The last four days have been an exhausting sprint to get moved into our new house. Half the house is still in boxes, but I’m heading back to work tomorrow. The old house is cleaned out and ready for the new owners to move in tomorrow. It’s kind of sad to say good-bye to your first house.

Thanks to the incompetence of Verizon (we notified them a month ago of the date we were moving in), I’ve had no DSL in the new house and won’t until early next week. Tell me why the baby bells are allowed to merge back together? So they can abuse their customers even more. I’ll definitely be switching to Comcast for internet, especially with the deal at Comcast Offers. I’ve always done DSL in the past because it was cheaper, but with that deal, it equals out over a year. Plus, Comcast’s service has always been pretty good.

Came across Starve Ups today, an interesting looking group focused on start-ups. Here’s the twist

Unlike other organizations, Starve Ups membership is only open to the founders, management and core team members of idea, emerging and established stage companies. This unique approach, which eliminates investors, consultants, vendors and service providers allows Starve Ups to encourage full disclosure among its members.

I need to check it out a bit more and see if it complements the PDX Web Innovators and OEF events.

Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character? I got 39, but I have an excuse because I spent two weekends building the Innovation Map.

(via CrunchNotes)

Now that Portland is the best place to live, some people may want to move here. Because of that (but really because a couple people have asked recently), here are the various technology/entrepreneurial groups around town. This is by no means a complete list.

• PDX Web Innovators (cross between developers, designers, entrepreneurs)
• DevgroupNW (design focused)
• PDX UX (cross between designers and developers)
• SAO – Software Association of Oregon
• OEF – Oregon Entrepreneurs Forum
• IPN – Internet Professionals Northwest (now part of SAO)
• PADNUG – .Net User Group
• PDX CFUG – ColdFusion User Group
• PJUG – Java User Group
• POSSE – Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs
• PDX.rb – Portland Ruby Brigade
• PDXPHP – PHP User Group
• Internet Strategy Forum
• CHIFOO
• pdxMindShare
• OregonStartups.com – Great collection of resources for local entrepreneurs
• Starve Ups
• Northwest Entrepreneur Network
• nPost.com

There are others like Mac, Linux and PC user groups, Podcasting Meetups, Entrepreneur (general) meetups, but these are the main ones I’ve come across. What others do people know of or enjoy?

Portland is the best place to live. How do I know? Men’s Journal says so. Shhh… don’t tell anyone. Unless of course you want to move or launch your web startup here, I don’t mind having more of those around.

Tags: pdx portland

For all those sports fans looking to get an edge for their team, this is a great story.

In the days of MySpace and Facebook, making it easier to find you, I’d be extra careful if I were an athlete. You’re conversations might not be too private. Poor guy.

After rushing downtown to make the OEF PubTalk, I then rushed over the river for the first PDX Web Innovators meeting. It was interesting going to the PubTalk first because part of the vision I had for PDX Web was the ability for early stage companies to demo/pitch/present. Even after seeing that the PubTalk is built for this kind of thing, since it’s more general purpose entrepreneurship and the pitches are really short, I think that PDX Web can support that idea exclusively for web/mobile companies.

Wednesday night was a very rare night for me with two events in one night (more about PDX Web Innovators in the next post). As is often the case with OEF events, I heard about the Seed Oregon PubTalk at the last minute (I’ve sent feedback to OEF that they need to do better at getting notices out of their events, with Upcomig.org or something. I even signed up for emails, but still didn’t get anything about this.). Since I missed Angel Oregon, I really wanted to make this and see some companies pitch and check out the environment. The companies had to do a true elevator pitch, with no powerpoint or presentation tools. Out of the 5 companies that pitched, there were some interesting ideas. These were the companies:

Or I should say what’s down, because it’s been down all morning. But, I guess since it’s not even 7:00 here on the west coast it’s not really all morning. I’ve just been up for a few hours already, so it feels like it. I’ve been trying to follow the conversation about Minti and niche Web 2.0 sites (ahem, such as NetworthIQ).

Mike has some interesting comments about walled gardens. In general, I don’t tend to buy his argument about aggregating content from blogs and not forcing people to enter content on the site. I think it’s a nice addition to be able to do so, but it’s not essential at this point (early in a product’s lifespan, the internet as a whole doesn’t really get it). It does get me thinking about NetworthIQ and our other projects and how we should reach out beyond our walls.

It was a little over a year ago that I started seriously brainstorming application/business ideas. We had struggled to get going on our first idea, so something simpler was needed. I amassed a list of ideas, which isn’t particularly hard these days. It’s pretty simple to follow the blogs and trends to pick up ideas. Almost exactly one year ago, NetworthIQ was picked to be first. What’s interesting is how many of these ideas have shown up in different forms recently. Like what you ask?