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.

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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.

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But there were no rules saying you always had to go on a Friday. Or only go to Portland’s gathering, for that matter.

So this week, you’ve got the chance to go to Beer and Blog one day early—and get to experience Ignite Corvallis as a bonus. But how to get there? On this bus, my friend.

The bus is sponsored by Calapooia Brewing and they not only made your ride free, but are providing refreshments for the trip! (It is BEER and blog.) With wifi on the bus, you can tweet, blog, and have fun all the way down to Corvallis.

Geeks, beer, and wifi? Oh my. Well, and of course the awesomeness that is Beer and Blog and Ignite.

What could be better? Spending some time with the people you know. Getting the chance to meet some new techie people and startup types. It’s shaping up to be a real Silicon Forest get-together of sorts. They’ll even be some Portland flavor to the Ignite, with Adam DuVander, Dawn Foster, and Aaron Hockley presenting.

The bus is scheduled to leave The Nines Hotel in downtown Portland at 3 PM, Thursday, November 5. It will leave Corvallis for the return trip to Portland around 10 PM.

To RSVP or for more information, see Willamette Innovators Night—the event hosting both Beer and Blog Corvallis and Ignite Corvallis, Dawn “The ‘What is Ignite?’ presenter” Foster’s post, or the post on the Ignite Portland blog.

(Image courtesy Jason McHuff. Used under Creative Commons.)

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Sound familiar? If so, you—like thousands of others—are likely suffering from fire-hose fatigue. I mean, that real-time Web thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it? But now, there’s hope with Silicon Florist curated content.

What’s Silicon Florist curated content—besides, of course, the opportunity to throw some new buzzword into your vocabulary—you say? Why, it’s a quick collection of the most important and relevant stories of the week, upcoming events, available jobs, and interesting links—whether I happened to write about them or not. And it arrives in your inbox every Friday via that newfangled email technology.

Okay, it’s a newsletter. But a short one. Kind of like espresso. Not much there, but it’s guaranteed to pack a punch. Not only that, the newsletter even goes well with coffee.

What’s more, it’s brief and to the point. No more meandering diatribes. Nor more long winded rambling. No more “so”s, “well”s, and “I mean”s.* No more, um, “no more”s. Just good quick content to keep you on top of the Portland and Silicon Forest startup, mobile, and open source scene.

So if you’re into keeping track of what’s happening but you can’t dedicate your life to it, sign up for Silicon Florist curated content and bring some happiness back to your inbox—and likely, your life.**

* Correct grammar not guaranteed. ** Your results may vary.

(Image courtesy Jami Dwyer. Used under Creative Commons.)

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So let’s do that shall we? Here are the top 10 posts according to your peers—a combination of Web and RSS metrics—from Silicon Florist for October 2009.

1. Mayor Sam Adams and the City of Portland to open source, open data, and transparency communities: Let’s make this official
2. From Air Sharing to Zipcar: 40+ iPhone apps developed in the Silicon Forest
3. It’s not project management, it’s FMYI: HBO and other big names laud Portland-based collaboration platform
4. Portland, Oregon, joins the ranks of the open cities, officially embracing open data and open source
5. KATU launches hyperlocal Portland blogs
6. Make PowerPoint even more painful with Portland Presentation Karaoke
7. In the strange bedfellows department, Jive hooks up with Microsoft SharePoint
8. Angels in Oregon: The definitive guide to early stage investment opportunities for both startups and potential investors
9. Legion of Tech falls victim to embezzlement
10. Embedding video in WordPress will get easier, thanks to Portland’s Viper007Bond

We now return you to your Halloween-candy-induced sugar coma.

(Image courtesy K. Kendall. Used under Creative Commons.)

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And while the site had been running of its own volition, a recent mishap inspired Ryan to begin redesigning and restructuring the site. Today, that work resulted in the launch of a brand new Foodgeeks.

Now, I realize that Foodgeeks may be a new thing to you. But it’s been around for a long time. A long, long time. Like it may be older than some of you. Like since December of 1998.

