Techvibes Blog

Today, most any site you encounter is actually—beneath the hood—a series of dynamic interrelated elements. Meaning, the page you see is likely a page only you see. And, what’s more, it may only be that page for that moment. Returning to the URL even a second later could result in an entirely new experience.

How to capture that fleeting second? That’s what Iterasi hopes to solve.

And for the past few months, a number of BETA testers have been using the Iterasi toolbar on a Windows browser (Mac is still in the works), to save a wide variety of Web pages—including all the dynamic elements—as usable HTML, forever.

Now, you have the chance to do the same thing. Today, Iterasi opened the doors to their public BETA for Windows users. And you’re invited.

[Full discloure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I worked with them a great deal on the initial announcement of their product in February, but aside from some ad hoc consultation, I did not participate in this launch.]

Strands, which to-date has provided musical recommendations for listeners based on their prior behavior, has announced the acquisition of Expensr, a service for managing personal finance. Expensr will be relaunched as moneyStrands, Strands’ first foray into recommendation solutions for personal finance.

Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is an online money management solution that allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. With moneyStrands, users can anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits, such as demographics.

If I had to pick a word-of-the-day for Portland tech today, it would be easy. Today, that word would be “OpenID.” (Okay, so it’s not really word, but you know what I mean.)

Why OpenID? Well, many of us around the Portland tech scene recognize that Portland has something special when it comes to OpenID. But it’s not often that we have day with so much OpenID stuff happening.

Today, Portland was OpenID crazy:

1. JanRain announced the launch of their OpenID ID Selector, a widget which brings OpenID out of its geeky hallows and into a more mainstream application.
2. The new Portland-based spinoff of Vidoop, ConfIdent Technologies, announced a major partnership with three leading OpenID providers.
3. David Recordon, one of the original developers of OpenID, was in Portland, hosting a geek lunch.

All of which led Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger at ReadWriteWeb, to state:

Already the home of the inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham), the initiator of the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds), a boatload of RSS and OpenSource-heads, Portland Oregon is also becoming a hotbed of OpenID work.

TwitterLocal, the service (formerly known as TwitterWhere) that allows you to grab an RSS feed of all the Twitter users for a given geographic area—like Portland for example—has just released a “Leader Board” that ranks the top 30 cities by Twitter use.

The service uses a rolling 24-hour snapshot of Twitter use, reordering the leaders accordingly. So who’s leading whom right now is likely quite different from what you saw on the TwitterLocal Leader Board the last time you looked.

TwitterLocal is the creation of local map-savant, Matt King, a ridiculously productive developer with a knack for twisting mapping APIs to his creative ends.