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Month: January 2009

Ignite Portland 5: And the presenters are…

Ignite Portland

Ooh. We’re getting close now. The Ignite Portland team just announced the lucky people who get to deliver presentations for Ignite Portland 5.

So who gets to spend a nerve-wracking and seemingly interminable five minutes on stage? Here are our latest victims presenters:

Now is also a good time to remind you that tickets will be going “on sale” on February 5.

Congratulations to all those selected! I’m looking forward to seeing you on stage, dazzling 500+ of your closest friends with your burning ideas.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 29

Masterbacon contest is real heart-stopper – OregonLive.com

Via The Oregonian “To pay homage to their favorite pork product and win golden piggy trophies, 32 competitors showed up with tin-foiled pans of their beloved ‘meat candy’ dishes, ready to impress, boast and barter.”

LinuxCon 2009 Portland

Via the Linux Foundation “LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux. LinuxCon will bring together the best and brightest that the Linux community has to offer, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts. In being the conference for ‘all matters Linux,’ LinuxCon will be informative and educational for a wide range of attendees. We will not only bring together all of the best technical talent but the decision makers and industry experts who are involved in the Linux community.”

Looking forward: SiOnyx, Iovation, RNA & more – Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway covers the positive news coming out of the Silicon Forest this week.

Ignite Portland 5! (…oh, i think i’m gonna be sick) | Positively Glorious!

John Metta writes “The line-up for Ignite Portland #5 is in, and yours truly is on the freight train headed straight for Public Humiliation, USA. I think this must be some kind of payback or revenge for laughing so hard when Cami Kaos went on about ‘her bluff being called.’ There I was, sitting with A.J. and Jon laughing it up. ‘Ha!’ I said, ‘She sent an idea as a joke and totally got called on it!’ Now here I am with waves of nausea spreading over me. Why? Because payback’s a bitch.”

From Planned Obsolescence to Community Innovation

Wende Morgaine writes “Are you worried about technology and information literacy in K12 and higher ed? If you are, I say, let’s get together. Let’s brainstorm. Let’s come up with one idea, or 100 ideas. And let’s implement something. Portland is a tech haven and heaven. Its an open source mecca. And we have the most engaged tech community (possibly in the world.) Let’s implement something great and create a model for school revitalization that will be copied in cities the nation over. We live in Portland. From our transportation to our city government to our tech community we create the kind of innovations that is studied and copied all the time. Yes we can. I am thinking we should meet each other at Ignite5 and plan our first brainstorming meeting in March 2009.”

FiveEdge Media has officially joined the Innerecho family!

Portland’s FiveEdge Media (John Weiss of Refresh Portland fame) gets adopted by innerecho “FiveEdge Media and Innerecho were both founded at about the same time with the same values: we believed in small teams, personal relationships, and the power of great experience design. This was not merely a coincidence. We the founders had actually begun a friendship five years prior.”

Hungry Nerds Flock to Lunch 2.0 – Social Dining for Fun and Profit

Amber Case writes “Are you into tech? Do you want to meet other tech types? Are you tired of eating lunch with the same people? Well you can meet a bevy of interesting people just like you if you attend a Lunch 2.0 event. Here in Portland, 100-150 Nerds flock to a local tech company to eat, greet, get clients, get hired, find employees, and exchange memes. Basically, it rocks—-nerd-style.”

Social Media and the Open Web

Tim Sears writes “Our personal web footprint really is no longer just what we blog about, but is really a collection of our interactions across various social media. I can see this being the future of blogs, in that they are no longer blogs at all, but rather centralized portals to the content that person contributes across the web. The first natural question to this is how do you manage the firehose of content that we each contribute to social media every day? If people wanted to read every tweet you make, wouldn’t they just follow you on Twitter? This is where tags and hashtags come into play, in that we find meaning and value in content we contribute through the metadata we and others provide with it. It’s machine-readable, so it’s easy to process.”

11870.com and Strands partner to offer the best personalized recommendations of services and places

Via Strands “We are happy to announce that Strands is partnering with the Spanish start-up 11870.com to offer the best personalized recommendations of services and places to their users. 11870.com, the European equivalent to Yelp, is used for people to save, share and keep track of the places and services they like around the world through reviews, pictures and videos.”

How Ignite Portland Presentations are Selected

Aaron Hockley writes “With the fifth incarnation of Ignite Portland coming up in a few weeks, one issue surrounded in a bit of mystery is the process used to select the presenters. With far more entries than speakers (Ignite Portland 5 had over 80 submissions with less than 20 chosen to speak), many people wonder why they weren’t chosen or how the field is narrowed.”

What Twitter could have given Sam, and Portland | Our PDX Network

Abraham Hyatt writes “Late last month, when the whole Gov. Blagojevich indictment situation was threatening to taint Barack Obama’s transition, two writers at the Politico put together a list of “five rules of scandal response” that the president-to-be had intentionally, or unintentionally, imposed on his staff. Rule No. 1 was simple: ‘Be transparent, to an extent.’ Sam Adams didn’t get that memo. As the opening days of the Breedlove scandal unfolded, Adams hid. He hid from the press, from his critics and from his city. And it’s too bad, because whether you support the mayor or not, he had an incredible communications tool at his fingertips: his Twitter account.”

