Silicon Florist

Instant Action open house at Ground Kontrol tomorrow or Dude. My quarter was up there. I’m next.

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:14:35 +0000

Yes, yes. I realize some of you never had to go through the pain and heartache of putting your quarter up to reserve a video game. Only to have some pushy guy cut in front of you. You’ve been spoiled by having video games at your disposal ever since you could remember. I mean, you’ve even got them on the Web with companies like Instant Action.

Well, the good news is that Instant Action has moved to Portland. The better news? They’re hosting an open house at Ground Kontrol on Wednesday night. Even better? The games are free. And the best news? They’re hiring.

Who is Instant Action, you ask? Well remember Garage Games from Eugene? They became Torque. And Instant Action is the arm of Torque that publishes Web games.

Originally under the name of GarageGames, Torque was founded by 4 industry veterans in 2001 with the goal of disrupting the games industry with quality development tools and upsetting the dominant retail/publisher distribution model. One of the first companies to make primary use of digital distribution for our games and those we publish, our latest effort in publishing is InstantAction.com.

Now that you’ve met them, they’d like to meet you.

To help celebrate its move to Portland, InstantAction is also inviting local web and game development university programs, companies and other organizations to join an Open House on Wednesday, November 11th at 6pm at Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade. Those who attend can meet InstantAction team members, check out products and job openings, learn more about the company, and most importantly, have fun. Those interested in attending can RSVP by sending an email to rsvp@instantaction.com.

What’s that? The fact that they’re hiring and letting you play games for free isn’t enough to get you down to Ground Kontrol? I have two words for you then: open bar.

That’s what I thought. See you Wednesday night at 6.

For more on the company, visit Instant Action or follow InstantAction on Twitter. For more on the hires, see the press release.

(Hat tips to Marshall Kirkpatrick and Carri Bugbee)

Azplode: Missile Command aficionados rejoice, your iPhone app is here (1)

Whiffies and Food Carts Portland featured on MSNBC, Strange Love Live gets a cameo

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:43:15 +0000

We’re a fairly tight-knit community here in the Portland startup scene. Even if those startups have nothing to do with tech.

One of the best examples? The Portland food cart scene. We know it’s awesome. And it’s also a primary source of sustenance that fuels any number of late night hacking session—or even daytime hacking session depending on the cart.

Arguably, there is no more beloved cart—at least by the local geeks—than Whiffies, the fried pie cart at Cartopia on SE Hawthorne. Especially because Whiffies’ strong Twitter presence. So it was great to see Whiffies, Food Carts Portland’s Dieselboi, and even Strange Love Live getting a little love from the national press.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Nice to see some of the most hardworking folks I know get some of the recognition they so richly deserve.

For more on all things food cart in the Rose City, visit Food Carts Portland.

(Hat tip to Lizzy Caston)

MioWorks closes doors but leaves with valuable startup lessons in hand

Rick Turoczy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:22:21 +0000

It’s unfortunate to see Portland and Silicon Forest startups suffer shutdowns, be it at the hands of the economy or otherwise. But on the upside, it’s alway good to see the execs taking lessons away from their efforts. And even better when they share them with the rest of us.

Mike Berkley provided some insights he learned after SplashCast shut down. And now, with the the shuttering of MioWorks—a people-centric project and customer relationship management app that also happened to speak Spanish—David Abramowski the former CEO of MioWorks has shared some tips based on what he learned during the journey, in the hopes that other entrepreneurs don’t make similar mistakes.

So how did we get here from there, so quickly? When 2009 kicked off, MioWorks was an up-and-coming part of the Portland startup community. They sponsored Ignite Portland 5. They hosted Portland Lunch 2.0. They were profiled in The Oregonian as one of the tech entrepreneurs able to defy the recession. And they jumped in to help Open Source Bridge come to fruition.

Now, less than a year later, the company has helped customers migrate to other services and MioWorks has completely closed up shop.

How’d that happen? Well, David was kind enough to share some of his thoughts on what went wrong and where MioWorks made mistakes.

