Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
In the past, one of the knocks against Portland’s startup scene has been a lack of seasoned executive talent. But that’s starting to change. Especially with Portland’s startup scene gaining more acclaim and making it easier for startups to find—or import—the talent they need. Read More
Sometimes you found companies. Sometimes you join a company that’s poised for success. The latter is the case today as serial entrepreneur Josh Friedman takes the helm of GigaPan Systems. Read More
If your revenue is trending, it’s always good to have someone focused on it. And Urban Airship just landed a doozy.
The company has just announced that former Skype exec Christopher Dean has joined Urban Airship as Chief Revenue Officer. All Things D broke the news. Read More
Seems to be a lot of Salesforce.com in the Portland area as of late. First, Urban Airship took an investment from Salesforce.com. Now, AppFog is taking an executive from Salesforce.com.
Meet John Higgins the new vice president of business development at AppFog. Read More
While funding starting to flow is a good sign of startup activity in the Portland area, so is the traction some of these companies are beginning to show with their customer bases.
Take for example Urban Airship, which today announced it has served more than five billion push notifications. A staggering number, especially considering they hit 1 billion less than a year ago. Read More
Even as Portland-based Jive has continued to set performance records quarter after quarter, one component of their executive team was missing: the Chief Marketing Officer role formerly held by Sam Lawrence. Today, Jive announced that that piece has now fallen into place with the hiring of Ben Kiker as the new CMO.
Kiker has an impressive past with a number of enterprise software firms—just the type of experience that Jive needs to continue taking their Social Business Software to that level. Read More
Fresh off a stellar DEMO performance, Portland-based Ontier, the company seeking to make day-to-day electronic missives more effective and interactive, is continuing to ramp up for the public availability of its product.
Their latest move? Creating a new position—Vice President of Engineering—and hiring industry veteran Dom Virgilio to fill it.
“Dom has the perfect background to help Pixetell™ become the standard for on-demand mixed-media communication,” said Ontier CEO Sebastian Rapport in the press release announcing the hire. “In addition to his proven ability to accelerate product development, Dom has deep experience with communication and collaboration software and has great insight to our customers’ requirements.”
Virgilio served most recently as the VP of Engineering at Hillsboro-based Daverci. He also co-founded and served as COO for InfoCast. In all, Dom boasts more than 20 years of experience managing development and design pursuits.
Ontier gets something—and they give something in return. The company also recently announced that they had donated 250,000 stock options to the Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest.
Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest (EFNW) helps small and mid-sized companies develop and implement strategies for community involvement that jointly meet the goals of the company, the passions of the employees and the needs of the community. Companies become EFNW members for a small annual fee or by contributing equity that EFNW holds until liquidity and then distributes profits for community benefit, as directed by the company.
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Digital Trends is one of my favorite “sleepers” around the Portland area. Whenever I mention their name and the fact that they’re here in the Silicon Forest, I’m usually met with a “Really? That’s a Portland company?”
Kind of like Survey Monkey and—to a lesser extent—COLOURlovers. (Yes, those are both Portland companies, too.)
I mean, I rarely if ever hear anyone around here talk about Digital Trends—apart from an occasional mention on the Techvibes’ Portland Start-up Index (they’re #5). And unfortunately, I never happen to run into any of their employees at any of the local tech events.
So, why should you care?
Only because Digital Trends happens to rack up about 40,000,000 visitors readers (3-4 million unique visitors to the site). Per month.
That’s right. 40 million visitors readers each month.
And that, my friend, is not to be taken lightly.
Another sign that they’re not to be taken lightly? Even though they’re pretty small, Digital Trends has just hired a new CFO, Nathan Bell.
No, not that Nathan Bell. That’s Nathan P. Bell.
In fact, I think this Nathan Bell is actually related to the CEO, Ian Bell. Or it’s just a random coincidence that they’re both named Bell—and that there are two Gauls in the company, too. (I’m not ruling anything out at this point, given that whole Nathan Bell thing. Maybe it’s Intrigo‘s Nathan who’s related to Ian?)
I’m sorry. Where was I? Gauls. Bells. Oh yes.
So Nathan Bell has been named the new CFO:
“Nathan brings years of financial experience to the table, and will help to shape the future path of the company as it continues to evolve and grow its awareness amongst technology readers,” said Ian Bell, Chairman and CEO, Digital Trends. “We’re pleased to welcome him to the Digital Trends team.”
And I’m hoping that we see more and more of Digital Trends around the Portland scene.
Digital Trends is the first stop for everyday readers, working professionals and gadget enthusiasts alike looking to make sense of how gadgets, games, home theater components and other tech-related products fit into their everyday lives. For more information, visit Digital Trends.