Planet PDX

March 15, 2010

COLOURlovers

Color Wonders of the World

The natural world will forever be our greatest source of color inspiration. Not a day or season goes by without being able to find a profound experience of color: After the white snow melts away taking with it the stark contrasts of bare tress and black shadows, the grass's green becomes richer each day, until one day. And as quickly as the first transformation happens, an opposite and equally powerful transition takes place. The green retreats, fading into shades of grey and making way for the falling white to come again.

In appreciation for these very colors I have selected, some of the world's richest, most powerful color experiences, that if given a chance to view in a non-RGB setting that opportunity should be grasped.

Red Lava

redcolorwonder
Wikipedia

When this red-hot molten rock erupts from a serene black landscape of protruding mounds and mountains of volcanic formations a true humbling experience can be had when contemplating the substance before you and its impact on the formation of the very ground you stand upon and that fact that that ground is not a static platform but rather a living, evolving  stage.

Read about lava's unique properties and find more color inspiration from the Big Island of Hawaii and other landscapes.

lavalava

Lava_MadnessLavaDora

Lava lava_boogie

The Orange Australian Dust Storms

orangecolorwonder
El Fotopakismo

Why is the dust orange in the first place? Because there's so little vegetation. Southeastern Australian soil is composed of weathered ferric rocks. The iron makes the resulting clay minerals—like nontronite, saponite, and volkonsokite—orange-ish. This process is certainly not unique to the land Down Under. Many regions started out orange but eventually transitioned to brown or black as vegetation sprang up in the fertile clay and composted into dark organic matter. The climate around Sydney is too arid for trees and shrubs to proliferate, so the area retains its original hue. The lack of vegetation also explains the frequent dust storms. Clay is flaky, and there aren't many trees or roots to prevent it from sweeping across the plains. - keep reading at Slate.

dust_bowl_orangeorange_dust

Dust_Orange orange_dust

dusty_sand Dust_Storm

The Yellow Desert Flowers

yellowcolorwonder
Martin_Heigan

Mesembryanthemum clavatum flowers (Mesembs) in late Spring, creating carpets of colour in the semi-desert landscapes of the Northern Cape (Tanqua Karoo, October 2006, South Africa). - Photographer Martin_Heigan

desert_sandsDesert_Light

desert_primrosedesert_sand_mica

Desert_SandGolden_Desert

Green Algae

greencolorwonder
karlequin

Green algae is the most diverse group of algae, with more than 7000 species growing in a variety of habitats.

A few other organisms rely on green algae to conduct photosynthesis for them. The chloroplasts in euglenids and chlorarachniophytes were acquired from ingested green algae, and in the latter retain a vestigial nucleus (nucleomorph). Some species of green algae, particularly of genera Trebouxia and Pseudotrebouxia (Trebouxiophyceae), can be found in symbiotic associations with fungi to form lichens. In general the fungal species that partner in lichens cannot live on their own, while the algal species is often found living in nature without the fungus. - Wikipedia

algaebloom Fuzzy_Green

Algae_in_Mist Algae_Light

algae_road Algae_Glow

Glacier Blue

bluecolorwonder
dave_apple

A glacier is a mass accumulation of snow and ice. However, unlike snow, a glacier's color appears a deep, almost deep-sea-eerie blue. This is because, while white snow sits atop these massive giants, all the previous year's snow has been compressed into ice, and light acts differently in ice. When white sunlight hits a glacier, instead of being completely scattered, like with snow, it penetrates deep into the ice. The farther it goes the more red frequencies get absorbed due to an "overtone of infrared OH stretching mode of the water molecule." This is the same reason water appears blue. Why is Snow White

Glacier Glacier_Ice

glacierglacier_tango

glacier Glacier

The Purple Aurora

purplecolorwonder
Arnar Valdimarsson 1, 2.

The colors created by aurora are most commonly, green and red, but depending on the particles present in the clouds from the sun, say if there is nitrogen present, the color can range from low level reds to very high blues and violets.

Aurora originates from the sun. Large amounts of solar particles are thrown into space and travel for about two to three days at a rate of 300 to 1000 kilometers per second in order to reach earth's outer magnetic field. At this point, the clouds of particles are pulled towards the northern and southern magnetic poles. As they are being pulled towards the poles they are stopped by our atmosphere colliding with other present particles. The interaction of these particles causes what we know as aurora, the northern lights or aurora borleis in the northern hemisphere, and aurora australis or the southern polar lights in the southern hemisphere. Colors in Nature: Aurora

auroral_purple_sky Aurora_Borealis

Aurora Aurora_Borealis

Aurora_Borealis Aurora_Borealis

by evad at March 15, 2010 06:06 PM

Legion of Tech

BarCamp Portland 4 to be Rescheduled

Last month, we announced a date for BarCamp Portland 4, and dove into planning for a combined event with Code Camp. Many of us were excited about the possibility of combining these two events.

After a few weeks, though, we found that the attempt to combine planning efforts was not working well. In particular, several of the BarCamp organizers and volunteers were finding the combined planning process difficult.

We discussed this at last week’s board meeting, and decided to pull BarCamp out of the May 22 event at the U of P.  We will reschedule BarCamp 4 to another date and location.

I’d like to emphasize that Code Camp is still going to happen on May 22, and that it is likely to be an excellent event for developers, as it has been for the past several years.

Want to know when BarCamp is happening? We’ll post it here when we know. If you’re following this blog or following @BarCampPortland on twitter, you’ll be among the first to know.

by Amy at March 15, 2010 05:44 PM

Chris Brentano

Record grooves under an electron microscope.

Grooves

Chris Supranowitz is a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Along with a number of other spectacular studies (such as quantum optics, trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement), Chris has decided to look at the relatively boring grooves of a vinyl record using the institute’s electron microscope.

(via djgblog)

by ctb at March 15, 2010 05:16 PM

Cooking up a Story

Raised On Grass: Pastured Fed Animals

Cooking Up a Story: Stories

New to the life of farming, a middle-aged couple make a career change to becoming sustainable farmers. First mentoring under Joel Salatin, they now raise pasture fed cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, lambs, and sheep.

I started to really think about the food the animals I ate were fed, after I saw “King Corn” and talked to Curt Ellis.

As I was breaking down the equipment and packing it all away, I said, more or less to out loud to myself, ‘I ought to do a story on pasture fed cows’. Curt was right there, responding, ‘You should!’. I nodded my head, thinking, Okay, I’ll look into it.

As the Jongles look on, their animals graze on the pasture grassThe looking didn’t come right away. But evidently the forces in the world were at work, for not too long after, I finally started reading “Omnivore’s Dilemma” . The second chapter was all about Michael Pollan visiting Polyface Farm where Joel Salatin raises his animals as humanely possible and on pasture. Not concrete, not alongside thousands of others, not full of injections, and not 100% grain fed. Sounded like a good idea to me. But Mr. Salatin was nearly 3,000 miles away. It wasn’t going to work, at least not right away. In the meantime, I started to read his book, “You Can Farm,” and I liked what he was doing and wanted to learn more.

In the meantime I met with Michele to talk about films and food. I mentioned to her I wanted to do a pasture fed story and she immediately lit up and told me about the Abundant Life Farm
buyers club, for that’s where she got her meat, and it was all grass fed and pasture raised.

chickens feeding in the open pastureSo I gave the Jondles a call and found quite a story. Not Joel Salatin’s, mind you (but they did mentor under him!), but their own story that was quite compelling. What a wonderful environment they’ve created for their animals. The pigs get to root under brush and tree, the chickens get to scatter, and the cows and lambs run at will. In fact, when Marilyn opened the gate for the cows to go to a fresh area of pasture, they ran and kicked up their heels! What a sight that was. I’m not an animal psychologist, but these are happy cows!

A website that is dedicated to news and facts surrounding grass fed food is EatWild. Yes, pasture fed meat is more expensive, but I believe it’s healthier to eat, and more humane for the animals as well.

Check out the recipes from this show: Mom’s Potato Salad; Easy Baked Chicken

—Rebecca

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by Cooking Up A Story at March 15, 2010 03:30 PM

March 14, 2010

Silicon Florist

From Portland? At SXSW? Head over to the Portland Tech Community Party tonight

So you’re down in Austin at SXSW. Soaking up all kinds of interactive knowledge and goodness. But you’re feeling a little wistful. You’re missing spending time with your Portland tech friends. I mean, that must be why you’re reading this blog post.

Well, buck up little camper. I’ve got some good news for you. There’s a Portland party at SXSW this year. That’s right! See all of your Portland peers all in one spot, Sunday night beginning at 5:30 at the Karma Lounge. What’s that? Not from Portland? Swing by anyway.

The party—sponsored by Portland shops ISITE, Mighty Code, Taplister, Webvisions, Legion of Tech, and Fast Wonder—is simply a chance for Portland folks down at SXSW to meet up with other Portland folks down at SXSW. And it also provides an opportunity to drag along any other folks who might enjoy meeting the Portland crowd.

Oh. And did I mention that there’s werewolf? That’s right. It wouldn’t be a Portland tech event without some breaking out a game of werewolf, know would it? (But don’t worry. Playing werewolf is not required.)

So feel free to come on over to the Karma Lounge. And join the Portland crew for a few drinks.

Related posts

by Rick Turoczy at March 14, 2010 08:55 PM

COLOURlovers

Oak Hazelnut

Data Visualization Panel at the Data Cluster Meetup at SXSW 2010

amber-case-data-cluster-visualization-meetup

In 2009, a twitter conversation at SXSW among three data geeks accidentally turned into a 30+ person data meetup — with no planning, nowhere near enough chairs, and yet a total success. Clearly, the web’s largest yearly convention needed a gathering of data geeks.

The idea is simple: get a whole bunch of really smart data geeks together, set up group discussions and a round of lightning talks, but leave the majority of time for people who admire each other’s work to meet and exchange ideas.

data-cluster-meetup-sxsw-amber-case

Five Panels:

When?

March 14, 2010 (Pi day!)
6PM - 9Pm
Opal Divine’s, 700 W 6th St 78701

RSVP here (limited space left).

Note: Panels start at 8Pm. At 6Pm, there will be aRelational Database Smackdown, featuring Stu Hood of the Cassandra project. He’ll lead a discussion that will debate the merits of various non-relational databases.

FACING OFF:

  • Cassandra core team committer Stu Hood (Rackspace)
  • CouchDB core team committer Jan Lehnardt (Apache)
  • MongoDB evangelist Wynn Netherland (Orrka, TweetCongress)
  • … expert in another scalable DB tech? If you’re brave enough to step up, email us.

data-cluster-meetup-austin-sxsw-2010

See you there! If you can’t make it, but you like Data Viz, be sure to check out my Flickr Data Visualization group - Innovation in Data Visualization and my Data Viz set on Flickr.

by Amber Case at March 14, 2010 03:31 AM

March 13, 2010

Fast Wonder

Chris Messina on ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? at SXSW

Here are my raw notes from Chris Messina’s session ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? at SXSW. Like I said, these are raw notes, so there are bound to be some typos / mistakes. Also keep in mind these are his ideas and content, not mine.

Updated 3/13/10 with his presentation:

Notes:

Generative structures (rhizomes) – start with small constructs that move into very complex systems. Like in “The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It.” This forms the basis for activity streams.

