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SXSW Interactive 2009: Portland Meetup, January 19

Rick Turoczy on January 7, 2009

SXSW InteractiveIn a little over two months, a good chunk of the Portland tech scene will begin its annual pilgrimage down to Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive.

Maybe you’re going. Or maybe you’ve been toying with the idea of going. Either way, Dawn Foster highlights an upcoming meetup that you should seriously consider: SXSW Interactive Portland Meetup.

This will give you an opportunity to learn more about SXSW from the people who organize it. If you’ve never attended or were on the fence about attending, it’s a great opportunity to learn more. For those of us who already love SXSW, it gives us an opportunity to get to know some other Portland people who plan to attend.

The event will be held Monday, January 19, beginning at 6 PM at the Fez Ballroom.

And now here’s where it gets a bit weird. If you would like to attend, you should RSVP by emailing interpress@sxsw.com with “Portland” in the subject line. Because nothing says “cutting-edge interactive conference” quite like email.

Ahem.

Okay, here. I created a Calagator entry for the event. While you can’t RSVP there, that definitely makes it a little more cutting-edge—and Portland-y to boot.

All kidding aside, SXSW is an amazing conference. A place where you’ll find yourself talking to the best and the brightest in the industry and feeling like you’re definitely among people who “get it.” What’s more, the Portland contingent promises to be even bigger this year, so we’ll be able to take that shared experience back here—and we’ll continue to benefit from it all year long.

You should go. It’s well worth the time. And I’d love to see you in Austin in March.

Masterbacon: More techie bacon love than you can shake a strip of bacon at

Rick Turoczy on January 7, 2009

Bacon!There are some things that just go well together. Chocolate & peanut butter. Beer & Blog. And, of course, technology & bacon.

What’s that? You’re not aware of the kismet-like connection of cured meats and coding?

Well, then Masterbacon is for you, my friend.

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.

For more information, see Masterbacon on Bacon Geek. To RSVP, visit Upcoming.

I can’t wait to see how you get your bacon on. That is, just so long as this isn’t how you get your bacon on.

Photo courtesy the bacon geek, himself, Scott Kveton. Used under Creative Commons.

REMINDER: First Portland Web Innovators of 2009 (tonight!) will be Demolicious

Rick Turoczy on January 7, 2009

Flirting with its third year, Portland Web Innovators is one of the old guard when it comes to the new Web tech scene in Portland. For many developers, it’s the best place to get together on a regular basis to share ideas.

As such, there’s no better way to get an early glimpse of the next big thing here in the Silicon Forest than with Demolicious, PDXwi’s quarterly demo round-up of new products.

And you’re in luck. It’s tonight.

Currently scheduled to appear:

  • Dave Miller, An Open Laszlo Project
  • Michael Kelly, Foodisms
  • Akshay Dodeja, Mugasha
  • Scott Andreas, Sunago

So come on out and see your peers demonstrate the cool stuff they’ve been building, tonight at 7 PM, hosted by NEMO design. To RSVP or for more info, see Demolicious on Upcoming.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 06

Rick Turoczy on January 7, 2009

Checking Out Earth Class Mail

David Recordon writes “I’ve been up in Portland the past two weeks for the holidays which coincidentally is where Earth Class Mail is headquartered. A few days, ago their community manager @UncleNate shot me a message asking if I’d be interested in checking out their facility. So yesterday – yes they work on Saturdays too – I drove over to Beaverton to get a tour of their warehouse.”

VC funding for open source: mixed messages from 2008

Via The 451 Group “The figures for publicly disclosed venture capital funding in open source vendors during Q4 and FY08 are in and while the numbers themselves provide a mixed picture, the statistics don’t necessarily tell the full story.”

OPB News · People Fine Tuning Social Networks To Meet Their Needs

Via OPB “Social networks on the Internet like Facebook and Myspace have been around for years. But more recently, a new trend has emerged in the social networking world. People are creating smaller, theme-specific, and geographically defined social networks. From Portland, Elliot Ward reports.”

