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Results for: osoeco

OsoEco shuts down

Rick Turoczy on March 8, 2009

OsoEcoI’m sorry to have to report that Eugene-based OsoEco—a site focused on socially responsible shopping that was in the running to win Angel Oregon last year—has announced it is closing its doors and shutting down its site at the end of this month.

The site never made it out of beta.

Community members received the following email on Saturday:

Hello OsoEco Community:

I’d like to start off this e-mail saying how much all of us here at OsoEco have appreciated your time, insights and patience over the last 18-24 months while we’ve worked to continue building our “healthy social shopping” community. We had been diligently trying to raise more funds from investors to enable us to finish building our Web site; however, we were not able to secure any additional funding. As a result we will be disabling osoeco.com on March 30, 2009.

This deeply saddens all of us at OsoEco. We realize that if it wasn’t for each of you joining our community/adding valuable content that we would not have gotten as far as we have.Your belief in creating a community of people that enjoy helping each other find the healthiest solutions is the real reason why we started OsoEco. Thank you for the the time and energy you put into adding content to OsoEco. We know that OsoEco would have become a trusted source for people to exchange healthy ideas and solutions.

We’d like to take this opportunity and suggest a few online communities that we feel share our values for fostering a business that focuses on personal and/or planetary wellness. If you’re not already members of these communities I encourage you to consider joining them:

Greenlane (Lane County, OR)
“A business network providing education, resources, networking, and marketing for sustainability. Join our community of Lane County businesses, non-profits and individuals and share sustainable ideas and practices.”

Sustainlane (Global)
“The web’s largest people-powered guide to sustainable living. SustainLane.com is filled with personal accounts of how-tos, news, and local business and product reviews for sustainable living.”
NOTE: Our former (and amazing) Community Manager, Cris Bisch <mailto:cris@sustainlane.com> , is now on the SustainLane team. I highly recommend you connect with her if you’d like to talk about “green” products and services. She is a wealth of knowledge!

EcoMetro (Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Minneapolis/St Paul, MN; and East Bay, CA)
“EcoMetro guides provide great resources and several hundred coupons for products and services that have reduced environmental impacts.”

Helia (Global)
“Healia is the premier consumer health search engine for finding high quality and personalized health information on the Web. It serves as an independent, unbiased gateway to the highest quality health information resources.”

Thank you again for being a part of this exciting ride with us! We look forward to crossing paths with each of you out there in both the real and virtual worlds of sustainability/health & wellness.

Enjoy life!

Sincerely,

Caroline Cummings | CEO/Co-founder
(please feel free to connect with me on Facebook – search for “Caroline Cummings Eugene”)

Katie Wilson-Hamaker | President/Co-founder
(please feel free to connect with me on Facebook or GreenLane
<http://www.greenlane-sbn.org/&gt;

Voice your startup concerns to the Oregon legislature

Rick Turoczy on September 15, 2023

While you may not have time to educate elected officials on your needs as a startup founder, there are organizations that spend significant time in Salem trying to do just that. One of them is RAIN. And its CEO is a former startup founder. But even though she gets what you’re going through, she’d love to have your direct input on what she shares with the Oregon House Revenue Committee, this month.

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Most popular stories on Silicon Florist in 2020

Rick Turoczy on December 23, 2020

Since I don’t think I’m going to manage to write any barnburners in the last few days of the year, now seemed to be as good of a time as any to share the year end recap for Silicon Florist. So what were the most popular Silicon Florist stories written in 2020? I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn many of them are pandemic related. Let’s take a look.

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Portland Web 2.0 startups get some love from Oregon Business Magazine

Rick Turoczy on June 27, 2008

Oregon Business Magazine features Toonlet et alOne of the reasons I started Silicon Florist was to use my marketing powers for good, by casting the spotlight on “Portland Web 2.0 startups” and individuals who have been developing really, really cool things here in the Silicon Forest. But who, through sheer lack of time, may not have the opportunity or wherewithal to promote themselves as much as they would like.

I’m happy to report that a number of those companies just got a much brighter spotlight shone on them, thanks to Oregon Business Magazine‘s cover story this month “10 Coolest Tech Startups You’ve Never Heard Of.”

Among the Silicon Florist alumni featured are:

Gone Raw and Lumeno.us—two sites I haven’t yet had the chance to cover except via mentions in the Portland Startup Index—made it as well.

