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Grabb.it releases incredibly cool interface for iPhone

Rick Turoczy on August 16, 2007

Tired of the music on your iPhone? Point it to the Grabb.it iPhone interface and you’ll be surfing new tunes in a matter of seconds. Find one you like? Click and you’ll be listening—to the whole song.

Just flip through the iPhone friendly scroll list or search, then click on a selected tune, and voila! That’s it. It’s playing on your iPhone. Just like that.

The new Grabb.it iPhone service worked flawlessly on wifi, with no interruption. It played the songs as if they were stored in my iPod library. With Edge, it was a little choppy.

Still, worth checking out.

[UPDATE] Great insight into the development challenges, on Chris Anderson’s blog.

Designed to support independent musicians, the Portland-based Grabb.it service makes any Web-accessible MP3s—from local favorites, relative unknowns, and popular artists—more accessible by indexing MP3s as they are posted by artists and fans.

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.

Metroblogging Portland meetup August 22

Rick Turoczy on August 16, 2007

Metroblogging Portland is a collectively composed blog featuring a relatively continuous stream of local news from local talent. The bloggers work together, but they don’t work together. So they try to meet up once a month.

This month? You’re invited.

We’ll be at rontoms starting about 5:30 or so on August 22nd. If you’d like to come have a drink, we will be supplying a variety of nibbly things for you to munch on while you have your beverage and come say hi to us. Especially if you’re a commenter, even more especially if you’re a regular commenter (whether you agree with us or not) we would love to put some faces to some names. Wouldn’t you?

For more information, visit Metroblogging Portland.

iPhone Whois

Rick Turoczy on August 15, 2007

If you’re anything like me, you come up with domain ideas in the most random—and often unwired—places. I mean like the grocery store. What were you thinking about?

Never mind that now. We have important matters to discuss.

Matt King has just released a Whois application for the Apple iPhone. So now, no matter where you are—as long as that “where” has Edge or wifi access—you can check that domain name and see if it’s available.

To try it out, head over to whois.onmyiphone.net.

Of course, then you have to go try to register it on the very non-iPhone-ish registry sites. Baby steps.

Shopify Marketplace widget released by CouldBe Studios

Rick Turoczy on August 15, 2007

If you’re running Mac OSX and have a penchant for shopping, today is your lucky day. CouldBe Studios just released a Shopify Marketplace dashboard widget.

Now, all the merchandise in the Shopify Marketplace is only an F12 away. Unless, of course, F12 isn’t your widget key. Then, it would actually be some other keystroke away.

For more information on the Shopify Marketplace widget or to give it a test drive, hit the What Could Be blog.

Marshall Kirkpatrick offers blog matchmaker service

Rick Turoczy on August 14, 2007

If you’re like most of the Silicon Forest startups, you don’t have a ton of money to advertise, you probably can’t hire full-time public relations help, and most people don’t even understand what you’re doing. So, there’s a communications gap between you and your audience.

Blogging helps fill that gap.

But, let’s be honest. After spending 20 hours cranking code, it’s hard to find time to keep your blog up-to-date.

That’s what makes this offer from Marshall Kirkpatrick so interesting:

So, if you are a company who would like to hire a blogger for either in-house content creation or for news coverage for your blog network, send me an email at marshall@marshallk.com. Tell me what topic areas you’re looking to fill, whether it’s a part time, very part time or full time job and how much the position pays. (How much should you pay? See the bottom of this post.) If and when I find bloggers who I would recommend for the position, I’ll email you and offer to introduce you. This is where the quality control comes in, my reputation for this depends on my not recommending bad bloggers. If you would like to hire me to offer advanced training for whoever you select, that’s great – let me know. You’ll end up with a world class social media presence. I’m happy to make introductions regardless.

Marshall is asking bloggers who are looking for paying gigs to contact him, as well. Then, he’ll work to synchronize the right writers with the right companies. Win-win-win.

To get the full story, see Marshall’s post, entitled “Introducing good bloggers and companies to hire them.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick currently serves as the Director of Content at SplashCast and a consultant on social media. Prior to joining SplashCast, Marshall was the lead blogger at TechCrunch. For more information, see Marshall’s personal site.

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?

YourList takes on Craigslist

Rick Turoczy on August 14, 2007

Beaverton-based YourList recently announced it was open for business and ready to take your classified ad.

Classifieds can be a challenging space, primarily because most folks tend to think online classifieds are synonymous with a guy named Craig. Still, YourList boasts several features which way help it gain traction:

Users are able to search by city or choose a mileage distance from their zip code. They can set up alerts to notify them when a particular item or job posts in their vicinity, thus saving them valuable time searching listings. Users can also sign up for a free account to manage their posts in one interface without having to confirm their classified ads through numerous emails.

The classified listing service is free. Job postings will run $15.

Next, YourList has to see if they can overcome the traffic conundrum. Given that they just launched as a tabula rasa, postings are slim, at best. Classic chicken or the egg. You need traffic to get listings, and you need listings to drive traffic.

In attempt to short-circuit this problem, YourList is giving away iPhones. One a month, for a year.

For more information, visit YourList.

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