The Beer and Blog family expands to include two more people and two more chapters at Beer and Blog

Via the Beer and Blog mothership “Last week we announced the addition of Michelle to the Portland Chapter as the Chapter Provost. This week we’re proud to announce the addition of two more people to Beer and Blog: Kelly Guimont as Mistress of Organizer Affairs, and Christine Kistner in charge of Development. Please also welcome our two newest chapters: St. Louis and Eugene.”

Clearwire streams from MAX trains, mayor’s office at WiMAX launch – Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway writes “I attended Clearwire’s formal WiMAX launch this morning at a South Waterfront hotel. They pulled out all the stops, with elaborate demos (on the Portland Streetcar, in pedicabs, in Smart cars, etc.) and a fancy A/V presentation more suited for Moscone Center.”

People are people; users aren’t what they used to be

Via the AboutUs blog “Yesterday wiki enthusiast Stewart Mader commented on his weblog about a guest editorial on zdnet.com by SocialText’s Scott Schnaars which highlights an idea gaining groundswell in online communities as well as the AboutUs office – referring to those utilizing social networking tools (including wikis, blogs, etc) as people instead of users. The idea is more than a shift in terminology, but reflects the ever-changing nature of the web, from single “users” to vast communities sharing and building things together.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Concrete5 pours the foundation for another Portland user group

Rick Turoczy on January 6, 2009

Concrete5If I had to describe 2009 thus far, I would dub it the “Year of the User Group.” And that would also make Audrey Eschright’s prediction right—already.

What is it with you people? I mean, it’s a totally good thing. But man, there are new user groups springing up left and right. First Portland Data Plumbing, then Portland WordPress, and now Portland Concrete5. And since I promised Igal Koshevoy that I would do a better job of highlighting what’s happening in the user groups and development groups in town, I’m simply trying to keep up.

What’s Concrete5? It’s an elegant open source content management system developed right here in Portland, Oregon, that rivals some other more popular content management systems out there in terms of functionality—and downright crushes them in terms of ease-of-use.

Well, something as good as C5 is sure to develop a legion of fans. And now, those fans and users have the opportunity to meet one another with the newly launched Concrete5 Portland User Group:

Earlier this summer we released our previously commercial CMS as fully “Free Beer” under the MIT open source license. The second half of 2008 was a whirlwind for us as we were named project of the month on SourceForge and saw traffic go through the roof.

As part of running what promises to be the next Drupal, local user groups are going to be a huge component to our success. We have several starting around the states and Europe this month, with the Portland one obviously being super keen as this is our home turf.

Meetings will be held the second Thursday of every month, beginning with the inaugural meeting this Thursday, January 8 at Hopworks. For more information, see the Calagator entry. To RSVP, visit the Concrete5 Portland community.

Angels among us? Only if you apply by January 7

Rick Turoczy on January 6, 2009

OENIt’s that time of year again.

Time for a bunch of startups to begin vying for funding via Angel Oregon, the annual competition from the OEN that pits startup against startup during stumping sessions at PubTalks. Why? Hopes of securing some much needed funding for their companies.

OEN’s Angel Oregon is the nation’s premier investor/entrepreneur matchmaking event. Angel Oregon brings together Oregon and SW Washington’s brightest entrepreneurial talent with qualified angel investors. The top six companies who apply, including the OEN Seed Oregon PubTalk winner, will present at the OEN Angel Oregon conference on March 12th at the Governor Hotel. Two investment prizes will be awarded by a final vote of the OEN Investment Committee.

In 2007, an architectural software company walked away with the prize. In 2008, it was an apparel company. Could this be the year that a Silicon Forest Web company takes the big prize? I don’t know. Are you going to apply?

You have until the end of the day on January 7 to get registered. Go get ’em, tiger.

[Editor: The link to the guidelines on the main page seems to be broken, so here’s a direct link to the 2009 OEN Angel Oregon application guidelines.]

Portland WordPress User Group: Why save all the love for WordCamp Portland?

Rick Turoczy on January 6, 2009

WordPressHands down, one of the most compelling and beneficial events of the Portland Web scene last year was WordCamp Portland, where the WordPress faithful took the opportunity to gather, share ideas, and learn about new ways to use their favorite blogging platform.

So much WordPress love from the community. It seems a shame to keep it pent up all year.

