The PDX Mojo: Open Source Finding its Stride

I had dinner with a good friend the other night and we started out at the Backstage which is a bar run by the McMenamin’s brothers. I can’t describe the coolness factor of this place. 80 foot ceilings?! Are you kidding me?! The McMenamin’s turn everything they touch to gold.

Stepping out into the blustery night air, we were greeted with Hawthorne Blvd in all of its night-time glory. Lined with shops, cafes, bars and restaurants its an extremely vibrant neighborhood. This must be an anomaly, right? But over to Belmont or further across town to the Pearl or NE to Sellwood to the South Waterfront its vibrant. No strip malls, no chain stores. Local, local, local. And the food is good. The beer is amazing. The spirits warm your belly. And we even make our own fuel here. What’s the story with this place?!

Portland Skyline

Originally uploaded by Infinite Wilderness.

Portland, OR has seen an influx of 25-35 year olds that is really changing the landscape of the city. Portland is an extremely livable city. Its affordable. The climate is mild (that’s an Oregonian’s way of saying ‘at least its only rain and not 4 months of snow’). Its beautiful (see insert). Its close to the ocean and the mountains. And its got *life*.

Its this livable environment that has attracted a large cadre of open source developers who choose to live locally and develop globally. There are all kinds of linux kernel hackers here. The Open Source Lab and the OSDL are here. IBM has a bunch of open source developers here. Intel. Informix. Ruby developers. Perl hackers. Python guys/gals. You name it, we’ve got a little bit of everything. Out of this eco-system come some really amazing companies that are starting to do some cool things.

Within the US, the two cities I think could most easily be turned into new silicon valleys are Boulder and Portland.
- Paul Graham

Its not about building the next Silicon Valley. The trends we’re seeing in Portland are reflected in the businesses that are starting up here. Jive Software started things off when they moved here a few years ago from New York. They wanted something livable and they got it. Now they are 30+ people and growing strong. No longer a startup, these guys are 100% growth stage and poised to do some great things.

Platial is a great Web 2.0 company. Building your own personal atlas. Mashup city. Di-Ann’s company is firing on all pistons and they are doing something insanely cool. Enabling users to annotate their own maps and share them with the world.

Rael recently left O’Reilly Media to start his own company and they just launched their first product a couple of weeks ago. Stikkit is another Web 2.0 play that helps you organize your daily life and make it easy to share with your friends, family or co-workers. Again, another amazing product that is focused on doing “something good” for its users.

And I wouldn’t be my shameless self if I didn’t plug my company. We’re working on a single sign-on technology for the Internet called OpenID. Its simple. Its easy to use. Easy to setup. Most importantly, its decentralized. Anybody can use it and it empowers a whole new set of services to exist on the Internet. Extremely disruptive by putting the user at the center of the equation OpenID is about doing “the right thing” when it comes to digital identity.

Brian Jamison heads up a great local company called OpenSourcery. They are a consulting firm that helps companies, non-profits and schools take control of the applications they use. They do this with open source. Brian’s company is growing like gangbusters and are looking to have a great year in 2007.

Just this week I got wind of yet-another-startup. SplashCast is a media syndication service and just this week they picked up former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick to be the director of content. I’m expecting some great things out of these folks when they launch in January.

Almost every single one of these companies has an open source slant to them but its not core to the business. They use the tools and paradigms that have been enabled by open source to help build their businesses. Each and every one has a central theme of “doing the right thing” for the users and helping them do more than they ever could. Couple that with the Portland way-of-life and you’ve got a recipe for some amazing, amazing things to happen.

Watch out world; 2007 will be known as the year when Portland puts itself on the tech map for good.