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Month: April 2009

Attend WebVisions for free

Rick Turoczy on April 10, 2009

WebVisionsWho—would you say—are the top three visionaries in terms of the Web?

That’s what Portland’s leading Web event—and honestly one of the leading Web events, period—WebVisions wants to know.

And if you’ve got an answer, it could mean something for you.

Simply submit your answer to that question before May 7, and you could be waltzing into WebVisions, May 20-22, free of charge.

The winning entry will receive a WebVisions conference pass plus a pass to the workshop “Mental Models” with Indi Young of Adaptive Path. The runner up will receive a free WebVisions conference pass. Third place? You’ll get a WebVisions t-shirt. So that you can pretend you attended WebVisions.

Come to think of it, even if you don’t win, you’ll want to pay to attend. Why? Because WebVisions features more than 50 incredibly cool speakers, like Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.net, Jared Spool, Indi Young of Adaptive Path, Jeff Croft of Blue Flavor, search engine guru Vanessa Fox, Molly Holzschlag of Molly.com, Chris Pirillo, and Armin Vit of UnderConsideration.

Plus there are a ton of amazing Portland-area speakers, as well. Who? Well, check out the who’s who of WebVisions this year.

I know! I can’t believe it either. So cool.

So what are you waiting for? Just submit your top three Web visionaries and you could be headed to WebVisions for free.

Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

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Lunch 2.0 with MioWorks, Pronounced Me-Oh

Rick Turoczy on April 9, 2009

nametag.pngDavid Abramowksi cleared up the correct pronunciation of his new startup’s name yesterday during their Lunch 2.0 at the Green Dragon.

It’s MioWorks, Me-Oh-Works.

Probably not exactly the way Webster would mark it up, but you get the picture.

About 80 or so people showed up at the Green Dragon for lunch yesterday; surprisingly, several people I know from Twitter were making their first trip to the Dragon. Hard for me to believe, since it’s Beer and Blog worldwide headquarters and an all-around geektastic place to hang out and compute.

David and Manuel Espino from MioWorks provided food and Twitter-friendly name tags (+1 for geeky name tags). They also provided anyone who was interested with a 30-day free trial of their web app which provides relationship management for small businesses. The app recently entered public beta, and David and Manuel are actively seeking people to beta-test the app.

After talking about MioWorks, David, who also volunteers time with Open Source Bridge, called Rick up to give the good people in attendance the 411 on OSB. There was speculation that Rick was thrown under the bus, fingers were pointed. I won’t dignify any of those rumors here. As always, Rick acquitted himself well under pressure.

Finally, we heard from Carri Bugbee about the SoMe awards, covered previously by Rick. There’s precious little time left to submit your favorite social media projects for consideration. The awards will be handed out at Innotech Oregon on April 23.

Update: As Carri notes in comments, the deadline is Saturday, April 11, and the awards gala will be at Candy (NW 9 and Couch), not at the OCC where Innotech is.

The food was fantastic, provided by the Green Dragon, and even though the crowd was a bit smaller than usual, it fit nicely into the space, with clusters of people chatting at each picnic table and at the bar.

I met a few new people, attending their first Lunch 2.0, and as always, I ran into the usual suspects, which is always a pleasure.

Thanks to David, Manuel and the great folks at the Green Dragon for accommodating us.

The Big Book of Portland Lunch 2.0I almost forgot to mention the Lunch 2.0 “artifact” was ceremoniously passed from Thomas to David. I’ll back up; at the Portland Lunch 2.0 birthday at AboutUs in February, someone (not sure if it was Mark, Steven or Nico) put out a guest book that anyone attending could sign. That book was passed to Thomas at the OpenSourcery Lunch 2.0 last month, and now, it’s in David’s hands.

A fun idea. By rights, the book should pass to Denney in two week at TechShop Portland, assuming David makes it out to the ‘burbs.

Don’t forget these Lunch 2.0s, coming soon:

If you’re wondering about the WebVisions’ lunch, it will be open to anyone, attending WebVisions or not.

Big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.

Burgeoning Bac’n business coerces Kveton into consulting

Rick Turoczy on April 9, 2009

[Editor: Let me preface this by saying that I know, full well, that Kveton hates it when I do this. But I think it’s newsworthy. And I thought I should let you know. For that, I’m willing to incur his wrath.]

Scott KvetonMany of you know Portland’s Scott Kveton as one of the new board members for Software Association of Oregon (SAO), founder of the OSU Open Source Lab, the former chair of the OpenID Foundation, a Portvangelist, someone who spends more than his fair share of time at PDX, and the guy who helped bring Vidoop to Portland.