Here are his top three observations:

1. Don’t assume you know your market.

Before we started any development on MioWorks we started with the numbers. Days of research on the small and medium business segment helped us to pick several segments that we thought were going to just love our solution. Our final analysis gave us a comprehensive list of industry codes to target along with some great numbers to use in funding presentations. Unfortunately we really didn’t know our market. We didn’t understand what made Lawyers & Accountants actually purchase things. We didn’t know what influenced them and what triggered their behaviors. Once we realized that we targeted an audience we had little domain expertise with, it was a bit too late. Our competitors were lawyers and accountants who could talk the talk and walk the walk. It created a barrier to entry that was hard to overcome. So our first lesson learned is to really know your market. Not just who they are, but what they do – how they do it – and why they buy things. I’d say it’s best to focus on a market you have been involved with or know inside and out. That will give you a big advantage.

2. Don’t build a product without a partnership strategy.

Very quickly we learned the overwhelming cost of awareness in the small business market segment. A single advertisement in a magazine was $5,000. Direct mail campaigns would cost around $1 per company you touched with a single postcard. Press releases were worthless without a PR agency pushing your agenda and those cost anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 per month. The fact that we were an “out of our own pocket” startup, we were constrained with what we could do. What would have helped us was a targeted partner strategy. The right partner could have provided us access to an audience at a fraction of the cost of trying to carve our own ice cube from the middle of a glacier. Going forward, I will always make sure I have a strategic partner or two that can help open doors, get attention and give you a little bit extra credibility. Lesson learned here is that going it alone is a lonely venture!

3. Listen to the VCs and target, target target.

I spent a lot of time (too much!) talking to VCs to see if there was opportunity for external financing. Although I had great conversations the conversations ended up in the same spot. The VCs wanted to see traction in a specific market segment. They also wanted to see how the team could really target in and win a beach-head. Somewhat related to my first lesson, but this was the reality check that we ignored. As a team we let our “research” guide us instead of our street smarts. The big numbers of the SMB marketplace gave us the false confidence that we would have a fast ramp to success. The lesson learned here is that you actually listen to what is being said. Don’t apply your own filter to it. The biggest lesson, don’t fund raise – sell. That’s right. Use your time to sell your product, generate revenue and prove your business model.

Upside to the downside

It’s always hard to see good ideas failing to gain the traction they need to survive. But I’m always thankful when folks share what they’ve learned. Hopefully, it will help some other entrepreneurs in their pursuits.

No definitive word on David’s next venture, but word around the campfire is that there’s something in the works.

In depth discussions about Portland, podcasting, and the death of traditional media? That’s Crazy Talk

Rick Turoczy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:49:21 +0000

Here in the Portland blogging, startup, and open source community, we get into a bunch of conversations. Conversations about the future. Conversations about how to make a living doing what we love. Conversations about what we could do to make things better.

But so many of these conversations are lost in the ether or wedged into the gray matter of the few people who were involved in the conversation. Until now.

Introducing Crazy Talk, a new podcast from Dr. Normal that brings the backroom conversations of the Portland tech community to the forefront.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Dr. Normal, he’s the technical magic—and sometimes schtick heavy talent—behind the production Strange Love Live, the Friday night livestreamed podcast starring Cami Kaos that features the movers and shakers of the greater Portland tech scene. He also produces memePDX, the weekly podcast that covers the hottest tech stories in Portland and beyond. And of course, he helps by livestreaming any number of events around town.

So what, in the name of sanity, could persuade Dr. Normal to start yet another podcast—especially a daily one? NaPodPoMo, my friends.

That’s right. November is the month of NaWhatverWhateverMo—National Whatever Whatever Month—like NaNoWriMo, NaNoDrawMo, and NaPodPoMo. Not to mention Novembeard and Movember.

But I digress.

Fact of the matter is that Dr. Normal is producing a podcast a day—every day—for the entire month of November. And since he’s got three shows with Strange Love Live, Strange Love Live Afterhours, and memePDX, that means he’s got Crazy Talk going Sunday through Wednesday.

But what to focus on? How about taking all of the face-to-face conversations that he has with people about Portland startups, podcasting, and traditional media and capturing them for posterity? Think Charlie Rose or Tom Synder meets Leo Laporte. And the beauty is that the topics he’s covering—while specific to Portland—have very broad insights to the world at large.

Take his chat with Mike McClure about the Portland startup scene or his conversation with Robert Wagner of Portland Sucks about podcasting and traditional media. Or there’s always this conversation Dr. Normal had with us after we finished recording memePDX.

Longer format. No schtick. Just some important conversations.

I’m really glad to see Dr. Normal taking this on. And I’ll be interested to see what discussions these conversations inspire.

For more information, visit the blog where Dr. Normal is posting Crazy Talk. Or become a fan of Crazy Talk on Facebook.

