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Category: Washington

Diplomatic mission: Portland Lunch 2.0 reps venture north for Seattle Lunch 2.0

Rick Turoczy on March 4, 2009

Seattle Lunch 2.0Here in Portland, we love the Lunch 2.0. But we can always stand to improve it. So Jake Kuramoto, the Portland Lunch 2.0 guy, has proposed that we take a trip up to Seattle to see how our neighbors to the north handle Seattle Lunch 2.0.

So this Friday, March 6, we’re doing just that.

It’s a diplomatic envoy or something. And it has two goals. The first is partaking in Seattle Lunch 2.0 but the second part? Talking to all the cool open source folks in the Emerald City in hopes of convincing them to come visit us in the Rose City for Open Source Bridge.

Jake, Selena Deckelmann, and I will be heading up for the event. I know that Brian M. Westbrook, who oscillates (wildly, I might add) between Portland and Seattle, will be in attendance, as well.

We’re all looking forward to getting the chance to hang out with our fellow Lunch 2.0 types, like Eric Berto, John DeRosa, Josh Maher, Danielle Morrill, and more. So if you’re from Seattle and debating whether you should be attending or not, hopefully this will be the little push you need to show up.

What’s that? Not enough inspiration to attend?

Okay. Fine. Ben Huh will also be there.

(yes, the CEO of the company that runs FAIL Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger?, GraphJam and other Interweb time sinks), will swing by and give a talk about his view on the world, building a lean business, and how to make a business out of being a blogger.

Oh. So now you’re interested. I see how you are.

For more information, see the Seattle Lunch 2.0 site or Seattle Lunch 2.0 on Upcoming.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

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Why just Yay!Monday when you can Yay!Everyday?

Rick Turoczy on January 13, 2009

I’ve been a huge fan of Yay!Monday, an inspirational collection of cool design and thought-provoking imagery that refreshes—you guessed it—every Monday. Um, yay!

But, I must admit, it left me longing for Monday on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday… well, you get the idea.

Now, the curator of Yay!Monday, Vancouver’s Chris Kalani, has launched a new site to solve that problem. Introducing Yay!Everyday.

Yay Everyday

Yay!Everyday is curated by a community of users, ensuring that there’s always something new and interesting to see. And it’s got a fresh and eclectic feel that reminds me of other amazing inspirational design sites like k10k, surfstation, and Design is Kinky. But unlike those sites, Yay!Everyday is right here in our own backyard.

It’s always great to see another combination of creativity, design, and technology in the Silicon Forest. But most of all, I’m just thrilled I don’t have to wait until Monday to get my Yay! on.

If you’re lucky enough to secure an invite code, you’ll soon be submitting creative content that is sure to inspire your peers and fans. Otherwise, spend some time flipping through the content collected by the current participants.

Air Sharing: Vancouver iPhone app gets more than 700,000 downloads in one week

Rick Turoczy on September 15, 2008

Air Sharing iPhone appEven the iPhone critics have to admit that there may something to the iPhone app thing. I mean, if the results Vancouver-based Avatron Software is producing are any indication.

Last Monday at 5 PM Pacific time, Avatron released Air Sharing, a temporarily free iPhone app that lets you treat your iPhone as a wireless hard drive. Not earth shattering news, I grant you.

But fast forward to today. And as of this writing—a few minutes shy of one week—they’re approaching nearly three-quarters of a million downloads.

That’s right more than 700,000 little versions of the Avatron apps are walking around on iPhones.

“It’s just amazing,” said Dave Howell, CEO of Avatron. “It’s way beyond what we thought would happen.”

And the reviews are looking quite positive, too. Even donpdonp might be happy with this little app, considering:

Best app in the app store. It’s incredibly useful and works with my Ubuntu desktop!… This is seriously the best app around. Worked out [of] the box, almost zero config.

Using Bonjour and the standard WebDAV interface, Air Sharing allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to mount the devices as a wireless drive on any Mac, Windows, or Linux computer; drag and drop files between the device and computers, and view documents in many common formats.

Basically, it’s like working with any other drive. Wirelessly.

But there are also some other interesting features that could extend the use of the Air Sharing app. What are those features? Well, Dave will be my guest on the next Silicon Florist podcast, so tune in to find out.