But it’s likely that far more of you know Kveton for one thing: bacon. Or perhaps more appropriately Bac’n.

And now, what began as side project—albeit a passionate one—has drawn Kveton into the world of consulting as a full-time gig.

But it’s more than just his passion for that wonderful magical meat animal. It’s truly a desire to help organizations understand how to better use technology and community to achieve business worthy ends—regardless of their particular focus.

It’s really hard to explain but selling bacon is honestly one of the most interesting/fun things I’ve ever done. Its not just technology-for-the-sake-of-technology. Jason, Michael and I created something out of nothing using off-the-shelf tools to make a solution that delivers real things to real people. And we did it all in less than a month.

Long story short, Kveton is taking the opportunity to do something he loves—and to make it a viable business. And given that that is something with which many of us struggle, I personally couldn’t be happier seeing him take this chance.

I know Portland will gain from this move. And I’m already seeing some local startups beginning to take advantage of his talent and guidance.

For more, see Kveton’s post on his new pursuit or follow Kveton on Twitter.

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Less than 48 hours remain for Open Source Bridge submissions and comments

Rick Turoczy on April 9, 2009

Open Source BridgePortland’s Open Source Bridge, the entirely volunteer run conference for open source citizens, has been quietly amassing nearly 200 proposals to speak at its inaugural conference in June.

They’ve received so many interesting submissions, in fact, that they’ve already selected some of them for the agenda—and they’re all across the board with topics like Ruby, Drizzle, Git, CodePlex, cfengine, Puppet, Opscode, AutomateIT, and bcfg2. (I honestly don’t know half of what I just said, but I know some of you do and that’s what really matters.)

But have no fear, gentle reader. Despite all the wonderful proposals and interesting early selections, there is still time for you to get involved.

No, I kid you not.

The Open Source Bridge call for proposals remains open until 11:59:59 PM on April 10. So that culturally relevant, language agnostic open source talk you’ve been wanting to give? Get on it, tiger. Or maybe that technology specific hack that’s going to wow the open source crowd? No one is going to be wowed if you don’t submit. So get going. There isn’t much time left.

Oh I hear you, “I love me some open source, but I don’t really have anything about which to speak and as such I am feeling somewhat uncomfortable and left out. If not completely disheartened.”

There, there, little camper. There’s something for you to do too. Yes! Seriously!

Because picking the talks won’t be easy. So any and every comment will help. And that’s where you come in. You can provide feedback on the proposals.

What would you like to see? Who would you like to see? Which topics and technologies should everyone see?

I’ve no idea. You tell me. How? Simply head over to the proposal system, log in to your account with your OpenID, and begin providing comments on the talks that you’d like to see.

Not feeling very verbose? Even a “+1” would help the organizers figure out which talks people really want to see.

But the pressure is still on, I’m afraid. Those comments, like the proposals, should be submitted by 11:59:59 PM on April 10.

So scoot scoot, little bug. Get on over to Open Source Bridge and pitch your open source talk or provide your feedback on those who have.

Go! Now! Just think, if you finish early, you’ll be able to tune into Strange Love Live, Friday night, completely guilt free.

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Ontier expands executive team with VP of Engineering, donates options to EFNW

Rick Turoczy on April 9, 2009

OntierFresh off a stellar DEMO performance, Portland-based Ontier, the company seeking to make day-to-day electronic missives more effective and interactive, is continuing to ramp up for the public availability of its product.

Their latest move? Creating a new position—Vice President of Engineering—and hiring industry veteran Dom Virgilio to fill it.

“Dom has the perfect background to help Pixetell™ become the standard for on-demand mixed-media communication,” said Ontier CEO Sebastian Rapport in the press release announcing the hire. “In addition to his proven ability to accelerate product development, Dom has deep experience with communication and collaboration software and has great insight to our customers’ requirements.”

Virgilio served most recently as the VP of Engineering at Hillsboro-based Daverci. He also co-founded and served as COO for InfoCast. In all, Dom boasts more than 20 years of experience managing development and design pursuits.

Ontier gets something—and they give something in return. The company also recently announced that they had donated 250,000 stock options to the Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest.

Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest (EFNW) helps small and mid-sized companies develop and implement strategies for community involvement that jointly meet the goals of the company, the passions of the employees and the needs of the community. Companies become EFNW members for a small annual fee or by contributing equity that EFNW holds until liquidity and then distributes profits for community benefit, as directed by the company.

