Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community
Portland startup and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
Portland reddit is one of those sub-reddits. And if you’ve never had a chance to check it out, now would be a very good time. It’s timely, relevant, and widely varied in topics. Best of all, those Portland redditors—or predditors for short—are as eclectic as the topics on which they post.
Remember when I got a little snippy at The Oregonian reddit and tried to create a Silicon Florist reddit? Good. I’m glad you don’t. Because it was a big fat steaming bucket full of fail.
But along about that time, Portland reddit really started to take off. And now, more than 2500 subscribers strong Portland reddit is a great resource for finding all sorts of interesting stuff about all things Portland. Read More
Well, how about reminding you about all the ways you can consume Silicon Florist content and interact with the awesome startup community here in the Silicon Forest?
It may be a short week, but it’s not a slow news week. That said, it is the Friday of a short week. And posting about really cool startups or important news may get lost in the haze of moving into the weekend.
What to do? What to do?
I’ve got it! How about taking care of some housekeeping around the ol’ Silicon Florist?
What kind of housekeeping you ask? Well, how about reminding you about all the ways you can consume Silicon Florist content and interact with the awesome startup community here in the Silicon Forest? Read More
Via Open Source Bridge “We’ll be getting together again this Sunday, March 29, at Ristretto (3808 N Williams) starting at 10am to hack on Open Source Bridge-related code, and work on contacting User Group and university outreach.”
Chris Kalani and his wild and crazy friends managed to make it on KGW The Square with a sweet pyramid.
Via Jive “And one of the tougher transitions for me will be saying goodbye to our Chief Marketing Officer, Sam Lawrence, who is leaving Jive at the end of this month. Sam is a great friend and a great marketer. He was an instrumental part of moving this company from a small technology vendor to the category leader – from the initial Clearspace direction to developing creative ways to evangelize this new space.”
Via Strands “Used to be your financial data was sentenced to solitary confinement in many hard to navigate web sites each singing a different tune and sporting a different look. Well, would you care to say ‘No more!’ with us? You can keep all your accounts with other sites and institutions but for your regular ‘Let’s check if any financial Gremlins have been sneaking up on me?’ rituals you now have moneyStrands’ free mobile versions.”
Via strdup “The hackerspace idea is obviously one I’m interested in. I have my own proposal for one, but tailored less of a 24-hour space for random hacking encounters, and more as an un-office to give remote-working people an in-person community of peers.”
Via Jive “Admittedly, it is early and the cynical may dismiss this move as pure marketing or hand waving. But, I’m willing to predict that the skeptics will fall silent over time. The module offerings were strongly pulled by our customers and will have an incredible amount of uptake. Our solution focused Centers strategy was not created on a whiteboard, but from a deep assessment of the way our customers are actually using our products. All we are doing is making their experience easier, cleaner, and more powerful by productizing and packaging our software in a way that provides clear solutions to large business problems.”
Mike Rogoway writes “When startups rallied for more state investment last week, Portland Mayor Sam Adams and members of his economic development team were among the hundreds who turned out.”
Via Open Source Bridge “When we had the opportunity to build Open Source Bridge, one of our primary concerns was that we had plenty of space for hacking. But we weren’t thinking a couch in the hall or a bunch of people crammed around the table. And we wanted our attendees to have something better than a desperate search for places with outlets, wifi, and space to code at 3:45 AM. We were thinking about dedicated space for hacking, 24-hours a day.”
Via AboutUs “March 25th marks a very special day in the history of the Internet. 14 years ago today, Ward Cunningham publicly launched the revolutionary technology that is the wiki.”
Via Beer and Blog “Last time I wrote, I said that March would focus on social skillz. Well it’s still March, so get out your party hat and floss your teeth. Yes, now that we’ve walloped bloglessness and joblessness, this Friday we’ll be putting an End to Awkwardness!*”
Via Clicky “Go to your Spy page, then click the “test the mega spy beta” link to check it out. It still has some issues and is not yet feature complete, but we’ve drastically increased the performance since the original beta was released on Friday. It now runs very fast on all browsers, including MSIE. This will also really help you out if you have a slow computer.”
Via OTBC “In spite of the difficult economy, Ontier CEO Sebastian Rapport recently closed an investment round, launched a product, and added tech heavy-weights Paul Gulick and Les Fahey to the Ontier Board. At this lunch program, Sebastian will talk about Ontier, share some lessons learned, and give attendees a peek at Ontier’s Pixetell™ product, which provides ‘The Power of In-Person Interaction and the Convenience of Email.’ Join us to hear about this local success story in the making!”
