Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
From Oregon-based Matt Haughey. Slack works best as a collaborative workspace when everyone in a company uses it to have transparent, informative discussions in channels, which are organised around projects, teams and disciplines. But let’s be honest, many teams rely far too often on direct messages—mostly for quick questions and answers. This creates two issues…
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Portland-based 3D-printed shoe company Hilos won Best In Show and the Innovative World Technologies award at the South by Southwest Pitch event this weekend in Austin, Texas.
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As local retail recovers from Covid-19 pandemic restrictions and shoppers return to more traditional retail channels, the team at Built Oregon is ending its online marketplace April 15.
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As always, I’ll start this with the caveat that I promised Bill Lynch, cofounder of Jive, that I wouldn’t just write posts that celebrate funding for the sake of funding. Which is actually more work. (Thanks, Bill.) But in the long run, I’m hoping my bag-full-of-cats startup-history brain full of tangential facts and likely little known context can be helpful in providing a broader picture of why these funding events are important.
In a world where marketing and advertising continues to up the level of creepiness on a regular basis (Thanks, Cambridge Analytica!), it’s refreshing to see a company that’s willing to stem the tide of distrust. And it’s even more awesome when it’s a Portland startup. That’s why it was great to see Lytics pushing for an industry standard around trust based marketing.
Much like the city of Portland itself, we’re starting to see Portland startups becoming more attractive to executive talent. Both folks from outside the region and folks who happen to live in Portland and work elsewhere (and I am happy to bend your ear with a hypothesis on the latter, anytime). What’s that? Have we cured the “it’s hard to find executive talent” refrain from startups in town? No. But we’re definitely chipping away at it. Take for example Lytics, who just named a new CMO.
We have more access to more data points than we’ve ever had. And the more data we consume, the more ways we find to leverage that data. Perhaps no one finds this opportunity more compelling than digital marketing. But with an abundance of data—data which often falls into silos—there are challenges, as well. That’s why Portland’s Lytics has created Orchestrate.
It’s no secret that corporations and startups have a lot to learn from one another. Even when those corporations are just beyond being startups themselves. That’s why I was super interested to see Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, get into the accelerator game. And today, I was even more pleased. Because I heard that Portland startup Lytics would be taking part in it.
Remember back in the old days of the web? You know, back when “the Web” was actually a proper noun? When we all got served up the same silly banner advertisement or message every time we visited a site? With the prevalence of personalization the web now affords, that seems trite and dated. But it’s still not easy. Unless you’re using Portland startup Lytics’ newest offering, Lytics Personalization. Read More
Remember a few weeks ago when I was waxing philosophic about Bill Lynch joining Cloudability? And how maybe, just maybe, I had hoped that it was an indicator of things to come? Well, what could very well have been a one-off occurrence has been happening with more regularity in the past few weeks. With a number of local startups recruiting experienced executive talent—who bring with them their knowledge of how to grow successful Portland companies. Read More