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Month: July 2008

Acquisition, Lunch 2.0v4 Recap, souk is Next

Rick Turoczy on July 2, 2008

lunch20.jpgRick has kindly agreed to let me do Lunch 2.0 stuff here on the Florist. This makes a lot of sense, since this is the place to get the lowdown on technology companies and the tech scene here in Portland and nearby.

Oh, and the people who go to these lunches actually read and comment here, big plus.

So, my first post-acquisition content is the recap of Monday’s Lunch 2.0v4, held at Wieden+Kennedy, and a reminder that the next iteration is coming up soon at souk.

W+K Recap
img_0257.jpgThis Lunch 2.0 was a little different than usual, which ruffled a few feathers, at least initially. Everyone has since hugged and sung Kumbaya.

Gaia Brown, the mastermind behind the W+K format, put together an ice-breaker activity that paired attendees with W+K people. From what I observed, people took the advance packets in varying degrees of seriousness, but the conversation flowed freely, regardless.

The lunch was held in the atrium at W+K in the Pearl, and I’d guess the attendance was probably more than 100, but less than 200. Yeah, I’m not a very good estimator. The raffle of swag went over well; gift baskets from several W+K clients were given away, and the final prize was several tickets to Inverge.

After chatting as pairs for a bit and listening to the raffle, people got up and milled around and talked, others played Rockband.

Next up, souk
souk.jpgAs Rick previously mentioned, the next Lunch 2.0 will be held at souk in Old Town on July 16, so pretty soon. RVSP on Upcoming if you plan to make it, and yes, we’re returning to the old format, with no work and no packets, just free grub and good company.

Old Town has been very good to Lunch 2.0, thanks to eROI and Vidoop and now souk. I guess this begs the question, are you a real company if you’re in Old Town and haven’t hosted a Lunch 2.0?

Your thoughts?
After four Lunch 2.0s here in Portland, I’m pretty happy with the progress. The event is dominated by Tweeters, which (sadly) is the primary means of promotion, yet another reason why I wanted to move here to the Florist.

So, fellow Florists, what do you think of Lunch 2.0 so far? Sound off in comments and stay tuned for more Lunch 2.0 action here on the Florist.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for July 01

Rick Turoczy on July 1, 2008

Office Snapshots: Vidoop Office

From the Office Snapshots blog “Hidden behind an unassuming green door in Portland, Oregon is Vidoop’s office: a nice, open, well-lit office space. Awesomely, the office also contains two of my favorite workplace features: red brick walls and plenty of food. Now if only they had a dog, they’d deserve all five stars.”

No Beer and Blog this Friday in observance of Independence Day

Beer and Blog takes the 4th off. “Please take this 4th of July to spend with your friends and family. You can still enjoy beer and maybe even blog, but you should def watch something blow up. It’s the American way.”

Gary Vaynerchuk at Legion of Talk

Dawn Foster is a consummate note-taker and queen of the wrap-up. Here’s her take on Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk on July 1 at W+K, “Tonight is the first in what will hopefully be a series of guest speakers for Legion of Talk, a Legion of Tech. event. Gary V. is in town for his book tour at Powells, and we were lucky enough to snag him to talk to us about how he has used social media to grow his family wine business.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Iterasi gets more social with RSS feeds, widgets, and public pages

Rick Turoczy on July 1, 2008

[Editor: Full disclosure, Iterasi is a client of mine, but I was not involved in this announcement.]

http://www.iterasi.net/user/siliconflorist?format=widgetN1Vancouver-based Iterasi, the service that allows you to create your own personal Wayback Machine, took a huge step forward in making its network of users more social, today, when they announced three major additions to their offering: public pages, RSS feeds, and widgets.

Josh Lowensohn at Webware broke the news:

Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.

In my opinion, these seemingly innocuous changes actually mark a decided change in Iterasi’s stance. With these features, Iterasi moves from being an interesting personal service toward becoming a valuable social service. And by embracing features that allow me to distribute my saved pages to a much, much wider audience, they gain the benefit of more people encountering their service.

I have found a great deal of value in being able to save pages for myself. But now that I have the option of sharing pages with folks? It opens a whole new realm of use for me. Like a more typical social bookmarking service.

Fringe benefits abound. With RSS feeds and widgets, Iterasi just increased its exposure exponentially. I’ve added the widget to this post and I’ll likely add it to the blog (once the Mac version is out and I can use the service regularly.) And, I’m adding the RSS feed to my lifestreaming services, like FriendFeed and Strands.

What’s more, by launching public pages, Iterasi has the potential to rapidly increase its online footprint for search engines and the like—like any other public-facing social network service.

Now, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. As with any new feature on a BETA product, there are some rough spots and some nice-to-haves that didn’t make the cut. There are some areas over which I would like to have control, like skinning the widget and dealing with the publishing function.

But as I’ve mentioned, I see this release as less about “features” and more about “vision.” It’s clear to me that Iterasi is taking a much more social stance. And that’s a very good thing.

To test drive the product, visit Iterasi. To see the public page in action or to get the widget code, please visit the Silicon Florist page on Iterasi.

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