Congratulations to all of those featured for stepping on to a much larger stage! I’ll look forward to continuing to cover your progress and highlighting your wins.

Photo credit: Michael G. Halle

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for May 05

Rick Turoczy on May 5, 2008

The Portland Pulse beats in 4/4 time

Michael Kelly writes “Since Intrigo has moved offices to Portland, the substantial amount of tech resources to both pull and contribute to trumps any other city I’ve been intimate with. Portland is an enabler, connector, grower, and supporter of it’s business residents. I can’t say this about Tucson or any other (unnamed) cities.”

Congratulations! You’re Our 1,000,000th Color!

Darius Monsef writes “Almost 4 years ago I had an idea and threw down some code that would allow people to share colors and rate them… Just a few days ago our 1,000,00th color was named and shared on the site. It was only 10 days ago, but since that milestone color was upload… another 32,000 have been shared. That’s some serious color love!”

Four Lessons for Entrepreneurs from Working Two Weeks as Press

Shannon Clark writes “Although I am an entrepreneur, for the past two weeks I have also been active press as I covered parts of Ad:Tech San Francisco and Web 2.0 Expo also here in San Francisco. Having done this for the past two weeks as well as a few earlier conferences, I have learned a few lessons and would encourage all entrepreneurs to spend some time working as a member of the press.”

Updates to OsoEco!

From the OsoEco blog “Phew. We’ve just uploaded some updates to the site – most notably with language changes, ratings, tag me nots, and search.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Smart-ups: OEN Eugene chapter

Rick Turoczy on March 21, 2008

The Oregon Entrepreneur Network (OEN) has announced a new group that has sprouted out of its fledgling Eugene chapter: Smart-ups.

Smart-ups is a new entrepreneurial support group in the Eugene/Springfield area. We’re a local chapter of the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) based in Portland, OR.

The new group will take charge of hosting a series of Pub Talks similar to those the OEN holds in the Portland area on a regular basis.

Caroline Cummings, CEO of OsoEco—whom you may remember from this year’s Angel Oregon—started the Smart-ups group. She talked to Eugene’s The Register-Guard about the inspiration behind the group.

“We know there are entrepreneurs in this community,” Cummings said. “What happens is they end up starting up their own little Yahoo groups, or they meet at coffeehouses, and they don’t realize there’s a lot of support out there, like the chamber, like the university. That’s what Smart-ups is all about — pulling all of these groups together.”

Sounds like a common problem. It will be interesting to see how Eugene goes about solving it. And I’ll be sure to keep track of what they’re doing.

For more information, see Smart-ups.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for March 10, 2008

Rick Turoczy on March 9, 2008

 

Sometimes, a link says more than I could ever say. Here are some fragrant little buds I’ve found recently, courtesy of ma.gnolia.

OsoEco: We’re O So Excited to Win!

OsoEco CEO Caroline Cummings, after placing as a finalist for Angel Oregon, writes, “Our next steps are to continue fundraising to finish raising the $1 million we need to close this round. We’re scheduled to launch OsoEco to the public this Spring. If you haven’t already – please sign up on our home page to request an invitation to our next beta launch. We look forward to being able to share OsoEco with the world – and enable consumers everywhere to recognize their collective consumer power.”

At SXSWi

Bruce Kroeze, who joined the Portland SXSW breakfast, shares some thoughts on the event, “I’m sitting in a panel “Social Design Strategies” at South by Southwest Interactive. What a privilege and a pleasure to be here. I can’t believe I’ve never attended this before.”

BarCampAustin and BarCampPortland Compare & Contrast

Dawn Foster provides a comparison between the Austin and Portland BarCamps highlighting, “This is my second BarCampAustin, and it’s been interesting to notice some of the similarities and differences between Austin and BarCampPortland. For some reason, Austin seems to have more presentations and pitches instead of the informal round table discussions that people seem to favor at BarCampPortland; however, Austin also has more of a party atmosphere.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

OEN announces the winner of Angel Oregon (and it’s not a tech company)

Rick Turoczy on March 5, 2008

I just received the official announcement from Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) naming the winner of the Angel Oregon competition. [Update: Who won the elevator pitch competition? Steve Morris has your answer over on Oregon Startups.]

