Category Archives: portland

Portland Tech Events for August / September

We have some fun events planned for the next month here in Portland, and I wanted to take a minute to highlight some of them.

Sarah Lacy Tweetup (business week reporter, author, and more)
Monday, August 25, 2008 at 6:00pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub (on the patio) 928 SE 9th Ave
RSVP on Upcoming.

Legion of Tech Happy Hour Meetup
Thursday, August 28 from 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub (on the patio) 928 SE 9th Ave
RSVP on upcoming.
Contact me if you are interested in sponsoring the meetup.

From Side Project to Startup
Friday September 12, 2008 (5:30pm – 9:00pm)
Saturday September 13, 2008 (9:00am – 5:00pm)
CubeSpace 622 SE Grand Avenue
Details about the event.
RSVP on Upcoming.

Haunted Lunch 2.0
Wednesday September 17 from 12:00pm – 2:00pm
SplashCast 226 NW Davis Portland
RSVP on Upcoming.

WordCamp (all about WordPress):
Saturday September 27
CubeSpace 622 SE Grand Ave

I hope to see you at some or all of these events!

Demolicious!

The Portland Web Innovators meeting this month is devoted to 5 demos aka Demolicious.

Metroseeq (Kevin Chen)

This grew out of a free food association for college students. Metroseeq is a way to search for local discounts and is tied into Google maps, so you can get very local, targeted information based on a specific area, intersection, or address. You can search for coffee near an address and see whether or not they have a current discount available. If you know about a deal that isn’t already entered, you can share that promotion with other users. It also has a “Wheel of Meals” – like the wheel of fortune that you can spin during those indecisive moments when you can’t decide what to eat.

XFN Spider aka Do-it-yourself Friendfeed (Don Park)

You need a better way to find your friends on various networks. You can manage your own friend lists with rel=”contact” in a regular html page, and you can also use rel=”me” to connect pages that describe you. XFN Spider can look at those me links, spider to the friends listed on those pages, create an OPML file and get all of this information in an rss reader. The spider is pretty cool, and I’m going to have to take a closer look at this. It also reminded me to finish adding my rel=”me” tags; I added a couple a while ago, but was distracted by something shiny and never finished adding them.

Interface Content Management Framework (Matt King)

It’s a CMS that builds CMSs, so it’s really a CMS framework. Create pages and templates from an admin interface, easily rearrange them, and do basic maintenance. Then you can add models that create dynamic content and build any kind of content that you want tailored to your site through a fairly simple interface that specifies fields for the pages. These models are used to add individual content into those fields for the pages. It’s a pretty slick DIY, highly customizable CMS. It will be available soon from Instrument, but hasn’t been released yet.

GoLife Mobile (Mounir Shita)

GoLife Mobile has an open platform for mobile applications. It’s an object-oriented development framework with a revenue share built in to give developers a way to monetize their applications. It has personalization technology and has semantic web capabilities.

Green Renter (Lev Tsypin)

Green Renter provides an easy way for people to find green buildings to rent. The goal is to be the resource for sustainable buildings starting in Portland, but expanding out to other areas. Owners can list their buildings by providing detailed information about what makes it a green building. Renters can then find sustainable buildings and view the detailed information about the building.

The evening festivities were also recorded, so I imagine that the video will be available from the PDX Web Innovators web site soon

The Portland Entrepreneur: POSSE Meeting Wed. 4/16

POSSE, the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneur group is holding an open meeting on Wednesday at 5 pm at Jax Bar to kick off our speaker series on “The Portland Entrepreneur.” We’ll be hosting Martin Medeiros, a lawyer who specializes in open source and has lots of investment experience and connections to VCs in the area talk about what makes a “Portland Entrepreneur.” This is a group where we focus on the business side of open source, and we’d love to see you there.

I’ve been a member of POSSE for a little over a year. Usually, we have small member meetings, but we want to start bringing in more speakers and open it up for more people to attend. We are also actively looking for new members.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

Don't Miss Innotech This Week in Portland!

