Acquisition, Lunch 2.0v4 Recap, souk is Next
Rick has kindly agreed to let me do Lunch 2.0 stuff here on the Florist. This makes a lot of sense, since this is the place to get the lowdown on technology companies and the tech scene here in Portland and nearby.
Oh, and the people who go to these lunches actually read and comment here, big plus.
So, my first post-acquisition content is the recap of Monday’s Lunch 2.0v4, held at Wieden+Kennedy, and a reminder that the next iteration is coming up soon at souk.
W+K Recap
This Lunch 2.0 was a little different than usual, which ruffled a few feathers, at least initially. Everyone has since hugged and sung Kumbaya.
Gaia Brown, the mastermind behind the W+K format, put together an ice-breaker activity that paired attendees with W+K people. From what I observed, people took the advance packets in varying degrees of seriousness, but the conversation flowed freely, regardless.
The lunch was held in the atrium at W+K in the Pearl, and I’d guess the attendance was probably more than 100, but less than 200. Yeah, I’m not a very good estimator. The raffle of swag went over well; gift baskets from several W+K clients were given away, and the final prize was several tickets to Inverge.
After chatting as pairs for a bit and listening to the raffle, people got up and milled around and talked, others played Rockband.
Next up, souk
As Rick previously mentioned, the next Lunch 2.0 will be held at souk in Old Town on July 16, so pretty soon. RVSP on Upcoming if you plan to make it, and yes, we’re returning to the old format, with no work and no packets, just free grub and good company.
Old Town has been very good to Lunch 2.0, thanks to eROI and Vidoop and now souk. I guess this begs the question, are you a real company if you’re in Old Town and haven’t hosted a Lunch 2.0?
Your thoughts?
After four Lunch 2.0s here in Portland, I’m pretty happy with the progress. The event is dominated by Tweeters, which (sadly) is the primary means of promotion, yet another reason why I wanted to move here to the Florist.
So, fellow Florists, what do you think of Lunch 2.0 so far? Sound off in comments and stay tuned for more Lunch 2.0 action here on the Florist.
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for July 01
Office Snapshots: Vidoop Office
No Beer and Blog this Friday in observance of Independence Day
Gary Vaynerchuk at Legion of Talk
Iterasi gets more social with RSS feeds, widgets, and public pages
[Editor: Full disclosure, Iterasi is a client of mine, but I was not involved in this announcement.]
http://www.iterasi.net/user/siliconflorist?format=widgetN1Vancouver-based Iterasi, the service that allows you to create your own personal Wayback Machine, took a huge step forward in making its network of users more social, today, when they announced three major additions to their offering: public pages, RSS feeds, and widgets.
Josh Lowensohn at Webware broke the news:
Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.
In my opinion, these seemingly innocuous changes actually mark a decided change in Iterasi’s stance. With these features, Iterasi moves from being an interesting personal service toward becoming a valuable social service. And by embracing features that allow me to distribute my saved pages to a much, much wider audience, they gain the benefit of more people encountering their service.
I have found a great deal of value in being able to save pages for myself. But now that I have the option of sharing pages with folks? It opens a whole new realm of use for me. Like a more typical social bookmarking service.
Fringe benefits abound. With RSS feeds and widgets, Iterasi just increased its exposure exponentially. I’ve added the widget to this post and I’ll likely add it to the blog (once the Mac version is out and I can use the service regularly.) And, I’m adding the RSS feed to my lifestreaming services, like FriendFeed and Strands.
What’s more, by launching public pages, Iterasi has the potential to rapidly increase its online footprint for search engines and the like—like any other public-facing social network service.
Now, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. As with any new feature on a BETA product, there are some rough spots and some nice-to-haves that didn’t make the cut. There are some areas over which I would like to have control, like skinning the widget and dealing with the publishing function.
But as I’ve mentioned, I see this release as less about “features” and more about “vision.” It’s clear to me that Iterasi is taking a much more social stance. And that’s a very good thing.
To test drive the product, visit Iterasi. To see the public page in action or to get the widget code, please visit the Silicon Florist page on Iterasi.
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 30
mapdango Is Now Available as a Google Gadget
Gone Raw in Oregon Business
The Mercury’s New Website: A User’s Guide!