And unfortunately, for me, the winner is an apparel company. (Upside? They have a blog.)

Well, that doesn’t really fit the Web startup flavor of Silicon Florist, so I’m going to cover the runners-up, instead. Because, honestly, these two finalists have the most potential of becoming regulars here on the Silicon Florist:

  • OsoEco, the first online community that allows consumers to shop and research green products and services with friends, interests groups and consumers
  • Revelation, a software company that optimizes qualitative market research, enabling companies to develop and harness rich understanding of customer experiences, behaviors and needs at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional research techniques

OsoEco and Revelation each received $57,500 investment awards for winning the Sustainability Investment and Technology/Biotech tracks, respectively.

“The entrepreneurs participation in the investor presentation coaching and exhaustive due diligence process really helped them to articulate their business plan and demonstrate the potential return for investors,” said, Bob Ward, Angel Oregon chair. “Angel Oregon is attracting really high caliber companies. Couple that with value of the exposure and the experience that competing companies get, and the value proposition of the event is pretty compelling for Oregon’s economy.”

For more information on the Angel Oregon program, visit OEN.

Angel Oregon: Three diverse Web-tech companies vie for funding

Rick Turoczy on February 20, 2008

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) has announced the seven finalists gunning for funding in its annual Angel Oregon competition. Among the seven are three particular companies who have decidedly focused some angle of their offering on a Web play.

And since we all know the Web is near and dear to my heart, I’m going to focus on them.

I’m not guaranteeing a win. But were I a betting man, I’d be putting my money on one of these:

OsoEco – OsoEco is positioned to exploit a significant gap in the E-commerce market for green products & services by launching the first Web-based “Sustainable Social Shopping” community w/a unique focus on local solutions. Members can connect, discover, research, and recommend green products & services to peers, interest groups and gurus.

Powermand, Inc. – Web service and solution to aggregate many small electric loads into a large virtual load for monetizing as “negawatts.” Low cost service fee per site per month paid by the negawatts customer.

Revelation – Revelation creates web software that optimizes qualitative market research, enabling companies to develop and harness rich understanding of customer experiences, behaviors and needs at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional research techniques.

For more, see the complete list of Angel Oregon participants. Visit Upcoming to RSVP for the event or register to attend at Angel Oregon.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement

Rick Turoczy on February 16, 2008

Sometimes, a link says more than I could ever say. Here are some fragrant little buds I’ve found recently, courtesy of ma.gnolia.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Beer and Blog

For one week only, Beer and Blog, the weekly knowledge sharing get-together for Portland bloggers, will be held on Sunday from 2-4 at the eastside Lucky Lab. (Which is a little late for me to tell you, if you tried to attend on Friday and are reading this on Saturday.) This week? Using dashboards for tracking and managing information.

Hyperlocal News

Brooks Jordan on getting hyperlocal in your focus. An interesting read. And the underlying reasoning behind the blog you happen to be reading right now.

Portland Start-up Index – February 2008

A ranking of Portland-area companies and products based on their Alexa and Compete rankings.

NetworthIQ: The median balance sheet

The following is the initial findings of the data for all “current users” in the US. Nothing too interesting yet, but it’s a start. I have a hunch this is mainly because our user base skews to the under 30 crowd. It will get more interesting as it’s broken out by the demographic categories and presented as part of the comparison report feature.

Congratulations to ENDoutdoor, winner of OEN’s Seed Oregon

ENDoutdoor won OEN’s Seed Oregon Finale, landing them the opportunity to present at Angel Oregon 2008 on March 5th to vie for the grand investment prize. Other competitors in the final round of Seed Oregon were OsoEco and Greenlite Motors.

Vimeo Turns 3 Years Old

Portland-based Dalas Verdugo of Vimeo announces that February 16 will mark Vimeo’s third birthday.

Northwest Startup Events

Anthony Stevens writes, “I’ve been getting a lot of information lately on startup and entrepreneurship events in the Northwest area, so I thought I’d take a moment to compile them. This list is not exhaustive and I’d love to hear about more in the comments section!”

Portland State University Presents “Internet Strategies Workshops”

Designed for CEOs, managers, marketing professionals, strategists, and online developers with an identified customer base, this series provides the most current curriculum in Web analysis and management. Kent Lewis is one of several distinguished teachers that will lead these Portland State workshops.

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

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