So what’s it take to bring a social but still fairly dotcom site up to today’s social Web standards? It’s safe to say that takes a lot of rethinking and then a lot of tweaking. And probably introducing some new features, to boot.

“Even after 10 years, it’s a project that I’m still passionate about,” said Ryan. “It’s cool to see that it still has a place, today.”

But where to begin? Well, having the site crash is always a helpful motivator.

35 days after the big crash, and with the gracious help of Crystal Beasely and her amazing design talents, Foodgeeks has been rebranded and relaunched in time for Thanksgiving. Foodgeeks includes most of its original features, as well as some new offerings, such as activity streams, badges, tags and the lovable Mr. Yummy. In my spare time, I’ll continue to crank out features for Foodgeeks, and will soon rebuild Winegeeks as well.

File it under “every cloud has a silver lining.”

It’s also worth noting that Nate DiNiro has been helping with the rebuild, adding video content to the site—and that content has really brought some of the recipes to life.

So, if geeking out about recipes with your fellow would-be chefs is of interest to you, head on over to Foodgeeks to peruse and rate the more than 10,000 recipes that have already been submitted by folks just like you. Or you could always start following Foodgeeks on Twitter.

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Now, Venture Northwest isn’t a tech-centric thing. It’s a startup thing. But there were some interesting tech companies that pitched. So I thought I’d recap for you. Or more appropriately, steal borrow my own recaps from the Venture Northwest guest posts I submitted to TechFlash.

Here they are, in order of appearance:

Giftango

It was interesting jumping from the major brands and Hollywood stars of Wicked Quick to Portland-based Giftango, which didn’t have the glitz and glam—but they did have a solid model and some well-known local customers in their own right.

But that’s not downplaying it. Remember, Giftango is no slouch. They’re in the midst of filling out a first round. And they’re already planning series B. And they’re looking forward to exit by being acquired.

Giftango helps companies offer gift cards—or “stored value” in the parlance. But they’re not handing physical cards. They’re delivering those “cards” via SMS

Like Portland-based Urban Airship, Giftango is an infrastructure play, providing the plumbing that allows this stuff to work—by helping folks get up and running quickly and easily.

Elemental Technologies

Portland-based Elemental Technologies—the company that’s developing both software and hardware to help folks encode video for the Web more quickly and easily—kicked off the second group of pitches.

Sam Blackman was very comfortable with the crowd. More like a keynote than a presenter. Elemental has been around for awhile. And has pitched a number of these folks before. Successfully, at that. They have raised $7.1 million to date with about $5 million in cash in the bank.

The talk tended to oscillate between highly technical talk littered with acronyms and practical applications of that technology. Personally, I found it incredibly interesting, but I couldn’t get a good take on how the crowd.

Prolifiq

Beaverton-based Prolifiq is all about getting sales teams and marketing teams on the same page. And making marketing materials accessible to sales types no matter where they are.

Long story short, it gives marketing a place to put materials and sales a place to get them—with mobile devices.

Having worked in marketing for longer than I care to remember, I can honestly say that this seemingly simple problem is ridiculously hard to fix. And Prolifiq seems to have found a way to do it. It’s a product that any number of companies could use.

Don’t believe me? Well what about Forbes? They selected Prolifiq as one of the most promising companies for 2009.

ShopIgniter

One of the most anticipated pitches—at least from my perspective—was Portland-based ShopIgniter, a “real time, social ecommerce platform.” And it didn’t disappoint.

ShopIgniter provides an elegant ecommerce package, delivering exactly the functionality you would expect—but then they take it in a couple of different directions that make it all the more compelling. First, they allow sellers to publish their store as a native Facebook app, allowing them to tap into an entirely different group of users in an their preferred environment. And second, they have a sentiment-based Twitter search that allows sellers to more easily identify potential customers—and to more quickly resolve customer issues.