Interested in trying Air Sharing? Well, it’s free to try for one more week. After that the price will go up to $6.99.

For more information, visit the Air Sharing area on Avatron’s site. Or to see what others are saying and to try it for yourself, head on over to the Air Sharing page in the app store.

(Hat tip Raven Zachary)

Got bookmarks on those social bookmarking site thingees? Now, you can import them into Iterasi

Rick Turoczy on September 8, 2008

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I was aware of this feature under development, but I was not involved in this release. Quite frankly, it took me by surprise. But it makes sense that they’re pushing it while they’re down at the TechCrunch 50.]

IterasiBack when I discovered social bookmarking, the way I used the Web changed.

Okay. That may be a little hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of truth to that.

With social bookmarking, I was able to save site locations, tag them in a meaningful way, and get to them from any browser with an Internet connection.

It may not seem like a big deal now. But back then? It was “You mean my bookmarks aren’t beholden to this one browser on this one machine? Oh my. Very cool.”

But my bookmarks always suffered from a problem that I couldn’t solve with just a link.

And that was? Well, sometimes the page just changed. The story or the thing I thought was important or—worst of all—the cool design that I wanted to rip-off save for inspiration.

Screenshots were a workaround. But they were never really what I wanted.

What I wanted was to save the page.

Fast forward to today.

I’m sitting on a ton of bookmarks. I use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia and del.icio.us every day, if not several times a day. They have become so much a part of the way that I use the Web—and the way that I share and glean information from others—that social bookmarking would be an incredibly hard habit to break.

But I still worry about losing the page I actually wanted.

Well, now, that problem is solved thanks to still just barely Vancouver-based and ever-so-close to being Portland-based Iterasi and their new “import bookmarks” feature:

This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.

Now, granted, that’s not going to do much for the links that have already aged. But from now on? I can be sure that I’ll have exactly the page I wanted to save.

Saving bookmarked pages in Iterasi is great, but not using Iterasi is even better

As excited as I am about this feature to extend the use of Iterasi, there’s one thing I’m even more excited about: not having to use Iterasi.

Huh? Stick with me here.

I’ve developed a workflow for saving links and—as chagrin as I am to admit it—Iterasi isn’t part of that workflow.

It’s an afterthought. A habit I’m trying to force.

But with this feature? That problem is solved, too.

How?

Now that Iterasi can import bookmarks, I can work in my preferred social bookmarking tool and still have Iterasi saving the pages for me.

I can fly around willy nilly tagging things in del.icio.us or saving them to the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia. All the while, knowing that I can bring those over to Iterasi to make an archived copy.

And that’s pretty cool.

I can work where I’m comfortable working without losing the ability to save things I really want to save. And that makes this new import bookmarks feature very powerful indeed.

The feature, however, does come with a caveat:

If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.

For more information and a short video on the new feature, see the Iterasi blog. Want to test drive it yourself? Download the latest version of Iterasi and then click on the “leaves” to access the feature.

New Iterasi release (now with Mac support) garners coverage and kudos from TechCrunch

Rick Turoczy on August 21, 2008

Iterasi, the currently Vancouver-based but soon to be Portland-based company that allows you to create your own personal Web archive, has released the latest version of its service. And some people are taking notice. [Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine.]

https://www.iterasi.net/embedded/?sqrlitid=VCTZ2q3oBEm2VERKCHW9ig

Who? Well, there’s a little blog called TechCrunch that deems the new release—with the addition of a scheduling feature—“a must have research tool. ”

Michael Arrington writes:

Overall Iterasi is an excellent service, and the schedule feature makes it a must have research tool.

So what does the new Scheduler offer?

Use the iterasi Scheduler to automatically Notarize pages when you tell it to, without having to be there to push the button. Set up the Scheduler to Notarize a page every day, week or month at a time that you choose. Great for tracking blogs, reviews, retail sites, and just about anything you can think of. Use the Scheduler to build your own history of any website!

But the biggest news (in my opinion)? They now have native Mac support for Firefox 2 and 3!

No more switching over to my Windows machine to save pages. With the latest release, I can do it right from my Mac. Simple.

Now, granted, I’m a little biased since Iterasi is a client, but I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see another Silicon Forest based company—joining the ranks of Vidoop and others—getting recognition on such an international stage.

