Through snow, sleet, hail, rain and of course a fair mix of sun yesterday’s Startupalooza was a fantastic success. Organized by Todd Kenefsky with a whole host of volunteers and the rest of the Legion of Tech pitching in as well it was a great event and I got a chance to put a lot of faces with (mostly Twitter) names.
Highlights for me included:
- Hearing the Jive Software story (complete with embarrassing photos)
- Meeting Matt King and Jason Glaspey (the Unthirsty guys)
- Seeing @ahockley totally decked out with a lot of photo gear I wish I had
- Buying drinks/food for folks at the Side Door afterwords thinking the bill was huge only to have it be $360
- Realizing that Garage Games is actually a ginormous endeavor
- Getting to meet the Toonlet guys
- Realizing that gamers and people with connections to NYC seem to do well in Portland
And, as is the case at any event in Portland, there were the seedlings hatched for new events. One was an impromptu idea that Paul Biggs (aka @techpaulogy) had called #drunkgeeking. Say you’re married, with an SO, etc and they have gotten tired of your inebriated ramblings about technology. Wouldn’t it make sense to find a couple of other nerds you could get your drink on with and then talk about geeky topics? Instead of trying to organize it on a regular basis, why not just use Twitter + the hashtag #drunkgeeking to coordinate on-the-fly events. For example, you could couple this with Unthirsty and find a good happy hour, Tweet “#drunkgeeking in 15 minutes at the Side Door” and see what happens. I love it and am looking forward to it after Paul gets done with his three day pantless bender. :-)
While at Startupalooza, Matt King demoed a new application he’s working on for a few folks that were there. Its in the Alpha stage but he wanted to get the take of some folks that could take a hard look while drilling down into the actual details of the application. This could be really handy for folks if we formalized it. Pick someone’s office, an afternoon and choose 2 or 3 applications to critique. To participate you have to have something you’d want looked at in the coming weeks/months. You’d want high quality participation and it would be great to have a mix of devs, designers and (*gasp*) even a marketer or two … :-)
All in all I was amazed at the vibrance of the Portland startup scene … clearly there is something here, clearly we’re just starting to pick up the pace here … I can’t imagine anywhere else on earth I’d rather be working and living.