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Category: News

Silicon Forest and the Identity Management Working Group

Rick Turoczy on February 7, 2008

Sometimes, I get pretty focused on OpenID-flavored identity management. But there are other startups in town working on a different type of identity management. The kind that involves your offline existence. (If there is a such a thing.)

The Santa Fe Group, a respected consultancy focusing on fraud reduction, has just announced the formation of its “Identity Management Working Group.” Among the group’s top concerns will be the growth of business identity theft, in which bogus entities use existing business names to compromise business accounts.

And the group has two Silicon Forest ties, one direct and one tangential.

First, the direct. Rick Kam of ID Safeguards, a Beaverton-based startup focusing on the identity fraud protection and compromised identity recovery, has been named the chair of the new organization.

“Collaboration is a critical component of curbing identity theft ,” said Kam. “This group will work together and with the industry at large to share knowledge that will find new and effective ways to protect us all.”

Second, the tangential. CheckFree, parent company of recently acquired Hillsboro-based startup Corillian, is also part of the working group.

Interesting news for the Silicon Forest, and perhaps the early rumblings of an opportunity.

What if all of the “identity” focused folks here in town got together and started working on this whole problem? I’m thinking these fraud protection folks, the Portland-based OpenID folks like JanRain, and the soon-to-have-a-Portland-office, rethinking-online-credentials Vidoop folks could have a pretty interesting conversation.

Kveton joins Vidoop, opens Portland office

Rick Turoczy on February 5, 2008

Well, here’s a double whammy.

I’ve heard rumors that Scott Kveton, open-source proponent Silicon Forest Twitterati, and local tech dynamo, has had plans to get more involved in the Portland tech scene—by moving up to the Rose City.

But I never expected that he’d bring a company with him.

Now, it’s official. Not only is Kveton headed to Portland, but he has the newest addition to the Portland tech scene—Vidoop—in tow. Starting in February, Kveton will serve as the company’s Vice President of Open Platforms and the director of Vidoop’s new Portland office.

“The tech community [in Portland] is amazing, and we hope to contribute to it in a big way,” said Luke Sontag, Vidoop co-founder and President, Technology.

What’s more? Get your resumes ready. The Portland office plans to employ a dozen software engineers within three months, said Joel Norvell, president, CEO and co-founder of Vidoop.

What’s Vidoop? Headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Vidoop has created a user credential technology that replaces passwords with a dynamic grid of images that is interpretable only by valid users. Vidoop’s technology was originally developed in 2006 to secure user accounts for financial institutions and corporations and has recently been licensed by several Fortune 500 companies.

Personally, I’m looking forward to more exciting news out of this crew.

Scott Kveton is fixture of the local tech and open-source community. A digital identity promoter and open source advocate, he has worked at Amazon, RuleSpace.com and JanRain, and founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. Working closely with projects like Mozilla, Linux, Drupal and Apache led Kveton to OpenID in mid-2006. He was named to Red Herring’s 2007 list of ‘25 Titans in Waiting’. Kveton speaks publicly about identity and open source and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Oregon State University.

For more information on Scott Kveton visit his personal site or follow him on Twitter. Or come meet him and Sontag, tonight, at Ignite Portland. For more information on Vidoop, visit the corporate site.

Calagator, the PDX tech calendar, snaps to life

Rick Turoczy on February 4, 2008

Calagator, the community project designed to give Portland one tech calendar to rule them all, has quickly begun to show signs of progress. In fact, events have begun populating the calendar already.

How is this possible? Well, in addition to a bunch of hard work by a bunch of talented folks, this rapid development is thanks in no small part to the Calagator team’s choice to adopt microformats for importing event information, specifically hCal.

So let the importing (and bug reporting) begin!

For more information on importing your Portland tech events into Calagator, see the Calagator blog.

Grabb.it releases API, documentation

Rick Turoczy on January 31, 2008

Portland-based Grabb.it, the music service that helps users share and rate MP3s, has announced the release of a rich RESTful API for accessing its data.

The primary resource type Grabb.it makes available is the playlist. We make playlists available in many formats, at many endpoints. We also have a few methods to manipulate and generate playlists. This document details the formats, endpoints (access urls) and uses of Grabb.it playlists.

Documentation on the API is available on a new Grabb.it API Google Group. For more information, visit Grabb.it.

SplashCast reports metrics, hits the 200 million views mark

Rick Turoczy on January 29, 2008

Portland-based SplashCast, makers of the media widget that allows anyone to create their own channels of content, has just crossed the 200 million views mark, rapidly eclipsing the 100 million views mark they hit just nine weeks ago.

Another impressive metric, SplashCast is reporting that they have more than 8.5 million unique users.

“That likely puts SplashCast in the top 20 of widget providers on comScore’s widget metrix chart,” said Mike Berkley, CEO of SplashCast.

For more information, visit SplashCast.