It’s the first product I’ve seen that promises to formally extend the reach of small and medium sized business sales into social networking—and in a way that holds the promise of direct revenue generation.

ShopIgniter is available on a subscription basis as software as a service or it can be installed on the users’ servers. They’ve partnered with Bend-based EllisLab, making it the first ecommerce solution for EllisLab’s popular ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter platforms.

From an investor perspective, the numbers seem to all be pointing to the upside. Most interesting? Even though they are pre-launch, ShopIgniter claims that $2.5 million investment would help them be profitable in nine months.

Second Porch

It was a shame that the two strong social network plays got clumped into the same group for voting purposes. That said, in a region that’s known for investing in deep tech and apparel, it’s always great to see these more cutting-edge technology folks getting selected to pitch at all.

Portland-based Second Porch is a Facebook app that allows people with vacation homes to promote them to friends without being smarmy or spammy. It’s a great way for owners to make sure their homes are filled more often—and by people they trust. Not to mention, it’s an easy way for renters to find lodging.

In short, they’re making a trusted relationship generate revenue. And it’s an idea that people immediately understand. As such, they’re getting a ton of uptake from the popular press which is always good for a startup. Sometimes, it’s the most straightforward solutions that hold the most promise.

What’s more, they’ve got an attainable revenue goal—with the potential to grow much larger. At this point, profitability requires 2.5% of the vacation home market to participate with each making around 9 transactions per year.

Second Porch is looking to raise $700,000 in the short term and another $1.5 million in mid 2010. They’re planning to exit via acquisition.

Congratulations to everyone who got the chance to present

While there isn’t a cash prize, there is a crowd favorite. And Prolifiq walked away with that prize.

So that’s it. Those are all the cool tech folks from yesterday. What’s tha? You’re interested in a more comprehensive recap of the day? Well your wish is my command. Visit TechFlash for part one and part two of my complete write-up.

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With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce that Extensis will be hosting the first Portland Lunch 2.o of 2010 on January 20. Go ahead and save that date now.

Not familiar with Extensis? Well, they build font management and digital asset management software and have been around for 15 years, I believe all of them here in Portland.

Interested to learn more? Here come the details:

Hosts: Extensis

Where: 1800 SW First Avenue, Suite 500, Portland, OR, 97201

When: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 from 12 PM to 2 PM

As usual, please RSVP on Upcoming. This tells the hosts how much grub to get, and if you’re vegetarian or vegan, make sure to drop a comment on the event page for planning, unless you don’t want to eat, which kind of defeats the purpose of, you know, lunch.

Don’t forget these Lunch 2.0s, coming soon:

• January 20, 2010 at Extensis

So, it looks like we’re taking a break for the holidays, unless someone steps up in a hurry. Probably just as well, what with all the happy distractions. Don’t fret too much though because I have a few leads for February and March, but as always, I can use your help finding new (or re-convincing old) hosts.

If you’re interested in hosting a Lunch 2.0, drop a comment or hit me up on Twitter (@jkuramot). Also, check out the how-to primer.

Big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0.

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Well look no further. It seems tonight in Portland is going to be jampacked full of events to keep you busy. No matter what you’re techie desires, I’m sure you’ll be able to find something that strikes your fancy.

Like what you ask? Let’s take a look.

coming@party

From digital anonymity to personal interaction. We’ll go from digital chatter to personal conversations and maybe make some new connections in the process. All you need is a Twitter handle, a laptop or tweet-capable phone, and an open mind. There will be 8 laptop stations available on a first-come-first-served basis. Those unfamiliar with Twitter can show up early for a brief tutorial.

The coming@party begins at 6 PM at the Art Institute of Portland.

Digital Journalism Social Hour

Digital Journalism Portland and Society of Professional Journalists Oregon and SW Washington Chapter have teamed up to create an informal social hour that showcases local, innovative digital journalism projects. Come hang out with your peers, have a drink and learn about the people who are changing our industry.

