Portland has gone acquisition crazy. Why? After surviving a lean year, there’s lots of good affordable technology out there. And that means that Portland-based businesses are snapping it up or other businesses are looking to Portland products to augment their own offerings.
And today, it got even more Portlandy. You see, with AboutUs announcing the acquisition of JanRain’s Jyte, Portland products are being acquired by Portland companies. Talk about shopping local.
Jyte isn’t a product I’ve covered much here. (In fact, I only found one mention in an OpenID roundup.) It was in JanRain’s portfolio of products but it wasn’t heavily promoted. In essence, it provided an interesting service—allowing users to make claims which others could refute or support—but it always seemed like it was more of a demo for JanRain’s identity credential capabilities.
Wait a second. What’s that look on your face? Oh. I’m sorry. What is Jyte?
Well, according to Ray King, CEO of AboutUs:
On Jyte anyone can toss out a claim, and the Jyte community opines with votes, comments and related claims. It’s a great way to validate—or invalidate!—your thoughts, and get unabashed feedback from both people you know and total strangers.
Now with AboutUs picking Jyte up, things get a little more interesting. Why? Because the kind of reputation and ranking that Jyte handles is very much in the vein of the lists and rankings that AboutUs offers.
“JanRain has developed some interesting technology on Jyte that’s adjacent to our technology,” said Ray in a press release. “We believe it will be useful to us in future product development.”
I, for one, can’t wait to see how they incorporate Jyte into the AboutUs world. It could be really interesting. And if you feel the same way, maybe you’d like to work on that whole integration thing? I mean, AboutUs is looking to hire someone with some Ruby and Rails chops.
Oh. And on a tangential note, there’s some other business taking place between JanRain and AboutUs, as well. Seems that AboutUs is going to be implementing JanRain RPX to make creating accounts and using the AboutUs site even easier, too.
And that’s good news for all of us.
For more information, see the AboutUs blog post on the Jyte acquisition. For on more on the functionality AboutUs is gaining, visit Jyte. And to get a feel for what AboutUs does, feel free to muck with the Silicon Florist page on AboutUs.
AboutUs is a wiki for and about businesses and organizations, containing millions of editable pages about websites as well as other community... [more]
JanRain has been a recognized leader and catalyst driving the OpenID market forward since 2005. While providing OpenID solutions for both consumers... [more]
Rick Turoczy
Rick Turoczy has helped Portland-area startups with traditional and Web-based communications activities for more than a dozen years–from spectacular dotcom IPOs to working with some of the best and brightest Web companies in Portland, today. A blogger for nearly a decade, Rick currently covers the startup tech scene throughout the Silicon Forest on his blog, Silicon Florist.