Ignite Portland hits the mainstream press

Rick Turoczy on January 26, 2008

We’ve been waiting for this to hit, and now it has.

I couldn’t be happier to announce that Ignite Portland has gotten real ink (as opposed to the pixels I dedicate to the subject [Full disclosure: Silicon Florist is a sponsor of Ignite Portland 2.]) in The Oregonian. Not only that, it’s front page news. Well, front page of the Living section. But that’s a front page. And front page is front page in my book.

Ignite — a Seattle invention that spread worldwide — came to Portland last fall courtesy of several self-described geeks in their 20s and 30s. They knew each other through the social networking site Twitter and techie workshops called BarCamp. If they thought Ignite was cool, the group figured, so would some other Portlanders.

Boy, did they. Response was so overwhelming, the Ignite crew plans to host quarterly events — starting now.

As always, news quickly percolated throughout the Portland Twitter crowd. And Dawn Foster has announced the article in Fast Wonder, with pictures by Scott Kveton:

w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?

The Q&A style article has many members of the Legion of Tech—the force behind the event—chiming in to round out the picture of Ignite Portland and its purpose. Quoted are Josh Bancroft, Audrey Eschright, Dawn Foster, Todd Kenefsky and Raven Zachary.

Raven Zachary has covered the coverage on the Ignite Portland blog, including additional folks who also deserved recognition:

[T]he print version is worth the trip to the store to buy a copy for $0.50. There are a few people whose names were not mentioned in The Oregonian article who have been a big help with Ignite Portland planning – Scott Kveton, Adam Duvander, Aaron Hockley, Ann Marcus, the rest of the board of Legion of Tech, Renny Gleeson, and a whole host of volunteers who help from crowd control to cleanup and everything else that needs to be done to make Ignite Portland operate smoothly. Thank you!

And, Banana Lee Fishbones sums up the appeal of Ignite Portland very nicely in her coverage on Metroblogging Portland:

Specifically in Portland this event has a great story: Some geeks from here were in Seattle for a conference that happened to coincide with the Seattle Ignite event. They went and loved it. When they got home they thought, “Why don’t we do something like that here?” and they went out and did it. And it was good. And it is stuff like this that makes me love living here. “Hey that would be cool, let’s do that!” and then DOING IT. Not sitting around bitching that nobody else is doing it for them.

To read the print article in pixels, see “What’s on your mind? You’ve got five minutes…” from The Oregonian, Saturday, January 26, 2008.

And perhaps most importantly… Obviously this increase is exposure will have an impact on the number of attendees. Please make sure to RSVP if you’re planning to attend.

MyStrands joins Data Portability Working Group

Rick Turoczy on January 23, 2008

Corvallis-based MyStrands, the service that—among other things—lets you share and compare your musical tastes, has announced that they have decided to join the Data Portability Working Group.

A number of folks are putting their hopes in the Data Portability concept. And, to be sure, their recent “skyrocketing into the tech-public consciousness” momentum may have given them the best chance of solving the problems at hand.

As Scott Kveton highlights in the MyStrands post:

We’re really excited about the work that the Data Portability (DP) group is chartered to do. The goal of the group is to build a set of technical and policy blueprints based on existing technologies and concepts that will allow for the free-flow and control of data by users among sites on the web. Taking advantage of the building blocks like OpenID, OAuth and microformats allows the effort to move that much faster….

MyStrands is committed to the Data Portability group because we believe we can really help make things happen and be an integral part of its success.

Coincidentally, another little company you may have heard of—named Microsoft—just announced that they were going to join the Data Portability Working Group, as well. But, I’m not interested in covering that, because a) Last time I checked, they were a bit north of the Silicon Forest, and b) They may have gotten a little bit of press about it already.

In fact, Portland-based blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick has an insightful write-up on the Microsoft news:

Microsoft’s joining the group is an event of sufficiently complex historical meaning that I’m hesitant to try and interpret it here. Microsoft has both been the ultimate example of lock-in and also an important force behind other open standards efforts on the web, including OpenID. Though no fan of Microsoft, I am consistently excited about what the Live team in particular does. I’ll look for analysis of this and future news about implementation at Live from my favorite source on the topic, LiveSide.

Deep breath. Okay, I realize I’ve just thrown around a whole bunch of jibber jabber at you, which probably makes absolutely no sense.

Just what is this “data portability” and why would we want it? Here’s a simple explanation. (Apparently, Vimeo’s embed code doesn’t like WordPress, so I’m linking now instead. Apologies for the extra click.)

For more on MyStrands reasoning behind joining, read Why MyStrands is joining the Data Portability Workgroup. For more on the Data Portability Working Group, visit dataportability.org.

Calagator gnaws on the Portland tech calendar problem

Rick Turoczy on January 21, 2008

Last Saturday, the Portland Tech Calendar group dove headlong into a code sprint around the problem of aggregating all of the tech calendars for Portland, Oregon, and the surrounding areas. The result? Calagator.