SplashCast pulls plug on free user-generated channels

splashcast.jpgPortland-based SplashCast—which has gone through any number of interesting permutations as they worked to find a revenue model for their technology—has just announced that they will no longer be supporting free user-generated channels. The decision had to be a tough one, given that it was this community groundswell that brought the service to the attention of its current customer base: media companies and advertisers.

Over the past several months, we’ve been less and less focused on our “free” product, that is, the user generated channels. While we have well over 100,000 publishers, we simply haven’t been dedicating attention and resources to this part of the business.

All successful startup companies must focus. SplashCast is no different. Therefore, we have decided to discontinue our user generated content product as of February 11. We want to give our loyal (and brilliantly creative) users a chance to find other services that meet their needs.

While I’m sad to see this free service disappear—especially when it comes to rounding up Ignite Portland presentations—I can appreciate where SplashCast is trying to go. And while it would have been great to see them offer a pay version of the user-generated content service, there were likely some legal ramifications of SplashCast making money off of people repurposing other people’s intellectual property.

Suffice it to say, while this is a painful announcement for those early users and supporters of the service, this has been—obviously—a long time coming. Better to see SplashCast gnaw off a proverbial leg to escape the trap, then go down with the ship. To completely mix metaphors.

Things are tough all over. SplashCast isn’t alone in reducing its free offerings to the benefit of the business. A couple of little companies of which you may have heard, Google and Yahoo!, are among the thousands of companies that have been going through similar slimmings to deal with the current economy, as well.

Finding focus is terribly difficult for any company—especially when it comes at the expense of faithful users. But it would be nice to see SplashCast sticking around. And if they have to forego their free services to do it? So be it.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 28

Startup funding ideas for tough times

Via TiE “Finding the money to invest in your startup is tough even in normal times. With the global economic climate being what it is today this task is even harder. How do you find the right funding in this environment? Join our experienced group of Venture Capitalists – Venky Ganesan – Managing Director of Globespan Capital, Carolynn Duncan – Micro-business expert and subject matter expert in VC /Angel funding & Bobby Kandaswamy – Director Strategic Investments at Intel Capital on Feb 5th to discuss the best ways of funding your company in a downturn. “

Thanks to everybody who attended Recked. Presentations are now available!

Via the Strands blog “Thanks to everybody who attended Recked, the informal event for engineers interested in recommender systems. It was awesome. And thanks to Robert Gaal for putting the event together. You can find the three presentations (Strands, Wakoopa and Reccoon) below.”

Master of 500 Hats: Great Entrepreneurs are PASSIONATE about Customers & Products, NOT about being Great Entrepreneurs.

Dave McClure writes “I DO hope some of you young-ass whippersnappers get your heads out of your collective asses and get a little more practical about what you’re likely to encounter should you decide to do your own startup. and a little more real about what you may face at the end of a rough hand of poker.”

OpenID Foundation: Portland people remain in leadership roles

Many of you know that in addition to serving as an OpenID proponent, a critical part of the Vidoop team, and a devout bacon—and bacn—geek, Scott Kveton has also served as the chair of the OpenID Foundation.

Today, the Foundation announced its new officers. And while Kveton has moved into the role of vice-chair, I’m happy to report that Brian Kissell of Portland-based JanRain has been elected chair of the organization.

It’s great to see Portland—the de facto hub of OpenID development—continuing to have a noted presence in the Foundation and its efforts.

In other news, a little company called PayPal—which is owned by another little company called eBay—became a sustaining member of the OpenID Foundation. But neither of them are from the Silicon Forest, so that’s secondary news.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 27

Will digital history simply disappear?

Via Iterasi “Referring back to the article in the Guardian, the iterasi archive has 29 pages on Whitehouse.gov from the Bush administration and zero pages of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. On the former, hey that’s 29 pages that perhaps don’t exist anywhere else on the Web. I can’t feel too bad about not having web pages from the 2000 Olympics as we started iterasi in 2007. So if you use iterasi, realize that you are also a librarian and a historian. So go forth and save the Web! Someone in the future may benefit from your efforts.” (FULL DISCLOSURE: Iterasi is a client of mine.)

Test site fixed! | Oregon Blogs

Via the Oregon Blogs ORBlogs 2.0 blog “Please go ahead and create yourself an account, add plenty of (appropriate) feeds, file issues for anything that is broken or otherwise obviously wrong, and chat us up on the mailing list with ideas for improvement! Please don’t be shy, we need as many people beating on this thing and providing feedback as we can get!”

