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All posts by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy

SXSW: Josh Bancroft featured by Forrester’s Charlene Li

Now, okay. I’ll give you that Josh Bancroft doesn’t exactly work for a “startup.” (He works for a little company called “Intel.”) But no one can deny his impact on the Portland startup scene. Be that his efforts on Ignite Portland, his participation in the Legion of Tech, (both of which are “startups” in their own rights) or even his conversations and guidance via Twitter—he’s a startup guy at heart.

And he’s Portland through and through.

So, it was a proud moment for all of us when he was recognized as a thought leader—or more accurately, a “Revolutionary”—by Charlene Li of Forrester during her SXSW presentation on Sunday.

Dawn Foster of Fast Wonder and Jive Software summed it up best, observing:

[Li] also used Josh Bancroft as an example of someone who made something happen inside a big company using social software (wiki) to create Intelpedia under the radar of the executives (bonus points for a little Portland geek cred).

Other coverage included:

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for March 10, 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

ExpressionEngine 2.0 sneak peek

Bend-based EllisLab took SXSW as an opportunity to give attendees a sneak preview of the upcoming version of ExpressionEngine. [Update: EllisLab has released a video of the ExpressionEngine 2.0 sneak peek.]

From a user standpoint, the big news is the new ExpressionEngine control panel, which the team has designed to greatly simplify the usability of the product with a wealth of AJAX-y goodness.

From a coding standpoint, the big news is that ExpressionEngine 2.0 is now built on top of CodeIgniter, EllisLab’s open-source PHP framework. This means a huge leap forward in the options for customizing and extending the functionality of the tool.

Don’t like how that feature works? Build a new one yourself.

The most interesting thing about this move is that both the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter community become one single community, which should push ExpressionEngine development farther and faster than ever before. Best of all, this marks a decided step forward in the EllisLab philosophy as it continues to embrace open-source collaboration.

Oh and one more thing? JQuery. Boom.

For those of you not familiar with ExpressionEngine, it’s designed for the power user or company who has grown beyond the capabilities of current blogging tools, but isn’t interested in wrestling more unwieldy content-management systems. Or, in EllisLab’s words:

ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website.

If you’re interested in seeing ExpressionEngine 2.0 for yourself, I’d recommend checking out Startupalooza where Kurt Deutscher, Chief Technology Evangelist for EllisLab, will be providing a similar preview of the product.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for March 8, 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.

Portland Web Innovators March Meeting Recap

Simeon Bateman write, “The focus of the meeting was not a technical subject but as more on actually running a small business. The meeting was lead by Lynn Hoyle and Kevin Spence, a local CPA and Attorney respectively. The meeting had a great feel with about 20 folks asking great questions and us getting to hear about the implications or solutions from a tax standpoint as well as from the legal side.”

Josh Bancroft: I’m in Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive

Josh Bancroft writes, “I’ll be taking photos and shooting video, and posting real blog posts, but mainly, you can expect to keep up with what I’m doing via my Twitter microposts. You’ll find a daily summary posted here to the blog (but not in the feed), or you can see it all as it happens in my lifestream at http://www.joshbancroft.com, or follow me on Twitter.”

Lyza Danger Gardner: Coffee People Enclave

Web startups need coffee. Good coffee. And wireless. So I thought that this might be interesting to a bunch of you. Lyza Danger Gardner writes, “For PDX-ers still mourning the loss of local coffee chain Coffee People (summarily bought out of existence by Starbucks, who coveted their two drive-in locations on MLK Blvd.) might feel a little bit better knowing that there is somewhere that is still carrying the flame.”

Mobile Portland at eROI (Monday, March 24, 2008)

Mobile Portland is a local user group focused on mobile development. We cover everything from application development and SMS to mobile web technology.

Josh Bancroft: Thoughts and Photos from SXSW Interactive 2008, Day One

Continuing his series of lifestream posts from his SXSW experience, Josh Bancroft provides a recap and photos of his “Day 1.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for March 7, 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.

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) – END//outdoor wins top honors at Angel Oregon 2008

The official Oregon Entrepreneur Network post on the Angel Oregon winners. Includes links to other coverage.