What if every time you went shopping, you got an activity stream – like a receipt, but electronic and more available. You bank has this information and aggregates it to find useful information & a digital identity for you. He showed a clip from fight club to illustrate this point. Receipts are paper, crappy activity streams – paper-based way of comprehending information. Banks have this, but it’s in a format that suits them (pdf / paper / etc.), and not in a good format for analysis by their customers.

The news feed (Facebook) is the best example of an activity stream now.

Brief history of feeds

  • 1999: RSS moves content from one format / place to another. Initially just titles, description & link
  • 2006: Atom came a little later – similar idea, but it had author, id & updated. Still based on media consumption usage.
  • Now: RSS more like a news feed, but still not all that complex.

Formats were designed to syndicate basic media content, and now we’re trying to pump a bunch of additional data through it. Format is still stuck in 1999.

FriendFeed problem – it was an aggregation service with a few additional features (comments, etc.) Brought everything together in one place. When it was acquired by Facebook, FriendFeed started to languish.

The solution? A universal format – this is where the idea for activity streams came from. More than syndicating an activity from one place to another.

Russians proposed something called activity theory for how they could make workers more productive with divisions of labor: Subject + tools = object / outcome (triangle). Later expanded by Scandinavians to expand it into communities with mediating artefacts, rules & roles.

In producing activity streams, we want to create meaning and make sense of the information.

If your goal is to produce meaning and culture, then you have a compelling framework for a compelling service.

foursquare + activity theory will help you understand why it has been so successful. It’s not just about the games, but is more nuanced.

Social objects - Jyri Engeström – “people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.” Through those connections, people make meaning.

As you roll around the web, you collect all kinds of information. Look at YouTube – adds value to a social object with comments, ratings, etc. Flick is similar – comments, tags, etc. Some people create the content and others curate it by adding comments, rating, etc. Publishers vs. contributors.

Flickr makes it easy to tune the rules (configure licenses, search, etc.)

Control and rules can be set at system or personal level. Life streaming is more than just a news feed.

The Second Coming – A Manifesto by Gelernter (2000) talked about lifestreams as a sequence of all kinds of documents that are retrieved by search and not names or titles. Stream is concrete representation of time with now dividing past and future.

Now we live in an environment with so much information. It seems like information overload, but it’s really that we don’t have the tools to effectively deal with this information.

Mapping of behavior becomes interesting when you can look at your behavior along with the data that other people have about you. In 10 years, your kids could look back on the profile of your history via foursquare, etc. and see how you spent your birthday (example from Kevin Rose).

What if you could use your status information to train your computers to better meet your needs. Fitbit tracks behavior over time. You need to accrue data over time and compare it to other people’s data to make sense of it.

Look at Feltron annual reports. He collects information about himself and summarizes it (not real, but an example of what you could do?)

The solution to data overload is more data (metadata).

Take the basic construct of RSS and weave in some metadata about the data: Actor (author), verb, object & target – all are added to basic atom / rss feed info. It’s trivial to add these 4 elements to make an activity stream based on basic Atom / rss data.

Verbs & objects:
verbs: favorite, follow, like, join …
objects: article …

Process inspired by microformats. Why: Ask why you are doing this? Homework: Do you homework and document what you think. Propose: Bring it back to the community for input. iterate: Use an iterative process to make it better. Inter-operate: find ways to collaborate.

This looks similar to the semantic web, but it’s a little less ambitious. RDF is pretty hard to use.

More information can be found on activitystrea.ms.

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by Dawn Foster at March 13, 2010 05:55 PM

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

The Crazy Neighbor*

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • The Crazy Neighbor: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.
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by Dawn Foster at March 13, 2010 05:32 PM

COLOURlovers

The Colorful World of Designer Vinyl Customs

We've already brought you a primer on the simplistic, brightly colored vinyl toys known as 'Designer Vinyl' in the collectible toy world, and if you aren't much of the make-it-yourself type, you can easily sate your hunger for bursts of color by placing these bits of toy art around your home. However, if you are the crafty type (and if you're hanging around in our craft channel, I suspect that you just might be), you may find it inspiring that these toys also come in fully customizable (or DIY -- do it yourself) forms.

2536304736_c9606fdf9b_o
[Via Ian Murchinson]

The basic white Munny form can be purchased from Kidrobot.com for as little as $4.95 for smaller sizes. However, a larger size is available (you can get these guys up to 18"!). Once you get your hands on that simple little form, the only thing holding you back is the limits of your imagination.

The emergence of these DIY toys has basically fired up an entire subculture of artists who have gotten their creative groove on by painting and modifying them into something altogether different, and often incredible.

3329863622_c905f5007f_b
[Via Bobby Chromik ~ Lawcrow]

You can easily search the web and find all kinds of tutorials on how to make your own Designer Vinyl customs. Toy artists will also often show the creation process on their blogs. Even celeb Rosie O' Donnell has gotten into the custom world. You can start simply with something like markers or use products such as Sculpey to completely alter the shape of the figure itself.

808928221_1924afd0fa_b

Check out some more examples of Designer Vinyl customs below. Maybe you'll be inspired enough to get out your own supplies and create your own!

4134055542_8c0ed88e1a_o
[Lunabee]

2119533157_5275bd0503_o
[Emilychang]

2128431085_9df3661e6d_o
[hello nekko]

3529339649_3ae7881931_b
[zincsaucier442]

2972719791_3f87d3deed_b
[carianoff]

1724420486_3c00c34e73_o
[thewhitestdogalive]

3283841049_3d0655fb11_o
[M i x y]

4335107377_f9941bd1d4_b
[tjtrewin]

[Header photo via Meffi]

by Colette Bennett at March 13, 2010 05:00 PM

SplashCast Media

BusinessWeek & NYT Both Say "Advantage Cable" This Week

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171038593210.htm

Funny how trends work in the world of media. Somehow, both the NYT and BusinessWeek came out with "cable cutting ain't so threatening" articles this week. It's certainly fueled by recent research that indicates the bark of the anti-cable techno-elite may be bigger than their bite. Both news outlets decided this was a good week to discuss how the TV industry is heading down a different road than their Music and Newspaper predecessors -- a much more sunny road.

It's fun for me to straddle the fence on this one, being in both camps.

Sent via BlackBerry

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

March 13, 2010 01:45 AM

March 12, 2010

Silicon Florist

memePDX 028: Special Portland at SXSW episode

Hey it’s Thursday! Oh wait. It’s not Thursday. It’s Friday. Yes, there was a technical glitch while a big chunk of the memePDX team was traveling down to SXSW. So if you grabbed it from iTunes, it was likely broken.

Well Morgan, the one part of the team who remained in Portland, managed to pull a rescue mission and get the file uploaded again. So here, without further delay, is the special SXSW edition of memePDX.

Want to subject yourself to this torture on a regular basis subscribe to this podcast? Get 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.

(NOTE: For those audiophiles, we’re working on it. Stay tuned.)

Related posts

by Rick Turoczy at March 12, 2010 06:18 PM

.51

For Appreciative Geeks: Molly Dilworth’s Rooftop Paintings

Fine art and geekdom don’t often cross paths, but when a talented artist creates something that might be viewed from space, she scores major geek points.

Molly Dilworth’s latest artistic expression has her painting rooftops - ones that can be seen by satellites orbiting the Big Blue Marble. While those of us gravity-bound to the ground will only be able to see her work through her Flickr photostream and the occasional perfect-vantage-point, perhaps we should nag - er, politely suggest to the folks at Google Earth that they take a few digital images so we can view them through the application in the near future.

Molly Dilworth - Rooftop Painting

I could wax poetic about Dilworth all day long - my house is practically an art gallery of her work - but photos and various posts and articles on the web will do it better. This article includes fabulous shots of her works-in-progress, as does this one (though some of the page’s other posts are rated R).

Read Italian? How about French? Live in NY and want to get in touch with her to commission a rooftop painting of your own? Check out her web site for contact info.

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by ubergeeke at March 12, 2010 05:08 PM

COLOURlovers

Tending the Garden

Speakers workshop at LibrePlanet next week!

I’m headed off to Boston (and then NYC!) next week for three days of free software love at LibrePlanet, March 19-21.

While there, I’ll be giving a speaker’s workshop – how to give talks at technical conferences. There’s not really a magical formula, just lots of tips and things to practice that will help you not only give great talks, but find excellent places to give those talks, be prepared for speaking to any size crowd, and have a good time while you do it.

I started giving talks at conferences about five years ago, and have been running my own conferences for three years. I still get the butterflies when I get up in front of people, but I’ve got a whole kit of strategies I now use to deal with it.

The workshop is scheduled for 3:30-5:30pm, and I’m sure we’ll all head out for dinner and conversation right after.

I’ve also got one free pass to the conference left, so leave a comment if you’ll be in the area and can use the pass.

Also, I’ll have some incredibly profane free software advocacy stickers on-hand to share. We’re free software activists, but we can still have fun, right? :)

Related posts:

  1. Off to MySQL Con
  2. PgCon in Ottawa – following people on twitter
  3. Open Source Bridge speakers announced!

by selena at March 12, 2010 03:52 PM

Cooking up a Story

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

March 12, 2010 Sometimes called the Doomsday Vault, built inside a mountain located in a remote area of Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is designed to reliably store the world’s remaining samples of important agricultural seeds over extended periods of time. Given the year-round, chilly conditions of the surrounding arctic permafrost, the seeds (no GMO’s are allowed at this time) are kept at an ideal temperature just above 0 degrees F through mechanical cooling powered by a single 10 kilowatt compressor. Should the power go out, the highest temperatures inside the vault would still fall below freezing (27 F), providing up to 200 years of adequate refrigeration, presumably enough time to fix just about any problem.

Designed to hold up to 4.5 million seed samples, the seed vault is intended to conserve agricultural diversity for future plant breeding and research. Crop diversity is so important to agriculture because it provides the pool of biological resources to draw upon when environmental conditions significantly change over short periods of time. Crop diversity is nature’s diversified portfolio, helping to insure long-term survival of a species by conferring certain strengths within a variety, under a given set of environmental conditions— for example, from pests, drought, or other climate change related issues—a survival edge over its related breathren. It also provides the necessary diversity of the gene pool for farmers and plant breeders to further refine. In the past 100 years, many varieties of crops have been permanently lost, no longer growing in farmers fields, nor saved as samples in any known gene banks.

Aproximately 1400 gene banks throughout the world hold seeds, (and for species that do not produce useful seeds such as bananas, potatoes, apples, etc. ); gene banks are not well suited for long-term storage being susceptible to funding issues, poor management, and infrastructure problems. Since February 26, 2008, the seed vault accepts seeds from these institutions, and depending upon the species of seeds, can safely store their samples for periods ranging between 1000-20,000 years. Some species do not survive such long storage, even under ideal conditions, and may only last about 50 years.

Currently, the seed vault holds over 500,000 agricultural seed samples.

Go To Original Post

See also:
Svalbard Global Seed Vault website
Preparing For Doomsday

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by Cooking Up A Story at March 12, 2010 12:00 PM

Lyza Danger Gardner

Book Review: “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen

At this point I feel like I could easily write a computer program to write a passable Austen novel. Sure, she’s droll and she invented an entire genre; she made social commentary where social commentary was otherwise essentially impossible for someone of her gender and station.

