[HTML1]I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Portland—and to some extent the entire Silicon Forest—has a predilection for building iPhone apps. No, it’s true. There are a number of amazing development shops in town—some one-person, some a few people—building iPhone apps that are attracting users by the thousands.
But who are those folks? There isn’t really any way to search for “apps made in Portland” in the App Store. So I thought I’d take the time to share the developers of whom I know off the top of my head—and of course, I’m always open to your enlightening me on the ones I’ve missed. Read More
iAte gives you local restaurant information coupled with tweets associated with the venue. So instead of everyone yammering about what they’re eating, you get a focused stream about a certain food in a certain town or about a specific restaurant.
[HTML3]You know the old (well, old in Internet time) joke. Twitter? Why would I get on Twitter? Isn’t that just people talking about what they’re eating?
Well, yeah. To some extent it is. But what if they were talking about that new restaurant where you were going to spend your anniversary—and it sucked. Or what if you were really hankering for vegan BBQ and your first choice happened to be closed? Sometimes what people are eating, where they’re eating, and what they’re tweeting can be extremely valuable.
And Portland-based iAte is gobbling that Twitter data up and serving up some very tasty results. Read More
Portland-based NEMO Design, in conjunction with Group y, brought a bunch of marketing folks together to listen to a panel of social media savvy folks, including Dave Allen, Lee Crane, Matt Savarino, James Todd, and Tony Welch all moderated by Marshall Kirkpatrick.
With a great group of opinionated speakers, the lively conversation jumped from topic to topic. And even though it got a little derailed by an SEO-focused comment and perhaps a little too much “Twine, drink!” it provided a great deal of insight for the “marketing savvy but potentially social media uninitiated” folks in attendance.
So, who killed social media? Like the seemingly unanswerable “how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” the world may never know. But here’s what folks had to say. Read More
These folks are literally the who’s who in social media and technology and they’ll be in P-town checking out Intel’s tech and touring their fabs and research centers. As a special bonus, they’ll be heading downtown in the evening to join several folks from Social Media Club PDX at The Green Dragon Pub for chit-chat and beer.
Sweet, huh? Join your fellow Portland Social Media Peeps on Thursday, April 16 from 7:30 to 8:30 for a Tweetup at the Green Dragon. And if the notoriety of these Insiders isn’t enough to spark your interest, Intel will provide the first round of beers (depending on how many people show up).
So who’s going to be there? Well, let’s take a look.
Sarah Austin was one of the first live streaming, life-casters popularized on Justin.TV and now hosts a weekly live show in conjunction with Pop17 at Mogulus.
Cathy currently serves a multi-faceted role at Seesmic, overseeing marketing, assisting with business development, and driving content. She was also instrumental in helping Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur develop LeWeb, now one of the largest and most well know tech gatherings in Europe.
Frank is best known for his blog, Somewhat Frank, which covers social media and emerging technology. In an effort to facilitate startup community, he co-founded TECH Cocktail, an organization that “that offers events and community-powered projects open to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs & professionals interested in technology in under served technology communities.”
Irina is the co-founder and host of Geek Entertainment TV which has been on air since November of 2005. She also put together the Vloggies, an award ceremony for video bloggers.
Whoof. That’s quite a line-up.
So, if you get the chance, please swing by the Green Dragon, this Thursday (April 16) at 7:30 or so. Not only would it be a great opportunity for you to meet this interesting group of people, it would be yet another chance for us to expose some very influential folks to the amazing Portland tech community.
Plus, to repeat: free beer.
And if you’re interested in video on the Web *cough* Strange Love Live *cough*, I’d doubly recommend that you try to make it. Since there’s a heavy contingent of video savvy folks—Sarah, Cathy, Frank, and Irina—in this little gathering. I’m just saying.
Strangely enough, for a “social media” gathering, there wasn’t anything on any of the social event services. So I added the event to Calagator and Upcoming. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.
Rick was kind enough to handle the driving duties, which left the rest of us free to chatter and OH all the pearls of wisdom on Twitter. After about 20 minutes, Rick went into shock from being surrounded by people tweeting, but unable to do so himself.
This spawned a discussion about a steering wheel keypad with a heads-up display that would finally allow Rick to see all his TweetDeck columns without scrolling.
But you already knew that because you were following our road trip on Twitter.
What? Oh.
Even though we started off a bit slow, we arrived with plenty of time to spare and then quickly wasted it looking for a coffee shop with a restroom.
Josh Maher, the organizer of the Seattle Lunch 2.0 chapter, holds happy hours as well as lunches, and Friday’s was a happy hour. Since we were on a diplomatic mission, and it was a happy hour, Rick brought a gift, Portland beer. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and that’s such a Portland thing to do.
