Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
After a successful closed beta, serial entrepreneur Fritz Brumder today officially launched the product from his latest pursuit, Zipcan, a product that — in my overly simplified take — resembles the functionality of the Intercom and chat buttons you see around the Internet but that — instead of engaging you in a pseudo conversation with a chat bot — immediately puts you into a video chat with a real human.
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You may have heard of a little company called WeWork. (Actually, the company is called We Company, now, but bear with me…) They’ve got a few spaces where folks can, you know, work. They even have a few of those spaces here in Portland. But what you may not know is that they’ve recently launched an accelerator program for startups called WeWork Labs. And we’re getting one of those here, too.
You have to love Public Market. They’re very much an atypical startup for the Portland area. They’re swinging for the fences as they work to build an ecommerce platform that’s designed to — wait for it — kill Amazon. Yes. That Amazon. And as if that’s not difficult enough? They decided to launch their platform to the public on Cyber Monday, the most server meltingest of days in ecommerce.
It seems almost trite now. For the last few years, launching products—or the promise of products—has been a series of: 1) Get a tech blog to cover it, 2) Hope it hits Hacker News or Techmeme, 3) ????, and of course 4) Profit! So it’s always nice to see young Portland entrepreneurs like Jackson Gariety re-evaluating this process. Read More
While seeing new companies start and grow in Portland is amazing, having awesome companies decide to open up offices here is pretty darn cool, too. So when Cozy said they were opening a Portland office, I was pretty excited. Now, I’m even more excited because Cozy is live. Read More
If there’s one downside to Portland’s aggressive humility, it’s our reticence to celebrate our victories. Funding, launches, big customer wins.
But some of that is starting to change. And here’s one example: spotsi is opening up their public beta. And to celebrate? They’re throwing a launch party on Thursday. Even better? You’re invited. Read More
One of the most cryptic and stealthy startups around here lately has been Nozzl. We knew it had something to do with controlling and managing the firehose of information on the Web in real-time.
[HTML4]One of the most cryptic and stealthy startups around here lately has been Nozzl Media. We knew some of the people who were working on it. Really smart people like Steve Woodward and Brian Hendrickson. And we knew it had something to do with controlling and managing the firehose of information on the Web—in real-time.
But beyond that, we had very little hint of exactly what the Nozzl folks were doing. That is, until today. Read More
As you may have read in my previous gushing, Portland Startup Weekend graduate Mugasha launched this week. And what’s a great launch without a great launch party? Well, it’s a great launch. But it’s still cool to have a launch party.
And that’s just what the Mugasha folks are doing. Tonight. So if you’re a fan of electronica and you’re looking for something to do this evening, join Mugasha at Rontoms tonight to celebrate. Read More
It’s always good to see new Silicon Forest based products being launched—especially when there’s a launch party involved. So, don’t forget that Communit.as will be unveiling their product, tonight.
What’s Communit.as? According to the founders, it’s an “open source web application that provides a foundation for building custom community and social network sites.”
That’s about all I’ve got, because I haven’t seen it yet, either.
Oh okay. Here are some other details:
There are certain core features any community or social network site needs: user accounts, access control, database abstraction, template rendering and a few other essentials. While you could certainly build these things from scratch every time you build a site, this seems like kind of a waste of effort to us. With that in mind we set out to create a reusable, upgradeable foundation that can shave the first few weeks of development off of any custom community site.
“Custom” is really the operative word there. Communit.as is generally intended for building sites with lots of custom functionality. Instead starting with the functionality we think you want and forcing you to hack the crap out of it, we take care of the tedious stuff and give you a great set of tools for adding your own features. If you want a generic blog or a social network that does everything out of the box, there are better solutions for those things.
This isn’t to say you don’t get a running application out of the box. You do. We provide a simple and robust installer that will have you up and running in minutes.
So if you’re intrigued, make sure to show up at CubeSpace, this evening from 6-8. There will be drinks, snacks, and demos galore.
For more information, visit the Communit.as launch party on Upcoming or Calagator.