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GadgetTrak goes mobile

Rick Turoczy on October 14, 2008

[HTML1]GadgetTrak BlackBerryPortland loves mobile. And, clearly, Portland-based GadgetTrak, the company that turns your stolen electronic devices into a sentient Neighborhood Watch for nabbing thieves, is no different.

That’s why they have just announced the launch of GadgetTrak’s thief-thwarting technology on mobile devices:

GadgetTrak® Mobile Security enables device owners to send remote commands to wipe data from their device and back data up to another phone. Additional commands for Blackberry devices can be sent to lock the device, signal an alarm that cannot be disabled by the thief, get the current location of the device, send a message to the main screen, and initiate a remote call back.

Simply install GadgetTrak on your BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device, and you gain remote access to destroy the data on the device, backup contacts, lock the device and signal an alarm, get the location of the device via GPS, call a predetermined number, and—perhaps my favorite—taunt the thief with a custom message that appears on-screen.

For more information on the mobile solution and GadgetTrak’s other products, visit GadgetTrak.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 13

Rick Turoczy on October 13, 2008

A Field Guide To Coffee Shops Around Northwest Portland, Particularly The Pearl District Neighborhood

Bram Pitoyo writes “ut, first things first, let me clarify that this post serves to answer one question (and one question only): Which coffee shop is appropriate for which occasion? Now, having spent adequate time in various coffee shops around this area in specific, and Portland in general, I feel that I am able to identify some factors that are present in most, if not all of them.”

PortlandTechTwitter – AboutUs Wiki Page

From AboutUs “Portland is extremely well-represented on Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform. The following is a list of some of the most interesting citizens in the Portland Twitterverse. Feel free to follow them, ask them for advice, or run into them at the many local Portland Tech Events.”

Last Chance to Submit Your Talk Ideas for IP4!

Via the Ignite Portland blog “There’s only 1.5 days left to get your Ignite Portland 4 talk idea submissions in. The window officially closes at 12:01 AM Wednesday 10/15 (that’s the hour after 11PM on Tuesday night 10/14, just to be clear). If you’ve got a talk idea you’d like to share on stage at Ignite Portland 4, now is the time to get it in.”

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Lunch 2.0 at the Art Institute is Wednesday

Rick Turoczy on October 13, 2008

It’s been a while since this Lunch 2.0 was announced, but the big day has nearly arrived.

aiipdx.png

So in case you’ve forgotten, the kind people at the Art Institute of Portland will be opening their doors to the eighth iteration of Portland Lunch 2.0 this coming Wednesday, the 15th, from 12 to 2 PM.

Ideally, you’ve already RSVP’ed on Upcoming, and you know where you’re going. It’s not too hard to find, right across the street from the Portland Armory, in the Pearl District. Parking may be a bit dicey, so carpool, MAX it, or bring your parking space radar.

As previously mentioned, the space is very big. So, feel free to bring along your coworkers, but if at all possible, RSVP with an accurate number to help with the food planning. The Art Institute’s Fall term just began, so perhaps some students will come by to mingle as well.

One person you can definitely expect to see on Wednesday is Art Institute graduate Bram Pitoyo, who convinced the Art Institute to host this Lunch 2.0. Bram recently had his bike and laptop stolen, and Amber Case has rallied the Portland tech community to come to his aid. Collecting small donations over the course of four days last week, she suprised him with $400 at Beer and Blog last Friday.

If you haven’t met Bram or Amber, take the opportunity on Wednesday over lunch.  Based on Upcoming, it should be a nice turnout, and I hope to see you there.

Upcoming Portland Lunch 2.0s

  • November 5 at the Eclipse Foundation
  • January 14 in the ‘burbs at the new OTBC offices in the Beaverton Round

Thanks to all the hosts and people who’ve made this a success. If you want details about hosting, let me know in comments.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 11

Rick Turoczy on October 11, 2008

Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey – Waxy.org

Andy Baio writes “With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases. Check out the screenshot below, and install the Greasemonkey script or standalone Firefox extension to try it yourself.”

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Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 10

Rick Turoczy on October 10, 2008

GOSCON: Government Open Source Conf in PDX at Fast Wonder Blog: Consulting, Online Communities, and Social Media

Dawn Foster writes “I was just talking to Deb Bryant about the upcoming GOSCON event here in Portland Oct 20th – 23rd, and there are some very exciting things about the event. For anyone unfamiliar with GOSCON, it is focused on providing ‘forums to explore both the business case and real-world applications for open technology to deliver the next generation of government services.’ This is the fourth annual GOSCON event.”