I’m just kind of done with Austen for the time being. Engagements and secret affairs and dances and going to London during the season. Families full of daughters. Country estates.

All good. All well-written. All in all an easy and quick read. The good guy generally wins. The good girl always does. The good girl then serves to deliver slightly heavy-handed moral allegory. Not that the morals are in any way not those that we should strive for–it’s just a bit of a pretty picture.

Highlights include the adolescent pleasure that the emotional middle daughter Marianne takes in the intensity of her deepest heartbreak, coming down with the inevitable serious fever after distraught, long, solo walks in wet long grass, moping in an estate’s chintzy, teen-pathos-eliciting, faux-Grecian ‘temple.’ Sir John Middleton with his sherry-fueled grins and hunting dogs makes a gorgeous caricature of the jolly English landed gentry.

Unlike in Pride and Prejudice, however, Austen’s jibes at the banal conceit of certain characters lack the subtlety that her later novels have. Funny, yes, biting, still, but so obvious as to be somewhat dulled in their impact. But, in its defense, the book’s characters, at least some of them, are flawed in some appealing ways: Elinor’s holier than thou moralizing, their mother’s mawkish mothery-ness, and Willoughby’s–well, I’ll leave it to you to find out about Willoughby.


Buy the books mentioned in this post from Amazon.com now and help me maintain my rock 'n roll lifestyle.

by Lyza Gardner at March 12, 2010 05:28 AM

Waxy.org

Kickstarter at SXSW 2010

Yancey rounded up our SXSW appearances over at the Kickstarter blog, but I thought I should mention it here...

On Saturday night, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and SoundCloud welcome you to F*CK YEAH! SXSW, a party with music/visuals by Eclectic Method sponsored by the nice folks at ThePlanet. It's at Emo's on Saturday night, from 6:30pm until late.

On Sunday 11am, I'm doing a solo talk about a mish-mash of my interests, focused around metagames — both games about games, and games built on games. Quite possibly the only talk at SXSW to mention Mechanical Turk, Desert Bus, Barack Obama, VVVVVV, and Metafilter.

Also in amazing panels, Kickstarter's own Perry Chen (Monday w/Robin Sloan), Yancey Strickler (Wednesday w/Allison Weiss), and Fred Benenson. You should go to every one. More details here.

See you in Austin!

 

March 12, 2010 02:20 AM

Silicon Florist

Lots of New Faces at Lunch 2.0

Yesterday, well over a hundred people gathered at Hive-FX’s office in the SE waterfront for a Reese’s-like Lunch 2.0 co-hosted by Oregon Film (@oregonfilm), Beam Development and Hive (@hivefx).

I’ll explain. If you read here, you’ll know one of Rick’s favorite expressions is the classic:

“You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!”

“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”

As with those two great tastes that taste great together, yesterday’s Lunch 2.0 brought together several communities, ones that don’t normally mix, and the result was good.

This particular lunch was the brainchild of Vince Porter (@vinbutterknife), the Executive Director of Oregon Film, who called me up about a year ago to chat. Vince’s vision was a co-mingling of the tech and entertainment/creative/production communities that would inspire conversations and collaboration.

Vince articulated his vision yesterday with examples of these types of collaboration (YouTube, Netflix, TiVo and 3D video) from the last decade that have forever changed the way we consume film and television.

He also debuted Oregon Film’s new blog, Oregon Confluence, which, like any good product is in beta right now. He and Nathan Cherrington, the blogmaster, are looking for feedback, ideas, suggestions and comments on their blog. Check it out and provide your thoughts.

In addition to Vince, the assembled crowd heard from Jonathan Malsin of Beam Development, the company that has transformed several areas of the SE waterfront into great working spaces, and Jim Clark from Hive-FX who said a few words about his studio and their projects.

We also heard from Skip Newberry (@skipnewberry), economic development policy advisor to the Mayor. He mentioned that Portland was answering Google’s RFI for the 1 gbps fiber-to-the-home network, a.k.a. Google Fiber for Communities.

ZOMG WANT!

Anyway, I saw a lot of new faces and saw lots of cross-pollenated conversations happening, so I think the lunch was a rousing success. I, on the other hand, was guilty of chatting with people already knew about SXSW plans. Bad Jake.

Now, if we could only sustain some momentum.

Normally, this is the part where I would suggest people attend the upcoming lunches, but there have been none announced.

Don’t fret, I’ll soon be announcing hosts for April and May, followed shortly, I hope by June and July announcements.

Stay tuned.

Now, the boilerplate:

If you’re interested or know someone who might be 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.

(Images courtesy Jim Clark. Used with permission.)

Most Commented Posts

by Jake at March 12, 2010 12:14 AM

March 11, 2010

Jama Software

Contour 2.9.5 is here. See the new features to help you control scope and manage change.

The key enhancements in Contour 2.9.5 are designed to help teams stay connected while effectively controlling scope, managing changes and tracking approvals.

New features include:

  • Baselines – The most flexible baselining feature available on the market
  • Electronic Signatures – Capture approvals to help with compliance standards
  • Change Requests – Track versions of items within change requests
  • Inline Editing – Quickly edit items from a single view to save time
  • Permissions – Enhanced management of users, groups & permissions

See what’s new and watch the videos on the new features >

Special thanks to our growing customer community for all your great insights, you drive our product roadmap. Let’s build great products!

by John at March 11, 2010 11:41 PM

Connect your requirements with UML models using the new Jama Connector for Enterprise Architect.

Introducing the new Jama Connector for Enterprise Architect.

With this integration, you can automate the process of importing your requirements, use cases, test cases and other items from Jama Contour into Sparx System’s popular modeling application, Enterprise Architect.  Connect these two leading tools to keep your business analysts and engineering team connected at all times on the latest requirements. Simple integration. Major time-saver.  Gain end-to-end traceability.

See the Jama Connector for EA in action, watch the video >

Integrations speak to a larger trend in product development.

A growing number of companies are taking a best-of-breed approach to the software tool sets they use to help them plan, develop and test the products and software applications they’re building.  The days of the massively expensive and heavyweight ALM/PLM suites are in question. The suites require big money, long learning curves, heavy IT administration – and ultimately get rejected by users and deliver questionable value back to the business.

Alternatively, a new breed of lightweight applications that offer the same power of the traditional tools, without all the headaches have emerged and are growing rapidly.  Contour is a great example of this within the requirements management category – even within industries such as aerospace, government and medical devices that historically were deeply entrenched in traditional tools from IBM/Telelogic.  The movement toward more open, collaborative and agile ways of working is driving the need for easy, flexible and Web-based tools.  Read the recent article on how to transition from small to big in aerospace for an independent perspective of this trend.

Built on open standards, Contour is integration-ready.  Currently, we offer out-of-the-box integrations with  JIRA, Jive SBS and Enterprise Architect.  We will continue to add new integrations based on the requests we get from customers.  Let us know which integrations you’d like to see next.  Let’s build great products!

by John at March 11, 2010 11:13 PM

Dyepot, Teapot

Heading to SXSW

Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up stupidly early to catch a flight to Austin for SXSW Interactive. This is my second year attending. I have a few things bookmarked to attend, but as danah boyd commented, the best plan for an event like this is no plan. Show up and see what happens. Because I like [...]

by Audrey Eschright at March 11, 2010 09:50 PM

Panic News Channel

Quick Note: Naked Friends

(I know the RSS readers clicked this one.)

You know Tim, right? Of Panic Support, of the Coda Slider, of the Panic Sale?

Turns out, Tim is in a band — Cabinessence — and they’re celebrating the release of their new record, Naked Friends, this Friday, 3/12. If you’re in PDX, see them at Doug Fir Lounge in East Portland — 9th and Burnside, 9 PM, $7.

Cabinessence Naked Friends

In the meantime, listen to the whole catchy, rockin’ album on their website – or pre-order a copy. And hooray for multi-disciplinary Panic employees.

Tim FTW! (For the wim.)

by Neven at March 11, 2010 08:11 PM

MyStrands

Retail Bounces Back in Q1 & Customers Storm Stores Literally

As we near the end of Q1 is retail starting to bounce back?

Based on the video below, which was shot on opening day at a new H&M store, it looks like customers are bouncing back and storming the stores literally!

In a recent Bloomberg story, H&M’s CEO Karl-Johan Persson said the economy will be “a little better” this year and confirmed that Europe’s second-largest clothing retailer plans to open 240 stores in 2010. “2010 will be a challenging year for the economy and somewhat better than 2009,” The Swedish retailer, which sells ladies’ denim jackets for 14.95 euros ($20.32), continues to benefit from customers “trading down” during tough times, the executive said. Sales in January rose 11 percent.

Signs from other retailers such as Walmart, Kohl’s and Costco are positive, hinting at increases in sales in single digits in Q1. It looks like cost conscious customers are ready to open their pocket books and luxury retailers are treading water but not for much longer. We’ll see what the rest of 2010 brings. Until then watch out on your next H&M visit you might need to practice your rush and tackle techniques to get that shirt or pair of jeans you’re looking for!

What do you think will be the outlook for 2010 in retail? Will customers continue to search for stellar deals and continue to hold off on luxury goods? Or is 2010 the start of a rebound where customers will start opening up their pocket books again? We’d love t to hear your opinion on Twitter: @strandsrecs.

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by Trevor Legwinski at March 11, 2010 07:10 PM

COLOURlovers

Calculating Color Contrast for Legible Text

This guest post is written by Kevin Hale from WuFoo. It was originally posted on the Particletree blog in Sept. 2008. Kevin is a champion of good user experience and brilliant interface design. As much as Kevin likes keeping things clean and reliable, he loves innovation. Kevin was also the kid in elementary school who ate a box of crayons for a dollar.

In the past on Particletree, we’ve shared some of our favorite resources and guides for helping the color challenged and uninspired get their chromatic deliciousness on. As a designer, getting to choose the colors is often the part of the job I like the best. However, there are times when it’s nice to be able to write some code to help make some of the decisions for you.

One of my favorite implementations of using programming to supplement the color picking process was done by the clever Canadians over at Dabble DB. All you have to do is upload your logo and their application will automatically pick the colors based on the information contained in the image and create a theme for their web app that will match the logo.

Dabble-DB-logo

It’s an impressive feature that helps the user focus on getting things done rather than worry over the details. While I won’t be going into all of the ideas they used to implement their feature in this article, I do want to take some time to talk about how you can get a legible contrasting foreground color for a piece of text when given a specific background color.

When we were working on the Wufoo Form Gallery, I wanted a way to represent the pre-made color palette themes in a concise format without having to go through the laborious process of making a screenshot for each one. After a lot of trial and error, the following format is what we came up with for the gallery to represent themes:

Form-Gallery-Theme-Legend

The problem that we ran into after coming up with a structure that we liked, was that the text inside each color swatch needed to have some sort of logic applied to it so that it would show legibly regardless of whether it was a dark swatch or a light swatch behind it. This is when we turned to color theory to help us out.

