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REMINDER: From Side Project to Startup starts up tonight

Rick Turoczy on September 12, 2008

Whew! We’re drawing near to the finish on an event-filled week. And now, From Side Project to Startup will be leading us into the weekend.

What’s the focus? Selena Deckelmann gives us the lowdown:

If you were at Barcamp Portland, you may have stopped by for the My Other Thing session. (if you weren’t there you can listen to this recording of a great, freewheeling discussion) The session led by Rick Turoczy and Banana Lee Fishbones. After the group separated, people talked about wanting more – more discussions, more connections… maybe even – a conference! Inspired by that session, From Side Project to Startup was born.

Things kick off around 5:30 PM at CubeSpace, with a welcome reception.

Here’s the full agenda:

Friday Evening – September 12, 2008
5:30-6:30 – Reception/Networking
6:30-7:00 – Welcome and setting the stage
7:00-9:00 – Creative Entrepreneurship: Conception to Actualization – Bridget Benton of Eyes Aflame
7:00-9:00 – Unconference Sessions

Saturday – September 13, 2008
9:00-10:00 – Coffee, Bagels and Schmoozing
10:00-10:15 – Welcome
10:30-12:00 – What to Do Before You Quit Your Day Job – Mark Paul
10:30-12:00 – Unconference Sessions
12:00-1:30 – Lunch
1:30-3:00 – One Page Startup Marketing Plan – Peter Korchnak of Semiosis Communications
1:30-3:00 – Unconference Sessions
3:00-3:30 – Snack Break
3:30-5:00 – What Kind of Funding are You Eligible For? – Carolynn Duncan
5:00-5:15 – Wrap Up
5:15-??? – After Party

As you can see, the format is fairly open. With lots of time to jump in and out. So, even if you can’t make it to the whole thing, I’m hoping you’ll take the chance to swing by and participate. That is, if the subject matter interests you.

And something tells me that it does.

The event is brought to you by Legion of Tech, an Oregon nonprofit dedicated to helping grow and nurture the local Portland technology community through educational, not-for-profit, community-run events.

For more information on the event, visit From Side Project to Startup. To RSVP, visit Upcoming.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 11

Rick Turoczy on September 11, 2008

Talking with Paul Bausch about ORBlogs

John Metta writes “I learned a lot of important lessons during my talk with Paul Bausch about ORBlogs. I wanted to get a feeling for how he felt about the current excitement, and about the possibilities for the future. Most of all I wanted to make sure that the excitement wasn’t getting out of hand to him, and if he wanted to be involved in anyway.”

AboutUs: The results are in!

Via the AboutUs blog “The most valuable part of the survey results are the comments that we received. Here are a few about their experience and why they chose our service…”

iPhone Talks at Inverge 2008 | raven.me

Raven Zachary writes “Last week, I spoke at Inverge 2008, the interactive convergence conference held in Portland, Oregon. Conference founder Steve Gehlen was kind enough to give me not one, but two five-minute slots to talk about the iPhone.”

OSCON outgrows Portland

Dana Blankenhorn “Portland just doesn’t have the facilities to house a fast-growing conference covering a global audience. On the other hand LinuxWorld does not yet fill the Moscone Center, and San Jose also has a very attractive convention center.”

Come Drink With Us! | Our PDX Network

Come meet the OurPDX authors for drinks next week, will you?

Where Camp PDX 2008 – O’Reilly Radar

Brady Forrest writes “For the past two years the geo community has hosted WhereCamp right after Where 2.0 to discuss the events of the conference. Now it looks like WhereCamp is going regional! Portland will be hosting their own geo-oriented unconference called WhereCamp PDX from 10/18-19.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

REMINDER: Silicon Forest Forum tomorrow

Rick Turoczy on September 11, 2008

Silicon Forest ForumJust a reminder that a bunch of local venture capital types, entrepreneurs, and other tech enthusiasts will be gathering at the Intel Jones Farm campus on Friday for the Silicon Forest Forum.

As I mentioned in a previous post and the Silicon Florist podcast, the co-founder of Tesla Motors will be the keynote. I’ll do my best to see if he’s willing to give a Tesla Roadster to each of the Friends of the Florist.

But I’m not guaranteeing anything.

I’ll be in attendance as part of my effort to continue the wacky week of Silicon Florist appearances at events. I had a great time at LivePitch Portland on Tuesday and was honored to moderate a phenomenal panel—Josh Bancroft, Dawn Foster, and Marshall Kirkpatrick—at the OEN PubTalk last night.

So what I am doing at the Silicon Forest Forum? More smiling and nodding, of course.