Saturday Dinner and Hackathon – WhereCampPDX Blog

Via the WhereCamp PDX blog “After sessions on Saturday, the 18th, we’ll be heading over to Old Town Pizza for dinner and hacking. We’re asking attendees to RSVP and pre-pay for dinner with the form below. Join us to continue talking about ideas from the day’s sessions, and collaborate on projects.”

Shizzow Blog · Using Shizzow RSS: FriendFeed, Widgets, and More

Via the Shizzow blog “A few weeks ago, we turned the switch to make the RSS feeds for shouts publicly available. While we have a few people using them for something interesting, the rest of you slackers haven’t done squat with them. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.”

Quick update | Oregon Blogs

Via the Oregon Blogs blog “There are at least 4 people looking at the codebase, including me. This is a good sign because, although it’s complex and feature rich, it’s relatively clean and Patrick (@plightbo) has graciously provided a script to grab the dependencies, meaning going from ‘broken’ to ‘not broken’ is relatively painless.”

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JanRain helps the other side of the OpenID (and OAuth) equation

Rick Turoczy on October 9, 2008

JanRain RPXIt’s no secret that I fancy Portland the hub of OpenID development. And it’s days like today that I actually sound like I know about that which I am blabbering.

You see, today Portland-based JanRain, one of the old guard in terms of OpenID, unveiled a new service that has the potential to increase OpenID adoption.

How? By focusing not on those people holding an OpenID, but on those who want to allow people to use that OpenID—but simply can’t figure out how.

With this new software-as-a-service solution (that’s a lot of “s”s, isn’t it?), RPX, JanRain has the makings of a service that allows anyone to drop OpenID support—and OAuth support for that matter—into place on their site. Simply and easily.

With RPX you don’t need to become a security expert, a protocol expert, or play through a number of security and data flow problems, RPX handles all of this for you and delivers a simple payload in either JSON or XML.

In my mind, JanRain’s solution has a great deal in common with Will Norris’ brilliant OpenID plugin for WordPress, wp-openid. But for a much larger audience.

With RPX, JanRain has the opportunity to take that same kind of plug-and-play OpenID login concept to the larger Web—beyond blogs—to the companies who could greatly benefit from the technology.

And that’s very cool.

It’s also cool that they could be making some money off of subscription fees to deliver that service.

As an aside, I’m also happy to report that JanRain gains the distinction of being the first Portland company that I got to cover for ReadWriteWeb. And I can’t tell you how great it is to share the amazing tech scene here in Portland on that larger stage.

Well and speaking of that larger stage, JanRain also garnered coverage on a little tech blog of which you may have heard, TechCrunch.

Dare I say “YAY Portland!”? Indeed I do.

Still hungry for more OpenID news? Fear not, gentle reader. A little bird tells me that they’ll be some more cool OpenID stuff being released here in Portland within the next week or so.

Just you wait.

Venture Northwest 2008: AboutUs, Collaborative Software Initiative, Revelation, SplashCast make the cut

Rick Turoczy on October 8, 2008

Venture NorthwestMy favorite thing about entrepreneurs? They’re scrappy.

So today, it came as a pleasant surprise that—even in light of the not-so-hot economic environment—our plucky local organization of entrepreneurs, the Oregon Entrepreneur Network (OEN), has chosen to unveil the presenters for the upcoming Venture Northwest 2008.

“The companies presenting at the conference represent some of the most innovative and creative companies from across the Northwest,” said John Hull, chair of the OEN Venture Northwest 2008 and managing director at OVP Venture Partners. “Some of these companies are seeking their first institutional venture financing while others have already received first rounds of capital from top-tier venture firms. In total, this list of companies represents well the broad spectrum of investment opportunities that flourish in our region”

Not only that, but I’m happy to report that there are some Web startups—and at least one open-source-focused company—on the list.

And four out of 14 isn’t bad.

So which of the Silicon Florist crowd got a nod to present?

Interested in who else is presenting? The Oregonian‘s Mike Rogoway has a complete list of the 14 Venture Northwest presenters with links.

OEN’s Venture Northwest is the premier forum for new and emerging investment opportunities in exciting companies from Oregon, Washington, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. This annual conference draws institutional investors and investment bankers from across the western US who are interested in the emerging companies that the Northwest has to offer. Companies that have presented at Venture Oregon have raised over $1.3 billion in venture capital since 1996 and over $68 million in angel investment.

