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Category: Oregon

Ignite Portland has sparks beginning to fly

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2007

It looks like there’s been some activity over on the Ignite Portland site. It’s no longer reporting a 403 error, and the blog is at the very early stages of taking shape.

If the site doesn’t exactly do it for you, maybe the Ignite Portland Facebook group is more your speed? (If so, you might want to join the Silicon Florist Facebook group, while you’re there. Or not.)

Ignite Portland will be fashioned after Ignite Seattle:

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking).

The Ignite Portland team is still in the planning phase, but given the folks involved, it promises to be a must-attend event.

More news as it becomes available.

To-do: Name that stealthy Portland startup

Rick Turoczy on September 7, 2007

It’s Friday. Isn’t it? It is right? I’ve kinda lost track of time.

What’s that? It is? Okay, great. In Portland, too? Okay, cool.

Ahem.

It’s Friday, so why not give yourself a little treat?

Ryan Williams of NetworthIQ fame has a new project in the works. It’s stealth. Super stealth.

Well, that’s what I’m claiming, anyway. Because the project doesn’t have a name. And in my book, you can’t be much more stealth than that.

Worse yet? He doesn’t quite know what to call it.

So you get to help.

Which is the best domain name for a site that aggregates feeds from traditional and social sites for a city?

  • socialmetro.com
  • metbuzz.com
  • vibelocal.com
  • localsignal.com

Exercise your inner-entrepreneur—or your outer one for that matter—by swinging by Ryan’s blog, Web things considered, and placing your vote. Or suggesting a new name.

[Update] Ryan was nice enough to drop by a provide a link to the work-in-progress. Might provide a little more inspiration for your vote.

Meet: Portland Internet Astronauts September 20

Rick Turoczy on September 7, 2007

Continuing to lead in the “quirkiest Portland group name” contest, Portland Internet Astronauts has announced the date for their monthly gathering. The event will be held the evening of September 20.

Talking about current internet hot topics, looking at the latest web start-ups and sharing our ideas for projects and what we’re working on.

Current start-ups are covered by sites like www.techcrunch.com.

Portland has a pretty great creative scene and I know lots of sites owners are out there… Why don’t we get together and chat about what we’re doing and share experiences?

Space is limited, so if you’re interested in attending, please RSVP at Meetup. Currently, Goboz and Loud Is Relative are planning on attending. Colour Lovers is the organizer.

[Editor’s Note: As an aside, Loud Is Relative admits to “wanting to be blogged by TechCrunch.” Well, they’re now in a blog entry with TechCrunch. One step closer to the dream. Baby steps, but steps nonetheless.]

Coda named one of the 35 absolutely essential Mac apps

Rick Turoczy on September 6, 2007

Portland-based Panic is well-known for developing beautiful and intuitive Apple Macintosh applications. So, it comes as no surprise that their latest product, Coda, follows suit.

What has been a nice surprise is the rave reviews the product has been receiving around the industry.

The latest? Freelance Switch has named Coda one of the 35 Absolutely Essential Mac Apps. To wit:

Coda is an all in one application that makes designers want to take notes and is a lot of web developer’s only tool. A text and css editor, a built in file browser (let’s not forget, these guys built Transmit) and an Apple Design Award to its honor. It also comes packed with a an actual web reference book reformatted and built into the actual application.

Portland pairing: Using Attensa and Jive Clearspace in tandem

Rick Turoczy on September 6, 2007

Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing at Portland-based Attensa, will be presenting at the Office 2.0 conference, this afternoon. He’ll be describing how to use Attensa’s product in combination with another Portland startup’s product, Jive Software’s Clearspace.

You can get the high-level gist of his talk—how using these tools in combination can be an effective way of streamlining the information flow in your organization—from the presentation embedded below on Attensa’s blog. (Unfortunately the embed doesn’t play nicely with WordPress.)

At the very least, I wanted to highlight this pairing of complementary technologies from the Silicon Forest.

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.

Uncloaking: LUNARR

Rick Turoczy on September 5, 2007

Apparently, Wednesday is the “Announce the events I’d really like to attend yet upon which I will inevitably be forced to bail” Day at Silicon Florist. Here’s another one:

Portland-based LUNARR, which has gotten quite a bit of press for a company in stealth mode, is disengaging its cloaking device on September 17 at CubeSpace.

LUNARR was founded by wildly successful Japanese entrepreneur Toru Takasuka of Cybozu fame:

LUNARR was founded in January of 2006 in the high tech corridor of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. The brainchild of Toru Takasuka, one of Japan’s foremost technology entrepreneurs, LUNARR was founded on the idea that every knowledge worker in an organization has the potential to be a creative contributor, one who can have a significant impact on the organization’s success by sharing his or her unique ideas and perspectives through collaboration.

What do they do? Do you not understand the concept of “stealth”? I don’t know. We’ll just have to go to the launch party, won’t we? And by “we,” I mean “you.”

For information on the launch party, see the Upcoming page.

(Hat tip to Dawn Foster)

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