Category: Links

Via the Shizzow blog “A huge thank you to Matthew Gifford for creating the Shizzow Google Gadget. His reason for creating it was simple…”

Amber Case writes “Looking for something to do this week/month/season in Portland? Itching to get to know more people/minds/ideas? Look no further. I’ve created this list for you of a bunch of Portland tech events for your convenience. Hopefully it is a useful resource.”

John Metta writes “Get a blog, people. Really. More and more of your customers are expecting it. They want updates on your humanity to hit their RSS feeds. They want to know that there’s a person there.”

Via Get Rich Slowly “So here’s a reliable true/false quiz to test whether you match the typical profile of an entrepreneur. I adapted these questions from a comprehensive new study of entrepreneurship completed earlier this year by Professor Scott A. Shane (on which more later). In this quiz, the word ‘entrepreneur’ is defined as someone starting a new business of any kind, and includes the solo self-employed.”

Aaron Hockley writes “Lots of folks are excited today because Microsoft has announced that Windows Live IDs can now be used as an OpenID. I’m less than thrilled.”

Chris Anderson writes “We’ll be soliciting reader feedback as we develop the book and API documentation. The content is freely licensed, so we’ll make it available as we write. Expect to see a few chapters and a some API docs up by the end of the year.”

Tom Turnbull writes “In other words, the audience for full length video content online has doubled and is north of 50 million people. That’s far from a niche.”

The spookiest breakfast of the year takes place at Kenny & Zukes this Thursday. Join Portland Twitter friends for amazing latkes and awesome chats. This is a buy-your-own affair that often spills over into coworking time afterward

Mike Rogoway writes “It was invite only, so if you — like me — couldn’t wrangle an invitation, here’s an interview that Portland’s own Linus Torvalds gave at the summit.”

Via the Calagator blog “We often talk about Calagator as a wiki-like collaborative calendar, so we borrowed an idea from the wiki world, and added event and venue versioning. This way, if someone (human or bot) decides the SAO Poker Night really needs a bunch of links to [insert generic spam topic here], anyone can roll back the entry to the previous version, cleaning it up.”

Via the WhereCamp PDX blog “There’s a sense of disconnection, on the one hand, from the realm of finance and the direction of the economy. This is linked to confusion, anxiety, and fear that people won’t have basic needs met. And there’s a strong desire, excitement, for there to be major changes in which we all have a role in supporting each other to meet collective goals.”

Via the Strands blog “Gravity R&D has created IMPRESS, a ‘magic button’ that provides TV viewers with instant personalized entertainment at any given time with relevant program tips instantaneously on customer demand. It automatically schedules recordings with the highest probability based on user’s interest.”

Jason Harris writes “This post is the first in a two-part series about 1) the African mobile marketplace and how Africans utilize their mobile phones; and 2) how organizations are using social marketing to reach this highly mobile population for social change.”

Via the JanRain blog “On Monday of this week over 40 people from Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, JanRain, SixApart, Vidoop, and others came together at an OpenID user experience (UX) summit hosted by Raj Mata and Allen Tom of Yahoo.”

Via Around the Sun “Free coffee. Need I say more? With this coupon, you can get a free tall coffee, latte, espresso, cappuccino, or hot tea at Barnes & Noble. The coupon expires on October 31.”

Upcoming COWPU on Rails at McMenamins Old St Francis School (Thursday October 23, 2008)

Raven Zachary writes “As you can imagine, I am disappointed by this decision. I believe the iPhone market to be fundamentally strong and growing rapidly, and Bill Dudney and I have spent a significant amount of time planning this event over the past few months. I plan to continue to work with O’Reilly Media on future iPhone related activities, including the possibility of an iPhone conference in 2009, and more regular blogging about the platform on O’Reilly Radar and Inside iPhone.”

Via Internet Astronauts “I’m no economist, but even I can tell that the world’s finances aren’t in their best shape. Tech blogs are writing about layoffs in startups everywhere, investment advisors are urging their clients to knuckle down for a long, economic winter and news analysts are calling doom and gloom at every turn. So it’s probably a bad time to start your web startup right? Wrong. This may very well be the best time.”

Via the Vidoop blog “Vidoop headed out to the Big Apple last week for Finovate 2008, and after seven minutes of presentation, eleven media interviews, 50+ partner and customer meetings, 12 hours of round-trip flying and 5,000 miles of total travel, Mitch Savage and I are back home in Portland.”