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Sequoia RIP Good Times + Jive’s quick response = Belated ink in The New York Times

Rick Turoczy on April 8, 2009

Jive SoftwareLast October, Sequoia Capital‘s “RIP Good Times” was the bubble-bursting presentation heard around the startup world. And given that one of Sequoia’s portfolio companies happened to reside in our backyard—Portland-based Jive Software—we all knew full well that the bubble-bursting was going to be happening close to home.

It came in the form of layoffs for the young—and arguably successful—company.

I first heard about the Jive layoffs from Chris Kalani, one of the employees who was let go. Then, TechCrunch picked up on the Jive layoff story and things started to snowball. Unfortunately, the rapid escalation and swirling confusion seems to have precluded the real story from making it to the light of day.

Until now.

Yesterday, The New York Times brought a new perspective—and some much needed detail—to the the Sequoia and Jive story in an article entitled “Start-Up Gets Course in Survival.”

In the piece, we finally get a glimpse into what happened last October. And how those changes impacted one of the most successful startups in the Silicon Forest.

The changes Jive has made since the Sequoia meeting illustrate the ways in which young technology companies have slashed costs and narrowed their focus in an effort to stay alive. “Jive is the poster child. They nailed it,” said Jim Goetz, the Sequoia partner who is on Jive’s board. In the quarter ending in March, Jive booked higher revenue than any quarter in its history and plans to start hiring again.

We also get some insight from CEO Dave Hersh about the actual numbers of employees who were let go and why.

Seven days after the Sequoia meeting, Mr. Hersh laid off 25 of Jive’s 150 full-time employees and several contractors. They included underperforming salespeople and three executives who lacked the skills to build a company past the start-up phase, Mr. Hersh said. He scrapped an instant-messaging project and let go of the engineers on the team.

That same afternoon, he called the remaining employees to the office’s open meeting space that Jive calls “Whoville.” Mr. Hersh first put up a slide with the names of the laid-off employees. He figured the remaining employees would not look around the room wondering who was missing and would thus concentrate on what he had to say. He detailed everything the company had done wrong. He borrowed from Sequoia’s presentation and told the staff that Jive needed to conserve cash, make swift and deep cuts and invest based on results instead of ahead of them, as they had when they overhired.

Finally, the Gray Lady looks into some of the changes the company made to bring in experienced talent to help the company improve its course.

In January, Mr. Zingale brought on John McCracken, who had been his vice president of sales at Mercury. Mr. McCracken, who is known inside Jive as Johnny Mac, went to work overhauling Jive’s haphazard sales process. Jive’s strategy had always been to try to sell software to anyone who called. Mr. McCracken considered it a waste of money to chase customers who did not really want Jive, especially as the recession made software a much harder sell.

Salespeople were instead trained to grill potential customers with questions about their budgets and goals and turn away customers that did not fit. “One of the best things you can do as a business is to learn to say no,” Mr. Hersh remembers Mr. McCracken telling him.

As painful as it may have been, cutting early and cutting deep seems to be having a positive return for Jive—and their investors.

Given that Jive had the ability to lead by example when it came to Sequoia’s advice, I sincerely hope the next “lead by example” moment for the company is continued success and a clear path to bigger and better things. Because that’s an example I’d love to see all of the other startups here in the Silicon Forest follow.

(Hat tip Nino Marchetti)

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Startup stimulus: EasyStreet offers free services for Oregon entrepreneurs

Rick Turoczy on April 7, 2009

EasyStreetWe all know that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But what may not be as obvious is that when the going gets tough, the really super awesome tough realize that other folks need some help. And entrepreneurs reach out to help their would-be peers—especially here in the Silicon Forest.

That’s exactly what’s happening with Beaverton-based EasyStreet, one of the original Internet providers here in town. Today, they announced that they’re stepping up to help other startups during these less than satisfactory economic times with their “EasyStreet Stimulus Package for Entrepreneurs.”

Are you an innovator? Entrepreneur? Head of a skunkworks project inside an established enterprise? Let EasyStreet giving innovation a jump-start with free data center and Internet services for qualified Oregon startups through September 30, 2009.

What’s that? Free hosting and email accounts?

EasyStreet Stimulus Program

But wait. There’s more. Entrepreneurs can also qualify for a free Clear Wireless modem thingamajig if they sign a two year Wi-MAX aggreement.

Best of all? No binding contracts. Well, from EasyStreet, anyway.

“Tough times are great times for entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are great for the Oregon economy,” said EasyStreet President & CEO, Rich Bader in announcing the stimulus program. “As the economic downturn was being felt here earlier this year, we asked, ‘What can EasyStreet do to best help boost innovation here in Oregon?’”