Thanks, SplashCast – On To Iterasi

Alex Williams writes, “I resigned from SplashCast last week. Yesterday was my last day. I start today with Iterasi, one of the coolest companies I have seen in a while. I will be talking a lot about Iterasi. I plan to live by the “Loic LeMeur” school of market conversation. Get out there and talk to people in as many ways as you possibly can. I will start with SXSW in Austin, where I am right now.”

The design of Jive’s new logo

Michael Sigler describes the thinking behind Jive’s new logo: “Sam posted about the new Jive logo a couple of weeks ago. I promised myself I’d post something more in depth but let myself forget about it. Then I saw this post over at 37signals and it reminded me how much I love how-they-did-its.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

SXSW 2008: Silicon Forest contingent making the sojourn to Austin

It’s hard to believe that the annual geek pilgrimage to Austin, Texas, is almost upon us. That’s right, it’s time for SXSW 2008. The geeky portion of the event, SXSW interactive, begins on Friday, March 7 and runs until Tuesday, March 11.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of Portland and Silicon Forest folks who make the journey down to the event on a regular basis. This year is no different. There’s even a breakfast get-together for Oregon folks organized by Portland Web Innovators.

With all of the folks in attendance, I thought it might be valuable to have a list of what companies and what folks will be down in Austin. (If you don’t appear and would like to be listed, please comment, and I’ll work on updating the list.)

Silicon Forest companies down at SXSW include:

As far as individuals headed down that way, I know of:

This list is by no means complete. Just what I know.

I mean, there are also a ton of Portland people from the creative industry headed down to SXSW. I lost count of the number of Wieden + Kennedy folks making the trip.

So, again, if you’re going down to Austin and you’d like people to know, post to the comments and I’ll continue to update this post.

And for all of you back home in Oregon, please stay tuned to SIlicon Florist for updates on the Silicon Forest contingent and their participation in SXSW. Or feel free to follow me on Twitter. There are sure to be some cool things happening.

Showdango: Find and promote Webinars

I like Webinars, Webcasts, and online presentations as much as the next guy, but it’s rare that I attend one without having randomly stumbled upon the opportunity.Well, all that may change with Showdango, a Portland-based startup that aims to be your source for finding Webinars.

Showdango’s community-driven Webinar index also provides RSS feeds and the ability to automagically add an event to Google Calendar and/or iCal (the GCal and iCal links are included in the RSS feeds to boot).How did Showdango come about?

It all began with a webinar that we attended by Seth Godin. We were so inspired by Seth’s webinar that we decided to look for other webinars, and that is when, regretfully, we found out that there weren’t any good resources for webinars… until now. showdango is the world’s first webinar index, and our vision is to provide a valuable resource that anyone can use to share, view, and track webinars. We hope that you will help us spread the word about showdango.

Showdango was build by CartoSoft, a small geospatial startup based out of Portland, Oregon. The company’s mission is to extend the reach of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to a broader audience through the use of Internet Mapping Solutions.For more information, see the Showdango post on the CartoSoft blog. Or to try it for yourself, visit Showdango.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for March 6, 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.

Marshall Kirkpatrick to lead this week’s session on “Making your business’s blog a mover and a shaker” at Beer and Blog

If you’ve never been to Beer and Blog, this would be a good week to start. Not only is the event brilliant, but you can’t get much better than Marshall Kirkpatrick.

The Argon Express 2008? It’s not too late!

Picture yourself and your laptop. It’s been over a day and you’re sitting on a train with a group of Rails developers with a view like this over your shoulder.

USA Today: Microsoft: still out to squish the little guy (like Jive Software)

Rival Jive Software wants to be the Apple Computer of corporate social networks. Jive’s competing Clearspace system supplies all the bell and whistles in a slick, tightly integrated package. Jive only does Clearspace.

Amplify Interactive Turns 5 Years Old

Ben Lloyd writes, “You’ve heard the stat right? Something like 85% of businesses fail within the first 5 years? I just realized as I was going through some tax-time paperwork that Amplify Interactive officially opened for business on March 5 2003, which makes us 5 years old as of today.”

LazyEngine

Don’t know how I missed this one. Maybe I was lazy. Satyajit “Sam” Grover writes, “LazyEngine is a lazy search engine. If you want to do a search, consider for a moment if you need the results immediately. If not, then this is the search engine for you. This is probably a silly web application.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

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

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.