Portland Wiki project: City? Wiki. Wiki? City.

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:21:56 +0000

For all the wiki activity in Portland—I mean, c’mon, the inventor of the wiki lives here—Portland has been virtually bereft of a wiki of its own.

Until now. There’s a new project underway called Portland Wiki. It’s goal? To document everything there is to know about Portland, Oregon. And you’re invited to help. I mean, it’s a wiki. Duh.

Last WikiWednesday, About Us hosted a barn raising for Portland Wiki to help get the site framed and roofed and whatever.

In the wiki world, a gathering dedicated to work on a particular site is called a Barn Raising, and this month we’re devoting WikiWednesday to a barn raising for a Portland city wiki.… A city wiki is a place for everyone to find and share information that matters to their community, and now Portland will have one too.

Not familiar with wiki concepts? That’s okay. This would be a great place to start learning. Especially considering that, at this point, the Portland Wiki is fairly tabula rasa.

Now that the structure is there, creating content and linking up pages is a definite priority. So sign up, dive in, and start building some content.

For more information, visit Portland Wiki.

Navel gazing: Picking apart Greg Huang’s article on Boston, Boulder, and Seattle to find guidance for Portland

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:50:43 +0000

Sometimes, it pays to look outside Portland and the Silicon Forest. To poke up our collective heads, take a gander, and assess what’s going on elsewhere. Even if that brief assessment only returns us to the position of navel gazing about what Portland could and should be doing.

Such is the case with a recent post from Greg Huang at Xconomy, “A Tale of Three Cities: How Boston, Boulder, and Seattle Measure Up as Tech Innovation Hubs.”

Like Greg. Like his writing. Figured I’d find a few good morsels. What I discovered, in addition, were some interesting insights that could help Portland find its way to a looming tipping point.

Take for instance, Brad Feld of TechStars recounting the early days of the Boulder startup scene.

When I showed up in ’95, what I found was on the software side you had a lot of smart engineering talent but you didn’t have much else.… Not much in the way of entrepreneurial executive leadership other than from these pockets. In the mid-90s, because of the counter-culture community—and the Internet was purpose-built for places like Boulder—you had a lot of people who were independent, very smart, doing their own things.… Yet there wasn’t a broad wave of entrepreneurial experience.… The other thing was that one of the hardest things for first-time entrepreneurs is to have an engaged relationship with an experienced entrepreneur.

Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought it might.

What helped fix the situation? A little incubator called TechStars that did two important things. First, it attracted new entrepreneurs to Boulder. Second, it lined those new entrepreneurs up with experienced mentors to guide them and challenge them to build the best startups possible.

Boston, now another TechStars city, has had a great deal of wealth generated by entrepreneurs. But the startups have been traditional tech pursuits.

What’s Boston seeing now? Chris Sheehan of CommonAngels sees a shift toward mobile and Web.

Boston is well known for growing up with hardware and software companies. You’re now seeing other parts of the IT space building clusters around Boston—mobile, gaming, Web, e-commerce, ad tech and marketing.

And finally, Seattle. Our closest metropolitan neighbor and the town with which we are most often compared. Steve Hall of Vulcan Capital highlighted some of Seattle’s shortcomings—which will likely sound very familiar.

The first is the question of whether Seattle has enough capital. It’s a very short list of funds. You need a critical mass of capital to drive entrepreneurs’ willingness to quit their jobs and burn the midnight oil to start businesses. While I think it’s good for us VCs to have the market to ourselves, you need a little more activity to jumpstart the system.

Complaining about lack of capital? Check. What else? What’s that? Lifestyle? Do tell.

People outside Seattle, particularly fund investors, believe that Seattle is a little too nice. We enjoy our lifestyle too much. Boulder may have a little of this as well.

And can we hit the trifecta with “risk aversion,” Andy Sack?

There’s a greater aversion to risk here than in Silicon Valley or Boston.

Bingo!

So for all the similarities among these three towns and what we’re experiencing in Portland, is there anything we’re doing especially well?

I’d have to say there’s one thing that we’re doing that will help solve all of these other problems: building a collaborative community.

Even Andy agrees that that’s important.

As nice as the Northwest is, it often isn’t as collaborative as I’d like to see it. Competition is good, but in terms of building a world-class city of technology entrepreneurship, I think we still have some things to learn.

But don’t just take my quoted-out-of-context snippets, go read Greg’s piece for yourself. Draw your own conclusions.