According to the W3C, when you’re evaluating your web site for accessibility, you should ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen. How does one know if two colors will provide sufficient contrast? Well, the W3C, being the fastidious folks that they are, provide the following definition and formulas to make what seems subjective very quantifiable:

Two colors provide good color visibility if the brightness difference and the color difference between the two colors are greater than a set range.
Color brightness is determined by the following formula:
((Red value X 299) + (Green value X 587) + (Blue value X 114)) / 1000
Color difference is determined by the following formula:
(max (Red 1, Red 2) - min (Red 1, Red 2)) + (max (Green 1, Green 2) - min (Green 1, Green 2)) + (max (Blue 1, Blue 2) - min (Blue 1, Blue 2))
Techniques For Accessibility Evaluation And Repair Tools

And so, if you’ve got two colors and their color brightness difference is greater than 125 and the color difference is greater than 500, you’re in the clear. Unfortunately, the formulas are only a starting point. They can evaluate whether your colors are made to be together, but they can’t actually decide your colors. Thankfully, the Internet is filled with a number of wonderful people that have tackled the problem head on. One of our favorite solutions we looked at was created by Patrick Fitzgerald over at BarelyFitz Designs. His CSS Color Class allows you to refer to colors using abstract names like base and highlight, automatically generate color gradients from a single base color and also adjust the contrast of foreground colors so they can be legibly seen on top of background colors.
2883081740_383d1ace67_o
While the CSS Colors Class is great and comes highly recommended by us (we’ve been able to do some pretty neat experimental stuff with it that we’ll hopefully use in the future), we thought for our purposes in the gallery, it was a bit too much overhead. Eventually, we ended up creating our own Smarty Modifier plugin based on code we found in the PHP documentation on the hexdec function—boy, do we love that community. Here’s the code we came up with, which can be easily be rewritten if you don’t use Smarty in your development environment.

function smarty_modifier_contrast($hexcolor, $dark = '#000000', $light = '#FFFFFF')
{
    return (hexdec($hexcolor) > 0xffffff/2) ? $dark : $light;
}

It’s very simple and very lightweight, which was exactly what we were looking for in a solution for the problem. The way the code works is that given a hex color like #FFFFFF or #CCCCCC, it will return either the hex for black or white depending on what’s appropriate. You can also pass in variables for $dark and$light in case you want the function to return colors other than black and white. In our Smarty template, we call it in our markup structure like so:

<span>
    <var style="background-color:{$bgHtmlColor};
        color:{$bgHtmlColor|contrast}">W</var>
    <var style="background-color:{$bgLogoColor};
        color:{$bgLogoColor|contrast}">L</var>
    <var style="background:{$bgInstructColor};
        color:{$ftInstructColor}">I</var>
    <var style="background:{$bgFormColor};
        color:{$ftFieldTitleColor}">F</var>
    <var style="background:{$bgHighlightColor};
        color:{$ftFieldTitleColor}">H</var>
</span>

Notice that the code doesn’t take those color difference and color brightness formulas into account. Basically, it crudely (yet kind of elegantly) divides the RGB color spectrum into two halves and if the color you give it is on one side, it returns one value, otherwise, the other. Here’s a very rough visual approximation I mocked up to illustrate the concept:
2881608487_87f5f859ac_o
And so while it’s not perfect, in 99% of cases, the function does what you need it to do without a lot of number crunching or programming overhead. Here’s an image showing off the function in action on a number of the themes we created in the gallery.
2882443376_719d550c7a_o
We’ve even recently reused the functionality when we made some upgrades to our graphing system in Wufoo. Now, our graphs automatically determine and use the appropriate color for the grid lines based on the background color a user has selected from their themes.
2881608453_0d81bae4a7_o
This way, the graphs are easy to read and follow even on a dark theme palette. It’s a small detail that we think makes a lot of difference in an application. If you want perfect contrast, then obviously CSS Colors is the way to go for you, but for us we’ve been really happy with the results.

Disclosure: WuFoo is a proud sponsor of COLOURlovers and we appreciate their support. We've reposted Kevin's article because it is high quality and in our opinion very interesting reading for our members.

March 11, 2010 06:46 PM

Techcraver

[Interview] MeeGo: The Inside Story

When MeeGo was first announced in February at Mobile World Congress, I was very intrigued.  What is this oddly named ‘MeeGo’ and what does it do?

Most folks are probably familiar with Linux, the open source operating system that is loved and embraced by hard core geeks and is the platform for many website and services you use every day (this blog is one of them).

For the last few years, Nokia has developed and coordinated Maemo, a Linux-based operating system for their Internet Tablets (reviewed on this site before).  Separately, Intel has been shepherding the advancement of Moblin, another Linux based project that provides a fast operating system for Intel Atom-based Netbooks

MeeGo is the unified project where Maemo and Moblin are combined, creating one operating system for portable devices of all types (including Intel’s netbooks and Nokia’s N900 and future Internet Tablets).

Interview Time!

Looking to find out more, I interviewed Peter Schneider, a marketing director with the Maemo team inside Nokia.

Q: How did MeeGo start…what brought Intel and Nokia together?

At Nokia, we have been involved with the Gnome Foundation because Maemo was build with cooperation from this group.   During Gnome related activities, our Maemo-involved team members got to know the guys from Intel.

After casual conversations and getting to know each other, we realized Moblin and Maemo share many aspects of the OS stack of the softwares.  We agreed it’d be best to not use separate branches of Gnome any more and decided to unify our code bases.

Q:  So who ‘owns’ MeeGo – Intel or Nokia?

Linux FoundationWe (Intel and Nokia) purposefully set up MeeGo under the hospices of the Linux Foundation.  So the MeeGo project gets technical contributions from both Intel and Nokia, but the project is ‘owned’ by the Linux Foundation itself.

Q: What are the benefits of MeeGo for both developers and consumers of portable devices?

For developers, the implications are huge.   Developers of mobile apps will now have a common framework in which they can develop and distribute their applications and services.  They’ll be able to aim their products are more people in various markets.

With programming languages such as Qt (pronounced like the word ‘cute), application developers can distribute an app on a Meego enabled laptop, Nokia MeeGo phone, and any Symbian devices.  That’s pretty powerful.

And for consumers, this benefit is present as well.  Presumably, you can run the same app on multiple platforms..look at Firefox as an example.

It’s now possible to run Firefox on your desktop, then sync your bookmarks and tabs over to your N900 for on-the-go surfing.  With the new framework..this can be extended to many other applications when they’re developed.

Q: What are the next steps with the MeeGo project?

In time, we’ll be rolling out the first version of MeeGo for a limited number of supported devices.  Keep an eye out – there’s cool stuff coming.

(As we have since learned, since my interview with Peter, that the N900 *might* be supported by MeeGo.)

Thank you to Peter for talking to Techcraver.com about the MeeGo project.  This open source project has quite a bit of promise and I’m interested to see how this all unfolds.

Post from: Techcraver.com | Craving Tech, Craving Life!

[Interview] MeeGo: The Inside Story

by Jason Harris at March 11, 2010 04:30 PM

Cooking up a Story

Seeds Of Life: Hybrids and the Emergence of Seed Monopolies

CUpS: Food News

Throughout much of agriculture, a remarkable span of 10,000 years, farmers were largely the stewards of the land and the crops that they grew. Seeds collected from one year’s harvest were selected, stored, and used again for successive growing seasons. As Frank Morton, an organic seed breeder explains in this segment of the Seeds Of Life series, the role of the farmer at the center of agriculture began to change with the advent of hybrid seed development beginning with hybrid varieties of corn in the 1930’s.

Hybrid seeds are created out of two separate parent lines, each (parent) line, incapable of producing the desirable plant characteristics themselves. Only the seeds of their offspring, provide the desired mix of traits, measured by characteristics, such as : crop yield; protein content; oil quality; disease resistance, and other characteristics. Most importantly, especially to the commercial seed companies, the plants grown from these seeds do not produce useful seeds for further use. Once grown, the plants themselves are dead ends; no further selection under the farmers control can be made to create better crops for the future. Giving new meaning to the term “free enterprise”, hybrid seeds can only be purchased from the commercial seed companies (those in control of the proprietary parent lines); nature’s inherent generosity, circumvented.

Frank Morton, Willamette Valley Organic Seed Breeder; Wild Garden Seed

As Morton points out, beginning in 1965, a period he refers to as, the end of the golden age of plant breeding, there was a push to bring crops that could be made into hybrids, onto the market. This is what attracted the giant chemical companies into the seed business, hybrid technologies, and later biotechnology innovations, conferred the special ability to prevent farmers from saving and reusing seed, making their investments in seed technologies, and closely related chemical products, almost full-proof investments. Land grant universities that formerly conducted plant breeding research under the public domain, and made seeds available to commercial seed companies for sale to farmers, began to shift toward proprietary research to serve private interests instead*.

This is all part of an unfolding story, since after World War Two, there has been a massive consolidation of seed, chemical, and related industries to promote global trade. By virtue of size, certain economies of scale offered protection against new entrants into the marketplace, along with the ability to control prices both at the buying and selling end of the value chain. This ushered in the modern industrial food system, one of the most concentrated set of industries in existence today, and to which, the current Obama administration Justice Department is examining toward possible antitrust litigation.

Although hybrid seed technology helped shift the control of seed production to the seed companies, the introduction of transgenic seed technologies with the extension of patent protection rights dramatically transferred the control of seeds to these massive corporations, the full implications, have not as yet, been fully realized.

As Claire Hope Cummings writes in her book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, whoever controls the supply of seed, controls the world’s food supply. Should such concentrated power be allowed to reside within the private realm, or is food so fundamental a right, only governments representing the public interest be allowed to retain ultimate jurisdiction over such a resource?

See Related:
*The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 2: Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity (PDF)

Related Posts:

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CUpS: Food News Throughout much of agriculture, a remarkable span of 10,000 years, farmers were largely the stewards of the land and the crops that they grew. Seeds collected from one year&#8217;s harvest were selected, stored, and used again for successive growing seasons. As Frank Morton, an organic seed breeder explains in this segment of the Seeds [...]

by Cooking Up A Story at March 11, 2010 12:00 PM

JanRain

JanRain Libraries and RPX Power Third Party Integrations with Google Apps Marketplace

This week Google announced the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, its online storefront for third-party cloud applications which are integrated with Google Apps. This is exciting news for anyone who is interested in gaining wider access to business applications in the cloud.

Applications in the Google Apps Marketplace are integrated with a user's existing Google Apps account through OpenID. This eliminates any burden on the user to create and maintain different logins and passwords for each business application.

JanRain’s open source PHP and Ruby libraries and RPX solution played a key role in enabling many of the businesses launching applications in the Marketplace. One JanRain RPX customer and Google Apps Marketplace launch partner is Get Satisfaction – the provider of a social CRM platform used on over 30,000 websites today, including Zappos.com, Microsoft, Nike, Mint, Tide and Yola. According to Thor Muller, CTO of Get Satisfaction, "Our existing integration with RPX dramatically reduced the time and effort to connect our application to the Google Apps Marketplace. It made the whole process painless."

Google was one of the first providers supported by JanRain's RPX, our turnkey hosted solution for third party authentication and social publishing.

"We are happy to see JanRain's RPX solution and their open source PHP and Ruby libraries help developers integrate their cloud applications with Google Apps," said Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise. "One of our goals is to make it easier for developers to participate in the Marketplace, and JanRain is helping us achieve that goal."