Good for Iterasi. And good for Portland.

For more information, visit Iterasi. Or to download the the browser-based tools, register for an account.

To view my saved pages, visit the Silicon Florist public Iterasi page.

Iterasi gets more social with RSS feeds, widgets, and public pages

Rick Turoczy on July 1, 2008

[Editor: Full disclosure, Iterasi is a client of mine, but I was not involved in this announcement.]

http://www.iterasi.net/user/siliconflorist?format=widgetN1Vancouver-based Iterasi, the service that allows you to create your own personal Wayback Machine, took a huge step forward in making its network of users more social, today, when they announced three major additions to their offering: public pages, RSS feeds, and widgets.

Josh Lowensohn at Webware broke the news:

Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.

In my opinion, these seemingly innocuous changes actually mark a decided change in Iterasi’s stance. With these features, Iterasi moves from being an interesting personal service toward becoming a valuable social service. And by embracing features that allow me to distribute my saved pages to a much, much wider audience, they gain the benefit of more people encountering their service.

I have found a great deal of value in being able to save pages for myself. But now that I have the option of sharing pages with folks? It opens a whole new realm of use for me. Like a more typical social bookmarking service.

Fringe benefits abound. With RSS feeds and widgets, Iterasi just increased its exposure exponentially. I’ve added the widget to this post and I’ll likely add it to the blog (once the Mac version is out and I can use the service regularly.) And, I’m adding the RSS feed to my lifestreaming services, like FriendFeed and Strands.

What’s more, by launching public pages, Iterasi has the potential to rapidly increase its online footprint for search engines and the like—like any other public-facing social network service.

Now, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. As with any new feature on a BETA product, there are some rough spots and some nice-to-haves that didn’t make the cut. There are some areas over which I would like to have control, like skinning the widget and dealing with the publishing function.

But as I’ve mentioned, I see this release as less about “features” and more about “vision.” It’s clear to me that Iterasi is taking a much more social stance. And that’s a very good thing.

To test drive the product, visit Iterasi. To see the public page in action or to get the widget code, please visit the Silicon Florist page on Iterasi.

CelleCast dials up Lou Dobbs

Rick Turoczy on June 4, 2008

Vancouver-based CelleCast, the service that lets you listen to on-demand radio programming via your mobile phone, has announced that CNN-anchor and household-name Lou Dobbs has signed on to distribute his radio show through the service.

“Having America’s Most Influential Independent Voice as an exclusive channel in the CelleCast Network is a big boost for mobile interactive radio to flood the mainstream,” said Andrew Deal, CelleCast founder and CEO. “As a long time and extremely well respected anchor, author, and speaker Lou Dobbs joins some of America’s finest radio programs on the CelleCast system.”

CelleCast, Inc. was launched in November 2007 to bring radio and all things audio to any phone, any time, anywhere. CelleCast is building a network of programming focused on top-tier radio programs. Its current partner networks include Westwood One, Premiere Radio Networks, Advanced Media and Envision Radio Networks.

For more information, visit CelleCast.

Iterasi: Get your own personal Wayback Machine

Rick Turoczy on May 6, 2008

[Full discloure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I worked with them a great deal on the initial announcement of their product in February, but aside from some ad hoc consultation, I did not participate in this launch.]

Vancouver-based Iterasi, the service that allows you to run your own personal Wayback Machine, has come out of private BETA and announced general availability for the Windows version of their browser toolbar. Using the toolbar, you gain the ability to capture an entire Web page, exactly as you see it—dynamic elements and all—and save it in that state, forever.

Sound interesting? Head over to the site to register and download your Iterasi toolbar.

The team has added some compelling features since the last time I wrote about the product back in February. Most notably the ability to embed captured pages within Web pages.

I’ve posted one of my favorite examples—the ability to save a Google search for future reference—below.

http://www.iterasi.net/embedded/?sqrlitid=_usQPoEYdU6mizC1xaJXOQ

As you’ll see from the embedded page, Iterasi saves the entire Web page as fully functional HTML, including any AJAX wackiness or completed form fields. In many ways, it’s the evolution of bookmarking. Moving from saving the location of a Web page to saving the Web page, itself.

But even that description might not give you a full feel for the potential of the product. So, if you’re a Windows user or have access to Windows on your Mac, I’d encourage you to download it and give it a shot.

