---
title: 'That’s it. Officially declaring 2010 “The Year of the Acquisition” in Portland. (AboutUs acquires JanRain’s Jyte)'
date: '2010-01-13T15:00:14-08:00'
type: post
word_count: 516
char_count: 3190
tokens: 671
categories:
  - AboutUs
  - Acquisitions
  - JanRain
  - Oregon
  - Portland
tags:
  - AboutUs
  - Acquisition
  - JanRain
  - jyte
  - Portland
---

# That’s it. Officially declaring 2010 “The Year of the Acquisition” in Portland. (AboutUs acquires JanRain’s Jyte)

Portland has gone acquisition crazy. Why? After surviving a lean year, there’s lots of good affordable technology out there. And that means that Portland-based businesses are snapping it up or other businesses are looking to Portland products to augment their own offerings.

And today, it got even more Portlandy. You see, with [AboutUs announcing the acquisition of JanRain’s Jyte](http://blog.aboutus.org/2010/01/13/aboutus-acquires-jyte-com/ "AboutUs acquires Jyte.com"), Portland products are being acquired by Portland companies. Talk about shopping local.

[Jyte](http://jyte.com/ "Jyte") isn’t a product I’ve covered much here. (In fact, I only found one mention in [an OpenID roundup](http://siliconflorist.com/2008/04/30/one-openid-gets-you-20-different-silicon-forest-sites/ "One OpenID gets you 30+ different Silicon Forest sites").) It was in JanRain’s portfolio of products but it wasn’t heavily promoted. In essence, it provided an interesting service—allowing users to make claims which others could refute or support—but it always seemed like it was more of a demo for JanRain’s identity credential capabilities.

Wait a second. What’s that look on your face? Oh. I’m sorry. What is Jyte?

Well, according to Ray King, CEO of AboutUs:

> On Jyte anyone can toss out a claim, and the Jyte community opines with votes, comments and related claims. It’s a great way to validate—or invalidate!—your thoughts, and get unabashed feedback from both people you know and total strangers.

Now with AboutUs picking Jyte up, things get a little more interesting. Why? Because the kind of reputation and ranking that Jyte handles is very much in the vein of the [lists and rankings that AboutUs offers](http://www.aboutus.org/Lists "AboutUs Lists").

“JanRain has developed some interesting technology on Jyte that’s adjacent to our technology,” said Ray in a press release. “We believe it will be useful to us in future product development.”

I, for one, can’t wait to see how they incorporate Jyte into the AboutUs world. It could be really interesting. And if you feel the same way, maybe you’d like to work on that whole integration thing? I mean, [AboutUs is looking to hire someone with some Ruby and Rails chops](http://www.aboutus.org/AboutUs.org/Jobs/Developer "AboutUs Developer gig").

Oh. And on a tangential note, there’s some other business taking place between JanRain and AboutUs, as well. Seems that AboutUs is going to be implementing [JanRain RPX](https://rpxnow.com/ "RPX ") to make creating accounts and using the AboutUs site even easier, too.

And that’s good news for all of us.

For more information, see the [AboutUs blog post on the Jyte acquisition](http://blog.aboutus.org/2010/01/13/aboutus-acquires-jyte-com/ "AboutUs acquires Jyte.com"). For on more on the functionality AboutUs is gaining, visit [Jyte](http://jyte.com "Jyte"). And to get a feel for what AboutUs does, feel free to muck with the [Silicon Florist page on AboutUs](http://www.aboutus.org/SiliconFlorist.com "Silicon Florist on AboutUs").

\[HTML2\]

\[HTML3\]

\[HTML1\]