Does Portland have what it takes? And what’s missing that could help put us on par—or better yet, surpass—these other cities?

memePDX 011: Venture Mash, Foodgeeks, Ignite Corvallis, Steph is back on The Square, Apple and DROID stuff

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:29:41 +0000

I know, I know. We’re running a little late. We seriously didn’t mean to stand you up for lunch. Sometimes these things just happen. We’re really sorry.

But it’s still Thursday. And so we’re still kind of on time. Right? Right?

This week on memePDX, Cami Kaos and Rick Turoczy cover Venture Mash, Foodgeeks, Ignite Corvallis, Stephanie Stricklen is back at KGW The Square, Apple and DROID stuff.

And away we go.

Want to subject yourself to this torture on a regular basis subscribe to this podcast? Get the audio podcast feed or subscribe on iTunes. Or get the full meal deal with the video feed or the iTunes feed for the video of memePDX. We’re also on Vimeo, because of the whole Portland connection. And of course, if you’re interested in staying in touch, you can always follow memePDX on Twitter. Or you can become a fan of memePDX on Facebook.

Interested in audio? Here you go.

Unfortunately, Microsoft layoffs will affect the Portland startup and open source communities, too

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:32:03 +0000

When news that Don Dodge had been laid off from Microsoft started percolating yesterday, my mind immediately jumped to a rather sad conclusion. If they let Don go, I thought, then what did that mean for our own community presence here in Portland, Jason Mauer?

Unfortunately, I learned that my assumptions were correct. Jason—the developer evangelist who has served as the face of Microsoft for much of the Portland tech community—had been part of the layoff as well.

And while ill news of the Microsoft is always guaranteed to inspire a bit of grave dancing and schadenfreude, I think there are any number of reasons to take this news as a very real blow to our community, as well.

First, foremost, and most obvious, we’ve had an active member of the community hit a big setback. And that always sucks.

But to be honest, Jason’s a smart guy—and tenacious as well. I mean, you don’t ride from Portland to San Diego on a bike without some tenacity. He’ll land on his feet. And it will be interesting to see what he has planned for the future.

So what’s next for me? I’m taking off the training wheels and going into business on my own. I will be providing training and contract dev work, plus nurturing a few crazy ideas on the side. I’ll announce more as soon as the dust settles. I was reluctant to do something like this in the past, but now I feel ready for the challenge. And thanks to the severance package I received, I can actually afford to do so!

The bigger—and possibly less obvious—concern is for the camps, events, and going-on here in the tech community.

You see, while it might not have been front and center, Microsoft has been a huge supporter of the local tech scene here in Portland. And a great deal of that, no doubt, was thanks to Jason’s presence here.

Microsoft has sponsored every Code Camp and every BarCamp Portland. They were the premier sponsor of WordCamp Portland, this year. And they’ve also contributed funds to sponsor events like WhereCamp PDX, RecentChangesCamp, CloudCamp Portland, and even Ignite Portland.

Like it or not, Microsoft has been underwriting a great deal of the free stuff in which we in the Portland community have been privileged to partake. And it’s highly likely that that type of funding and sponsorship will come to an abrupt and immediate end.

At a time when sponsor burnout and tightening budgets are very real threats to already tenuous event budgets, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing that increases the confidence.

Best of luck to Jason in his new pursuits. It sucks that he has to go through this.

As for the rest of us, we better start thinking of some creative ways to fill the funding gap that this latest round of layoffs has created.

The rising tide, as they say, floats all boats. The sinking tide, unfortunately, has an equally definitive effect.

Denormalize, optimize your datasets, and get relational with OpenSQL Camp

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:16:40 +0000

Everyone knows that Portland loves the camps. BarCamps, WhereCamps, WordCamps. No matter the camp, we’ll have one here. It’s just a good cultural fit. And word around the campfire is that we might like the open source stuff a bit, as well.

But what you may not know is that we’ve got a fair number of people who enjoy the database geeking, too. And getting all crazy with the structured query language and whatnot. If only we could combine the Portland love of camps and open source with some of that database geekery. Now that would be a camp wouldn’t it?

Well, be ready to be rapt with joy, you denormalizing debutants. OpenSQL Camp is coming to Portland, November 14-15.

