You’ve probably heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. And if you haven’t — and you live on the west coast of the United States — it’s probably a topic with which you should familiarize yourself. Because yeah. Sorry. I drifted off there for a second. Anyway, some good news on that front. Now you don’t have to do the prep or figure it out or whatever. Because PDX Quake Prep is here to help.

Remember Ray King…? What about AboutUs…? Yeah. That’s a deep cut. From way back. And while Ray may not be as prevalent in the startup community as he once was, his current startup pursuit is going exceptionally well: Porkbun now manages more than 4 million domain names.

You worked the booth for three days. You had a number of the good conversation — especially the one where that one potential customer tells you exactly what is blocking the deal — and then it evaporates somewhere between teardown and the follow-up. The badge scans land in your CRM with names, maybe titles, and literally nothing else. Your notes are illegible by the flight home. What a waste. If only you had a means of capturing that critical information in real time.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

Trump AI framework excludes open AI models

The AI framework reviewed on Tuesday defines a covered frontier model as closed-source with state-of-the-art capabilities and national security risks, multiple sources briefed on meetings held at the White House said.

Another Oregon State University spinout story. If you’ve ever wondered where Oregon’s chip-industry startups keep coming from, Oregon State just shared their contributions. Five semiconductor companies that spun out of OSU labs and now run R&D at ATAMI, the university’s Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Institute — Amorphyx, Inpria, nexTC, Phosio, and Valliscor.

An Oregon startup just became a key ingredient in a California solar manufacturer’s production line. Tandem PV, a maker of high-efficiency tandem solar panels, has acquired nexTC Corporation, an Oregon company that spun out of Oregon State University in 2018 to commercialize a new kind of transparent coating for solar cells.