We look forward to continuing to work with Google and enabling more SaaS vendors to participate in the Google Apps Marketplace through the use of RPX or our open source OpenID Libraries.

We recently moved our libraries from openidenabled.com to github.com/openid. More information will be coming in the next few weeks about this transition.

by Michael Olson (noreply@blogger.com) at March 11, 2010 09:16 AM

~stevenf

“And I think it turned out that the Playstation 3 leap day bug was caused by the same clock...

“And I think it turned out that the Playstation 3 leap day bug was caused by the same clock chip that was used in the Zune — the one that broke every Zune in the world for 24 hours a while back.”

“What’s a Zune?”

March 11, 2010 05:47 AM

Jama Software

Aerospace Consultant recommends Contour as #1 choice for requirements management over IBM Rational DOORS.

Having experienced the transition from start-up to bona fide company, we can relate to the advice given by Ralph Ewig in his blog article for Systems Engineering in the Entrepreneurial Space Industry. Here’s an abstract from his article:

To achieve the functions of “team alignment” and “customer input capture” you’ll need a requirements management tool. When choosing your tool, the most important rule is to select a tool that accommodates how you want to work, not a tool that forces you to accommodate how it works. Aerospace industry mainstays such as IBM’s Rational DOORS software are not only ridiculously expensive, but have evolved over many years to cater to their largest clients – using exactly the kind of overly formal practices you are trying to avoid.

Instead, consider web interface driven tools which evolved from the people who know software best (the software development industry). Jama Software’s Contour tool is my first choice, exceptionally capable at enabling a team of engineers to stay in synch, while also giving your customer real-time insight into how their input drives your efforts. It acts as the direly needed inbox-filter for teams suffering from “design by email” without placing any extra levels of bureaucracy between the technical team and the result of their labor. In addition, it is highly flexible to your way of doing things, and all but guarantees that no customer input will ever fall through the cracks again.

“Jama Software’s Contour tool  is my first choice, exceptionally capable at enabling a team of engineers to stay in sync, while also giving your customer real-time insight into how their input drives your efforts.” – Ralph Ewig, 15-year veteran of aerospace systems design, chief engineer at Holder Aerospace

Prior to the article, we had not met Ralph, but appreciate his unsolicited feedback on the experience he had with Contour and his recommendation of it to others in the aerospace industry.  It validates the differentiators of Contour, and our mission of building an application that our peers in product development want to use and find easy to use (instead of being mandated by management to use).

I’m always curious about how people learn about Jama, so I connected with Ralph via LinkedIn and found out he learned about Contour recently on a  project with one of our customers in Australia.  It was a desirable skill for the project team to have previous experience with Contour.  How about that?

I like to refer to it as an entrepreneurial company’s “path of bonafication” where you hit key milestones with your product that indicate you’re on the right path to disrupting the market leader’s grip on the category.  You know you are bona fide when…

  • Global deployments with thousands of users (check)
  • Fortune 100 customers adopt your product (check)
  • Top government agencies adopt your product (check)
  • Competitors buying your brand as keywords searched on Google (check)
  • Consecutive years of 100% + growth in revenue and employees (check)
  • Community of users recommending your product on their own to others (thanks)
  • Professors and universities incorporating your software into their curriculum (check)
  • And, companies listing your software as a desired skill for hiring employees and consultants (check)

It’s an interesting theme that’s occurring across businesses driven by the Web and social apps.  Where the big, traditional vendors try to win by spending millions on advertising (brute force) versus the new breed of companies try to win by building innovative software that works and helps people do their jobs faster and easier (grassroots).  We’ll see which approach wins.

by John at March 11, 2010 12:05 AM

March 10, 2010

Silicon Forest

Social media startups and shutdowns: Oregon tech week in review

Also: AboutUs closes its Lahore office and Clearwire runs into interference.

by Mike Rogoway, The Oregonian at March 10, 2010 11:48 PM

Silicon Florist

Creative crossover day: First Portland Lunch 2.0 then dMob dLux tonight at PIE

I’m a big proponent of getting the Portland tech scene—a very creative group in their own right—talking to the more established creative communities here in Portland, like graphic design, apparel, food carts, advertising, craft brewing, and film—just to name a few. It’s always nice to see different creative types getting together.

Well today seems to be a banner day for that. First, Oregon Film hosted a jampacked Portland Lunch 2.0 that brought filmmakers and tech folks together. And now 3">3" href="http://aigaportland.org/events/dmob-dlux-design-tech-3">AIGA Portland will be hosting dMob dLux, a gathering of graphic designers and tech types at PIE, tonight.

So if you didn’t get enough socializing at Lunch 2.0—or you missed Lunch 2.0 completely—take some time to swing by to mix and mingle with the AIGA types and other tech folks.

What’s dMob you ask?

This is our monthly gathering for the entire Portland design community. Social interaction and networking is the core of this monthly event. AIGA Portland wants to encourage discussion, business development, and help foster a more dynamic design community here in Portland. Plus, with such a plethora of independent breweries, our choice of venues and beverages is expansive.

Like Lunch 2.0, the dMob gathering is free to attend. What’s more, this time—unlike other dMobs which often take place at a local bar or restaurant—you’ll be getting your drinks free of charge.

Free drinks? Interesting people? Getting more creative crossover going? Sounds like a great time.

The gathering begins around 6:30 PM at 1227 NW Davis in the Pearl. For more information, see 3">3" href="http://aigaportland.org/events/dmob-dlux-design-tech-3">dMob dLux: design + tech = <3. For more on today’s Lunch 2.0, wait for Jake’s forthcoming write-up.

Related posts

by Rick Turoczy at March 10, 2010 11:00 PM

Lyza Danger Gardner

Today’s the day (stab stab stab)

A courier came yesterday with my first package of Humira®, which will, if everything goes right, take the place of the rather cumbersome Remicade infusions, which required me to spend half a day in the rather grim cancer center at St. Vincent Hospital. Remicade also required me to take a strong dose of antihistamine, lest there be reactions, which knocked me plumb out. Not to mention that Remicade has some fiercely fatiguing side effects.

Humira on the other hand can be injected at home, once we’re trained. I say “we” because my saintly David has offered to do the actual stabbing. I like the idea and hope it does not cause him too much trauma. If anything, maybe he can release some aggression! We are due at the GI clinic in an hour to be introduced to proper stabbing form.

Regarding cost, Humira, at about $800 per dose, will cost about $1600 a month in total cost to the health care system. Remicade properly taken (every eight weeks for me), costs about $2500 a month when averaged out. Our out-of-pocket costs are about $350 for each Remicade dose. The Humira package, which contains about three months’ ($4800) worth of doses, costs us considerably less. Due to a combination of good pharmacy coverage and Humira’s own co-pay subsidy program, it cost us five dollars total. Even the trip to the doctor today to learn how to use it won’t incur a charge.

This makes me a bit suspicious as to the possibly nefarious ways of Humira. I have a hunch that they are offsetting the cost of the training, and the co-pay reduction program is obviously in their best interest to keep folks using the drug. But, I should not look proverbial gift horse too deeply in its mouth.

I find it humorous that the package says “Crohn’s Disease Starter Kit” on it, as if it were some sort of yeast or fermented substance with which to make beer or cheese. Plus, I don’t want to start any more Crohn’s Disease.

Wish me luck.

Some previous posts about my experiences with Remicade:

Humira on Flickr

Humira

by Lyza Gardner at March 10, 2010 09:12 PM

~stevenf

I am one of those Dock-on-the-right weirdos and I hate that my desktop icons gradually drift out of...

I am one of those Dock-on-the-right weirdos and I hate that my desktop icons gradually drift out of alignment around the screen all day due to the changing size of the Dock. So I spent 30 seconds making cleanupd

Download it, customize the timeout if you like. Do a release build (or use the pre-compiled binary in builds). Copy it into /usr/local/bin. Run it backgrounded from the terminal: /usr/local/bin/cleanupd &

Hey presto, automatic desktop snap-to-grid clean up every so often, using whatever grid the Finder happens to be using this second.

Uh, enjoy?

March 10, 2010 07:19 PM

COLOURlovers

Vintage Romance Lasts Forever

While flipping through InStyle's latest issue, I was completely and utterly taken by Christina Hendricks & Geoffrey Arend celebrity wedding (Married October 2009). I mean, talk about the cat's meow of going vintage for your wedding. Absolutely gorgeous and done to perfection! The entire wedding party was dressed full vintage.

Vintage_Romance

I simply loved the variety of style, design, and color. With that being said, it all still coordinates nicely. Notice how the female wedding party (above photo) display's with two solids ( in colour) and two prints (or rather laces) and the prints compliment each other keeping within the same hues. Can you pick out the main colour that ties everything together? It's purple. Between headpieces, shoes and lace, purple is the colour that ties this into a picture perfect balancing act.

Geoffrey's rusty-plaid suit looks everything, but dull, when combined with that sharp looking vintage tie and kerchief combo which in turn compliments the lovely locks of his soon-to-be wife. They have his attire topped off with a simple fall-flower themed boutonniere.

Lastly, check out the simple details of the chandeliers using vintage kitchen hand-use appliances. Overall, a nicely done vintage wedding using the muted colors and lace of the 20's, 30's and 40's.

Vintage Wedding Palettes From the CL Library

Vintage_WeddingVintage_Wedding

Vintage_Wedding Vintage_Wedding_II

Vintage_Wedding Vintage_Wedding

Vintage_Wedding Vintage_Wedding

Photo's courtesy InStyle Magazine (scans). Handmade invitations Evaafter Desgins. Illustrated invitation from Bride.net

by mollybermea at March 10, 2010 07:09 PM

Chris Brentano

Tron Legacy trailer

But not until December. Can’t wait.

by ctb at March 10, 2010 05:20 PM

Jive Talks

What a Difference a Year Makes!

A year ago today, Jive laid out some pretty big plans for leading the Social  Business Software space:

 

“Social  Business Software is the first new application category to appear in over a decade that delivers a real breakthrough in cost, productivity, and competitive  advantage. Jive is the first SBS company with a complete strategy for meeting the needs of Global 2000 companies and governments.”

 

We were confident in our vision for Jive and the market we were defining—but how did it play out? Our strategy had three key elements:

 

We couldn’t have asked for better. A year ago, a lot of CXO’s were still skeptical about Social Business Software. They thought “social” meant employees weren't really working! Now they’ve seen the results. They understand the value that Jive SBS delivers: collaborating more effectively with employees, customers, and partners; accelerating sales cycle times and service delivery times; and increasing engagement with customer communities and the social Web.

 

Jive won them over because we’re solving big business problems, and our business has grown accordingly:

  • We doubled in size in 2008, then grew another 85% in 2009.
  • Major brands committed to and added to their Jive solutions including Booz Allen Hamilton, Bupa, EMC, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Kaiser Permanente, Life Technologies, Manheim, Musician's Friend, Qualcomm, SAP, Scheels Sports, Sling Media, Sprint, StrongMail, Swiss Re, and United Business Media Limited.
  • We made our first strategic acquisition—Filtrbox—in January.
  • We expanded our Portland HQ, and added offices in the SF Bay Area, Boulder CO, Germany, and the UK.
  • We’ve added numerous systems integrators and interactive marketing partners to the Jive SBS ecosystem—exactly as we’d planned.

