.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 16

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

ORBlogs 2.0: The State of the State

John Metta writes “Seems like half the state is clamoring for an update on the ORBlogs progress (well, four or five people were asking about it, anyway). Here it is, a line-item review of our progress so far- living proof that the lazy bastids at ORBlogs would rather sleep away their nights than give you satisfaction!”

Central Oregon Web Professionals Usergroup: October Meeting

Via the COWPU blog “Everything boils down to three things when you are building a successful web site. We’ll review the meat behind the brand, search and content balance to help position your site for ultimate visibility and conversions. Once you have these tools in hand, you’ll have some helpful tips to determining which company and which system to work with. From choosing a CMS to working with a design firm/agency, the balance is the key.”

Mamapreneur Conference in Portland next week

Via the TeachStreet blog “I was just poking around on Portland-based site, MomHub. Even though I don’t have kids, it’s a great site. (Oh, they’re also building a DadHub, too.) It’s similar in mission and functionality to what our friends at ParentMap (Seattle-based) are doing. They’ve got all sorts of great local listings for family-friendly activities in Portland and lots of groups you can join to connect with similar parents in your very own neighborhood.”

Seven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value – ReadWriteWeb

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Dawn Foster is a relatively new entrant into the consulting world but her blog Fast Wonder is already pumping out the usable information and tools.”

Lighthouse upgrade delays

Via ENTP “After bringing Lighthouse back online, we immediately noticed two crucial bugs in the system, which affected user invites and email notifications. Fixes for those bugs were promptly deployed to Lighthouse before traffic picked back up.”

wp-openid – faster, stronger, better

Will Norris (creator of wp-openid, the WordPress plugin many folks use to manage OpenID logins on their blogs) writes “One of the primary focuses for this next major release of wp-openid is stability. While most people have had great success with the plugin, there are a fair number that seem to have all kinds of strange problems, ranging from conflicts with other plugins, data corruption, library issues, etc. In order to reach the level of adoption I’d love to see, we have to make this plugin as easy to install and run as WordPress itself. This is certainly no easy task, but we’ve come a very long way.”

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Strands continues to improve by listening to its users

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

When Corvallis-based Strands released their new lifestreaming service a few months back, I found it friendlier than FriendFeed, but not without its share of faults.

To its credit, the Strands team was open to criticism—taking its detractors head-on—and, as such, they continued to elicit tons of valuable feedback on ways to improve the service.

Now, you get the chance to see some of those improvements with the latest release of Strands.

Gone are the dark and constrained streams of information. Now, they’re open, legible, and much more inviting.

Strands new interface

It’s definitely a marked improvement. And one that will likely draw me back into a more participatory role. As opposed to my current use: allowing Strands to churn along—ignored in the background as it works at capturing my lifestream.

This update makes me want to get back into the fray. Because, now, it seems so much more usable.

And I’m not the only one.

Prominent blogger and FriendFeed proponent Louis Gray highlights the progress Strands has made, too:

While it hasn’t yet gotten the buzz of some other social aggregators and lifestreaming projects, Strands is quietly going about making a product on par with the market leaders, letting the community find new content and people, and enabling micro-conversations.

I couldn’t be happier to see Strands getting these kinds of strokes.

If you’re a current Strands user (and I know a ton of you in Portland and Corvallis are), I’d highly recommend heading back over to Strands to give it a second look.

If you’re interested in trying Strands, comment below and I’ll be happy to get you an invite. I’ve got about 13 left. First come, first served.

Lunch 2.0 at SplashCast in Old Town is Tomorrow

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

splashcast.jpgSeems like ages since it was announced, so in case you’ve forgotten, the kind people at SplashCast will be opening their doors to the seventh iteration of Portland Lunch 2.0 tomorrow from 12 to 2 PM.

Ideally, you’ve already RSVP’ed on Upcoming, and you know where you’re going. The space isn’t huge, so we closed the guestlist a few weeks ago to avoid a crushing overflow of hungry Portlanders.

If you don’t feel like taking a chance and fighting a crowd, never fear, there’s always the October Lunch 2.0 at the Art Institute of Portland. That’s an enormous space, so bring your coworkers and friends. It’s still good to RSVP so they can plan the catering.

Anyway, I hope to see or meet you tomorrow.

Upcoming Portland Lunch 2.0s

  • October 15 at the Art Institute of Portland: This space is huge, plenty of room for everyone, so bring friends and colleagues.
  • November 5 at the Eclipse Foundation

In addition, I have soft commitments from hosts in the works for December, January and February. Looks like Portland Lunch 2.0 will see its first anniversary. Thanks to all the hosts and people who’ve made this a success.