Mike Rogoway writes “Portland-based Ontier, which makes online communications tools, is donating 250,000 stock options to the Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest. A fifth of the donation comes from investor and board member Les Fahey and Ontier CEO Sebastian Rapport.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Every time a person learns that they can edit the content on a web page, view the history of edits by other people and become a part of that history as their edits become subject to further editing – that’s a life-changing experience. 14 years and a whirlwind of innovation later, wiki is still probably the best example of collaboration on this social technology we call the web. So thanks, Ward, for inventing the wiki. The world is a much better place for it.”
Adam DuVander writes “Other Open Source projects could stand to learn from this. Heck, so could any technology that requires documentation. This stuff isn’t just for marketers.”
Via AboutUs “Yesterday in Part I of our series on five ways to improve an AboutUs page, we gave a tutorial on how to add a Summary. The next step is just as easy.”
Andy Baio writes “So I’m making my yearly pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW Interactive again this year. No crazy Worst Website Ever antics this time, but I will be speaking at a couple events, if you want to get together.”
Via Steven Frank “In 2002, I wrote a very simple program that would overlay a WebKit browser over your desktop. I haven’t worked on it in a very long time, and occasionally I get emails asking what happened to it. So, here it is, if you’re still using it and have an itch to scratch!”
Via JanRain “We have just released the first version of our RPX plugin for WordPress. The plugin adds RPX based authentication to WordPress user accounts, as well as for blog commenters.”
Cami Kaos writes “Friday night we were joined by Ryan Snyder and Dawn Foster of our friendly local Shizzow! We had a great time with them on the couch talking about Shizzow going global. Listen to (or watch) the Tech Edition to find out more about Shizzow and get info about SXSWi!”
Another cool iPhone app from Raven Zachary and team “Fight global warming on your iPhone by making an informed choice about where to ski or snowboard. Too warm for snow? Freeze over your iPhone screen with a single breath.”
Via AboutUs “In all types of wikis, we often see folks who have something of value to contribute but just need a few ideas to jump-start their efforts. If you’re feeling that way in regards to our community, here are five things you can do to create a more comprehensive, effective, and attractive page on AboutUs.”
Via The 451 Group “This is the one thousandth post to have been published on the 451 CAOS Theory blog, three years and six days since Raven wrote the first post, describing the blog’s raison d’être. It’s interesting to look back at Raven’s first post as a reminder as to why the CAOS Theory blog was launched and how it continues to add value to what we do and – we hope – the open source ecosystem at large.”
Amber Case writes “In a global, ever-connected economy, it is finally possible to rely on citizen media outlets to receive news almost as soon as it happens, however, people often have a limited basis on which to determine validity. Online, time and space for information gathering is compressed. This also means that time and space for decision making is also reduced. This is why online social networks try to use online metrics to establish validity in as short amount of time as possible.”
Dawn Foster writes “This afternoon, Katherine Gray (aka @thiskat) asked me about my strategy for keeping up with everything at sxsw, and I realized that I didn’t really have one. Here’s a start of one, but I would love to hear what tools other people are using.”
Via def euler(x); cos(x) + i*sin(x); end “If you live in or would like to visit beautiful Portland, OR, consider signing up for the Open Source Bridge conference. I will (probably) be giving a talk on RubySpec and Rubinius 1.0. There’s lots of interesting folks giving great talks. This is an opportunity to hear how people are developing the open-source community.”
Via Open Source Bridge “One of the unique things about Open Source Bridge is that it is entirely volunteer run. That’s right. 100% volunteers. All proceeds—sponsorships, registration fees, and in-kind donations—go to ensuring that Portland, Oregon, has a one-of-a-kind conference for open source citizens this summer—and hopefully for many years to come. Why do we do it? Because we love the idea of having an open source conference by developers for developers where they can focus on the topics that are important to them. But more importantly, it just seems like the right thing to do. But we can’t do it alone. So if you like the idea of Open Source Bridge as much as we do, we’d love to have your help.”
Via the Sustainable Marketing Blog “My first event as a blogger is over. Despite my best intentions, too many good or at least educational offline distractions kept me from almost any online activity at Business Leader NW. Here are a few impressions from the Blog Pavilion and beyond.”
Via .51 “In celebration of Women’s History Month, The Inside Scoop (Intel’s Consumer Blog) has posted two brief pieces in their “Innovative Women” series.”
Selena Deckelmann writes “I’d written during last PgCon about Postgres and Twitter, and I figured it was time for a new list of Postgres-related people who I follow! Especially since a few people commented that Twitter was a waste of time last year ;)”
Via Wired “This added layer of context makes any location-aware service useful as a real-life social networking tool. As the Shizzow team notes on its blog, the private beta community in its hometown of Portland, Oregon, has been using this “what” feature for ad hoc meetups with great success.”