 

The market clearly thinks we’re onto something too. Last year, the competition we were leading consisted of a handful of pure play vendors. Now, big guns like Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Salesforce.com want a piece of  the SBS action—and more are coming. They know we’ve been right all along: that  this is the next great enterprise software category.

 

Jive has come a long way in the past year but we’re far from done. Here’s what we have in store the next 12 months:

 

  • We’re going to be aggressive. We will maintain our  leadership position and establish Jive as the premium brand for Social Business Software.
  • Innovation is everything. We will expand our product through our own organic development efforts and through strategic acquisitions.
  • Extend our reach. We will be working with more enterprises  through direct and indirect channels.
  • Deliver customer success on a grand scale. Enterprises are using SBS to solve big business challenges, and Jive has the experience, and talent to deliver value.

 

And if you thought last year was fun to watch Jive, stay tuned!

by tony.zingale@jivesoftware.com at March 10, 2010 05:08 PM

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Why Big Data? Here’s Why I’m Interested

I just had my 2nd conversation this morning before coffee about this fabulous Economist special report on Big Data: Data Data Everywhere. The person I was corresponding with asked me why I was interested in this topic. Here’s my answer. If this is something you’re interested in, I’d love to know what it is about Big Data that captures your interest, too.

What got me excited is just that this is a topic I think is fascinating. I’ll tell you frankly: I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.

How about you? Are you interested in Big Data? Where does your interest come from?

Related: Check out Ta-Nehisi Coate’s critical analysis of one of the most prominent recent examples of social media data analyzed. I’m still reading it, myself.

by Marshall at March 10, 2010 04:58 PM

Panic News Channel

Noby Noby Panic Wallpaper

Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy (the “roll stuff into a ball” game) and Noby Noby Boy (the “stretch a thing around other things” game), is an interesting study: he’s an artist in the traditional sense, making non-traditional video games, for a very traditional Japanese company.

Of course, you know we’re huge fans — we even improbably made a whole series of Katamari and Noby Noby Boy t-shirts together.

Recently, Keita and his team shipped Noby Noby Boy for the iPhone. What is it? Wh.. where do I begin? Take basic iPhone utilities — camera, music player, notes, etc. — then press them through the mind of a toddler, squeeze a couple drops of comedy, sprinkle a little ground physics engine, then coat them in pastel fondant. I’ll say this: the built in GPS function has the best music of any GPS, ever. Give it a try for $1.99.

Anyway, to celebrate, Keita drew the following Panic/Noby wallpaper for readers of the Panic Blog.

Enjoy! We can’t wait to see what Keita comes up with next.

by Cabel at March 10, 2010 04:53 PM

Cooking up a Story

A Important Case of Preserving Food Sovereignty and Avoiding Green Revolution Calamity

March 109, 2010; Don’t overlook Malawi! In Seedling Magazine, a recent article about this tiny east African country that faces big battles ahead with how it feeds its people, and whether it can forestall the pressures of “Green Revolution” style assistance from the international community. At stake a nation, how it can reliably feed itself, and to do so, without undermining its food sovereignty, and its fragile environmental underpinnings. Are proposed high tech solutions with required dependency upon high cost farm chemical inputs, and GM hybrid seed technologies, the right agricultural approach for poorer nations? Who gets to decide?

Go To The Original Post…

Related Posts:

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by Cooking Up A Story at March 10, 2010 12:00 PM

Cloud Four

Voices that Matter: iPhone and iPad Developers Conference

Join Me at Voices that Matter: iPhone Developers ConferenceUnbeknownst to me until now, Spring is conference season. For the next two and half months, I’m attending a conference every two weeks. I’m already looking forward to June when the conference gauntlet ends.

One of the conferences I’m looking forward to the most is the Voices that Matter: iPhone Developers conference on April 24-25 in Seattle.

Why am I looking forward to it? A few reasons:

  • There are some great speakers like Erica Sadun (who I had the pleasure of meeting at Foo Camp and is an absolutely brilliant iPhone developer), Aaron Hillegass, August Trometer, Suzanne Ginsburg, Erik Buck, Michael Daley, Joe Conway, Jonathan Rentzsch, Kevin Avila, and the list goes on.
  • The schedule looks very focused and intensive. It is focused on getting people up to speed on building apps.
  • It is only three hours away in Seattle so I get to see my Seattle friends and attend the conference.
  • It is the only conference on my schedule that I’m NOT speaking at. I’ll actually get to relax and enjoy this one!

If you’re interested in attending the conference, I recommend signing up soon. The early bird rates end on March 12th and the conference organizers gave us a discount code that they said I could share with Mobile Portland and readers of our blog. The priority code PHBLOGS saves you $100 off the registration.

If you sign up before the early bird rate ends and use the discount code, the conference only costs $395 which is a great price for a two day conference. If you end up attending, please say hello.

In the interest of full disclosure, the conference organizers have given me a complimentary pass. As a general rule, when people offer discounts or good deals to Portland’s mobile community, I like to pass it on. I’ve done so in the past for other conferences and webinars that seem relevant.

While the complimentary pass is unrelated to passing on this information to you (I would would have shared it regardless), I thought it was important to disclose.

by Jason Grigsby at March 10, 2010 12:03 AM

March 09, 2010

COLOURlovers

MAC Cosmetics' Spring Color Forecast. What's Yours?

MAC Cosmetics has released its spring color trend forecast, and all hands on the radar are pointing toward saturated brights: cheery, popsicle pink; citrusy coral; rich, reddish plum; and warm amber.

macspringforecast

hot_pink avilluk_lovers_red

plum_wine Amber_E28129

The pale side of each spectrum is represented as well for those who prefer a subtler attitude:

pale_pink pale_coral

light_plum peach_purr

What colors are in your spring palettes? Will you be working with MAC's jewel tones or are your sights set on cooler shades? We'd love to know how you're playing with and pairing colors in your wardrobes and makeup bags. In the meantime, we've got culled some of the community's patterns using variations of MAC's colors to get you going.

Madonna summer_wind

smoked_salmontancho_koi

bloom!ng_wallpaperplum_wine_buds

Amber_Inlay AMBER_is_the_colour.

Header photo from jungle mama.

by heroinepretend at March 09, 2010 05:40 PM

Silicon Florist

ActiveTrak (formerly GadgetTrak) lands first round of funding for thief-nabbing technology

One of the most interesting boostrapped companies I’ve followed during my tenure here on Silicon Florist has to be ActiveTrak (the startup formerly known as GadgetTrak). And honestly, I always saw them as a dark horse around here.

They have a compelling consumer-focused product that helps people recover stolen laptops and mobile phones. They get major media coverage more than any local startup I know. And they continue to pitch as hard as any company—they’ve presented at OEN’s Angel Oregon three times—I’ve seen. And yet, they couldn’t really seem to land funding. Until now.

Today, ActiveTrak announced that they had secured their first round of funding. [UPDATE] John Cook at TechFlash has pegged the investment at $500,000. [/UPDATE] And while an amount was not provided, they did provide details on where the investment will be channeled:

The round is led by strategic investor ProtectCell a leader in mobile phone insurance and handset protection, based in Michigan. The investment provides ActiveTrak Inc. capital to accelerate development of its enterprise and mobile security solutions, as well as provide ActiveTrak with direct distribution through 1,300 wireless retailers at the point-of-sale and other sales channels and opportunities.

This has been a good year, so far, for capital in the Portland area. ActiveTrak joins startup peers Urban Airship and ShopIgniter who have also raised money in 2010.

Here’s hoping more Portland startups join them in the near the future. And that those investors who have begun to dip their toes in the Portland startup scene find return in the current investments and gain confidence in the promise of what’s happening around here.

For more information on ActiveTrak’s products, visit GadgetTrak.


Related posts

by Rick Turoczy at March 09, 2010 05:17 PM

Lyza Danger Gardner

Mmmm, Fragrant: The dangers of the distillation season

With the early arrival of “magnolia season” here in town, I’m looking ahead to the year’s bounty in terms of things I can heat up a lot and force oil out of. Yep, it’s almost time to take the big ol’ Portuguese alembic copper pot still off of the shelf.

The great hurdle with distilling your own essential oils is obtaining knowledge. This is something you can’t really google. First, even owning a still is illegal in many states. Second, distilling anything but plant matter without license/permit/legislation is pretty much entirely illegal, and, though I give it to you on my Word that I’ve never made booze with my still, I’d wager to guess that an awful lot of people probably do, such that the group of everyday folks who own alembic pot stills who legitimately want to generate, merely, things that smell good is likely a narrow demographic indeed.

This is unfortunate, because mistakes are not always benign in this craft and I could sure use a strong guiding hand. Distilling the wrong kind of cedar can make your lungs bleed. Being a doofus about your condenser setup can get you exploded. The one time I was exposed to the master distiller (or whatever his title might be) at The Essential Oil Company (which, miracle of miracles, is here in town), I spewed out dozens of questions in rapid-fire demand, both annoying the hell out of him and also eliciting a couple of compliments as to the relative advance of my knowledge. Again, relative. Because not much of this is written down.

Here’s a good and typical story about how I might end up killing myself accidentally. I have a passionate love for Ponderosa pine, which has bark and sap that smells like butterscotch. I like to smell the trees. And they are great to look at, with that plated red bark. My idea was that maybe distilling the sap would give me some sort of wonderful ambrosia. Unfortunately, research led me to what it is you get when you distill Ponderosa pine sap. Turpentine. That is super not what I’m into.

As an entertaining side note, there is a species of pine, Jeffrey pine, that looks nearly identical to Ponderosa and often grows in the same groves (stands? Whatever.). If you try to distill the sap of Jeffrey pine, zut alors.

Occasionally the backwoods turpentine makers in the 1800s in California would mix up the two, “with explosive and sometimes tragic consequences.” Jeffrey pine sap contains heptane, a flammable hydrocarbon so potent that it was a basis for the octane scale in gasolines.

Sydney and the Alembic on Flickr

Even the dog looks dubious sometimes.

All I can say is, fire it up! It’s almost distilling season!

Sources

  • “Pinus Jeffreyi (Jeffrey Pine) Description.” The Gymnosperm Database: Home Page. Web. 09 Mar. 2010. .
  • “Turpentine from Ponderosa Pine – Industrial & Engineering Chemistry (ACS Publications).” Turpentine from Ponderosa Pine. ACS Publications. Web. 09 Mar. 2010. .

by Lyza Gardner at March 09, 2010 04:00 PM

Techcraver

Test post from N900

I am writing this post from the Wordpress app on a Nokia N900 running Maemo 5. The app uses Qt.
Nice!

Post from: Techcraver.com | Craving Tech, Craving Life!

Test post from N900

by Jason Harris at March 09, 2010 03:36 PM

Dorkbot PDX

Beginning Again

This is my first time EVER blogging so let's see if I'm doing this right.

I'm almost 48 years old. I started working with electronics just 7 years ago. After messing about with basic electronic circuits for a year I stumbled into programming micro controllers. Now the idea of building a robot of my own design that had been rattling around in the back of my head shot to the front. In the next 2 years I built 3 robots from kits. No new or novel additions made by me. But, alas, my ambitions of building something unique have been hindered in the last 4 to 5 years by one crisis after another. I learned what I could in the short segments of spare time that I was allotted.