I’ll be moderating another all star panel entitled “Bloggers, Digital Media… and the Business of Creating Content.”

The panel will feature:

See? Smiling and nodding indeed. But at least it keeps a consistent theme to the week. That theme being “Great panel, but what is Rick doing up there?”

Sound interesting? I hear that there still a couple of seats left. So if you’d like to attend, swing by the Silicon Forest Forum site to register. And if you’re going to be there, please make sure to grab me and introduce yourself.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 10

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

Tips for Pitching to Investors

Dawn Foster writes “Keep in mind that I am not an investment expert, but I wanted to pass along a few tips based on these 5 pitches and the questions / feedback from the panel of experts.”

OSCON hits the road – Silicon Forest – The Oregonian – OregonLive.com

Mike Rogoway writes “It’s a big blow to Portland’s rep as an open source capital. I asked O’Reilly Media, which puts on the event, what happened. Here’s what Gina Blaber replied…”

Platial: New Scoring Ranking Filtering on Search

Via the Platial blog “Mostly brought to the forefront due to feedback about results in the Nearby iPhone app, but also with no small benefit to the average Platial.com search results, we just pushed a new modification to the filtering and scoring algorithms.”

Three ways to prevent startup death

Via the Under the Radar blog “If you think your company has NO competition. You’re dead wrong.”

WhereCamp PDX at Souk Meeting Space (Saturday October 18, 2008) – Upcoming

WhereCampPDX is a free unconference focusing on all things geographical and cartographical. This informal meeting of minds welcomes all geo-locative enthusiasts, anyone who asks “where am I” or feels the need to “know their place”. We share a vision of a fully transparent world where data is geographically relevant and just in time.

Tweet PDX at Backspace (Thursday September 11, 2008) – Upcoming

The first official meetup for users of Twitter, old and new. But the event is open and available to non-Twitter people, or anyone who wants to learn more about blogging, tech, design, cyborgs…

Vimeo: One million videos

Via the Vimeo staff blog “I’ve been looking forward to saying this for a long time: there are now one million videos hosted on Vimeo. Amazingly, 100,000 of them are HD, making Vimeo the largest repository of high definition video anywhere in the world.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Experimenting with Silicon Florist reddit: A reddit for the rest of us

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

OregonLive doesn’t know what it’s doing with Oregon redditIt’s no secret that I think that OregonLive does a horrible job with their reddit implementation. And with the recent redesign of their site, the value has decreased even further.

Oregon reddit is now buried 2150 pixels down the page. Far below the fold. The equivalent of running in the gutter on page 19 of the dead tree The Oregonian.

Couple that with the fact that I’m still incredibly interested in making sure that people are getting their stories heard, that people are getting to see the cool stuff happening in the Silicon Forest, and that people are getting the chance to voice their opinions and share their thoughts, and suddenly it seems like I should quit whining.

And actually try to do something about it.

Back when it became obvious that composing posts was never going to be an adequate means of keeping up with all the news around here, I began experimenting with ma.gnolia.

Now, those ma.gnolia link posts have become a near-daily addition to the writing here. And a way of sharing more of what’s happening—and giving more folks coverage.

And as I noticed that the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia was approaching 1000 bookmarks, it dawned on me: that’s still too filtered. And it’s only really filtered by me.

So I’d like to try new experiment: Silicon Florist reddit.

How can you participate in Silicon Florist reddit?

First, you can work submitting sites and stories that you like to Silicon Florist reddit. Tech? Events? News? Cool blog posts? Good geek hangouts? They’re all fair game. Just so long as they have something to do with the Silicon Forest.

Second, I’ve already created a button that you can embed in your blog posts (and all of the Silicon Florist posts will now carry this button in place of the Oregon reddit button):

http://www.reddit.com/r/siliconflorist/button.js?t=1

And I’ve created a little bookmarklet (Silicon Florist reddit) that you can drag to your browser. This will allow you to submit pages you find to Silicon Florist reddit at the push of a button.

Third, I’m still trying to work out the widget, but this is what I’ve got so far:

http://www.reddit.com/r/siliconflorist/top/.embed?limit=10

In a perfect world, any number of Silicon Forest blogs throughout Oregon and Washington could be running something like this, giving folks more broad exposure to what’s happening and what people choose to highlight.

Is this a perfect solution? Nope. Is it a start? I think it may be.

And I’m hoping you’ll join me in the experiment.

[Update] I just noticed that reddit is running a competition for the fastest growing reddit. If we win? Friends of the Florist will be cashing in on all the cool loot. We’re already at 6 subscribers. We are so winning this thing.

