badge above.)

Just as Portland has made Ignite Portland an overwhelming success and promises to make Lunch 2.0 a Portland-flavored affair, I’m sure we can show the Startup Weekend folks how Portland puts its own unique spin on these types of events.

Tickets for Startup Weekend Portland will be sold here for $40. This is really a RSVP cost, and you will receive your fair share of food, swag and memories. If you or your company is interested in sponsoring a meal, shirts or massive amounts of caffeine, email sponsor@startupweekend.com.

For more information, see Portland Startup Weekend. To reserve your spot at Portland Startup Weekend, buy a ticket.

Grabb.it releases API, documentation

Portland-based Grabb.it, the music service that helps users share and rate MP3s, has announced the release of a rich RESTful API for accessing its data.

The primary resource type Grabb.it makes available is the playlist. We make playlists available in many formats, at many endpoints. We also have a few methods to manipulate and generate playlists. This document details the formats, endpoints (access urls) and uses of Grabb.it playlists.

Documentation on the API is available on a new Grabb.it API Google Group. For more information, visit Grabb.it.

SplashCast reports metrics, hits the 200 million views mark

Portland-based SplashCast, makers of the media widget that allows anyone to create their own channels of content, has just crossed the 200 million views mark, rapidly eclipsing the 100 million views mark they hit just nine weeks ago.

Another impressive metric, SplashCast is reporting that they have more than 8.5 million unique users.

“That likely puts SplashCast in the top 20 of widget providers on comScore’s widget metrix chart,” said Mike Berkley, CEO of SplashCast.

For more information, visit SplashCast.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement

Sometimes, a link says more than I could ever say. Here are some fragrant little buds I’ve found recently, courtesy of ma.gnolia.

Screencast: Welcome to AboutUs

As another step towards making available great help resources for wiki editors and vistors, we have created our first screencast, called Welcome to AboutUs. Over the next few weeks, we plan to create many more screencasts, to compliment all of the existing help information. We would love your comments both on this screencast and on which topics you think we ought to be covering first as we develop more.

VanPortlander: Portland Mobile Newspapers

For the past several months I’ve used a Blackberry to read a lot of content during my commute. One thing that has become apparent is that local newspaper websites aren’t created equal when viewed from a mobile device – some work just fine and some downright suck.

OregonStartups.com News: Startup Weekend Coming to Portland

May 24-26 is Startup Weekend Portland. So what is Startup Weekend? Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of small business entrepreneurs to build a community and company in a weekend.

Reminder: The Big Idea Bash, Wednesday, January 30, 2008

To start out the year with a bang, Credit Suisse, manager of the Oregon Investment Fund, invites you to meet and exchange big business ideas with entrepreneurs and investors. Enjoy drinks and food on us while initiating conversations with some of the brightest business minds in the Northwest. Now is the time to make partnerships and grow your business. It’s set to be the business event of the year.

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Iterasi launches at DEMO 2008

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is one of my clients which may taint my objectivity. For other reviews of the tool, see coverage in CenterNetworks, Profy, VentureBeat, Webware, and Web Worker Daily.]

Vancouver, Washington, based Iterasi has been working in stealth mode for the last six months. (So stealthy, in fact, that my friends and family have, to date, only known them as “double secret probation.”) Today, Iterasi was finally able to start talking about their offering, unveiling an early—yet highly functional—version of their product at DEMO 2008.

They will be the only Silicon-Forest-based company taking the stage at DEMO, this week.

So what does the Iterasi do? It saves Web pages.

Sounds simple. But, these days? Not so much.

Given the dynamic nature of today’s Web sites—AJAX, CSS, dynamic HTML, widgets, database-driven content—“saving a page” is a little more difficult than it seems like it should be.

But Iterasi makes it incredibly easy, enabling the user to save the exact page he or she is seeing. No matter how many little AJAX balloons may have been opened or what personal information has been provided.

When Iterasi saves the page, it’s in its native format. It’s HTML. So all of the links still work. All of the CSS is still there. So you get to see all of the content, in context, and work with it, instead of just looking at it.