Portland Links
CouchEngine – CouchDB with Action Servers
Silicon Florist: Jobs in the Silicon Forest
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 29
Find the free WiFi here…!
Twitter track hack: Where there’s a will, there’s a workaround
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for June 28
SplashCast Owns Top Music Apps on MySpace
Wi-Fi and the blues
Twitter Status (well, the fake one anyways)
Mugasha Blog
MetroSEEQ: Requesting feedback on information architecture
An Open Letter to Mr. Panic & Mr. MacroMates
Free to Migrate
Portland Web 2.0 startups get some love from Oregon Business Magazine
One of the reasons I started Silicon Florist was to use my marketing powers for good, by casting the spotlight on “Portland Web 2.0 startups” and individuals who have been developing really, really cool things here in the Silicon Forest. But who, through sheer lack of time, may not have the opportunity or wherewithal to promote themselves as much as they would like.
I’m happy to report that a number of those companies just got a much brighter spotlight shone on them, thanks to Oregon Business Magazine‘s cover story this month “10 Coolest Tech Startups You’ve Never Heard Of.”
Among the Silicon Florist alumni featured are:
- Toonlet
- Values of n (Sandy and Stikkit)
- JanRain (myOpenID, pibb)
- WeoGeo
- Iterasi
- LUNARR
- OsoEco
- NetworthIQ (now part of Strands)
- Grabb.it (Silicon Florist’s first post)
- Walker Tracker
- Urban Drinks
Gone Raw and Lumeno.us—two sites I haven’t yet had the chance to cover except via mentions in the Portland Startup Index—made it as well.
Congratulations to all of those featured for stepping on to a much larger stage! I’ll look forward to continuing to cover your progress and highlighting your wins.
Photo credit: Michael G. Halle
Portland Lunch 2.0 roadmap
Portland Lunch 2.0, admittedly a continually evolving work-in-progress, has quickly taken a firm hold—and sparked some interesting conversations—in the Portland tech community.
And like developing any product, even though the Portland Lunch 2.0 team (read Jake Kuramoto) hasn’t launched the latest version of their product—that version will launch on Monday—the team is already hard at work on the next version.
So, I thought it might be helpful to step into a product manager role, ever so briefly. Just so you can get the milestones and release schedule on your calendar.
Let’s take a glance at the product roadmap:
- Portland Lunch 2.0 SP4 will be released Monday, June 30, at Wieden + Kennedy
“On Monday June 30th, the PDX Tech/Tweeple community is cordially invited to join 50-100 W+K employees for a “blind date meets grade school birthday party” ad/tech extravaganza. It’s going to be a fun, it’s going to be quirky, and it’s going to rock RockBand style (literally).” - Portland Lunch 2.0 SP5 will be released Wednesday, July 16, at souk
“The Portland Lunch 2.0 saga continues at flex term office space provider souk, once again in Old Town on July 16, 2008. We won’t stop until we have Lunch 2.0 at every, single business in Old Town.” - Portland Lunch 2.0 SP6 will be released…?
For more information or to RSVP, visit Upcoming for the Portland Lunch 2.0 SP4 and Portland Lunch 2.0 SP5 RSVP lists. If you’re interested in hosting SP6 or a later release, please ping Jake Kuramoto.
Universal Edit Button: Ward Cunningham, Mark Dilley, and Peter Kaminski
Like the little orange RSS chiclet, the Universal Edit Button—launched last week—is, in my opinion, one of the most promising promotional tools for raising the visibility of wikis and other editable sites.
But in order for it to work, people need to understand exactly what it is.
To help further that understanding, Justin Kistner sat down with Ward Cunningham and Mark Dilley of AboutUs and Peter Kaminski of SocialText to discuss the impact and potential of the UEB.
“I heard about the UEB when it came out, and I thought it was really cool,” said Kistner. “Then I started talking to some other folks about it, and managed to get Ward, who devised the wiki concept, Mark, who had been coordinating the UEB launch activities, and Pete, who had been integral to the project, all on the phone.”
Kistner’s Skype conversation is available below. (Audio quality is a little rough at times, but the content more than makes up for it. And don’t be fooled at the beginning… You didn’t just initiate a Skype call.)
Just click the little gray arrow to listen.
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