Via the JanRain blog “What do a social news and content aggregator, a map-based real estate listing service, and a programmer collaboration and community website have in common? They are all innovators in their fields who have implemented OpenID as a single sign-on (SSO) method for their users and seen a significant increase in new registrations and improved login for repeat visitors.”

Via The 451 Group “As always, the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) in Portland, Oreg. provided some fascinating discussion about how governments across the country and across the globe are using open source and how they want to use more of it.”

Via the AboutUs blog “You may have noticed that I like to post the numbers from AboutUs. Some of them get smaller (which is good), like our Alexa ranking. Some of them get bigger (which is good), like our page count.”

Via the Shizzow blog “Since everybody was talking about Geode last week, we decided to give it a whirl. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, have Geode installed and have your wi-fi device enabled, the Shizzow dashboard will use Geode to try to auto-determine where you are at.”

Thomas King writes “Well, the two day core program of GOSCON comes to a close this evening, and I’m left with more ideas than I can possibly digest here. Instead of attempting to chronicle every presentation, I’ll share some high-level notes that I’ll take away from my interactions here.”

Via the Strands blog “Strands Social Player has won today the BlackBerry® Developer Challenge 2008 as the Best Multimedia Application!! The challenge is designed for BlackBerry developers from around the globe that have created their own BlackBerry applications.”

Mike Rogoway writes “Onetime Oregon startup Earth Class Mail, which long ago fled to Seattle, announced a $5.1 million venture capital round today…. But he left behind 80 of the company’s 100 employees at a Beaverton office, where ECM processes mail and does its technology development.”

Via the ExpressionEngine blog “We’ve added over a 100 new sites to the Showcase Gallery. We also took the opportunity to tweak the Showcase navigation to make exploring easier.”

Via ITS insider “The individual in question, Chris Kalini, along with his wife Jessa, are both what we’ve come to know as ‘Gen Y’ employees. Chris is a web designer and now happily employed at Euro RSCG as a front-end web developer/designer. The problem with Chris is, well, he blogs his life. Everything gets published– from playing pool, to helping friends move, to ordering pizza, to cooking with Jessa. Did anyone expect him not to blog losing his job?”

Via the Ignite Portland blog “Man, that was TOUGH. We received over 50 talk ideas for Ignite Portland 4. The vast majority of them were really, really good. But we only have room for 13 talks on stage at the Bagdad (plus the traditional ‘What is Ignite?’ talk). So before I announce what those 13 talks are going to be, I just want to give a HUGE “Thank You!” to everyone who submitted a talk that wasn’t chosen.”

Selena Deckelmann writes “I just blogged about WhereCampPDX, and am enjoying a few days of quiet before heading out to Google for the Summer of Code Mentor’s summit this coming weekend. I was so busy I didn’t have much time to blog about the PostgreSQL Conference West. “

Ben Bleything writes “I was just looking at my FeedBurner statistics and noticed that my feed readership has gone up by approximately 100 in the past year. Then I looked at my blog and realized I hadn’t posted anything Ruby-related in 2008. Then I remembered that I’m a Ruby programmer and decided to release some software for the express purpose of blogging an announcement. Okay, not really. Well. The last part is mostly a lie. I guess. On to the point…”

Via Ideademic “And just like that, Elementary becomes Ideademic. Here’s to a moment of evolution among our medley of firsts, iterations and lessons that we’ve experienced over the last four months. We write to share the stories of Ideademic, past and present, and shed a little light on our up to now decidedly vague startup.”

Via Techvibes “Jama Software won the Bend Venture Conference on friday. They were part of the 5 companies which presented business pitches to the 250 people who went to the conference. Jama provides an webservice which facilitates collaborative software product development.”

Mike Rogoway writes “In a small state like Oregon, which doesn’t get much venture capital, no single quarter (or even a single year) is enough to draw any conclusions about funding trends. But it’s encouraging that each of the past two years have been strong.”

Garett Croft Stenson writes “I began hand making wallets back in the sticky summer of 1998. I simply made them as a hobby at first and gave them out as novelty gifts to those close to me. I then moved back to Portland, they soon caught on fire, and I immediately found myself asking the question, ‘How do I make these things better and faster?'”

Via The 451 Group “The decline is not exactly unexpected. The overall market was down nearly 6% according to figures from The National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, while there was bound to be some hangover for open source following the most successful quarter ever in Q1 and solid growth in Q2.”

Paul Graham writes “The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded.”

West Cafe offers “Portland Twitterati are invited to spend some quality time at the West Cafe, a fine downtown Portland dining and drinking establishment. Because we’ve begun to experience such a positive response to our involvement with the Twitter community, we wanted to ‘Thank You’ by offering Twitters a special dinner deal.”