OSCON? Gone

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

Well, I’m sad to report that the rumors about OSCON‘s departure from Portland’s 2009 summer tech event line-up have been confirmed.

It’s true. OSCON is gone.

OSCON 2009 won’t be in Portland, Oregon

After six years, O’Reilly has decide to move its anchor conference of the summer—and the leading venue to discuss all things open source—to San Jose, California.

And I’m not alone in my unhappiness over this announcement, if Twitter is any indication.

Worse yet? This comes on the heels of O’Reilly’s decision to move RailsConf—which has also called Portland home—to Las Vegas, next year.

As I’ve mentioned before, the departure of these two O’Reilly events leaves a decided gap in our summer geek activities around here. After WebVisions wraps.

And I have to imagine that the Portland tourism industry is crying openly into its microbrewed organic beer at this point.

It makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be courting another event or two. (BlogHer?I ain’t too proud to beg.)

Or maybe, just maybe, stage one of our own.

Silicon Florist Podcast 03: ORBlogs, events, Internet Astronauts, events, Vidoop, events, Iterasi, and more events

Rick Turoczy on September 10, 2008

Links from this podcast include:

And thanks very much to Matthew Atkins for the bumper riff.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 09

Rick Turoczy on September 9, 2008

Build a Tackle Box Before You Go Fishing: A Starter Kit for Internet Entrepreneurs | Internet Astronauts :: Bootstrap Startup Blog

Darius Monsef continues sharing his insights on startups with part 2 of the post he began with a Silicon Florist guest post. Grab a cup of coffee (or beverage of your choice) and spend a few minutes with this one.

SplashCast and Clearspring Partner to Create Social Advertising Network | CenterNetworks

Allen Stern writes “SplashCast and Clearspring have announced plans to partner together to create a social advertising network targeted towards consumer brands. SplashCast provides content management services while Clearspring is a widget distribution service.” (P.S. SplashCast hosts Portland Lunch 2.0 next week, September 17)

TC50: IMINDI Wants To Get Inside Your Head

As I mentioned on Twitter, IMINDI seesm to be the only Silicon Forest company launching at the TechCrunch 50. Here’s what they had to say. “IMINDI’s mind map is chart showing thoughts and those that branch off from them. Users can click on thoughts to see which thoughts on connected to them. IMINDI calls it the ‘journey of thought’ that will help connect people and share their information.” Mark Cuban’s comments are classic Cuban.

GREAT VCS RESPOND, FAST: Pick investors who give you unfair share of time and mind

Professor of entrepreneurship at Cornell University, John L. Nesheim writes “BOTTOM LINE: Pick your board members carefully. You get more than money with a venture capitalist. And you have to live with that person for half a decade or more…. [L]ook for their characteristics in the VCs and angels you are planning on using. When you find the right ones, they’ll help you build power into your unfair advantage.” (Hat tip Carolynn Duncan)

Honey, I Shrunk the Startups! | Redfin Corporate Blog

Via the Redfin Corporate blog “Venture capitalists are racing to miniaturize themselves toward the vanishing point. One of my favorite bloggers, Fred Wilson, recently asked why not ‘back 10 teams at $25,000 each instead of one team at $250,000’? Just last week a Seattle venture capitalist boasted that ‘we are seeing impressive companies being built for under $100,000.'” (Hat tip James Whitley)

GadgetTrak appears on Good Morning America

GadgetTrak was featured on Good Morning America, where the topic of tracking technology for gadgets was discussed. GadgetTrak provides theft recovery software for mobile devices including laptops, mobile phones, portable storage devices and more.

Shizzow Widget Contest

Via the Shizzow blog “Now that the RSS feeds for Shizzow are public, we would love to have a widget that takes an RSS feed from Shizzow and makes it look awesome in a blog sidebar. Yes, yes, we know this isn’t hard to do, but would you rather have us spend an hour on a widget or spend an hour working on SMS support and m.shizzow.com?”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Got bookmarks on those social bookmarking site thingees? Now, you can import them into Iterasi

Rick Turoczy on September 8, 2008

[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I was aware of this feature under development, but I was not involved in this release. Quite frankly, it took me by surprise. But it makes sense that they’re pushing it while they’re down at the TechCrunch 50.]

IterasiBack when I discovered social bookmarking, the way I used the Web changed.

Okay. That may be a little hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of truth to that.

With social bookmarking, I was able to save site locations, tag them in a meaningful way, and get to them from any browser with an Internet connection.

It may not seem like a big deal now. But back then? It was “You mean my bookmarks aren’t beholden to this one browser on this one machine? Oh my. Very cool.”

