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Category: News

Goboz launches Digg for Portland

Rick Turoczy on September 6, 2007

Portland-based Goboz, which has been available to a closed group of beta testers, has officially gone live, today, as promised.

Goboz features Citysearch-like functionality for reviewing and rating business. And the company has been working to position itself in this light. I mean, it’s Portland. We like to chat about our restaurants and bars. And, continuing down that path will likely be Goboz’ best means of supporting the site with local advertising revenue.

And, it’s true: Citysearch is horrible. It’s an easy target. No argument there.

At first blush, the easy Goboz brush-off could be “Another Digg clone?” or “Is this another Pligg site?” Do we really need another way to rank restaurants and bars in town?

Maybe not. But Goboz has something we do need. I’m thinking there’s some real potential here. That, if Goboz plays their cards right, they could fill a very interesting niche for the Portland Web community.

I think the true utility of Goboz is its ranking engine. Not for businesses, necessarily, but for Portland-based news and blog entries. And currently, that sort of activity is vastly under-served in our beloved Rose City.

I mean, as far as locally focused news-ranking services go, there’s The Oregonian reddit. And then there’s…. Well, that’s about it, actually.

So, while Goboz seems to want to lump themselves in with the Citysearch crowd, I’m going to advise you head over to the Goboz site with “Portland’s Digg” in mind. There could be some real value to the blogging community in that type of service.

In fact, I’ve added this post to Goboz, and we’ll see if you agree.

Breaking News: SplashCast to release fullscreen player

Rick Turoczy on September 5, 2007

We all know that Portland-based SplashCast has been hinting at some interesting stuff in the works. It appears that one of the features in the offing is a fullscreen version of the SplashCast player.

Well, It’s big. I’m not seeing any content Now, I’m seeing content.

I’ve no idea how long this link will be live. But give the SplashCast fullscreen player a shot.

[Update] In other news, it appears that SplashCast has revamped their landing page, giving visitors direct access to SplashCast channels. Another welcome change.

AboutUs expands into new space

Rick Turoczy on August 31, 2007

AboutUs, the Portland-based Wikipedia of business listings, has relocated its office, moving to a larger space in industrial Southeast Portland. The Olympic Mill, to be exact. Or the OMCC, as the cool kids like to say.

Need to drop by? Here’s the address:

For anyone needing to send us mail, cookies or other care packages at the new space, the address is: 107 SE Washington #520, Portland, OR 97214

AboutUs is a wiki whose goal is to create a free and valuable Internet resource containing information both about websites and other community created topics. The site was pre-populated with information about many different websites and thousands of updates are now being made by people each day.

RailsBoxcar open for business

Rick Turoczy on August 16, 2007

Unveiled earlier this year, RailsBoxcar is now open for business.

Portland-based Planet Argon has announced that the pricing for their Ruby on Rails hosting environment has been released and that they are prepared to take orders.

Good news if you’re a Portland Rails developer looking for local hosting for your app.

[Boxcar is] a new hosting service, which aims to provide you with even more privacy, more guaranteed resources, and better options for scaling your Rails application as your business grows.

For more information, see the Planet Argon blog.

PLANET ARGON is a Ruby on Rails development, consulting, and hosting company that encompasses a network of developers and administrators that love working with open source technology. Founded in 2002, PLANET ARGON started only as a custom web application development company, but eventually expanded its services to offer web and database hosting to the general public, specifically to fellow developers.

Ignite Portland begins to smolder

Rick Turoczy on August 16, 2007

As mentioned earlier (“Ignite Portland?“), Josh Bancroft came back from Gnomedex with an urge to begin Ignite Portland.

Well, if Twitter is any indication, a small planning session, today, seems to have been extremely positive. Josh mentions it in tweets here and here. And Dawn Foster mentioned it in a tweet as well, offering that something may be happening as soon as October. I know that Raven Zachary was in attendance, too.

Both Raven and Dawn are involved in organizing the annual BarCamp Portland and monthly BarCamp Portland Meetup events.

(Full disclosure: I was honored to be invited to attend this planning session, but had to decline due to personal commitments.)

More details on Ignite Portland as they become available.

[Update] Ignite Portland has a Facebook Group, now.

Web Worker Daily covers NetworthIQ

Rick Turoczy on August 14, 2007

Portland-based Fourio‘s NetworthIQ was listed in a recent article in Web Worker Daily on social money management tools.

Get a read on your net worth. NetworthIQ allows you to track the changes in your net worth and look at how other people’s net worth is changing too. You can check by various attributes like geographic location, education, and so forth in order to see how you’re doing relative to your peers.

Apparently, NetworthIQ has also garnered recent coverage in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. But I mean really. Who reads those pubs, anyway?

Matt Beck named to Shopify Advisory Council

Rick Turoczy on August 9, 2007

Recent changes in the Shopify pricing structure have had unfortunate effects on a number Portland-area developers. And some of them, like Matt Beck of CouldBe Studios, are letting the Shopify team hear about it.

Beck voiced his displeasure on the What Could Be blog, highlighting the problems with the way that Ottawa-based JadedPixel, makers of Shopify, handled the pricing change.

The problem we had with the situation was not the new rates which are actually quite reasonable, but that the change was carried out in secrecy, which left us in a potentially sticky spot as we had bids out to potential clients which were based on their old pricing model, and even worse projects currently being developed that had their pricing model changed! How were we supposed to handle that? We’d quoted people based on their old pricing model, started working on the site and then had it change mid-way through.

No good deed goes unpunished. So, with his thoughtful comments, Beck has been rewarded with a position on the newly formed Shopify Advisory Council.

The Council is made up of a handful of Shopify users who are particularly passionate and active in the forums, and we will be bouncing ideas off of them concerning both how we communicate changes to our users and specific strategies for improving Shopify in general. This means that the Shopify team will be able to get user feedback on things before they are quite ready to be announced publicly, and we’ll then be able to balance our priorities and adjust our efforts accordingly.

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