I wanted to just remind everyone about InnoTech here in Portland this week. I will be there on Wednesday and Thursday, April 16th and 17th.

A few things that I am involved in or excited about:

  • Jive Software CEO, Dave Hersh, is presenting on “Ready or Not? Assessing Your Collaboration 2.0 Preparedness” at 9:30am on April 17th. Dave is a great speaker, so you won’t want to miss it!
  • The eMarketing Summit has some great content, and it will be kicked off on the 16th with a panel including Dawn Foster (me), Jeff Hardison, Kerry McClenahan, and Barry Tallis to talk about Strategies for Planning & Building an Online Community
  • I will also be moderating a panel about Open Source Communities on April 17th with some amazing panelists and open source rock stars: whurley, Stormy Peters, Danese Cooper, and John Mark Walker. The session is part of an all day open source tracking being organized by Raven Zachary.
  • There are many other great sessions at InnoTech including: Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics), Ward Cunninham (inventor of the wiki), Brian Jamison, Andrew Aitken, Jason Mauer, Steve Morris, and many more.

Cost-wise, this event is really reasonable, and it is a great opportunity to learn and meet interesting people.

Just Launched: Portland is Awesome

Yay! I just launched a new blog, Portland is Awesome, to celebrate all that is wonderful about Portland. We have so many great technology blogs, and group blogs run by big media, but Portland has such an independent (non-corporate) culture. I wanted to create something independent and fun to cover all of those other Portland topics.

If you want to be an author, send me an email (geekygirldawn on gmail) with your desired username and a link to your existing blog. Assuming that your writing style is a good fit for Portland is Awesome, I will get your account set up and you can start contributing!

Ignite Portland Featured in the Oregonian!

w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?

Thanks to Scott Kveton for the pics:

Update 1/26/08 9:10am PST:

You can now find the Ignite Portland write up online, too (minus the pictures). Thanks to @kveton@mfriesen via twitter for the link.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Join Us for the First Lunch 2.0 in Portland!

I hope to see everyone at the first Lunch 2.0 held in Portland! Lunch 2.0 is a an excuse to eat lunch with other people (instead of at our desks) and to meet other interesting technology types around Portland. If you have never heard of Lunch 2.0 and want to learn more, you can visit the main Lunch 2.0 site.

You can get all of the details and RSVP on Upcoming for the Portland Lunch 2.0.

The Details:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
AboutUs.org
107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214

A huge thank you to Jake Kuramoto for reminding us that we needed to do one of these in Portland and then for working with AboutUs to actually make it happen!

Want to see me present at Ignite2?

Don’t forget to RSVP for Ignite Portland 2! We have some awesome presentations on the lineup.

I’ll even be doing a presentation on online communities in the style of Dr. Seuss. For example:

Dr. Seuss:

“I’m the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.

NOW…thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ’round.

And my poor Bar-bar-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food in their tummies!”

Dawn’s Translation: Play Nice: Be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members.

Other awesome presentation topics include: robots, rockets, sushi, undercover hookers, biodiesel and more!

Fast Wonder Community Podcast: The Role of Community Managers

I released the fourth Fast Wonder Community Podcast today, The Role of Community Managers. In this podcast, I talk about the community manager role and the skills required to manage online communities. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

If you have any suggestions for people you would like to see interviewed on a future podcast, please let me know!

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via RSS or iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Did You Remember to Submit Your Ignite Portland Presentation Proposal?

We have some really amazing proposals for Ignite Portland so far, but we are looking for more!

I just submitted my proposal for Ignite Portland: What Would Dr. Seuss Say About Online Communities? Have you submitted yours?

If you had five minutes to talk to Portland what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? Talk about recent learnings, successes, failures? Fill out our presentation submission form to submit your talk. We are looking for talks that will inspire and teach, not recruiting or product pitches.

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts: