Jama Software won the Bend Venture Conference on friday. They were part of the 5 companies which presented business pitches to the 250 people who went to the conference. Jama provides an webservice which facilitates collaborative software product development.
The companies that presented were:
Gadget Trak was the winner of the wild card session where ten companies gave one minute pitches and was provided a slot to present and be eligable for the award.
This style of Angel Investment Conference has grown out of the activities at the Oregon Entrepreneur Network, which sponsors several events including the Oregon Seed , Angel Oregon (March 12,2009) and Venture Northwest (Oct 30,2008). This year, there are two new Angel investment conferences: The Gorge Angel Conference which as held in september and the Willamette Angel Conference (May 14, 2009).
These conferences in Oregon differ from the Early Stage Investors Conference, held by NWEN in Seattle, because the conferences forn an Angel Fund which creates an LLC which provides an award of a specific cash investment in the company. The awards range from $70,000 to $150,000 for most of these conferences. Jama Software was awarded $110,000 for the Bend Venture Conference.
There is a great write-up of the event in Bend by the local Bend paper.
Based in Portland, Oregon, GadgetTrak provides theft recovery and loss prevention solutions for mobile devices. Through our unique and... [more]
Out of a discussion happening on the Seattle Tech Start-ups mailing list and a side meeting that got called last week, the following list of resources was posted to the Seattle Tech Start-ups list. This is the list of organizations that I wish that I had known about when I arrived in Seattle. Its broken into Frequent Events, Infrequent Events, Entrepreneur support/educational institutions, Funding sources, and Web Resources.
Frequent Events (Every week or month):
Infrequent Events: (Every few months, it is best to find out about when these events occur from sites like MeetAtThePig or Seattle 2.0, or Gary’s Guide)
There are a lot of other events that occur here in Seattle which attract interesting, smart technical people : Bizjam, Start-up Weekend, Dorkbot, Powertool drag strip races, Seattle Scrum, Seattle X-Coders, Seattle Ruby Brigade, Python Users group…. Its best to subscribe to a few of the calendars above to find out about those events.
Entrepreneur Support/Educational Institutions:
Funding Organizations:
Web Resources:
DrupalCamp Seattle will take place on June 27th and June 28th at the Youngstown Arts Center.
Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) which provides some interesting features that can make setting up a group managed website particularly easy. The particular feature that keeps pulling me back to Drupal is the ablity to easily define "Roles" and have different rights and access to the website based on those Roles.
The key to Drupal is to recognize two specific things. First that much of the power of drupal lives in the different modules that you can load as a way to add functionality. The second is that drupal has been stretching to do new and innovative things. So it can be that there are features that come at the expense of backward functionality. Portland and Vancouver have already had their DrupalCamps, where many people gathered to discuss the details and to explore how things work. Seattle will have its chance at the end of the month. Be sure to register to help them plan for food and bring a freind along to help spread the conversation.
BarCampSeattle is happening this coming weekend on June 14th and 15th at the Adobe Conference Center. BarCamp is going to be different than the SeattleMindCamp which was delayed and seems to be working on a new location/venue.
Last month the BarCampPortland was a great experience, with many people gathering in CubeSpace and exploring different topics. As an unconference, you get out of the conference, based on what you bring to the conference. Being willing to bring some idea to talk about and share can make all the difference.
The topics have ranged widely from detailed discussions of Drupal or of the semantice of Rails, to things as far ranging as knitting, Women in Science Fiction and PeakOil discussions.
Seattle Barcamp is using Pathable.com to register people for the event
Take a friend or two with you when you go to the event and bring something interesting to talk about. The depth of skills in the room has impressed me, I think it will impress you too.
LinuxFestNothWest is an annual gathering of the Linux community in Bellingham Washington at the Bellingham Technical College. There is an expanded booth area, which has grown into a second room, with many different groups sharing information about projects, activities and products. There are some big hitters there like Google and HP. There are many local Linux groups with booths as well. One of the vendors that I had not heard of before, but who caught my attention was ZaReason which builds and sells Linux based hardware. They are out of Berkley working with ASUS to build systems with Linux integrated from the start. They were demonstrating some laptops with Ubuntu 8.04 on them.
Saturday also featured a raffle that is used to fund many of the group activities. There were some books and software given away. But some very nice systems were also included in the Raffle. I think that if you go next year, you need to plan to be there for the Saturday Raffle. There was a new building added to the event, which had some demonstrations including some robotics as well.
Silicon Mechanics sponsored the fine party at the American Radio Museum Saturday night. Fine local pizza, lots of cool radio gadgets and tubes to look at, and a Tesla Coil to play with, all with a great band playing.
There are several talks from all over. Eric Promislow from Active State in Vancouver BC gave a talk on Komodo. I had not realized that Komodo had been open sourced. Andrew Becherer from Tacoma gave an interesting introduction to using Amazon EC2. There are over 44 talks about many interesting topics. This year is the first year that they had a Linux Lab that they provided hands on tutorials. Several of these tutorial sessions were full to the point that all of the stations were occupied.
This event is drawing vendors from Maryland, Texas and California. It drew local participants from Oregon to Vancouver BC. It is a great opportunity to explore the current state of Linux in the region.