The Mac version of Iterasi’s toolbar is still under development.

For more information, visit Iterasi.

OpenID: Aaron Hockley takes a stand and you benefit

Rick Turoczy on April 24, 2008

Vancouver’s Aaron Hockley is fed up.

I’m going to take a bit of a stand. Effective immediately, I will no longer comment on tech blogs that don’t support OpenID for comment authentication.

And I, for one, really respect his taking this stance. I think it’s these small, self-admittedly “mostly insignificant” kinds of actions that make things happen. The journey of 1000 miles and whatnot.

Aaron makes a strong argument for every blog pursuing its own OpenID login for comments:

OpenID is a win-win for blog comments. It’s a win for the comment author, since it means less info to type. It’s a win for the blog owner, since it means the comments have a “real” identity behind them.

I mean, if you really want to be part of the conversation, shouldn’t you make it as easy as possible for others to join in the conversation?

Of course you should. And OpenID can help you do that.

And you—as a Portlander or Silicon Forester—should be more than embracing OpenID. You should be singing its praises from the rooftops, if only to support great companies like Vidoop, ConfIdent, and JanRain who are the forefront of OpenID development.

OpenID is like the Portland Trail Blazers of technology around here. Only better. Like the ’76-’77 Blazers. That’s right. You know what I’m talking about. The plucky young upstarts who win despite all odds.

And OpenID has more than a fighting chance. But it still needs the support of each and every one of us.

But what if it’s a technical issue that’s preventing your adoption? (Like me, for instance. I wrangled my OpenID WordPress implementation for hours before Chris O’Rourke was able to pinpoint the issue and help me resolve the problem.)

Well, you don’t have that excuse anymore. Because Aaron has offered to help:

And I’ll put my time where my mouth is: I’ll help you. If you follow those links above, and can’t figure it out, or you try it and it doesn’t work. I’ll help. Send me an e-mail. I want you to have OpenID.

I’m looking forward to using my OpenID to comment on your blog the next time I swing by.

So where’s that benefit for you? Right here, tiger

In fact, how about this? Let’s round up a list of all the Silicon Forest based blogs and services that support OpenID.

If you’re one of them, use your OpenID to comment below.

I’ll work on gathering a comprehensive list for posting. And then we’ll work on promoting your blog or service for being one of the ones who’s supporting OpenID.

Just as a way—albeit minor—of saying “Thank you for using OpenID.”

Iterasi launches at DEMO 2008

Rick Turoczy on January 28, 2008

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is one of my clients which may taint my objectivity. For other reviews of the tool, see coverage in CenterNetworks, Profy, VentureBeat, Webware, and Web Worker Daily.]

Vancouver, Washington, based Iterasi has been working in stealth mode for the last six months. (So stealthy, in fact, that my friends and family have, to date, only known them as “double secret probation.”) Today, Iterasi was finally able to start talking about their offering, unveiling an early—yet highly functional—version of their product at DEMO 2008.

They will be the only Silicon-Forest-based company taking the stage at DEMO, this week.

So what does the Iterasi do? It saves Web pages.

Sounds simple. But, these days? Not so much.

Given the dynamic nature of today’s Web sites—AJAX, CSS, dynamic HTML, widgets, database-driven content—“saving a page” is a little more difficult than it seems like it should be.

But Iterasi makes it incredibly easy, enabling the user to save the exact page he or she is seeing. No matter how many little AJAX balloons may have been opened or what personal information has been provided.

When Iterasi saves the page, it’s in its native format. It’s HTML. So all of the links still work. All of the CSS is still there. So you get to see all of the content, in context, and work with it, instead of just looking at it.

In addition to saving pages, Iterasi offers a scheduler that allows you to capture the same page over time:

You can also schedule automatic capture of a page at regular intervals. We believe that capturing the same page over time will highlight the differences among notarized versions. And we think that type of comparison will be great for competitive intelligence and other online research. Some people will use it to monitor their kid’s MySpace page over time, others to take an extended look at Craigslist search results for a town they might move to.

For more information, to see a demo, or to sign up for an invitation to future BETA versions of Iterasi, visit Iterasi. To keep tabs on what the company is doing, visit the Iterasi blog.

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