The Digital Journalism Social Hour will take place at Rose & Thistle Pub beginning at 7 PM.

The Church of Social Media

Gather ‘round brothers and sisters to testify your love for social media and how it has touched your life. We will be meeting in the Open Space at AIPD to let everyone know just how awesome and amazing social media is, and that we don’t care who knows it. Leave all your worries about the dangers of technology at the door. Forget about objectivity. Let everyone know about your new friends, and the valuable contacts you’ve made. Share the sheer delight of telling people on Twitter about what you had for breakfast, and about the times when you’ve actually care about what someone had for breakfast! Tell everyone about the hours and hours spent updating profiles, twittering, texting and how you loved every minute of it. All are welcome. Skeptics and lurkers feel free to watch the show. Come dressed in Halloween costumes if you’d like, it will only add to the hilarity. Drinks will be provided.

The Church of Social Media will be held at the Art Institute of Portland beginning at 7:30 PM.

Finance for Startups 101

Come listen to Steve Babcock and Craig Vagt talk about finances, taxes, and money for startups and small businesses. There will be a 30 minute talk, followed by an open Q&A. All are welcome.

Finance for Startups 101 will be held at PIE beginning at 6 PM.

The Interactive Open

Open Source, Open Content, Open Invitation – this event invites interactive artists to remix and reimagine the animated film Sita Sings the Blues as a standalone art piece, focused on the theme of ‘Conversations’. The finished pieces will be available for hands-on play and discovery, and the source code freely downloadable.

The Interactive Open will be held at Grassy Knoll Gallery beginning at 7 PM.

Mid-Point Mixer hosted by Struck/Axiom and Simler

Learn more about Simler (the smoothest, prettiest and, well, best online social network of all time!) while checking out Struck/Axiom’s new Old Town studio. We’ll provide the drinks, food, Guitar Hero World Tour, Halo and the ping pong table. You bring your friends. It’ll be new communication all mashed up with old-school chit-chat.

Mid-Point Mixer will be held at Struck/Axiom beginning at 6 PM.

PDX Hackathon

Come do strange things with your computer amongst others whilst drinking fine Portland beer.

PDX Hackathon will be held at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne beginning at 7 PM.

Refresh Portland October: Online Video For Everybody by Andy Beach

Andy is the author of Real World Video Compression and oversees all aspects of marking at product management at Elemental Technologies. His vast knowledge of video post-production, compression and interactive design has attracted clients worldwide, including: Microsoft, Major League Baseball, Apple, INC and Adobe Systems, INC.

Refresh Portland takes place at Jive Software beginning at 6:30 PM.

SAOpdx: I Wish I’d Thought of That: Creative Approaches to Closing Deals

All the best new ideas have one thing in common: they make you ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And when you finally get wise, you can only slap yourself on the forehead and promise to steal the idea the next time you can.

The Software Association of Oregon’s Marketing and Sales Forum (MSF) brings together seven of Portland’s top deal makers to each share one creative closing technique. You’ll leave the event with a new angle on how to close that stalled deal.

The SAOpdx group meets at Kells Irish Pub beginning at 6 PM.

Westside Proggers

This month Markus will be presenting his response to Matt’s programming language presentation from last month. If previous presentations by Markus are any indication, a good time will be had by all.

Westside Proggers will be held at OTBC beginning at 7 PM.

Already booked?

What’s that? You’re busy tonight? Well, do you need something to do tomorrow? The New Communicators series—which is to thank for a good chunk of these events—continues through Friday. Or you can always subscribe to the Silicon Florist calendar on Upcoming.

(Image courtesy Selena Marie. Used under Creative Commons.)

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For a special Halloween episode of memePDX, join the disembodied heads of Cami and as we cover OSCON’s back in Portland, Venture Northwest, Cort & Fatboy, Building a Better Journalist, Technorati’s state of the blogosphere, and Whitehouse.gov on Drupal.

But that’s not all. Cami also reveals a secret project underway.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

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.

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