Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
If you, like I, were unable to attend the Portland Web Innovators‘ get-together with StepChange, last night, fear not, gentle reader.
Justin Kistner of Metafluence has provided a thorough recap of the PDXWI event for your reading pleasure.
My biggest take away is that widgets are not just a fad, but rather an important stratification of content and services that will reshape the future landscape of the web.
For more, see Metafluence.
To support the monthly Rails Hackfest, Portland-based Planet Argon has offered a six-month Boxcar account to 1st place winner for October.
Boxcar is a pre-configured virtual server for hosting your business-level Rails applications and was designed to support the best-practices for Rails deployment.
The Rail Hackfest was designed to further the development of Ruby on Rails source code through good-natured competition. Contributions are rated and charted throughout the month, with the top contributors walking away with prizes.
For more information on Boxcar, see the Boxcar site. For more information on the Rails Hackfest, visit the Working with Rails site.
[Editor’s Note: Extending the Silicon Florist urban-growth boundary a touch, I wanted to include Corvallis-based MyStrands in the coverage. They’re doing some cool stuff and some of their folks are very active here in Portland. It’s a stretch, but a reasonable one.]
partyStrands, the newest offering from the MyStrands team, takes the ever-popular backchannel concept and makes it an interactive component of parties, concerts, and other gatherings. It’s a Twitter-on-the-big-screen sort of concept that makes every partygoer with a cell phone part of the action. And I mean, seriously, are you a partygoer without a cell phone? Not likely.
What’s more, partyStrands promises the ability to bring the party to you, whether you are “in the house” or not.
partyStrands allows you to join in on the party where your friends are even though you are somewhere else. Imagine tonight you stay at home, you can partake in the party from your room and interact with your friends at the party, by sending messages and pictures, all from MyStrands.com or m.MyStrands.com. Of course, you can read, see, and “hear” what they are doing and the music that is being played.
(Imagine staying home tonight? Not a huge leap for me.)
To see images of partyStrands in action, check out the recent Paul Van Dyk concert at the Crystal Ballroom.
For more on partyStrands, see the MyStrands blog post. For more information, visit MyStrands.
MyStrands develops technologies to better understand people’s taste and help them discover things they like and didn’t know about. MyStrands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.
Join the Portland Web Innovators for their monthly gathering, tonight. The topic? Portland-based StepChange will be presenting on their experiences developing widgets, like CLIQ. The meeting begins at 7 PM and will be hosted by Nemo Design.
For more information on the event or to RSVP, see the Upcoming page. For more on the group, see Portland Web Innovators.
As Lao-Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” So began the journey for Walker Tracker, a Portland-based community site for pedometer fans to log and track their steps.
One billion steps later, that journey continues.
To see how that total number of steps breaks down into the people who have taken them, try starting at the Walker Tracker Hall of Fame.
SplashCast hits one million. Walker Tracker hits one billion. Do I hear one trillion? Anyone? Anyone?
Portland Small Business, a burgeoning social network for members of the Portland small-business community to go for peer advice and network, has announced a planned site makeover. And, they’re looking for your feedback to help guide their development efforts.
This is the your opportunity to get in on the ground floor and have a real impact on this site. PortlandSmallBusiness.com is 6 weeks old and we are planning to retool and polish up this site by Oct. 23. I’m looking for as much feedback as I can before then. So, if you have any suggestions, please share them. With your help, we can make this site a useful tool for all the small businesses in Portland.
For more information or to provide feedback on future direction, visit Portland Small Business.
Portland-based SplashCast, which recently announced several impressive new SplashCast players branded for the Miami Heat’s Dwayne Wade and a number of popular recording artists, has seen equally impressive gains in the number of SplashCast player views they’re tracking.
Not rocket science or especially tantalizing investigative reporting there, I realize. More players == more views. And more popular players == way more views.
But, today, SplashCast achieved a notable milestone. Today, the company reported that the SplashCast player had reached 1,000,000 (one million) views for the day. An impressive feat, to be sure.
SplashCast user-generated (and increasingly corporate-generated) channels can be played and easily syndicated on any web site, blog, or social network page. When channel owners modify their channel, their content is automatically updated across all the web pages ‘tuned’ to that channel. For more information, visit SplashCast.
Looking forward to Ignite Portland? I hear you, brother and/or sister. Same here.
And I’d like to see as many folks getting involved in this thing as possible. So I created (and I use that term very loosely so as not to imply any actual “creativity”) a little badge to help promote the event. 
And now, I’d like to share.
If you’re interested in promoting Ignite Portland, you can use the badge, too. Have at it.
What’s that? You’d like to use my bandwidth to host the image so that I can track your Web metrics?
That’s cool.
Feel free to use the following code, allowing you to slap this bad boy into whatever Web page you like without any of those annoying graphic uploads:
<!-- Ignite Portland care of Silicon Florist -->
<a href="http://www.igniteportland.com" title="Ignite Portland">
<img src="http://siliconflorist.com/images/promoIgnitePortland.gif" title="Ignite Portland promo" alt="Ignite Portland promo" border="0" height="135" width="135" />
</a>
Presenter or sponsor? We’ve got you covered.
Got a better one? I should hope so. What took you so long? Link it up and share the love.
I thought there might be a little more than just mutual “We share Portland as a hometown” respect behind Attensa’s Office 2.0 presentation on how to use Attensa’s and Jive’s products in tandem.
Turns out Attensa just released a beta version of their support site. And it’s built on Jive Clearspace X.
Now, that’s the kind of Portland-based technology collaboration we like to see.
As part of the beta rollout, Attensa has also announced that it will begin phasing out its old support site, in order to “build a vibrant support community” using the features of Jive’s collaboration platform.
See additional coverage in NW Innovation.
I’m a big proponent of the “cache of locality.” The idea that, given the option, people tend to gravitate toward services and products based on their location. Even if those products and services have absolutely nothing to do with the location in which they are being used.
Buying local, if you will.
That’s why I think it’s important for all of you globally-accessible businesses and Web 2.0 entrepreneurial types to take note of this local event.
On October 23, the Alliance of Portland Neighborhood Business Associations (APNBA) will hold its annual meeting—entitled “Portland Business 2.0: How to Do Business in the 21st Century”—at the Oregon Convention Center, featuring a Web 2.0-leaning keynote entitled, “Doing Business in a Socially Networked Climate.” The cost of attendance is $50.
The event is promoted as an ideal venue for networking with small businesses, startups, and individual contractors in the Portland area. It also promises to give the somewhat-disconnected home-office types a better understanding of what business is occurring in the neighborhoods around them.
A strong, active business district association is the glue that holds neighborhoods together, giving them the distinctive identities that characterize Portland. Many of them serve the functions of a small town, offering the services and providing space for public interaction and community celebration. The well-organized business district association can be the business voice of this “micro-village” to the surrounding municipalities.
For more details on the event, please see additional coverage from Portland Small Business, the CubeSpace registration page, and the APNBA site. If you’re already sold on the idea, download the registration form.
The event is sponsored and managed by the folks at CubeSpace. If you’re interested in being a sponsor of this event, contact Eva Schweber at eva@cubespacepdx.com.
The Alliance of Portland Neighborhood Business Associations (APNBA) is an alliance of the 30+ business district associations (BDAs) in Portland, Oregon. BDA members are the merchants, property owners, and employees in the commercial districts surrounding downtown. For more, see the APNBA site.
(Hat tip to Portland Small Business)