But my bookmarks always suffered from a problem that I couldn’t solve with just a link.

And that was? Well, sometimes the page just changed. The story or the thing I thought was important or—worst of all—the cool design that I wanted to rip-off save for inspiration.

Screenshots were a workaround. But they were never really what I wanted.

What I wanted was to save the page.

Fast forward to today.

I’m sitting on a ton of bookmarks. I use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia and del.icio.us every day, if not several times a day. They have become so much a part of the way that I use the Web—and the way that I share and glean information from others—that social bookmarking would be an incredibly hard habit to break.

But I still worry about losing the page I actually wanted.

Well, now, that problem is solved thanks to still just barely Vancouver-based and ever-so-close to being Portland-based Iterasi and their new “import bookmarks” feature:

This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.

Now, granted, that’s not going to do much for the links that have already aged. But from now on? I can be sure that I’ll have exactly the page I wanted to save.

Saving bookmarked pages in Iterasi is great, but not using Iterasi is even better

As excited as I am about this feature to extend the use of Iterasi, there’s one thing I’m even more excited about: not having to use Iterasi.

Huh? Stick with me here.

I’ve developed a workflow for saving links and—as chagrin as I am to admit it—Iterasi isn’t part of that workflow.

It’s an afterthought. A habit I’m trying to force.

But with this feature? That problem is solved, too.

How?

Now that Iterasi can import bookmarks, I can work in my preferred social bookmarking tool and still have Iterasi saving the pages for me.

I can fly around willy nilly tagging things in del.icio.us or saving them to the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia. All the while, knowing that I can bring those over to Iterasi to make an archived copy.

And that’s pretty cool.

I can work where I’m comfortable working without losing the ability to save things I really want to save. And that makes this new import bookmarks feature very powerful indeed.

The feature, however, does come with a caveat:

If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.

For more information and a short video on the new feature, see the Iterasi blog. Want to test drive it yourself? Download the latest version of Iterasi and then click on the “leaves” to access the feature.

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 08

Rick Turoczy on September 8, 2008

 

Biff! Ka-Blam! Shizzow! | Our PDX Network

Betsy Richter writes “Shizzow has roared out of the Batcave and taken on a life of its own – it’s now the creation of four local PDX tech gurus, and it’s billed as a ‘location-based social web service that we built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction.'”

ReadWriteTalk: Google Chrome

Tune in to this ReadWriteWeb-produced podcast to hear Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vidoop’s Chris “Factoryjoe” Messina, and others discuss the new Web-browser darling Google Chrome.

CyborgCamp 2008

Our favorite cyborg anthropologist, Amber Case, and a number of other locals are hard at work on Cyborgcamp, “an unconference dedicated to exploring cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.” (Please don’t tell Josh Bancroft. This will give him nightmares for weeks.)

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Delayed

Rick Ellis writes “I apologize to all who have been anxiously awaiting 2.0, but I can assure you that we are as anxious to get 2.0 released as you are to get it. This has been a huge project for us, so we need to get it right. Rushing it to market before it’s ready would be irresponsible, so we ask that you give us a bit more time. We promise the wait will be worth it.”

Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one at Fast Wonder Blog: Consulting, Online Communities, and Social Media

Dawn Foster writes “I cannot put enough emphasis on the importance of using monitoring dashboards to understand what people are saying about you, your industry, your competitors and more. The information obtained can be used as ideas for blog posts, marketing messages, competitive analysis, product feedback and much more.” Not only is she wicked smart, she’ll be on the OEN PubTalk panel this Wednesday.

Greasemonkey Scripts for Flickr

Aaron Hockley writes “I use Firefox as my browser for Flickr, primarily because I can use several Greasemonkey scripts which add usability features to the Flickr pages. If you’re not familiar with Greasemonkey, it’s a Firefox add-on which allows scripts to be run which alter the display of a web page.”

JPV PDX: Unpacking InVerge ’08

JP Voilleque writes “InVerge is in the books, and there were a lot of amazing presentations and takeaways – and an equal amount of space for critique and comment. Everyone’s a critic, of course, but in this case I think that my (thoroughly informal) polling of audience and presenters, the Twitterstream, and Eric’s chats with people at the W + K reception, all combine to give me some standing to make some points about the conference as a whole.”

Announcing Clicky for your iPhone | Clicky Blog

Via the Clicky blog “We released a sneak peak of our new iPhone interface on Friday to some of our users, but we are announcing it officially today. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can point it to m.getclicky.com and use an interface designed specifically for the iPhone.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

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