Enter Portland WordPress User Group, a new event designed to help newbies get the help they need, to ensure power users get more powerful, and to generally forge a stronger community among the WordPress types here in town. And an event—most importantly—designed to occur much more often than once a year.

Apart from the assurances of “I know Beer and Blog. I’ve been to Beer and Blog. This is not Beer and Blog,” the format is still pretty open. The first gathering will be designed to help form that, um, format.

The inaugural meeting will be held Thursday, January 15th from 6:00-7:30pm at CubeSpace. To RSVP, visit Upcoming.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 05

Rick Turoczy on January 6, 2009

OAuth doesn’t stop phishing

Michael Richardson writes “Look, I love OAuth. It’s amazing. You should be using it if you aren’t. But it doesn’t really help against phishing attacks. The attack against an OAuth-enabled service is the same as an attack against an OpenID provider is the same as a normal phishing attack.”

More time with WiMAX – Silicon Forest

Mike Rogoway writes “While reporting Sunday’s article on Clearwire, I spent more time trying out the company’s Portland mobile WiMAX service at the end of this week from eight locations around the metro area.”

Learning Fast About Online Marketing in 2009

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation – perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?”

Modifying RSS Feeds: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo

Dawn Foster writes “While many people use Yahoo Pipes to filter RSS feeds, Pipes can also be used to modify RSS feeds to work better for your purposes. In this example, we will add the author name to the beginning of the title to make it easier to see the author without opening the item in your rss reader. I recommend watching the Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: 2 minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo if you haven’t already, since we’re going use the basic pipe developed in that demo using fetch feed and sort modules, but without the filter module.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

CitySpeek looks to cram more content into 140 characters

Rick Turoczy on January 5, 2009

CitySpeekLooking to provide a little more content than you can wedge into a tweet? Portland-based CitySpeek—a microblogging platform with a number of features beyond typing 140 characters—may be what you’re seeking.

Founded by members of the team that launched Goboz in 2007, CitySpeek was designed to fill some gaps in functionality that larger microblogging (oxymoron intended) platforms don’t offer—or aren’t interested in offering.

Turoczy on CitySpeek

What sort of things? I’m glad you asked.

First, on a grand scale the only similarity that CitySpeek shares with Twitter is the 140 character limit for messages (what we call ‘speeks’). CitySpeek offers many features that Twitter does not, including:

  • Groups, both open and private
  • Integrated pics and video, no leaving the site to view
  • Speek by category like “Overheard”, “Question”, “For Sale”, etc.
  • Communicate with CitySpeek via IM
  • Seamless integration with Flickr

The service is also offering Twitter crossposting—if you’re comfortable giving them your Twitter username and password.

[Editor: No offense to CitySpeek, but this “give me your Twitter username and password”—although currently unavoidable for certain functionality—has always made me edgy. And after today, it only make me moreso. However, it serves as yet another opportunity for me to wonder aloud “When oh when will Twitter make good on their promises to support OAuth?”]

CitySpeek has documented its API support and is said to have mobile support in production.

Long story short, with its group functionality, categories, and attachments, CitySpeek brings some interesting features to the social microblogging table. We’ll just have to wait and see if these additions—added to an otherwise simple format—attract users.

If you’d like to try the service for yourself, swing on by CitySpeek and register for an account. If you’d like to “speek” to me, I’m turoczy on CitySpeek.

Get out your RSS wrench: Portland Data Plumbing User Group

Rick Turoczy on January 5, 2009

Want to share the ways you consolidate different data streams to make your life better? Interested in learning more about RSS wizardry? Are your Yahoo! Pipes clogged?

Well, you’ll be glad to hear that there’s a new (or at least, resurrected) user group in Portland that will allow you to compare notes with other plumbers of your ilk: Portland Data Plumbing User Group.

Dawn Foster writes:

I’ve decided to resurrect the Portland Data Plumbing Group to give us a time and place to talk about RSS feed hacking, Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and other related technologies.

I know! What a way to start 2009. It sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

Well, what are you waiting for? A dangling preposition? (Sorry. Grammar humor.)

Get involved by joining the Portland Data Plumbing User Group discussion and RSVP for the first event, Tuesday, January 13.

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