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Category: News

Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants Portland to be a “hub for open source”

Portland Mayor Sam Adams opened the second day of Open Source Bridge with a keynote calling for increased collaboration between the City of Portland and the open source community.

Rick Turoczy on June 18, 2009

[HTML4]Portland Mayor Sam Adams opened the second day of Open Source Bridge with a keynote calling for increased collaboration between the City of Portland and the open source community.

Why? In hopes of making Portland the “hub of open source” and—in a bit of throwing down the municipal open source gauntlet—vowing to “out open source” Vancouver, British Columbia, which has recently declared itself a completely open city.

“Bottom line: the city government has unnecessarily been closed in proprietary software and has been a a laggard in using open source software,” said Adams. And he wants to see Portland change that. Read More

Open Source Bridge: A peek at the hacker lounge

Rick Turoczy on June 18, 2009

One of the most anticipated components of the Open Source Bridge conference—which is currently running in the convention center through Friday—was the 24-hour hacker lounge at the top of the Hilton.

The space opened yesterday afternoon and as the evening wore on, a number of developers managed to work their way up to the top floor to hack on everything from Arduino projects to using YQL to manipulate government data.

Don Park captured some video to give you a feel for the space. Read More

Tap tap: Urban Airship celebrates launch of iPhone OS 3.0 with Tapulous deal

Today as Apple makes iPhone OS 3.0 available, Urban Airship announces a deal with Tapulous makers of the insanely popular Tap Tap Revenge that will enable the game to support the latest iPhone 3.0 features.

Rick Turoczy on June 17, 2009

Okay. I have to admit, I thought it was a big deal when Portland-based Urban Airship launched at WWDC and announced Portland-based Subatomic Studios as their first customer.

But just wait until you hear this.

Today as Apple makes iPhone OS 3.0 available, Urban Airship announces a deal with Tapulous—makers of the insanely popular Tap Tap Revenge—that will enable the game to support the latest iPhone 3.0 features. Read More

Iterasi hints at fee-based product

So today, Iterasi hinted at something to satisfy that request: a fee-based version of the Iterasi service.

Rick Turoczy on June 11, 2009

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. As such, I have been privy to discussions about this topic. While I have acted as a sounding board on the concept, I have not directly participated in the development or marketing of this product.]

Times are tough for everyone. Especially startups. So tough, that people are starting with the crazy talk. Crazy talk like “Gee I don’t know. Maybe we should actually pay to use that functionality?” This time, those crazy people are users of Portland-based Iterasi‘s currently free product who are interested in seeing the service sticking around.

Iterasi’s response? The customer—or would be customer in this case—is always right. Read More

Who killed social media? Ask these folks

Portland-based NEMO Design, in conjunction with Group y, brought a bunch of marketing folks together to listen to a panel of social media savvy folks, including Dave Allen, Lee Crane, Matt Savarino, James Todd, and Tony Welch all moderated by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Rick Turoczy on June 10, 2009

[HTML3]Last week, Portland-based NEMO Design, in conjunction with Group y, brought a bunch of marketing folks together to listen to a panel of social media savvy folks, including Dave Allen, Lee Crane, Matt Savarino, James Todd, and Tony Welch—all moderated by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

With a great group of opinionated speakers, the lively conversation jumped from topic to topic. And even though it got a little derailed by an SEO-focused comment and perhaps a little too much “Twine, drink!” it provided a great deal of insight for the “marketing savvy but potentially social media uninitiated” folks in attendance.

So, who killed social media? Like the seemingly unanswerable “how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” the world may never know. But here’s what folks had to say. Read More

Toonlet enables creation of Becker Street, the Kindle comic book

Rick Turoczy on June 2, 2009

It’s no secret that part of the magic of this generation of Web startups is the whole social aspect of what’s happening. And while, no doubt, that’s a big component of what we see occurring, there’s something more important that’s often overlooked: enabling.

Web 2.0 is all about enabling. Enabling you to do things that would be practically impossible without the technology. Things like enabling you to find what you want when you want it. Enabling you to broadcast your opinion to the world, quickly and easily. And enabling you to do things like build comics and release Kindle books. Read More

OSU Open Source Lab gets a big ol’ chunk of bandwidth

I’m a huge fan of the OSU Open Source Lab down in Corvallis. Not only do they provide an incredibly important resource for the open source community, but their folks are always nice enough to make the trek up to Portland on a regular basis. And it’s always great to have them involved in events like BarCamp Portland and Open Source Bridge.

Rick Turoczy on May 28, 2009

I’m a huge fan of the OSU Open Source Lab down in Corvallis. Not only do they provide an incredibly important resource for the open source community, but their folks are always nice enough to make the trek up to Portland on a regular basis. And it’s always great to have them involved in events like BarCamp Portland and Open Source Bridge.

So when they get good news, I want people to know about it. Today is one of those days.

Today, Wisconsin-based TDS Telecommunications announced that they have donated $1.4 million in bandwidth to OSU OSL. Read More

Hey Portland! How’s your whuffie? Don’t know? Tara Hunt may be able to help

And no one knows the topic better than Tara “@missrogue” Hunt, who has written the definitive book on the topic, The Whuffie Factor. What’s more she’ll be speaking on the topic in Portland twice this week.

Rick Turoczy on May 21, 2009

That’s right, Portland. I asked how your whuffie was doing. Your whuffie. Your… wait a second. Let me step back.

What’s whuffie, you ask? Well according to Wikipedia, “Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow‘s science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

So what’s that got to do with you? Well, whuffie has also become a way of describing your goodwill—your social media capital, as it were—online and elsewhere in your life. What you give and what you get from your interactions with others.

And no one knows the topic better than Tara “@missrogue” Hunt, who has written the definitive book on the topic, The Whuffie Factor. What’s more she’ll be speaking on the topic in Portland twice this week. So get ready to talk whuffie. Read More

BrowserMob’s cloud-based load testing hammers your site without hammering your wallet

Rick Turoczy on May 6, 2009

When it comes to building Web apps and sites, making sure that those sites respond to a wide variety of browsers and can effectively support a heavy loads of concurrent users can be the difference between succeed and sucking.

But finding the resources to perform—or purchase—that load testing and performance testing has, to date, been an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. And that has left many startups in a Catch-22 situation.

Until now. Read More

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