For more information, visit OEN’s Venture Northwest.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 08

Rick Turoczy on October 8, 2008

Tell a Story in Five Minutes or Less… | Our PDX Network

Betsy Richter reminds us “You have less than a week to submit your presentation idea for Ignite Portland 4! (Submissions are closing at midnight on 10/14; presenters will be announced on 10/20.)”

The Stumptown Redesign, Part One

Via Needmore “This is the first of several posts, in which we’re writing about our experiences redesigning the Stumptown Coffee Roasters website. This is an overview of the project as a whole, and some ideas we had and things we learned along the way.”

The Stumptown Redesign, Part Two

Via Needmore “This is day two of four, in which we’re writing about our experiences redesigning the Stumptown Coffee Roasters website. This is a description of ’round one’ of our site mockups, and some of the thought process behind them.”

It’s Here! Revelation Project Version 2 launches | Revelation

Via the Revelation blog “Revelation will always need to be able to adapt to respond to wherever our customers would take us. V1 had served us well, but we realized the imperative for this V2 release was to create a foundation that would let Revelation scale, adapt and grow.”

Breakfast Tweetup/Shizzup at Fuller’s Restaurant

Via Upcoming “The Portland community is one of the highest-ranked communities on Twitter. Those of us who’ve used the service have vastly expanded our connections, friendships, and experiences. However a lot of Portland Tech events happen in the evening.”

Three Billion Steps

Via the Walker Tracker blog “October 3rd marked crossing 3 billion collective steps. Now, that’s a long way from the 700 billion needed for the bailout – but were steps = dollars, we’d all be doing rather nicely! And indeed, I would claim that we’re all a bit better off for it.”

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GoLife Mobile adapts to changing conditions

Rick Turoczy on October 7, 2008

GoLife MobileAs is evidenced by the time I’ve spent chatting with James Whitley time and again, it’s safe to say that I’m impressed with the leadership at Hillsboro-based GoLife Mobile.

And their latest move only further solidifies that opinion.

In an impressively transparent admission, GoLife Mobile proposes a change in their business pan—right on the home page of the GoLife Mobile site.

GoLife points to a number of changing market conditions that have had a decided effect on the company:

Industry Growth: Consolidations and mergers such as the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia are changing the mobile landscape. The carriers are rapidly opening their frameworks, recognizing both the inevitability and the value of community-driven mobile application development.

Locative Services: Location-based services are taking off like wildfire (who would like to write the location-based service to monitor wildfire growths, we’d sure like to see that before next summer in the West!) Locative services and mobile devices are such a natural fit that we are strong supporters of WhereCamp PDX.

The iPhone Appstore: The release of the iPhone and its AppStore has fundamentally changed the perception of mobile devices. The iPhone has precipitated the revolution that we knew was coming: people are beginning to realize the potential of mobile for more than just voice and text communications. We can’t tell you how exciting this is for us!

Technology Evolutions: Mobile technology is rapidly changing, growing, evolving, new capabilities are being added daily. For instance, near-field ID chips are being integrated into mobile devices already. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to poll your mobile phone and ask it where you left your glasses? Or your keys?

Economic Devolutions: There’s been another change that we’ve been tracking, like everyone else, we’ve been watching the state of financial markets. Sad to say, but the credit crisis has taken its toll on small businesses like GoLife Mobile, and has affected our ability to grow out our framework as rapidly as we’d anticipated.

But, GoLife isn’t crying in their microbrewed beer. They have a new plan.

GoLife is retrenching. And moving forward to take advantage of the obvious opportunities in the mobile market:

Given these changes, we’re changing our business too, to make sure that we stay on the cutting edge of the market and the technologies, and that our framework gives our customers, users, and developer partners what they need. After looking at the state of the art in mobile and what’s coming down the pike as far as technologies and services, we are taking our mobile client apart for some major revisions.

It will be truly interesting to see what emerges from this change in direction.

One thing is for sure. This is yet another reason I point to GoLife Mobile as one of the leading local mobile talents.

If anyone can make it, they will.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 07

Rick Turoczy on October 7, 2008

Discovering Portland’s Tech Community by Analog and by Twitter | Hazelnut Tech Talk

Amber Case writes “Thankfully, I’m going to have a greater ability to show the world how amazing Portland is. Beginning November 1st, I’ll be blogging for the Discovery Channel –> on Portland. Hopefully I can do it justice. Please don’t hesitate to point out my inefficiencies, writing incapabilities, and lack of refined blogging skills along the way. The Silicon Forest has amazing voices already, I only hope to approximate a percentage of their awesomeness.”

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