The group made a great deal of progress during the code sprint. A full recap is available via Google Groups. Highlights are available on the Calagator blog. (That’s right, they have the beginnings of code and a blog. These guys have accomplished more in a weekend than I’ve accomplished in the last six months.)

Some highlights (Go microformats!):

  • The existing group websites we examined can be imported much more easily with the addition of hCalendar markup for the event details. Selena and Daniel created documentation that we can share with event organizers. We discussed the possibility of using a hCalendar generator to provide ready-made HTML to paste into websites and blogs.
  • A next step for encouraging hCalendar usage will be to contact individual groups who aren’t using a standardized calendar format, and tell them about our project.
  • Paige created a sample email template that can be used to structure event information, for organizers to cc to our system when they send out event announcements. Email seems to be the one tool everyone uses, and this would help with our goal of accessibility.
  • Igal and I set up a new Rails application, and added it to a group repository at http://code.google.com/p/calagator/. The application now has a bare bones structure for adding and viewing events. We also decided that event venues were important attributes, and that combining information on venues across events would be highly useful, so users can now add and update venue information as well. We’re using a temporary view scaffolding system to allow us to add and edit information in the database. We’ll develop a more polished interface as we continue.
  • In order to begin pulling sample data from websites, Igal and Reid are creating an hCalendar event importer. This can also be used as a model for adding other calendar formats to the system.
  • Igal is going to set up our calendar program on a server where people will be able to try it out. Getting feedback early and often will be important to ensuring we’re meeting the needs of our users.

The next code sprint is planned for February 2. That’s Groundhog Day for those of you keeping score at home.

For more information on Calagator, the PDX Tech Calendar project, visit the PDX Tech Calendar Google Group or the Calagator blog.

wired.MD gets wired into a new parent company

Rick Turoczy on January 17, 2008

Portland-based wired.MD, which focuses on helping healthcare organizations provide health education to patients and consumers, has announced its acquisition by Krames, the leader in patient education, headquartered in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

According to a message posted by the CEO, Mark Friess, wired.MD will continue to produce and distribute content, with the benefit of having more capital and resources at its disposal.

We will continue to provide the same suite of products that we have to date, with an effort to continue to expand our video library to meet the needs of our clients and partners. Our team in Portland remains at the ready to assist you in whatever needs that you have regarding your wired.MD videos and applications…. Most importantly, this will allow wired.MD to achieve the legacy as both a pioneer in video patient education, as well as cementing our ability to lead that vision for years to come.

wired.MD was founded in 2000 with the hopes of “empower[ing] healthcare professionals to improve patients’ healthcare experience and reduce costs by making patient education more engaging, effective, and efficient to deliver. ”

For more information, visit wired.MD.

Apparently, CLIQ didn’t click with its new owners

Rick Turoczy on January 16, 2008

CLIQ, a dynamic blogroll widget which has been running in the sidebar of the Silicon Florist since I covered the tool in September 2007, is being shutdown as of January 31, 2008.

The widget was built by Portland-based StepChange Group in concert with Offermatica.

CLIQ was created as a joint-venture with our partner Offermatica – the leading online testing optimization platform, which was recently acquired by Omniture, Inc. StepChange managed all aspects of CLIQ’s strategy, design, development and has managed launch process for Offermatica (including the Private Alpha and Public Beta Programs).

I spoke to Kevin Tate of StepChange Group to get his perspective on CLIQ’s demise. He said his organization was taking the news in stride, seeing it as an opportunity for more Portland-centric efforts.

“While we’ve enjoyed working on CLIQ, we’re frankly looking forward to having more bandwidth at StepChange to put toward our own product development,” said Tate. “From a ‘Portland Perspective,’ it feels good to be able to let some of our project work go, so that we can spend more energy building a great software company here in PDX.”

The news of CLIQ’s shutdown was broken by Jeffro2pt0, who had this to say on the demise of the fledgling widget:

[W]hy Cliq is shutting down?

As it turns out, CLIQ was a client of Offermatica, INC and was built as a way to extend their story into the social media space. Well, Offermatica has since been acquired by Omniture. Omniture already has a number of projects within the social media space and therefor, it makes no sense for them to continue development and funding for Cliq.

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, who covered the story for Mashable, offered a similar assessment:

Clearly, part of the reason the service is being shut down is that it didn’t receive the traction it needed to survive the merger; other projects within the Omniture family had a wider userbase in the same space.

Personally, I found the widget useful, inasmuch as it provided additional metrics for determining what Silicon Florist traffic was generated by other Portland blogs. Plus, it served as another yardstick for assessing the popularity of companies, subjects, and stories.

Finally, I’m a bit chagrin to report that CLIQ also gains the dubious honor of being the first tool covered by Silicon Florist to go under.

An email will be sent to all CLIQ users, informing them of the Omniture decision.

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