Oregon

It didn’t occur to me until chatting with Dave Hersh over dinner last Thursday, that we Oregonians spend a lot of time thinking about tires. Its got to be because of Oregon’s own Les Schwab.

Les Schwab is the local town tire chain store and they’ve been around for years. Their signature services is legendary. When you pull up at one of their stores, they run, literally run, to your car to see how they can help. The first time they do it it kind of freaks you out (”What did I do wrong?!”).

One of the other traditions they have is “Free Beef” with the tires that you buy. That’s right. Buy a set of tires and get a bunch of free beef. We just had to buy a set of tires for our Honda Odyssey and along with it came this box of pepperoni and a big ole’ top sirloin steak. I’ve been seeing these ads on TV for years and it only just occurred to me that if you’re from out of state (like Dave is) that you might find it a little strange.

One more reason to love Oregon; free beef with the tires that you buy … :-)

Chris Messina is literally a factory of ideas. He’s one of the most selfless people I’ve ever met. He also possesses the only reality distortion field I’ve ever seen that actually stays with you when he’s not around. Hats off to you Chris; the selfless viral reality distortion field guy that’s doing amazing things every single day. Now put him together with his partner-in-crime, the original Pinko marketeer, Tara Hunt you’ve got a recipe for some amazing things. (full-disclosure: I’m an adviser to their company Citizen Agency).

Originally uploaded by spinnerin.

One of my favorite of their creations is the concept of co-working. The idea is simple:

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.

Or, it’s like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes.

I had a chance to visit the Citizen Space a couple of weeks ago and I was amazed. Its an open space with desks, white boards and a conference room. Its shared by multiple companies. The cross-pollination possibilities are endless. In an age when we spend more and more time on-line, its amazing what having some face time does to the creative process. While there, I attended the Citizen Summit which was joined by 25 really, really sharp people with amazing ideas and strong convictions.

A couple of weeks ago at the Portland BarCamp planning meeting there was quite a bit of discussion about co-working in Portland. Dawn and Raven are leading the charge and I’d really love to see something like this take off. With the eclectic culture and big batch of 30-somethings in Portland, co-working would be ideal. We know for a fact that there are lots of self-employed hackers living in Portland as well as lots of people who work for big companies from all over the globe but choose to live in Portland. I can see co-working spaces in NE, SE, the Pearl, etc. I can see events at each of these every week that help seed the next businesses, the next ventures. Connecting smart people and doing amazing things is just a few mouse clicks away.

The other really amazing thing about these co-working spaces is that they could lead to a federation of spaces across the globe. Imagine being able to travel anywhere in the world and find like-minded technocrats such as yourself and quickly and easily engage with them. Mix in a free desk for visitors (or a nominal fee) with wi-fi and you’re set.

If you’re interested in learning more, head over to the Co-working Portland wiki and sign-up, join in and make it happen!

I’m not sure who nominated me (thank you nameless and faceless, whoever you are), but I was selected by Red Herring for their annual “25 under 35″ review of up-and-coming entrepreneurs (to this day it takes a spell checker for me to spell that word - so much for being one).

I was mildly amused by the cover (there has to be an inside joke on the lollipop action - can’t wait to hear it). I was much-more-than-mildly amused when I saw over at Valleywag they had nominated the cover as one of the top 3 most embarrassing covers of 2006. The results proved that it was the least embarrassing of the most embarrassing. I mean how do you beat Arrington burning a bunch of Benjamin’s to light his cigar?! Priceless.

BTW - It took me a good four days to find a copy here in Portland, OR. The irony is that my mother had found two copies at a Barnes & Noble. Apparently they were the only two copies in the Portland-Metro area. So I snuck over to my folks house and swiped a copy … thanks Mom! Hahaha! :-)

So I’m really delighted and honored. Thanks so much Red Herring.

So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice. (name that pop-culture reference, win an autographed copy of Red Herring magazine!! Note: you’ll need to provide your own copy as supplies are limited here in the Portland-area.)

Update: The full-story can be found here.

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.

I’ve had a lot of different projects, communities and people come to me and say “Hey, I want to learn more about OpenID and I’d really like some help on implementing it for my site.” Ask for and ye shall receive.

I’m excited to announce what I hope is the first of many Mash Pit: OpenID events. We really wanted to do an event that was more hacking than talks. We figured doing something like a MashPit was the best way to do that. We’ll have a good group of OpenID-savvy people here that day covering languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl and others. Bring your laptop and yourself and we’ll help you OpenID enable your application, site or kitchen sink.

The first event will be 1/17/2006 at 4pm here in beautiful Portland, OR and hosted by JanRain (full-disclosure: these guys are awesome)*. More information can be found at the wiki or the Upcoming.org listing.

* - Super full-disclosure: I work at JanRain … :-)

Update: Tweaked links to move over to mashpit.pbwiki.com.

Congrats go to Corey and the rest of the OSL crew for winning the InfoWorld 100 Award for Education.

With the rackathon humming along, the new data center on-line and lots of hosted projects, the OSL continues to do amazingly awesome things. I’m really glad to see them continuing to thrive and I’m sure they are happy I’m not in there mucking with people’s systems anymore * … hahaha … :-)

Way to go OSL! Keep up the great work!

* - I never actually “mucked” with anyone’s systems … more like fiddled. And I’m an excellent “mucker” BTW.