But now....

Things and settled down. I finally have time to work on MY projects again!

I'm an now teaching myself how to get micro controllers to talk to each other. I picked up a Teensie board at the last DorkBot meeting. I've already got it happily blinking LED's in whatever fashion I choose. I've got many PIC boards built but I find those to be much more of a hassle to program than the ATMEL's. For the past several months I've been working with the Parallax Propeller chip. By far the most versatile and powerful chip in it's price range. My idea is to get lots of micro controllers to 'talk' to the Propeller chip. But it runs on 3.3v and the ATMEL chips on the Arduino boards run at 5v. To get two micro controllers to talk to each other they 'should' run at the same voltage level, and that indeed is the case with the Propeller chip. So while I wait for signal level converter solution to present itself, I'll get two Arduino/ATMEL boards to talk to each other.

Images to come later. Like you really expect images in MY FIRST BLOG EVER.

Onward into I2C protocol land....


by wbowers9000 at March 09, 2010 06:53 AM

Temperature Controller Board Soldered and Working

I populated one of the temperature controller boards, did some testing and then loaded the PID software and tried out the IR sensor. So far, everything seems to be working. I don't have any of the thermocouple chips to try out so that will have to await the next parts order. But so far, so good. I'll be happy to help anyone get their board built out and running.


by scott_d at March 09, 2010 03:33 AM

Panic News Channel

The Panic Status Board

This is probably the busiest year in Panic’s history.

This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!

So, with partial inspiration, Neven, Steve and I built the Panic Status Board. Take a secret, sneek peek:

What’s on the board?

The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:

  • E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
  • Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
  • Important Countdowns
  • Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
  • Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
  • The Panic Calendar
  • Employee Twitter Messages
  • Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!

Instant Pay-Off

Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)

We can’t wait to add more data in the future. Open bugs?

Implementation Notes

For the truly curious. Display: I picked the Samsung 460UXN-2 professional display for the thin bezel and lack of branding, airport-style. To my surprise, it had a built-in Windows XP Embedded computer (boo), which meant we didn’t have to waste a machine to drive the display (yay). We loaded Chrome on it, since it has a nice full-screen view — sadly, that meant we had to lose Safari’s beautiful text anti-aliasing. Display Mount: Hard to find a vertical mount! Wound up with the Premier Mounts RFM, and like it. Support Queue: I’m weird, and PHP IMAP libraries felt too heavy for just getting message counts, so I decided to do raw IMAP protocol calls over a socket. Bus Arrivals: this is using the fantastic Tri-Met real-time REST APICalendar: Steve used the PHP iCalendar library to parse our group Mac OS X Server calendarTwitter: feeds use Twitter’s simple (little-known?) blogger JSON service. HTML/CSS: Neven says, “This baby is all WebKit candy. The only images here are the icons. The rounded corners, the gradients, the animation – all CSS. Learn -webkit-transform and love it! Oh, I tried using Google Chart for the support graph, but it wasn’t flexible enough. Our little graph is infinitely scalable and stretchable.”

From start to finish, this was about a three-week project.

And no, it didn’t slow down development on [insert the app you want the most here]. Check the board!

PS: For one full year I’ve been promising a blog about the “new” office. If you can believe this, we’re still waiting on a guy to finish processing a couple of nice QTVR’s of the office under construction. With any luck, he’ll be done soon, and I’ll start writing…

by Cabel at March 09, 2010 01:18 AM

March 08, 2010

Silicon Florist

Reminder: Oregon Film, Beam Development, Hive-FX Lunch 2.0 is Wednesday

Friendly reminder, this Wednesday, March 10, Oregon FilmBeam Development and Hive-FX will be co-hosting Lunch 2.0 at Hive’s offices in the SE waterfront from 12 to 2 PM.

Hive is easy walking distance from AboutUs where we were last month, in case you need some geographical perspective.

This lunch should be interesting, since it theoretically combines several different local communities into a single room, sparking some unusual and enlightening conversations.

I say theoretically because you never know who will/won’t show up and what will/won’t transpire, but I’m pretty confident this one is going to be different.

And different is good.

A quick look at Upcoming tells me we’ve got a pretty solid number planning to come, including a lot of names I’m not recognizing.

Here’s a protip. With the Oscars last night, you have a ready-made conversation starter, sure to spark some interest among the entertainment and creative types.

Anyway, see you there. As always, if you haven’t already, please RSVP on Upcoming and drop a comment if you’re vegan/vegetarian.

Upcoming Portland Lunch 2.0s

Don’t fret. I’ll be announcing April and May soon, and I’m close to nailing down hosts for June and July.

Now, the boilerplate:

If you’re interested or know someone who might be 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.

Most Commented Posts

by Jake at March 08, 2010 08:10 PM

Cloud Four

SXSW: iPad Panel and Mobile Monday Austin

See me speak at SXSW 2010 (http://sxsw.com) I’m traveling to SXSW for the first time this weekend. I’m speaking on a panel entitled iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators on Saturday, March 13th at 11 am.

I’m looking forward to talking about the iPad. We had a great panel last month at Mobile Portland on the iPad that I moderated. I tried my best not to jump in and offer my opinion (sometimes succeeding better than other times). It will be fun to be able to talk iPad without trying to be a neutral moderator.

In addition, I’m going to be on a panel moderated by Carlo Longino of MobHappy at Mobile Monday Austin on Monday evening.

Immediately preceding the panel, Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design will give a presentation on Mobile User Experience Design. Barbara is one of the leaders in mobile design. Her book and blog are must reads.

The Mobile Monday event is only a couple of blocks from the center of SXSW so you have no excuse not to be there!

Finally, if you’re also going to be in Austin for SXSW, I’d love to meet you. Either connect with me via the SXSW site, Twitter, or contact me directly.

by Jason Grigsby at March 08, 2010 07:03 PM

COLOURlovers

Tomer Hanuka's Reds & A Google Monster

Tomer Hanuka, a New York City based illustrator and cartoonist, recently created some attractive looking color compositions for Australian wine maker Wine by Some Young Punks. The labels were just a taste of Tomer's color recipes, as I discovered his entire portfolio was filled with rich, emotionally drawing palettes and strong contrasts.

D268B8_fullsize

Fierce_AllureLust_Collides

A1E1D1_fullsize

Tomer's Reds

Screen-shot-2010-03-08-at-1

E19FEC_fullsize

What started as a portfolio overview quickly turned into a study of reds...

A7CC0A_fullsize
Koistinen_Rose
FE850E_fullsize
Mother
E97BB1_fullsize
the_concert_ticket
AB4356_fullsize
Red_Cross

Artist Biography

Tomer Hanuka is an illustrator and a cartoonist based in New York City. He works on a range of projects for magazines, book publishers, ad agencies and film studios. His Clients include The New Yorker, D.C comics, Nike and Microsoft. He has won multiple gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and the Society of Publication designers, and was showcased in Print magazine and American Illustration. In 2008 a book cover he created won the British Desgin Museum award as part of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary for which Tomer contributed art, was nominated for an Oscar in 2009, and won the Golden Globe that same year. Currently he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is working on a graphic novel with his twin brother Asaf.

Tomer Hanuka in the CL Library

Tomer_Hanuka tomer_hanuka

Google Monster

Asaf, Tomer's brother, created a nicely colored editorial illustration for California Lawyer about Google's plan to scan every book ever published and build the largest digital book store.

googlemonsterN-1

Tomer was found via The Poster District.

by evad at March 08, 2010 06:26 PM

Silicon Florist

OEN’s Angel Oregon 2010 and the state of startups and capital in Portland from Carolynn Duncan of Portland Ten

[Editor's note: Thanks to Carolynn Duncan, Director, Portland Ten, for her assistance in covering OEN's Angel Oregon, last week. Her recap and insights follow.]

This year, I was invited to attend OEN’s Angel Oregon, chaired by Angela Jackson, and the Oregon Entrepreneurs’ Network, and to write a guest article highlighting the experience. My hope is that you’ll get a quick download of the day’s events and outcomes, a taste for what the experience of being at OEN’s Angel Oregon is like from a blend of perspectives, a status update on Portland’s startup scene, and finally, that you consider attending and/or participating as an entrepreneur or investor at next year’s event.

For OEN’s Angel Oregon 2010, 48 companies applied, with 15 final presenting companies: Second Porch; DeltaPoint; Fuez; Coherence Resources; Matradee; Copa di Vino; ActiveTrak; Athletepath; Enjoy Life (Divina Sangria); Gamma Therapeutics; Green Goose; Kablooshie; MobSpot; My Home Details; and Zubeo.

Notable to OEN’s Angel Oregon 2010, is the introduction of a $25,000 Seed-stage track for earlier stage startups, and participation from Portland Development Commission and Willamette University Angel Fund (run by MBA students), both co-investing in the $195,000 investment pool.

As for the live experience of attending, let’s just say that private equity conferences are not your mother’s barcamp. Typical attendees include hopeful entrepreneurs, seasoned investors, and a variety of participants in the startup/venture community– incubators, government officials, press, lawyers, accountants, etc., and as such, crisp, dark-colored power suits are a dress code minimum.

My first private equity conference, which I attended as a bootstrapping tech startup founder, provided perspective shifts such as meeting individuals at the coffee bar who introduce themselves, “I’m from X fund; we currently have $785 million dollars under management.” Those interactions give entrepreneurs a useful reminder that the economics of the established business world operate on a much larger scale reality than does a classic garage-based startup, and yet, responding, “I’m from X startup, we have no revenue, no product, not much ramen left, and no hope anymore, thanks, ” makes for interesting conversation dynamics.

For a first time presenter, giving a public investment pitch can be nerve-wracking, not that most entrepreneurs admit it. Founders are hard on themselves before and afterward, critiquing every statement, rehearsing endlessly for perfection, clarity, articulation, and ultimately, to convince and win the investment. Whereas award winners leave with $25,000-$170,000 to take the business to the next level, everyone else walks off the stage, visibly let down, though true to entrepreneurial spirit, already parsing through which backup options they’ll deploy while continuing to look for needed resources for the business.

Ken Westin, founder of ActiveTrak, a software product that tracks stolen electronic devices, is a third-time presenter at OEN’s Angel Oregon, and attributes much of his company’s progress to the process and help from other entrepreneurs, peers, and mentors in the startup community along the way. “What Portland lacks in venture capital, it makes up for in community,” said Westin, who brought the house down, closing his presentation with, “We’re not just a technology company, we’re super heroes”.

Particularly where investment stakes are involved, and in the case of OEN’s Angel Oregon, $195,000, Jackson and her steering committee spent months orchestrating the application and due diligence processes, coaching and streamlining candidates presentation materials and investment pitches, marketing the conference, hosting pre-and-post banquets and social hours, not to mention general event set up/take down.

Investors met weekly prior to the conference, holding due diligence sessions for 3-4 hours, evaluating companies’ potential and current status in management, market, product development, financial projections, and exit strategy. Finalists prepared formal pitches as well as a demo/exhibition booth to display the product, with executive summaries distributed to all conference attendees.