How does an entrepreneur qualify? All you have to do is apply through one of the partnering organizations that are helping EasyStreet promote the stimulus package.

And they’re names we all know. Well mostly anyway. I mean, one organization just changed its name, so you might not know them. But you know them. If you know what I mean.

What’s that? Oh sorry. Where are my manners?

The partnering organizations include Oregon Entrepreneurs Network OEN, Oregon Technology Business Center (OTBC), Portland State Business Accelerator (PSBA), Software Association of Oregon (SAO), andTechAmerica Oregon Council (formerly AeA).

So maybe you’re a startup looking to save a little cash. Or maybe you’ve been forced to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams a little more quickly than you expected. Or maybe you simply just need that little push to get your project rolling. Whatever the case, EasyStreet is waiting to help.

Now, you have absolutely no excuse to avoid starting that project. You know the one. The timing is right. And as our old Portland friend Tom Peterson used to say “Free is a very good price.”

For more information, see the EasyStreet Stimulus Package for Entrepreneurs.

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VidoopCAPTCHA: Avoiding a more craptastic CAPTCHA by changing the game

Rick Turoczy on April 7, 2009

VidoopEver tried to do something on a site that uses CAPTCHA? You know, the Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart?

Oh. Well, how about the technology designed to prevent bots from submitting forms that requires us to enter a “human readable” element before submitting?

Um. Okay. The squiggly letters? You know the squiggly letters? The ones you can never read? The ones that force you through three or four attempts at submitting a form? The ones that make you wonder if you are, in fact, a bot?

There you go. That’s CAPTCHA.

The concept and CAPTCHA started simply enough, according to Wikipedia:

Moni Naor was the first person to theorize a list of ways to verify that a request comes from a human and not a bot. Primitive CAPTCHAs seem to have been developed in 1997 by Andrei Broder, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Mark Lillibridge to prevent bots from adding URLs to their search engine. In order to make the images resistant to OCR (Optical Character Recognition), the team simulated situations that scanner manuals claimed resulted in bad OCR. In 2000, Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum coined the term ‘CAPTCHA’, improved and publicized the notion, which included any program that can distinguish humans from computers. They invented multiple examples of CAPTCHAs, including the first CAPTCHAs to be widely used, which were those adopted by Yahoo!.

But as optical character recognition has improved and bots have become smarter, it’s been going downhill—faster and faster—ever since.

They latest iteration of CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHAs have taken a variety of forms: more and more obscured text, increasingly wiggly text with multiple “words,” unintelligible audio, increasingly complicated math problems… but none of them seems to get to the crux of the issue: allowing an average human to do what they came to do.

I mean, this is the CAPTCHA from arguably the most powerful company in the world, that little search company down in Mountain View.

Google CAPTCHA

Right. I can’t read it either.

There has to be a better way.

Enter Portland-based Vidoop and their image grid technology.

To date, Vidoop’s recognizable image grid technology has been used to obfuscate passwords for an OpenID login, enabling users to use OpenID without having to remember other credentials.

But what dawned on the folks at Vidoop is that the image grid also made a pretty darn simple CAPTCHA device. What’s more, it was actually intelligible to a human.

Introducing VidoopCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA that stops the craptastic slide of increasingly horrible CAPTCHAs by taking the concept in an entirely new direction.

The image grid password concept allowed users to select a few favorite things that they were to remember instead of a password—like rainbows, unicorns, and teddy bears. Then when they logged into a site using their myVidoop name, they simply selected the letters from those images as their password.

VidoopCAPTCHA takes the same tact, telling users to look for specific images and then asking them to type in the letters from those images. Simple, easy to use, and just as effective protection as the image grid for passwords.

VidoopCAPTCHA

And like the previous implementations of image grid technology, VidoopCAPTCHA has the potential to allow users of the service to insert their own images into the grid. Which, in most cases, results in an advertisement.

According to ReadWriteWeb’s coverage of VidoopCAPTCHA:

There’s a business model here, too. Vidoop says that if this system catches on, site owners will be able to sell spots in their image boxes to advertisers. The concentration required in order to identify these images would be a huge gift to advertisers placed there. There’s something a little troubling about that prospect, but the company says that in a survey so large they believe it’s nationally representative and most other people don’t mind.

Verdict: VidoopCAPTCHA is humane CAPTCHA

As a user, I found the image grid approach much easier to use than the prevailing text-based concepts. Were I a current CAPTCHA user, I’d implement VidoopCAPTCHA, today.

But is VidoopCAPTCHA enough to motivate folks to implement a CAPTCHA solution? I don’t know about that. But I do know that if you’re interested in deploying CAPTCHA, the imagery is far more legible and usable than the current squiggly text—at least to my eye. (And I’d say that even if Vidoop weren’t a Portland company.)