Axios Law Group hosted the happy hour at their offices in downtown Seattle, and TalentSpring, whose office is in the same building, co-sponsored the event. Dawn wasn’t there to get a count, but I think there were about 30 to 40 people spread throughout the office. Then again, I’m not very good at counting, so it could have been more.
In classic Portland style, we included our Twitter handles on our name tags, which drew attention from several Seattleites, many of whom were just making the jump into Twitter. There were also funny references to how happy were were to get out of depressing Portland, alluding to that recent Business Week article.
We mixed and mingled, and as always, Kelly’s LED name badge garnered a lot of attention. I’m pretty sure John DeRosa wants one of his own. I chatted with John, Matt Woodward and several other people. My pea brain doesn’t do well with names, so apologies for not calling out all the good people who chatted with me.
After about an hour of mixing, Josh introduced the gracious hosts, Adam from Axios and Bryan from TalentSpring. Then I stumbled through a “hello from Portland” and threw Rick under the bus to talk about Open Source Bridge, the other reason we headed up there. As usual, he did a great job despite the tire tracks.
Brian Westbrook and Danielle Morrill streamed the event live to Seattle 2.0, and I’m hoping to get the recordings of the interviews he did with Selena and Rick. If/when I get those, they’ll be added to this post.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get many pictures of the event. All we had were our iPhone cameras, and Rick’s nice camera took a header into the CubeSpace parking lot before we even got on the road. In hindsight, I guess we should have brought Aaron or Mark along to snap photos.
After the happy hour ended, it was back on the road; six hours in the car for a two-hour event. That’s dedication.
May 20 hosted by WebVisions at the Oregon Convention Center
As always, big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.
Cami Kaos writes “Friday night saw another big first in the history of SLL. During Afterhours we had a live musical performance right there in our little studio, but before that happened we had a very informative Tech Edition. Usually I like one episode from the night better than the other and it’s usually pretty clear cut for me which it was, but if you ask me to pick a favorite this week I’m likely to stare blankly at you for a while before asking if you listened to them both.”
Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo write “It is because of all of these things, and what I feel is becoming an essential next step in the development of trend prediction and the very useful implementation of data and information, that we’ve decided to start having some meetings around this sort of thing. The first Portland Data Visualization Group will be held on Monday, March 23, 2009 from 6–8pm at Webtrends.”
Via Open Source Bridge “The track names for Open Source Bridge are a little unusual. No Ruby, Perl, System Administration, Linux—instead we have Cooking, Chemistry, Culture, Hacks (and Business, but you’ve seen that one elsewhere). So what’s going on? How are these relevant to open source software?”
Dawn Foster writes “I talked to Hugh Forrest at sxsw, and he has offered a free upgrade from an Interactive badge to a Gold badge for one lucky winner! Basically, this means that you get to attend the film tracks and screenings in addition to the interactive program.”
Sarah Gilbert writes “The team at iPhactory is making that happen with its new iPhorest app, announced (but not yet launched) at TED. A joint venture between Raven Zachary, iPhactory and the Conservation Fund, iPhorest will plant a tree on your iPhone as the Conservation Fund plants a honest-to-gosh real tree in one of its renewal projects, beginning with a vulnerable wildlife habitat along the Gulf Coast. As your tree grows on your phone, you can send seeds to other phones and begin a forest, err, phorest.”
Via Zapproved “Since the launch of our beta, Outlook integration has been one of the most requested features from our users. They have wanted to have the ability to create proposals without leaving their email client since they would often begin an email and realize that they were actually meaning to send a proposal.”
Via KBOO Community Radio “This month, The Digital Divide looks at ways people are putting communications back in the hands of the community and how technology is shaping the future of how we work.”
Via the GadgetTrak blog “GadgetTrak Inc. the leading innovator of theft recovery and data protection technology for mobile devices, today announced it has been awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) entitled Portable Host-Pluggable Appliance Tracking System, U.S. Patent No. 7,496,201. The subject of the patent deals with tracking stolen portable electronic devices such as external hard drives, MP3 players, flash drives, digital cameras and others when connected to a PC.”
Via Substance “Substance and Pinch, along with the Flash PDX User Group, invite you to an evening of show and tell. We know that you have been working diligently on the next big thing, so we want to give you the opportunity to brag about it a bit. So on Tuesday, March 3rd at 6:30 pm, at Substance, we will be hosting an event where you can come and share what you’ve been working on.”
Dawn Foster writes “We had a great pre-sxsw party here in Portland on January 19 organized by the official staff of the sxsw interactive event. We had such a great time, that we decided to do a community organized, unofficial party exactly one week before the big event in Austin.”
