Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
I don’t want to get my hopes up. Or our collective hopes up. But there’s something about a new happy hour popping up on Meetup that makes me think that things may be changing for the better. Especially when it’s a gathering that brings together a community of folks who could use more happy hours. Like the local hardware community. Meet Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Portland.
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If you’re working with hardware, things can start off pretty clunky sometimes. And working prototypes are often a far cry from the final product that designed for manufacturing and assembly. Portland based Panic shared a great example of that. Revealing an early prototype of the Apple iPod in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Steve Jobs revealing the product.
Leave it to Portland. In a day and age where more and more solutions are going for faster, slicker, and more invasive, folks like August & Wonder are taking a completely different approach. What if, instead of glowing and bleeping, the latest high tech gadget appeared to be a finely crafted and seemingly analog object?
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.
I’m not going to lie: I love that the increasing accessibility—both in terms of costs and programmability—of hardware is inspiring new and creative pursuits. Sometimes, they create new business concepts. Sometimes they’re just cool. And when folks give you an inside look at how they made it? That’s even cooler. Which is why I loved this LEGO Saturn V project writeup from Portland’s Asa Miller.
Portland’s culture of curiosity had us among the early adopters of the whole “quantified self” thing. But for whatever reason—even though we’ve got a ton of apparel companies in town—that never translated into much in the way of wearable technology. But that doesn’t stop us from wearing those devices. Apple Watches, Fuel Bands, Ups, Fitbits, Misfits. You see them everywhere in the startup community. But what are they doing for us? Read More
In my first post, I made a mild dig at my former hometown (Silicon Valley) for perhaps becoming a bit soft(ware) and distant from the science and tech base it started from. That’s not the whole story, of course, and in any event the home of Apple and Google (great software companies that ended up doing their own great hardware) doesn’t need my help to philosophize on this topic. Read More
While Portland is more readily associated with hipsters, we’ve got our fair share of hackers, as well. And hardware hackers, at that. That’s why it makes perfect sense that we’re a stop on Hackster Hardware Weekend Portland, this weekend. And if you’re into hacking hardware, you won’t want to miss it. Read More
The Portland area has no shortage of startup accelerators. But the vast majority of them are focused on products that could be best described as ethereal. What about folks working in the physical world? Well, meet e1ectr0n, a Beaverton based accelerator designed to help folks working on hardware-based technology. Read More
Elemental Accelerator can bring a 2x to 11x performance boost to common video processing tasks in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.
Now, it’s rare for me to touch on traditional software around here. But Portland-based Elemental is doing so well, I couldn’t resist.
They’ve already been getting kudos with Badaboom, their consumer-level product that eases the process of encoding video for iPhones and other mobile handsets. And today, they’re making headlines again with their professional-level product Accelerator, which integrates with both NVIDIA video cards and Adobe Creative Suite. Read More