And I also know that if you’re a current CAPTCHA user, it would be well worth your time to take a look at VidoopCAPTCHA. Your users will thank you for it. Or at the very least, be able to communicate with you without screaming expletives at the screen.

For more information or to test drive the product, visit VidoopCAPTCHA.

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Fear of (bookmark) commitment? Try I Need to Read This

Rick Turoczy on April 7, 2009

I Need to Read ThisWe’ve all been there. There’s that one article that you need to remember to read. You simply don’t have time to read it, right now. And you’re not sure if you’re going to want it after you’re done reading it.

In short, you can’t commit to saving it to your bookmarks because you’re not sure if it’s bookmark material, yet.

Currently, I have a system set up in Evernote that involves a lot of clipping and organizing—and then reading and deleting—to manage my list of “read this later.” Honestly, it takes a bit of effort to simply remind myself to go back and read a particular page. And the Evernote saving process has a couple of steps to it.

Portland’s own Marshall Kirkpatrick, vice president of a blog called ReadWriteWeb and one with quite an appetite for consuming online content, has a delicious tag called “toread” that he uses to manage his “I’ll get to this later” list.

There has to be a better way. And as we all know, it’s usually the simple—and well implemented—ideas that can have the most impact.

Enter Portland-based I Need to Read This.

I saw I Need to Read This demoed at a recent Portland Web Innovators Demolicious, and I was blown away by how drop dead simple—and incredibly effective—the tool could be.

I Need to Read This is about as simple as you can get. Just register (either with a username and password or with OpenID) and add a I Need to Read This bookmarklet to you Web browser toolbar. That means it works for any browser—unlike a Firefox add-in (and since I generally run Camino, I’m addicted to bookmarklets).

The next time you’re browsing content and you come across a page you need to read? Simply click the bookmarklet and the page will be added to your list things you need to read.

Have a free minute to catch up on your reading? There’s another bookmarklet that will take you to the first item on your list of things to read.

So simple. Yet so effective.

Don’t trust me? What about Webware?

What’s nice about I Need to Read This is that you can use all of its services through bookmarklets instead of having to install anything in your browser. There’s simply “I Need to Read This” and “Read an Article” bookmarklets, which you drag up to your browser’s toolbar, and on any story you want to bookmark you just hit the former bookmarklet to save it. Then, to read what you have saved you click the latter “Read an Article” button, which takes you to the latest story. Clicking it again takes you to the second most recent, and so on.

Or maybe that little blog called Lifehacker?

We love the previously mentioned Read It Later Firefox extension, which offers a simple method for saving bookmarks to read later. The I Need to Read This bookmarklet offers similar functionality without the extension dependence.

I Need to Read This even made Techmeme.

Can I get a “Yay Portland!”?

This is just an early start for the tool created by Benjamin Stover and Jason Grlicky, but it’s got all the functionality you need to get started.

For more information or to register for an account, visit I Need to Read This or follow them on Twitter.

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Don’t Forget MioWorks Lunch 2.0 is Wednesday

Rick Turoczy on April 6, 2009

Back when David and I were talking about this week’s Lunch 2.0, which will be hosted by David’s new startup, MioWorks, at the Green Dragon, we mused about how nice it would be to have a warm Spring day to break in the Dragon’s patio.

Well, today it’s supposed to hit 70, and according to our friends at KGW, tomorrow will be equally spectacular.

Wednesday, not so much, at least not in the shorts and t-shirt department.

weather.pngMaybe we’ll catch a break, and the warming trend will continue.

Anyway, rain or shine, we’ll be at the Green Dragon on Wednesday, that’s April 8, to hear about MioWorks from David and his merry startup band. MioWorks launched a private beta at Ignite Portland 5 back in February, and they’ve since moved into public beta, offering a free 30-day trial.

You’ll probably get your fill of Open Source Bridge chatter as well, since David is also volunteering with many of us on that effort. MioWorks will be offering OSB attendees free service for six months, in case you needed another reason to attend.

So, come on down to the Green Dragon, even though it’s not Friday, and hang out with your favorite Portland geeks and meet some new people too, for good measure.

As always, please make sure you RSVP over on Upcoming so they know how much food to get and drop a comment there if you’re a vegan or vegetarian.

Finally, a quick announcement about the ISITE Design Lunch 2.0 in June. The date has changed to June 24. Please plan accordingly.

Don’t forget these Lunch 2.0s, coming soon:

As always, big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.

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