If you want details about hosting, let me know in comments.

REMINDER: Sold-out Linux Plumbers Conference on tap

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

Portland remains the place-to-be for this year’s sold-out Linux Plumbers Conference, a gathering of more than 300 folks who have a deep interest in the inner recesses of the popular open-source operating system created by Portland-area resident, Linus Torvalds.

Linux Plumbers Conference

Why “plumbers”?

Jonathan Corbet calls this the “kernel ecosystem”. We call it the “plumbing,” a collection of essential interfaces and services provided by the libraries, kernel, and utilities that make up a Linux system. Currently, when a problem exists that involves both kernel and user space, a developer must attend several different conferences to discuss the problems face-to-face with other key developers. As a result, problems crossing multiple subsystem boundaries are more difficult to solve than those within a subsystem.

Opening sessions begin today, with the bulk of the event happening September 17 – 19 at PSU’s Smith Memorial Center.

The Linux Plumbers Conference is underwritten by The Linux Foundation and organized in partnership with The Linux Foundation, Portland State University and community volunteers. For more information, visit Linux Plumbers Conference.

ProtoShare promises collaborative prototyping for Web designers

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

ProtoShareThere’s always a bit of miscommunication between clients and Web developers when it comes to prototyping. And that causes more stress for both parties than it should.

To compound matters, there’s usually a bunch of internal disagreements and miscommunication, too.

If only Web developers—who work day-in and day-out creating applications that solve problems for others—had a tool to help them solve their communications problem around wireframes and prototypes.

Now, they just may have that help with ProtoShare 2.0, the latest version of the interactive prototyping tool from Portland-based Site9.

What does ProtoShare do?

[ProtoShare] enables your entire team to communicate in real-time on clickable wireframes and creative designs. Team members can review work and provide timely feedback in order to keep projects moving ahead with better input. You can invite as many reviewers as you like and display comments in a wiki-like manner.

This “we built it for us and now we’re letting you play” reminds me very much of the Chicago-based 37signals guys, who built a number of apps to help them around the shop.

Turns out, those apps were so useful that now thousands of people use them everyday.

And if ProtoShare garners even a small percentage of the users that Basecamp—which is currently tracking more than 1,000,000 users—has managed to attract? That could be very interesting indeed.

In fact, ProtoShare may already be on starting its way down that path. You see, they’re getting some positive strokes from folks who might know a thing or two about online collaboration: the Wikinomics team:

“ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholders, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers, “ writes Wikinomics team member Will Dick. “By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design.”

Both Team and Network versions of ProtoShare are available for a monthly subscription. Pricing runs $25 for Team and $49 for Network.

Site9 is a developer of collaborative web development software from prototyping to deployment. Founded as an interactive agency in 1999 by web designers and programmers, Site9 transitioned into a software company to address common problems and pain points in the Web development process. For more information on the company, visit Site9. Or head to the ProtoShare site to see ProtoShare in action.

Silicon Florist 04: OEN Pubtalk, Silicon Forest Forum, Air Sharing, Portland Lunch 2.0

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

This week on the Silicon Forest podcast, I’ve got the usual review and preview of all that’s happening in the Silicon Forest Web startup scene. With an added bonus. I took a few minutes to chat with Dave Howell, CEO of Vancouver-based Avatron, the company behind the uberpopular iPhone app Air Sharing.

Click the Play button above to start streaming or feel free to download the Silicon Florist podcast.

Links from this episode include:

Oopie: I meant 501 c 3. I’m as bad as KGW’s iPhone G3.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 15

Rick Turoczy on September 15, 2008

Twitter / Aaron Hockley: Why do I have 10,000 tweets…

Aaron Hockley just rolled his Twitter odometer to five figures.

Strange Love: podcaster and android and afterhours… Oh my!

Cami Kaos writes “Yes I know that lions and tigers and bears joke is the oldest lamest one in the blogosphere but what can I do… we recorded 3 shows in one day and each one is special and worthy of being showcased.”

Computability: Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows’ Computer Video from 1984 – Waxy.org

Andy Baio writes “Election coverage, natural disasters, and Wall Street meltdown got you down? Let’s go back to a simpler time — 1984! It’s morning in America again, and the dawn of a new information age.”

CyborgCamp 2008 at CubeSpace (Saturday November 22, 2008) – Upcoming

CyborgCamp is a simulcast unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

Ignite Corvallis at CH2M HILL Alumni Center (Thursday November 13, 2008) – Upcoming

Ignite is coming to Corvallis! Share burning ideas.