In addition to saving pages, Iterasi offers a scheduler that allows you to capture the same page over time:

You can also schedule automatic capture of a page at regular intervals. We believe that capturing the same page over time will highlight the differences among notarized versions. And we think that type of comparison will be great for competitive intelligence and other online research. Some people will use it to monitor their kid’s MySpace page over time, others to take an extended look at Craigslist search results for a town they might move to.

For more information, to see a demo, or to sign up for an invitation to future BETA versions of Iterasi, visit Iterasi. To keep tabs on what the company is doing, visit the Iterasi blog.

Silicon Florist field trip: DEMO 2008

Next week, I’m in the enviable position of getting the opportunity to travel down to DEMO 2008 with one of my Silicon-Forest-based clients.

Although I’ve been tracking DEMO for years, this will be my first actual trip to the event. And, quite frankly, I’m looking forward to being a bit shellshocked by the whole affair.

What’s DEMO? DEMO is very much the grand ball of high-tech product launches. A very hush-hush, invite-only, keep-your-product-under-wraps-until-the-show kind of thing. Or, as the DEMO folks put it:

DEMO is the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies. For more than 16 years, DEMO has established a reputation for identifying and presenting to an elite audience the products most likely to have a significant impact on the marketplace and market trends in the coming year. Each product is carefully screened and selected by DEMO’s Executive Producer, Chris Shipley, one of the top trend spotters in the personal technology product industry.

Who’s the Silicon-Forest-based client? The embargo on DEMO product announcements lifts on Monday morning, at which point, I’ll cover the client’s product (with full disclosure of my consulting relationship with them).

Suffice it to say, they’re small, they’re out of Vancouver, Washington, this is the CEOs third trip to DEMO, and I think they’ve come up with something that will have utility for a wide-range of folks.

But for now, let’s just leave it at that. Please tune in Monday for more.

Now, I’m going to cover that client because they’re part of our community. And I hope you are okay with me doing that. I’m not doing it to push the product. I’m covering it because it’s as newsworthy as any startup I cover here. And I’ll strive to be as objective as I possibly can.

Obviously, I’m hoping to cover any of the other Silicon-Forest-based companies that come out of stealth mode down there. (If you are one of those companies, please drop me a line and let me know, so I can plan to jump on the coverage.)

What I won’t do is provide generic coverage of the event, itself. Or profile every single one of the more than 70 products that will launch at DEMO. In fact, after Monday’s post, this may be the last you ever hear of DEMO from me. Unless I uncover a story that has a specific Silicon Forest angle. (Or unless you’re following me on Twitter, as I’ll likely tweet some coverage of the event, just for my own historical reference of my babe-in-the-woods naivete.)

Just because I’m down there doesn’t mean that the blog should lose its focus.

If you are interested in more insightful coverage of DEMO, I know Portland-based blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick will be providing coverage—though not entirely product-focused—for Read/Write Web, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks has proposed a sort of blogger bullpen of writers to cover the event, and Rafe Needleman of Webware usually does a bang up job. Plus, the DEMO folks post videos of each and every one of the six-minute presentations to the DEMO site, so you can watch at your leisure.

If you are planning to be down there, as well, please let me know and let’s try to find one another. And if there is anything specific you would like me to cover from DEMO, please use the comments to let me know.

Ignite Portland hits the mainstream press

We’ve been waiting for this to hit, and now it has.

I couldn’t be happier to announce that Ignite Portland has gotten real ink (as opposed to the pixels I dedicate to the subject [Full disclosure: Silicon Florist is a sponsor of Ignite Portland 2.]) in The Oregonian. Not only that, it’s front page news. Well, front page of the Living section. But that’s a front page. And front page is front page in my book.

Ignite — a Seattle invention that spread worldwide — came to Portland last fall courtesy of several self-described geeks in their 20s and 30s. They knew each other through the social networking site Twitter and techie workshops called BarCamp. If they thought Ignite was cool, the group figured, so would some other Portlanders.