For people who can not get there, the IRC channel is at lfnw@irc.freenode.net
and there is a video archive being developed at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Linuxfest-nw-2008---btc-haskell-103
Nathan Kaiser at nPost is running a startup event in Seattle today. At this point over 170 people have signed up to come with more signing up as I type. You can find details on the NPost Wiki. There will be 5 companies that will be demo'ing the work that they are doing. They are new startups that are reaching out to the marketplace:
TalentSpring is looking to use the startup community as a way to build an example to use when talking to other groups. Take a look at the website and see if your startup activities could help with the process of exploring their system. It seems like a great show is planned.
nPost.com is a site devoted to entrepreneurship and startups. The nPost.com Tech Startup Job Board features opportunities with Internet, Software,... [more]
This weekend SixHourStartup is working on building another website in an afternoon. In preparation for this, a small group gathered at SaturdayHouse last weekend to get a tour of Drupal. Drupal is a content management system that is trying some new and exciting things.
On May 10th, the Portland Drupal Users Group will gather to talk about all things group in a fest called DrupalCampPDX. At the same time, the Vancouver BC Drupal users group will also gather for Vancouver DrupalCamp. June 26th and 27th, the Seattle Drupal Users Group will gather for a DrupalCamp Seattle.
The BarCamp process of bringing together interesting people and cooperating to come up with a good plan works well and is generating a lot of buzz. It makes for lots of opportunity to find people who are interested in similar things.
It is too bad that the time frames were not more distributed, so that Portland, Seattle and Vancouver Drupalites could visit each other more directly. I have learned a lot when I have gone to BarCamps in other cities.
Perhaps the issue is a organizational. when you go to the main BarCamp site, the first thing you see is a time ordered list of the BarCamp events across the world. I wonder what it would take to get a list of all the DrupalCamp events across the world?
Cleverset provides personalized recommendation based on the AI research of Dr. Bruce Dambrosio originally from Oregon State University in Corvallis. The former CEO of Cleverset, Tony Humphrey, gave a talk at the last NWEN meeting. He told the facinating story of how he came to the company and how they had built the company up. He gave a good description of the hard search for funding, visiting dozens of Venture Capital firms. In the end, he went through the analysis of how they decided to take the $10M offer from ATG. Tony was clear about when it makes sense to take outside Venture Capital and when the equation no longer makes sense. It was a fabulous talk. One of the other key points that is still ringing in my ears was to "Hire smart, nice, hardworking people". In my past hiring experiences, I wish that I had always followed that advise.
As a young company, Cleverset spent some time in the same building that I was in when I started my business. It had been part of the Business Enterprise Center, the local business accelerator. As it grew, it became clear that they needed to have a CEO for the company who could raise some outside funding. Following in the footsteps of John Herlocker at Smart Desktop, they contacted Janis Machala at Paladin Partners. This is a pattern that has worked before for Corvallis companies that are looking for outside funding. First they look locally, then on to the Portland Angel Networks and then often they move on to Seattle looking for funding.
Sometimes principals in companies might have ties into the Bay Area which gives the more direct access to capital from California. However, the natural progression seems to be heading for Seattle.
In running BeaverBarCamp it was sometimes challenging to explain to the uninitiated what a BarCamp was, how it was an unconference , using Open Space Technology and how this had nothing really to do with Bar (as in alcohol) and would not involve camping...
However, this week at SaturdayHouse there was an active discussion which got lots of supporting nods for having a BarCamp that really had camping. As the plans for this Seattle BarCamp come together, pay attention and you may find that there is real camping going on.
In this day of email, text messaging and twitter, there is a growing set of activities that bring people who met online together. The unconference scene with BarCamps and the IgniteSeattle events are large examples of bringing people together. In May 2007, a group of folks started getting together and visiting each other living rooms every Saturday to visit and chat and to work on projects. Eventually, things got big enough and moving around got to be enough trouble that they found and rented a space. They considered one of the emerging CoWorking sites in Seattle like Office Nomads, but decided to have a space of their own. And so, Saturday House was born.
Saturday House is in the SODO district of Seattle, in one of the re-converted buildings south of downtown. Each week, a group of people gather to visit, work on projects or otherwise hang out. A sibling group called SixHourStartup has started meeting at Saturday House on the second Saturday of each month. SixHourStartup tends to be more focused and more like a code sprint. Starting in November of 2007, there have been several projects trying to go from an idea to a prototype in an afternoon.
This last Saturday, I went to Saturday House to discuss some of the ground work for the next SixHourStartup project. When I was there, close to 20 people came by and visited. Some for a short time, while others worked hard on personal projects for several hours. The corner that I was in worked on how Drupal might be used for the next project. A good deal of planning was able to be done in a short amount of time. As we closed that discussion, the next discussion about Seattle DrupalCamp picked up. There are discussions and planning for a late June Drupal Camp underway. On the heels of that discussion, a group came in to talk about how a BarCamp for Seattle might be put together. A great deal of exciting activity for only a few hours in a reconverted building.
I'm looking forward to the next visit.