ORBlogs 2.0: Rebuilding the Oregon blog aggregator

And while any number of folks are currently running as fast as they can to get another version of ORBlogs on line, there are a number of other folks waiting in the wings. And they’re wondering what’s happening. And what they can do to help. So now, we have the ORBlogs Blog. To help communicate what’s happening a little more effectively to those who are interested in keeping tabs on the activity.

Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 10 | A Dinner Discussion With Reid Beels And Chris Pitzer | Hazelnut Tech Talk

Amber Case writes “This episode features Reid Beels and Chris Pitzer, wherein we talked about abandonware, search engines with unique algorithms, Cyber Surfari-adorned T-shirt, getting free meals for reading books, and a potential CyborgCamp session composed of scientifically extrapolating claims in science fiction stories of the past to predict the future.”

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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)

Panels: Quintessential Portland entrepreneur Craig Barnes launches another startup

Rick Turoczy on September 15, 2008

PanelsFew other entrepreneurs in the Silicon Forest have started and led as many high-profile local companies as Craig Barnes.

But that’s not stopping him from starting another.

Startups in his blood

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Craig’s track record, you should be. His record boasts a veritable “who’s who” of Portland tech companies:

  • Founded Now Software and in three years had grown it into the largest software company focusing exclusively on Mac software.
  • Founded Portland’s Extensis and grew the venture-backed business into a $100 million acquisition. Extensis recently celebrated its 15th anniversary.
  • Founded You Software, a Portland company that adds features and functionality to the software you already use.
  • Spun Attensa out of You Software, creating a company focused on building an attention-based RSS management system that garnered $12 million in venture backing. (For more information, I recommend reading Marshall Kirkpatrick’s write-up on Attensa, back when he use to write for a little blog called TechCrunch.)

Introducing Panels

Now, Barnes has founded another startup. And much like the other companies he’s founded, it’s designed to help you deal with a glut of information by making the products you already use better.

But this time, it’s all about the Web.

Designed for bloggers, Panels uses a small panel to provide additional information about companies that are being covered, much in the vein of services like Snap’s Snap Shots:

Panels appear for any company or organization ranging from the biggest public companies such as Apple, Ford, AT&T, or WalMart to up and coming startups such as WebDiet (launched at the Demo Fall 08 technology conference this week) and Yammer (launched at TechCrunch50 this week and chosen as winner!) By the time we go live there will be millions of entities in the system with improvements and features appearing almost daily.

But to me, the most interesting thing about Panels is the depth of content that it provides.

Panels example

Unlike traditional “additional information” popup services, Panels provides a multi-tab view of information, including:

  • “About” – Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary [including details from Portland-based company-information wiki AboutUs]
  • “Site” – A full preview of the home page, stats, tags and other goodies about the actual web site/blog
  • “Map” – Beginning with Google Maps, and others to follow, a place for geographic data
  • “News” – Headlines, Blog posts, News, Press Releases and more from a variety of sources
  • “Jobs” – Employment listings across numerous providers such as monster and simplyhired
  • “Financial” – If a public company, real-time info and quotes appear in several sub-categories

So why use Panels? Primarily, to provide a much richer set of information on the companies to which you’re linking—while keeping people on your site.

Basically, you’re eliminating the blind clicks that tend to draw the attention-deficient Web surfers away from what you’re trying to convey.

Also interesting? The inspiration behind the development?

Panels were inspired by the nutritional panels found on food that are mandated by the federal government. Like nutritional panels, our panels have a standard text-centric user interface that delivers consistent, predictable, detailed, real-time information from a variety of data sources across several categories.

Now, if I could only tell if the link was going to be nutritional or just so much Web junk food.

Panels is currently in closed beta. For more information or to see Panels in action, see Craig’s post introducing Panels. Or to request a beta account, visit Panels.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 14

Rick Turoczy on September 14, 2008

WordCamp Portland is Sold Out

Via the WordCamp Portland blog “We are maintaining a waiting list and will accommodate folks as possible if any registered attendees cancel prior to the event.”

Alpha Version of Shizzow Mobile Site Released

Via the Shizzow blog “Shizzow hadn’t even been released for 1 hour, and people were already asking for a mobile version of the site. Well, ask and ye shall receive!”

Web, Startup and Technology News: Weekend Rebroadcast | September 13th | Internet Astronauts :: Bootstrap Startup Blog

Darius Monsef writes “The most interesting startup, web, technology and generally relevant new stuff I read this week.”

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