86 IP5 Talk Ideas Submitted. Those Chosen Notified Soon. at Ignite Portland

Via Ignite Portland “We received a record 86 talk idea submissions for Ignite Portland 5 (we usually get around 50). There was a definitely ‘bathtub curve’ to when they came in – lots were submitted right after Ignite Portland 4, when lots of people surely thought ‘I should do a talk about *subject*.’ Then there was a lull, and, as usual, a nice big rush of submissions right before the deadline. You Portlanders sure are a bunch of procrastinators. ;-)”

Portland Data Plumbing User Group 1/27/2009

Footage from the Portland Data Plumbing User Group on January 27, 2009, featuring Marshall Kirkpatrick and his RSS magic.

Group widgets & Facebook integration

Via the Walker Tracker blog “Facebook Connect is now implemented (at least barebones – likely more to come, here). If you post your steps, you’ll see a button that will allow you to post your daily step count/blog post/picture to your Facebook feed if you have a facebook account.”

Portland OpenID looking healthy: Vidoop authentication for Microsoft HealthVault

VidoopPortland-based Vidoop—the OpenID provider that allows users to login more securely without using a password—has just announced that their authentication will be used by Microsoft HealthVault, the online health information storage and Personal Health Record product from our neighbors to the north.

“Our objective is to give our customers choice and make their Web experience easier, while helping them safeguard their privacy,” said George Scriban, senior product manager, Health Solutions Group, Microsoft. “We’re happy to be working with Vidoop to give HealthVault users the option of using their log-in and authentication solutions with their HealthVault account.”

Not only is this good news for Vidoop, it’s good news for OpenID. What’s more (and near and dear to our hearts), it’s good for Portland, as Vidoop joins Portland’s other OpenID juggernaut, JanRain, as an option for HealthVault logins.

Microsoft HealthVault allows individuals to store health information from many sources in one location, so that it’s always organized and available. HealthVault is working with doctors, hospitals, employers, pharmacies, insurance providers and manufacturers of health devices—blood pressure monitors, heart rate monitors and more—to make it easy for consumers to add information electronically to HealthVault records.

Vidoop’s ImageShield—which allows users to login based on information contained in a series of images—will ensure that individuals have secure access to these records without the issues generally associated with password-based security.

“The weakest point in Internet security is the front line – where users log-in – but with strong authentication the front line can become the strongest point,” said Scott Kveton, Vidoop’s vice president of Engineering.

For more on Microsoft’s consumer health solution, visit Microsoft HealthVault. For details on OpenID and ImageShield, visit Vidoop.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 26

 

Online Community Manager: Yes, It’s Really A Job

Dawn Foster writes “I have also noticed that online community management positions tend to be weathering the current economic downturn better than some other jobs. Community managers are still being hired on a regular basis, and I’m still seeing openings on various job boards for companies looking to hire community managers. Here are just a couple of examples of companies who are currently looking for or have recently hired a community manager….”

Portland Twitter Storm Team #pdxtst – Explained

Aaron Hockley provides a quick history of the local Twitter meme.

SLL: beer & blog, oh and a podcast too | Our PDX Network

Cami Kaos writes “Friday night we had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Beer & Blog’s Justin Kistner for round about 4 hours. Now we didn’t record all of it but we went over time on both the tech edition and afterhours because we all had so much to say. Justin was an excellent guest and he’s welcome back anytime. We were also joined by his lovely wife Christine and Strange Love Live and Beer & Blog regular Verso.”

Versionista exposes wiki-like views of edits for any site

You may remember Portland-based Versionista from last year, when they stepped into the limelight as the McCain camp used the tool to highlight recent changes to the Obama campaign site.

Now, they’re allowing Web site owners to expose those changes, themselves, with a new service that provides the date of the last change and highlights the content that has been revised.

This feature is particularly useful for Webmasters who wish to offer full edit transparency to viewers. By inserting a simple JavaScript snippet, any tracked Web page will automatically include the date of the last edit, and a link to the revision history of that document.

Here’s an example using Silicon Florist’s recent changes.

It seems appropriate that the town known for its wikis—and home to the father of the wiki, Ward Cunningham—is home to a service inspired by the wiki view of recent changes. Even if you don’t let your readers edit your site, it’s always nice to let them know what you’ve changed.

To test drive this feature or to add it to your site, visit Versionista.

Beer and Blog says “Konnichiwa!” to Tokyo and “Hello!” to Houston and Phoenix

Beer and BlogBeer and Blog, the weekly Portland get-together started by Justin Kistner, was been growing by leaps and bounds.

What kinds of leaps and bounds? I’m glad you asked.

Currently there is Beer and Blog Portland, Beer and Blog Corvallis, Beer and Blog Eugene, Beer and Blog St Louis, and Beer and Blog Las Vegas.

But does it stop there? Oh no, my friend. Not by a long shot.

Tonight on Strange Love Live, Justin announced the launch of Beer and Blog chapters in Houston, Phoenix, and—with its first international chapter—Tokyo.

Sniff sniff. Our little Beer and Blog is all growed up.

Congratulations to Justin, his Portland-based team, and all of the chapter leads! It’s great to see something that has so strengthened the Portland tech community getting the chance to work its magic in other towns.