Much like OpenSQL Camp 2008 and the 2009 European edition, this will be an un-conference style get together for people interested in Open Source Databases. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. OpenSQL Camp is free and its format is designed to blend spontaneity with the quality and depth that comes only with pre-planning. We borrow a little from many different styles of conferences to achieve this. Our target audience are users and developers, but others are encouraged to attend too. There will be both presentations and hackathons, so there will be plenty of opportunities to learn, contribute, and collaborate!

Everything begins with a pre-party on the 13th and then moves to Souk for the camp on the 14th and 15th.

Like many camps the format is fairly open, so that attendees can fashion sessions and discussions on the fly, ensuring the most beneficial and enriching discussions for folks.

Sound interesting? It does, doesn’t it? Well get ready to hate me.

You see, I’ve got a bit of bad news. I’ve been a tad tardy in getting to this post. And, as such, they’ve already hit the fire code limit of 130 attendees. But you can always keep an eye on the attendee list and stay tuned to the Google Group to see if people drop off. (No word on whether there will be a live stream or not. But I remain hopeful that something will come together in that regard.)

And if you’re interested in supporting this great community, there’s still an opportunity to sponsor the event.

For more information, visit OpenSQL Camp, join the Google Group, or follow OpenSQL Camp on Twitter.

Nebul.us has a not so nebulous tie to Portland (and I’ve got some invites)

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:44:27 +0000

We all spend a great deal of time online. And that’s putting it mildly. But do you really know how that time is spent? I mean, what are you really doing out there on the Web and when are you doing what?

That’s what a new startup called nebul.us is trying to determine—by tapping into your browser and helping you visualize where you’re spending your time and effort.

That’s cool. But what’s even cooler—at least from my perspective—is that the lead developer is from right here in Portland.

So who’s the Rose City resident helping develop this new visualization play? None other than Kris Wallsmith. Turns out that—in addition to serving as the release manager and community manager for symfony, a full-stack PHP Web application framework—he’s been banging out some brilliant work on nebul.us.

And it really is something to see.

But what’s nebul.us do? Well, I’m going to let Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch tell you. As he’s likely been mucking with it more than I have.

Here’s how it works: after installing a browser plugin (the service currently has support for Firefox with IE, Chrome, and Safari on the way), your browser will start monitoring your browsing history and uploading it to the service. Everything is intitally locked down in a private mode — meaning nobody else can see it — unless you visit the site and explicitly decide to share it with your friends. Or, if there are some sites you’d always be comfortable sharing with your friends, you can choose to add it to your ‘Trusted’ list, which means they’ll automatically be shared. The site has a friends system so you can determine who is allowed to following your browser history, or you can choose to share it into a public pool. If there’s a site you never want to have recorded, even in the private mode, you can block it entirely. If you do let something slip by, you can go back and delete it from your history.

In other words, you just use the Web the way you normally would, and nebul.us keeps track of what you’re doing. Then, you can tune back in to see how you’re spending your time—and how your friends are spending theirs.

That’s right, it’s got social features, too. Demented and sad, but social. Okay maybe not. But I can’t resist working John Hughes quotes into posts. So sue me.

Long story short, it’s great to see great Portland development talent shining on a larger stage. Folks here have some impressive chops. They just don’t always get the attention they deserve. But with apps like this—and Simler is another great example—the Portland development crowd should start getting some of the credit they so richly deserve.

Nebul.us is still in private beta. I have about 15 invites. If you’re interested in taking it for a spin, comment below. I’ll invite the first 15 folks who provide real email addresses.

For more on nebul.us, read the TechCrunch post. For more on the lead developer, follow Kris Wallsmith on Twitter. Or you can always go to the somewhat stealthy and nebulous nebul.us site.

Silicon Florist

Instant Action open house at Ground Kontrol tomorrow or Dude. My quarter was up there. I’m next.

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Whiffies and Food Carts Portland featured on MSNBC, Strange Love Live gets a cameo

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MioWorks closes doors but leaves with valuable startup lessons in hand

1. Don’t assume you know your market.

2. Don’t build a product without a partnership strategy.

3. Listen to the VCs and target, target target.

Upside to the downside

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Portland Wiki project: City? Wiki. Wiki? City.

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Navel gazing: Picking apart Greg Huang’s article on Boston, Boulder, and Seattle to find guidance for Portland

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Unfortunately, Microsoft layoffs will affect the Portland startup and open source communities, too

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Denormalize, optimize your datasets, and get relational with OpenSQL Camp

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Nebul.us has a not so nebulous tie to Portland (and I’ve got some invites)

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