Via ORBlogs “We have our first official ORBlogs Code Sprint scheduled, March 7th, 11am, at CubeSpace! Thanks to CubeSpace for donating the space. If you can, please bring a little cash donation to cover the cost of snacks and drinks n stuff. We pretty much have space for the whole day, but I figure we can probably be heading out around 4ish. Then we can celebrate our first Code Sprint, and all the great progress we’ll have made!”
Mike Rogoway writes “Talked to Harvey Mathews this afternoon for the first time since he quit the Software Association of Oregon a week ago. My first question to him was: What now? ‘I’ve just been really fascinated with this intersection between technology and sustainability, and I think that’s what I’ll pursue, on a contract basis, for a while,’ Mathews said.”
Via OurPDX “KGW is debuting its Studio on the Square this week with celebrations on Friday and an open house on Saturday. The Studio on the Square is KGW’s new HD studio in the former Powell’s Travel bookstore space in Pioneer Courthouse Square. The studio has been built with the reporters sitting with windows at their back, showcasing what is going on out on the square. From a viewer’s perspective, we get to watch both the news and something extra (if it happens.) It’s Portland’s own Today show.”
Mike Rogoway writes “Voyager already has three Oregon companies in its portfolio, two of which — Elemental Technologies and AboutUs — won their funding in the second half of last year. Voyager remains focused on our state (its partners will be meeting with two, unnamed, companies here later this month), and has strongly hinted that it expects another Oregon investment during the first half of ’09.”
Via Versionista “ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, now offers ChangeTracker, a service which lets visitors view the most recent changes to WhiteHouse.gov (and several other government sites). This service uses Versionista as a back-end. You can even ‘steal their code’ to create your own custom RSS for Versionista.”
The Technology Conference of Inspiration and Influence! [Editor’s note: And well worth the trip up from the Silicon Forest.]
Via The Oregonian “The Coraline Economy will cushion the state from the direst economic effects of the Great Crunch. Not timber. Not computer chips. The creatives — hanging at the local coffee shops and clubs and brewpubs, huddling in the corners and madly pounding their laptops — will lead us back to prosperity.” [Editor’s note: They don’t expressly call out all of you creative developers, but any time I hear the word “creatives,” I think of you.]
Via Upcoming “On Tuesday, March 24, two wonderful worlds will collide for the better of Portland-based nonprofits and technology geeks alike. Are you a nonprofit that thinks the server is just the guy that brings you bacon and pancakes? Are you a geek looking to serve a nonprofit all that bacon knowledge you have bubbling over in your head? We will try to match nonprofit needs and give you a few hours to talk one-on-one with a technology know-it-all.”
Dawn Foster writes “The entire Shizzow team, including yours truly, will be lounging on the Strange Love Live couch for the podcast this Friday evening (March 6th) around 10pm. We will be talking about some new happenings on Shizzow with a focus on our plans for attending SXSW and how you can use Shizzow to find the best parties and sessions as well as getting together for meals with friends.”
Via Beer and Blog Portland “This Friday is going to be our send off party for those of us fortunate enough to be going to SxSW. Shizzow will be rolling out a few features to help everyone stay in touch while in Austin. But wait! The fun doesn’t stop there!! @geekygirldawn also worked it out with Hugh Forrest for one lucky attendee to win an upgrade from an Interactive Badge to a Gold Badge!”
Josh Bancroft writes “I have the pleasure of speaking to a group of tech and VC lawyers at a local law firm (not sure if they want me to say who they are) about why and how they should be using “social media” and the web. I’ve sent them some pre-reading ideas, and I have lots to talk about, but I thought I’d ask you what YOU would teach a group of lawyers about the web?”
Via JanRain “We recently launched a wiki (http://rpxwiki.com/) to serve as a resource for developers adding RPX authentication to their website(s). Anyone signed up through RPXnow.com can edit pages on our wiki.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “I’m speaking to a Mensa gathering this Spring about the internet and was just sent some interview questions for the local chapter’s newsletter. Pretty strange, huh? After I took the time to reply to the questions, I thought I’d take a page from Dave Winer and post my replies here. Perhaps you, dear readers, can let me know if you think I am wrong, too obnoxious, or otherwise in need of different replies to such questions.”
Via Jive Software “Jive, the Social Business Software leader, announced that Intercontinental Hotel Group (LSE: IHG.L) implemented Jive Social Business Software to connect and engage with its 40 million Priority Club Rewards members.”
Via TechCrunch “What this economy needs to get out of its rut is more startups. Adeo Ressi, the founder of VC-rating site TheFunded, wants to do his part to help jump start the economy with fresh ideas and leaders.”