Dawn Foster writes “I have also noticed that online community management positions tend to be weathering the current economic downturn better than some other jobs. Community managers are still being hired on a regular basis, and I’m still seeing openings on various job boards for companies looking to hire community managers. Here are just a couple of examples of companies who are currently looking for or have recently hired a community manager….”
Cami Kaos writes “Friday night we had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Beer & Blog’s Justin Kistner for round about 4 hours. Now we didn’t record all of it but we went over time on both the tech edition and afterhours because we all had so much to say. Justin was an excellent guest and he’s welcome back anytime. We were also joined by his lovely wife Christine and Strange Love Live and Beer & Blog regular Verso.”
The News Hour with Jim Lehrer featured a number of Portland, Oregon, companies in a segment on the tech industry’s trials and tribulations, including Ambric, Elemental, and TriQuint.
From the ORBlogs 2.0 team “I feel like we have been stalling a bit, so I have done a few things recently to try to make the development process more transparent, as well as easier for anyone who wants to just jump in and do what they can, but may have been stymied by not knowing where to start.”
Via Daily Journal of Commerce “Also altering The Reserve is a new, 13,000-square-foot penthouse that was built on top of the original building. Taking advantage of the building’s view of the city, Hennebery Eddy designed the penthouse with floor-ceiling windows and a wrap-around porch with a continuous overhang to provide shade and block intense sunlight. Once it’s completed this week, the $5 million penthouse will belong to tenant Jive Software, which has occupied the building’s third and fourth floors since May 2008.”
Via the Symfony Project “Looking for something to do with all that brain power? We’re happy to announce an upcoming community event that will harness the power of the symfony community toward a variety of social causes. Help us get the word out! This event will take on the basic structure of other 48 hour web application development competitions, such as Rails Rumble, but with a special twist unique to symfony. The applications we create during the course of the competition will be gifted to different socially-minded organizations around the world. Once the fun is over, our work will live on and hopefully do a lot of good.”
Amber Case writes “There’s just one little problem. You live in a house. You work at an office or coffeeshop. There’s no really large space with tons of powertools, saws, and electronic equipment nearby. Your garage is lacking a 9′ wood lathe, and the basement has no more room for electronics. Enter Open Tech Space.”
Via the JanRain blog “We’ve been building a portfolio of OpenID case studies and just finished one that is pretty exciting, so wanted to share it with the community. AFI is a leading rock band with an exciting approach to fan engagement – a competition for six fans to perform on their next album.”
Tim Sears writes “Despite this dark news we keep seeing in companies across the tech industry, I keep asking myself if things are really as bad as they seem. Microsoft is actually still hiring a large number of Software Development Engineers – over 150, in fact – to help grow and support a variety of their different product platforms. Some positions were posted as recently as today. Intel, on the other hand, does not have anywhere near as many position openings, but there is no clear evidence of a hiring freeze.”
Jason Grigsby writes “Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of good applications being built based on solid business plans. And after evangelizing mobile for so long, I’m pleased that people are excited about the possibilities. It’s just important to recognize that it is a gold rush. During a gold rush, there is a lot of money to be made. But the part that makes it a rush is the irrational exuberance of the chase.”
Amber Case writes “Need help with your software project? Looking for a logo or WordPress hack? Interested in some of the brightest minds in Portland Tech? Whether you’re looking for community, coffee, or Wifi, Portland Tech hangouts abound. I’ve compiled a list of the top ten Portland Tech hangouts and what they’re like. If you’re in the area, make sure to stop by, or follow me on Twitter @caseorganic and I’ll give you tips on where we’re going to be next. “
Via NTEN “This meeting will be talking overall tech strategy. Do you have a technology plan in place? What types of things should you be thinking of? We’re going to take a look at the big picture and help you see what ways you can be using technology to make your nonprofit’s work more efficient. This will be a joint meetup with the Nonprofit Technology Network’s, Portland 501 Tech Club. Speaker details are still being finalized but be sure it will be some great local tech talent!” (Don’t be so sure. It’s me.)
It’s all about techies doing what they do best: geeking. Only this time, rather than geeking about some obscure algorithm or arcane coding language, they’re geeking about bacon.
Have you ever wanted to get together with a bunch of other bacon geeks and just geek out about bacon? What if there was an event specifically catered to bacon geeks to be able to share their favorite bacon treats with the world? Wouldn’t it make sense to make it a competition complete with trophy and prizes? Of course it would.
Masterbacon is just such an event.
So much bacon love, even the most vegan of geeks is sure to appreciate it. Maybe.
Masterbacon will be held on Saturday, January 17, at the newly opened Davis Street Tavern in Old Town. Participation is mandatory. That means you’re cooking, judging… something.
Friday, 