Andrew Hyde writes “$5,000,000 is being given away to fund innovative ideas that address the following points: Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base, use news and information to serve the public interest, benefit one or more specific geographic communities, and be innovative.” Um, hello? I can’t swing a piece of bacon without hitting 20 Portland startups that qualify for this.
(The hardest of the 4. A map mashup

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “One of the services that I provide for consulting clients is assistance in recruiting bloggers and social media experts for hire. In the past 2 months I’ve helped 3 companies find company bloggers or community managers. Right now I’m working on a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for a community management position for a very innovative and cool startup.”

Skip to the bottom where John Metta reveals the formation of a new blog covering the Gorge tech scene: “[O]ver the next couple weeks, I’m slowly building up the infrastructure for a way to Engage The Gorge (Site launch scheduled for November 1st). It’ll start small, because that’s all I can do. It’ll just be an article here and there thanking someone for what they’re doing. Just some quick write-ups and podcasts helping to make people look good.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “International recommendation technology provider Strands has announced the five finalists in the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups. From music to video to pharmaceutical drug development recommendations, these plucky startups from all around the world will now present at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Recommender Systems 2008 conference in Switzerland and one will be offered a $100k investment from Strands.”

Mike Rogoway writes “Free Geek’s Kevin Berg tells me this morning that someone broke in to the group’s Southeast Portland thrift shop early yesterday morning and stole a Mac.”

Via the WhereCamp PDX blog “On Friday evening, WhereCampPDX kicks-off with an art opening at Olympic Mills! The exhibition is called Equilibrium, the Human Mashup and presents artworks that explore the ways art and technology deal with Momentum, Maintenance, Multiplicity, and Mobility.”

Via the Shizzow blog “We made a few enhancements and some bug fixes this week as proof that we really do read all of that stuff that you post for us on Get Satisfaction.”

Via the Oregon Blogs blog “For a little while, things were starting to seem disappointing in the ORBlogs effort. I origionally shot for Oct. 1st to get the BigBark code running, giving us a near immediate availability of the aggregator and Digg ranking. However, the time I’ve spent away from Java has made that nearly impossible. So we started talking about what the best options are, and if we should step back from the BigBark code at all.”

Amber Case writes “The date’s been set. Due to scheduling conflicts (including the event being really close to Thanksgiving) CyborgCamp Portland will be held on December 6th, 2008, at Portland’s CubeSpace.”

Via the LaunchPad Coworking blog “For this installment, a virtual chat with Carolynnn Duncan, founder of CoffeeWithAnExpert, an online/offline way for entrepreneurs to find the right person with a skill that can solve a micro-problem in their business. Duncan has been partnering with coworking spaces [like Portland’s CubeSpace] to offer her program.”

Via OnStartups “If you’re one of those rare entrepreneurs that has the discipline to stay reasonably focused on what you should be working on, feel free to skip the rest of this article with the comforting knowledge that you have my admiration and envy.”

Darius Monsef writes “As an internet entrepreneur you never have enough time complete all the things you have on your list get done. Often working out is not high up on that list, but I’m going to encourage you to put it up there at the top… Membership fees cost around $20-50 a month and I promise you you’ll get a great return on your investment of cash and time. Have more energy, feel better, be happy, sleep better, be more successful…”

Via the Eclipse Foundation “During November 2008, we are inviting individuals to organize and attend Eclipse DemoCamps around the world. The Eclipse DemoCamps are an opportunity to showcase all of the cool interesting technology being built by the Eclipse community. They are also an opportunity for you to meet Eclipse enthusiasts in your city. You don’t need to be a software developer to attend!”

Via .51 “I first met Selena Deckelmann at a Code-n-Splode meeting here in Portland, Oregon. Code-n-Splode is a monthly meeting of women who are programmers. The ‘code’ is obvious; the ‘splode’ is what we do afterward with beer and local grub. Selena was one of the founding members, and she graciously agreed to an interview here on dotFiveOne.”

Via AboutUs “It’s no secret that Portland has one of the most dynamic Twitter communities in the country, if not the world. The multitude of interesting conversations, absorbing events, and just plain cool tech people to be found via the Portland twitterverse (including a wiki-built Twitter dictionary, for all those not up on the geeky lingo) is truly astounding.”

Via Legion of Tech “Todd had the best description of this event on Twitter: ‘Sweet waffles, savory waffles, beer, wine, art & geeks all converging in a glorious orgy of awesome.'”