BendTech

From Thomas L. Friedman’s recent, So Much Fun. So Irrelevant.:

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future.

There’s weeks worth of conversation about Central Oregon’s tech ecosystem wrapped up in that one quote!  What’s crazy is I honestly don’t know how we stack up.  We have a thriving community college, but only a nascent 4-year university program.  We have an educated populace, but most of them are too intent on their Real Job to have much of a presence.  We have a dynamic business community, depending on how you define “dynamic”.  We have one or more first-rate ISPs, but are they in the “fastest broadband on earth” category?  And then there’s the potential c-c-combo breaker of Facebook (+ other???) datacenters popping up in our backyard.

So much progress, so much yet to come.

Chile has been making headlines recently with Start Up Chile, a government backed initiative to attract foreign startups and investors. .   Recently Arnon Kohavi of Yarden VC spent 6 months in Chile in an attempt to build out a $40M fund.

As always, I see a lot of parallels between this sort of thing and our humble efforts at bootstrapping the Central Oregon startup scene.   Which is why I find Mr. Kohavi’s interview with The Next Web interesting.  He talks about what he learned and why he eventually decided to pull out. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy hell, if this doesn’t qualify as local tech blog news, I don’t know what does!

Local hacker, Timmy Crawford has put up ConePatrol.com, a site that lets you sign up for SMS notifications when Bachelor gets new powder.  So sweet!

I just signed up for alerts when it snows 4″ or more. (And you know what they say about a guy and his powder notifications … )

Just found (and instantly fell in love with) walkscore.com. Rates any location based on proximity of the nearest park, library, coffee shop, bank, etc. For example, downtown Bend is a “Walker’s Paradise”  at 92/100 points, while (interestingly) Northwest Crossing is “Car Dependent” with only 49/100.

Any of you NWX residents care to agree with or dispute that?

The “commute” tab provides good info about walk/bike/drive times, including elevation profiles, which I always love to see.

An light-yet-thought-provoking read for entrepreneurs, The 10 Mistakes I’ve Made So You Don’t Have To.

Statesman.com reports that 30 CEOs from Austin are gathering in the Bay Area to recruit technical talent.  Interesting proposition.

This is hardly a new idea – recruiting Bay Area workers to come  (in our case) to Bend.  But I’ve always been somewhat skeptical.  It’s a tough sell, although it does happen.  As I recently told Lloyd Fasset, CEO of Azteria, you have to find people who place an exceptionally high value on the one thing Bend offers: quality of living.  And even then, you have to sell them on Bend, from among all the other communities that offer similar value propositions; Aspen, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Nashville… it’s not a short list.

‘Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s an uphill battle for sure.  Hat’s off to the Austin crew for doing something innovative.  If nothing else, they’ll get some good press and raise awareness, so it’s worth a shot.

‘Just had this conference brought to my attention.  Early bird rates apply until September 19th.

If this is something you’d attend, I’d love to get your take on this.  I generally steer clear of the world of formal QA methodologies, so I don’t have a good feel for the quality of the presenters and program here.  Drop a comment and let me know what you think.

First, LinkedIn has finally figured out that Bend isn’t Eugene (yay!).  Of course, they aren’t retroactively updating profiles, so even though you probably put your Bend zipcode into your profile, you’ll still be listed as being in the “Eugene, OR Area”.  To remedy this, log into LinkedIn and edit your profile.  In the location area you should see two options, one for Eugene and one for Bend.  Select Bend and Save, and you’ll be good to go.

Unrelated to the above, this post by Peter Knego on age demographics on Stack Overflow (the premier Q & A site for software developers) is kinda interesting.  Especially given (my purely subjective opinion) how we lean toward more “seasoned” professionals around here.  The title, “Developers Get Better With Age”, is a tad misleading since I think the “better” is subject to interpretation.   Regardless, this puts some interesting numbers on a phenomenon any “seasoned” software developer is surely sensitive to (including yours truely, who moves one tick to the right on that graph today!)

Hey gang,  if you use WordPress, or are interested in learning about this mighty fine blogging software then you’ll want to check out the new WordPress & Beer meetup.  The first meeting is this Monday evening at 6pm, at TechSpaceBend (in The Old Cigar Building)

Don’t be put off by the $2 admission, btw – at the end of the meetup, people vote on who gave the best advice/tip/presentation. Winner gets the $$$!

[In case you haven't noticed, I haven't had a lot of time to blog here lately.  So this is my attempt at banging something out that is a) relevant and b) quick and to the point.  A theme I hope to continue...]

“Mobile + Location Aware” are the buzzwords du jour.  A year or two ago, this is what had Foursquare on everyone’s radar.  So when I saw this Mashable article on Top 5 Foursquare Mistakes Committed by Small Businesses, two things immediately came to mind.

The first was, “What would my buddy James over at The Social Business think?”  (and, yes, that’s a bit of a shameless plug, but if you’re a small business owner here in Central Oregon, struggling with the ever-changing landscape of social marketing, James is a great resource.)  The second was, “Isn’t the #1 mistake wasting time worrying about FourSquare?”

Admittedly, I have little/no interest in Foursquare.  ’Never particularly got into that scene, nor do I plan to.  But it does seem like there’s been a some fal off in the buzz on this front.  And data from Alexa seems to confirm that:

Maybe it’s just me, but if I were a small 1-5 person business, I’d focus my efforts where I’d get the most bang for the buck: Twitter, Facebook (who I work for, admittedly), Google…  FourSquare would pretty far down my list.

Thoughts?