OEN’s Angel Oregon also included a keynote presentation from Rob Wiltbank, PhD., Willamette University, who covered investment stats from previous OEN’s Angel Oregon investments as well as angel investing in general. Regarding OEN’s Angel Oregon’s track record, “33 finalists have generated $85 million in revenue, attracted $67.5 million in investments, had two favorable exits and employed almost 550 people.” In addition, Wiltbank commented that while due diligence efforts are disliked equally by entrepreneurs and investors, doing a minimum of 20 hours of investigative homework on a potential investment can decrease the failure rate of an investment choice from 60% to 40%, with additional due diligence lowering the overall failure rate down to an overall 35%. (If you consider an average angel deal to be approximately $200,000, according to Wiltbank’s statement, doing 20 hours of effort provides a potential $10,000/per hour in saved investment risk.)

But for those entrepreneurs who guesstimate that it is easier or faster to raise capital in lieu of generating revenue to keep the lights on during the early startup phases, Wiltbank commented that running a sales cycle requires an equal amount of time/effort as does fundraising cycle. Said Wiltbank, “If you have to raise capital to keep the company alive, it probably means you don’t have customers. And if there aren’t any customers, then what do you have?”

By the afternoon, attendees-at-large begin critiquing startups as ruthlessly as fund managers; “There’s no way they can make it to $150 million by year 3, not with their current sales pipeline, or with advertising as the sole source of revenue…!” As such, OEN’s Angel Oregon provides the People’s Choice selection, which incorporates the use of text voting, and allows audience members to vote for their favorite company, with results and percentage rankings visible on double large screens at the front of the hall. This year’s People’s Choice winner was MobSpot, cofounded by Benjamin Jacobsen, Justin Heikkinen, and Chris Wesley, launching this Monday and presenting at the upcoming SXSW.

Finally, after deliberating privately, the investment committee returned to the ballroom and finalists were called up to the stage, with DeltaPoint, Inc., founded by Richard Lazar, Lyman Potts, David Nason, and Tony Scaduto, for the Launched Stage track, winning a $170,000 investment; and Enjoy Life, LLC, founded by Maria Corbinos and Magdy Salama, for the Seed Stage track, winning a $25,000 investment.

Closing out the day’s event, Jackson thanked her staff and passed the torch on (literally, a brightly colored cloth torch), to Jim Huston, of Blueprint Ventures, who will chair OEN’s Angel Oregon 2011, and attendees participated in a closing social hour.

So my overall thoughts after attending OEN’s Angel Oregon?

First, that the startup ecosystem in Portland, and the state of Oregon, is no longer in the stagnant zone we felt we were in 12-18 months ago. We have become energized; things have been and are changing, and seeing the climate at OEN’s Angel Oregon definitely confirmed this.

I left with an increased appreciation for the macro ecosystem of entrepreneurship: seeing the fundraising process at a glance; the careful analysis by the investment team, the angst of founders struggling to rustle up the necessary funds to move the business forward; all of the many, many individuals and organizations available to assist Portland startups now and ongoing, whether or not they have or can even qualify for funding currently.

Even a quick review of some of the attending and/or sponsoring organizations: OEN, PDC, OTBC, Willamette University, PSU-BA, Babson Graduate School of Business, SwellPath, Jive, Blueprint Ventures, Lane Powell, Ater Wynne, OnPR, Morgan Stanley, White & Lee, Oregon Business Magazine, University of Oregon, Davis Wright Tremaine, eROI, Starveups, NedSpace, Portland Ten, Silicon Valley Bank, Stoel Rives, Capybara, Madrona Venture Group, and many, many others… they’re available to entrepreneurs, to assist startups in getting up and running.

So, if you’re starting a business, or thinking about starting a business, here are my two takeaways for you: 1) Consider applying for OEN’s Angel Oregon next year, and let the screening process assist you in streamlining your efforts; and 2) If you’re not already engaging with some of the organizations listed above, get connected, and get going! If you get focused now, by the time applications open for next year’s event, you will have accomplished significant developmental milestones (team assembled, prototype built, first revenues in), and as such, you may even be a serious contender for OEN’s Angel Oregon 2011.

Related posts

by Guest at March 08, 2010 06:22 PM

Lyza Danger Gardner

Photos: Your Vote! Best photo of my goddaughter

Help me choose which of these photos from last weekend I should make a nice print of for the parents of this lovely young lady (my goddaughter). I’ll print and frame the winning photograph.

 on Flickr

 on Flickr

 on Flickr

 on Flickr



Which photo should I use?trends

by Lyza Gardner at March 08, 2010 04:30 PM

SplashCast Media

ABC Attempts Brand Suicide

I have no idea what the 11th-hour agreement between ABC and Cablevision was last night to bring the ABC singal back online to 3.1 million folks in NYC... But I do know that this stunt by ABC has majorly pissed off a lot (millions) of their customers. The 'bad light' is squarely on ABC, not Cablevision, from where I sit.

Here's a quick backgrounder on the situation.

It's amazing to me that ABC thought that turning off the lights to 3.1 million consumers would be putting more hurt on Cablevision than on themselves. Really?? Someone in Disney (ABC) PR should lose a job over this. Or perhaps the entire team. What a brand disaster.

Folks, don't hold your customers hostage to gain leverage with a partner! It is on the Business 101 "Don't Do" list. It is also brand suicide.

Amazing.

ABC, of course, will survive.  Generally speaking, the companies further upstream, closer to content (the TV networks in this case), hold the cards.  However, ABC's misguided stunt could now shift some of the power over to the cable companies.

 

 

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March 08, 2010 02:44 PM

Cooking up a Story

The Art of Food Photography

Cooking Up a Story: Stories

The pictures can be tantalizing. Some even cause us to stop and stare. Join us for a behind the scenes look at a food photographer and his team, as they create sumptuous images out of fresh ingredients that seem to jump off the page.

We’re surrounded by images through billboards, television, magazines, the internet…the list is long. And since food is a part of everyone’s life, in some form or another, many of those images are about food. Some are blah, some are tantalizing, and some go unnoticed. But the ones that do grab my eye make me wonder and I begin to dissect. Why did they choose that background, who designed the arrangement, how did get that cheese get to look so yummy, and the lighting, how was it lit? These questions lead me wondering exactly what is happening outside of that frame.

I visited a food photographer’s studio to find out for myself. And boy, was it an education.

ed gowan cherry tart pie onion tart

The day I spent at Ed Gowans Studio, he was doing a shoot for the Pear Bureau Northwest. In my naiveté, I thought everything was done by the photographer. Wrong. It’s a team effort. Besides the photographer there is a food stylist, or two, and the client pulled up her sleeves and was involved too. Each food item was prepared from scratch on site. Everyone put their 2 cents in. They took as much time as was needed for each shot, and then moved on to the next. It was a full day. Food that is prepared for filming purposes are not intended to be eaten. Food photography is one of the most difficult specialties of commercial photography, getting food to look just right on camera involves considerable skill and experience to get it right.

Ed Gowans with Client Christie Mather of the Northwest Pear Bureau Examining Image Monitor

I feel a kindred spirit with people like Ed and his team. They’re not just technicians, they’re artists. While there are so many images we are bombarded with daily, when it comes to images of stunning beauty, and artistry, there can never be enough!

Recipes from the show: Pear Bread; Ed’s Tangy Eggless Caesar Salad

—Rebecca

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by Cooking Up A Story at March 08, 2010 12:00 PM

March 07, 2010

Lyza Danger Gardner

Photo: Beach foam

 on Flickr

Everyone knows that there is weird scummy stuff on the beach. Sometimes it gets opalescent and piles up in a way that looks like it might make a good desktop background for one’s computer.

by Lyza Gardner at March 07, 2010 07:20 PM

Site Theme: Fragrance

I like stuff that smells good, effectively to a fault. I routinely mix up cocktails of essential oils and in ceramic vessels and then set them alight. My library often smells like a forest or a savanna or a citrus grove. We own our own copper alembic still and distill our own smells, with varying degrees of success.

I want to explore a few things about aroma. Though I am chemistry-ignorant, I want to wrap my head around the various -enes that make things redolent. I want to think about pine resin and the anti-microbial tendencies of certain distilled substances. And I want to figure out what plant matter to stuff in our still this coming summer.

Keep your eyes out for fragrance-related posts, soon.

by Lyza Gardner at March 07, 2010 06:47 PM

Fast Wonder

Dorkbot PDX

Temperature Controller Board Final Design

The temperature controller PC boards have arrived. I was amazed at the interest. In the end, fifteen of the boards were requested. There have been a few people who have asked for them since the order was placed so I'll probably do another order of the boards in the next PCB order.

I've attached the final Eagle files to this blog entry. I've also generated a bill of materials and a corresponding parts placement diagram which are also attached.

In order to put the system together, you will need to make a few choices:

First you will need a way to control the AC to your heater. The temperature controller puts out a strictly on/off 5V logic signal which is used to control temperature. I bought a solid state relay off of Ebay for around $7.00 (check with me if you want a pointer to the same unit). The specs were 3-34VDC control, 24-480VAC load at 25A. Since the hotplate is specified at 10A/120VAC that seemed to be adequate and I've run tests with holding a constant temperature for several hours with no noticeable heat buildup on the SSR. Alternatively, in his original Instructable on surface mount soldering, Jim showed an AC control circuit you could build. He has since designed a PCB for that circuit and is willing to put some on the next PCB order if people are interested.

You will also need one or more temperature sensors. If you want the IR sensor, you need to buy the appropriate IR thermometer from Harbor Freight and do the modifications shown in this Instructable. If you want the thermocouple sensor in addition to or instead of the IR, then you need to have a K type thermocouple and buy the parts for the thermocouple interface.

The parts from the LCD/AVR section of the board are all required. These are sufficient to build an Arduino compatible (Dorkboard) processor with an LCD interface. This hardware will read the IR sensor. You will also need a suitable LCD (something like this 16x2 backlight unit from Sparkfun or any other HD44780 compatible). Note that the contrast control potentiometer specified is a thumbwheel style so that it is easy to adjust the contrast from the side of the board when the LCD is mounted on it.

You also need to decide what kind of switches you want to use to control the unit. I'm using an encoder with a switch (specified in the parts list) which provides a nice way to set the temperature but you could choose other combinations of switches instead if you prefer. The current code is set up for the encoder plus one push button to reset the system to the initial state. Once you decide on the inputs you can figure out what headers you want to populate. I've brought everything out to header pinouts where you can solder male header pins onto the board to use with plugs or you can solder wires directly to the board and run them to the switches and sensors. All of the headers are on the part of the board which is unobstructed by the LCD with the exception of the two pins for the thermocouple input. Those two will have to be right angle header pins to clear the LCD. There are also headers for both the five pin Dorkboard programming connection and a standard 6 pin AVR ISP header so you can choose which you want to use for programming the AVR.

I've attached my current Arduino sketch to run the temperature controller and a list of how I'm using the pins on the Atmega328 (Note that the current code requires an Atmega328 to provide enough RAM space).

The parts for the power regulator section are optional. You can leave that whole section out and provide 5VDC power for the temperature controller board. If you are using the IR sensor, you can either supply 3V to the appropriate pin on the controller board or you can leave the battery in the IR unit. Or you can build out the 5V and 3.3V regulator section and provide power from an appropriate wall wart (at least 6.5VDC and 200mA or so).

by scott_d at March 07, 2010 06:07 AM