Boy, did they. Response was so overwhelming, the Ignite crew plans to host quarterly events — starting now.

As always, news quickly percolated throughout the Portland Twitter crowd. And Dawn Foster has announced the article in Fast Wonder, with pictures by Scott Kveton:

w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?

The Q&A style article has many members of the Legion of Tech—the force behind the event—chiming in to round out the picture of Ignite Portland and its purpose. Quoted are Josh Bancroft, Audrey Eschright, Dawn Foster, Todd Kenefsky and Raven Zachary.

Raven Zachary has covered the coverage on the Ignite Portland blog, including additional folks who also deserved recognition:

[T]he print version is worth the trip to the store to buy a copy for $0.50. There are a few people whose names were not mentioned in The Oregonian article who have been a big help with Ignite Portland planning – Scott Kveton, Adam Duvander, Aaron Hockley, Ann Marcus, the rest of the board of Legion of Tech, Renny Gleeson, and a whole host of volunteers who help from crowd control to cleanup and everything else that needs to be done to make Ignite Portland operate smoothly. Thank you!

And, Banana Lee Fishbones sums up the appeal of Ignite Portland very nicely in her coverage on Metroblogging Portland:

Specifically in Portland this event has a great story: Some geeks from here were in Seattle for a conference that happened to coincide with the Seattle Ignite event. They went and loved it. When they got home they thought, “Why don’t we do something like that here?” and they went out and did it. And it was good. And it is stuff like this that makes me love living here. “Hey that would be cool, let’s do that!” and then DOING IT. Not sitting around bitching that nobody else is doing it for them.

To read the print article in pixels, see “What’s on your mind? You’ve got five minutes…” from The Oregonian, Saturday, January 26, 2008.

And perhaps most importantly… Obviously this increase is exposure will have an impact on the number of attendees. Please make sure to RSVP if you’re planning to attend.

BREAKING: Portland Startup Weekend

Just a quick note to let you know that your votes for have counted. Portland now has a Startup Weekend of its own.

Thanks to all of you have taken the time to vote. I think this could be a really interesting event for Portland and our community.

Details are still slim, but the date is set for the weekend of May 23 – 25.

More as details become available.

For more information, visit Startup Weekend.

Lunch 2.0 comes to Portland

Sometimes, there are people at a cool company with whom you would really like to meet. But maybe they’re the competition. Or it’s hard to get on their schedule. Or you’re just not the kind of person to hit them up for lunch.

Lunch 2.0 was designed to solve this problem. An event started down in the Silicon Valley—where churn can be exceptionally high—Lunch 2.0 is designed to give colleagues an opportunity to stay in touch. No matter where they’re currently employed.

We read about these companies in the blogs, and we use their products, and we’d probably all love to see how these companies and people live and work, but we don’t. Even though they’re like 5 minutes away from us, and they’re full of people just like us that would love to see how we live and work too!

And now, Portland’s Jake Kuramato of Oracle Apps Lab is working to bring Lunch 2.0 to Portland.

The inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0 will be held Wednesday, February 27 from 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM at the AboutUs offices, located at 107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520 in Portland.

Here’s hoping you take this opportunity to spend some time with a number of Portland bloggers, entrepreneurs, and just darned interesting folks. I’m planning to be there, if schedule permits. And I hope to see you there. RSVP for Portland Lunch 2.0 on Upcoming.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement

Sometimes, a link says more than I could ever say. Here are some fragrant little buds I’ve found recently, courtesy of ma.gnolia.

Software Association of Oregon Social Network

The Software Association of Oregon is clearly going through some changes. And this is just one example: a social network built on Ning. Looking forward to seeing more from them.

IT Conversations: Scott Kveton

OpenIDDevCamp was a gathering to develop web-based applications that use OpenID. Scott joined Phil to discus the event as well as the OpenID concept. He talked about the structure of the camp as well as the background of OpenID, including such topics as OpenID usability and best practices, data portability, and the OpenID 2.0 specification.

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia