Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
You know those time when you’re rushing around, getting a bunch of stuff done, trying to make things happen, and yet, you’re still bugged by the fact that you’re forgetting something? Yeah. Did I forget my house key? Did I leave the oven on? Did I miss someone’s birthday? Oh yeah. Right. I forgot to write a Silicon Florist post about the PIE news this week.
Last night, the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO) held their annual Oregon Tech Awards celebration gala, their biggest event of the year. (Coincidentally, GeekWire held their big Seattle tech awards last night, too.) And the Portland startup community was well represented.
The cofounder of Public Market will be a familiar face to many Portland entrepreneurs. That’s because he’s been an integral part of the Portland and Oregon startup community for years. And he’s had more than his fair share of experience with eCommerce systems. The new blockchain focused startup was cofounded by none other than Monsoon cofounder Kanth Gopalpur, who serves as the Chief Strategy Officer, under the leadership of cofounder and CEO KJ Erickson.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: PDX Women in Tech is the best thing going in the Portland tech community right now. From startups to established corporations, the organization continues to provide an impressive—and ever growing—center of gravity for our community. And now, they’re formalizing the leadership of the organization with the hiring of their first executive director, Elizabeth Stock.
It’s that time of year. Time to start sprucing things up. And getting ready for the summer months. So it makes perfect sense that the Portland Startups Switchboard would benefit from the launch of a new user interface.
It’s true that the Portland startup community is experiencing a bit of a hardware renaissance, but fact of the matter is, there’s been a strong and consistent undercurrent of that startup activity for years. A no one has been a more ardent champion of that activity than Portland startup Crowd Supply. So it only makes sense that they would be behind the effort to get that community together. Meet Teardown.
While Mozilla has been part of the Portland tech community for more than a decade, they didn’t officially open an office here—their first US office outside of Silicon Valley—until five years ago. But with ever growing concerns about privacy and security on the Web, Mozilla has recently started making a lot more noise about their presence in the Rose City—and their Firefox Web browser.
It’s no secret that the world of online advertising has devolved into a means of using any and every accessible data point to convince consumers to purchase products. But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when online advertising was far more simple and less invasive. And it still worked. But it was difficult. Portland startup Read the Docs has spent time building an ad platform that provides simple, ethical advertising. But in a world of ad blockers, that can be more difficult that one would think.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Portland had a plethora of incubators and accelerators. Corporations, organizations, and venture capital were all part of the family of accelerators designed to help early stage companies in Portland. And while the number of accelerators is only a fraction of what it was, the learnings from those efforts are creating new and different entities. Like the new Jaguar Land Rover Innovation Labs.