BendTech

Jay Harlow, a friend and colleague of mine, recently created the “Bang For Your Buck” App as part of the “Design For America” contest put on by Sunlight Labs.

That’s a bit of a mouthful to start off a post with.  You can follow those links for more info, but let me sum it up quickly here:

• Sunlight Labs – A community of open source developers and designers dedicated to opening up our government to make it more transparent, accountable and responsible
• Design For America – A contest to make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public
• Bang For Your Buck – A simple visualization app which shows which congressional districts are getting the most out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)

Jay’s app is a visualization of the dollars-in .vs. dollars-out data for each congresssional district, presented as a 3-D map of the U.S..  Blue districts voted for the ARRA, while purple districts voted against.  The ‘height’ of a district represents the ratio of dollars-received as part of the ARRA .vs. income tax revenue generated by that district.

I can’t say that it led me to any blinding flashes of insight as far as how the ARRA funds have been divied up (Oregon seems to be in the middle of the pack in this regard, btw) but it’s a good example of what happens when government datasets are readily accessible to creative, talented developers.

Not exactly the kinds of “tech” this blog normally talks about, but any self-respecting nerd will surely be interested in knowing about Beacham’s Clock Co. in Sisters.  I found out about them via Kristian Foden-Vencil’s OPB piece this morning.  Apparently Ed Beacham, the owner, is unique among master clockmaker’s in the country.  From the article:

He’s what’s known as an horologist and Clocks Magazine calls him the only master clockmaker in the country who can construct not just the gears and springs of a timepiece, but the face, the hands and the entire wooden case.

They go on to say that his presence in Sister’s is beginning to attract other aspiring clockmakers to the area.  While I don’t think we can expect a stampede of wanna-be John Harrisons to come barreling down highway 20 any time soon, it will be interesting to see if this creates a new micro-industry here. The Pacific Northwest seems to have a knack for this sort of thing (I’m thinking specifically of how the fine woodworking and glass blowing/sculpture industries have evolved in recent decades.)

Anyhow, just thought I’d get this on your radar in case you missed the OPB story.  If you’re passing through Sister’s, I’m betting Beacham’s clock shop will make a nice change from the usual tourist trap shops that litter main street there.

Bend continues to make Top 10 lists as journalists misinterpret various reports from data collecting agencies.  This time Philip Elmer-DeWitt over at Fortune magazine raises his eyebrows at seeing Bend ranked #5 on Net Application’s report about market penetration of the iPad.

Philip makes a couple missteps here.  First, he ignores the ±0.9% margin of error on Bend’s reported 0.19% market share, which pretty clearly shows we’re only there by the grace of sampling error. He also blunders in his assumptions about how backwoods Bend (and I suppose other non-”large metropolitan” markets) really are:

it’s hard to imagine large numbers of Bendites making the three-hour drive to Portland to queue up for Apple’s latest invention

That little goof raised the hackles on several commenters.  My favorite retort comes from “Paul”:

One came down on an ox cart from the Cascades with the Indian traders. i defrosted it by the campfire. i use it to kill rock chucks so there is food for dinner.

Bloomburg Businessweek just posted their list of top 10 cities for startups and guess what? Bend comes in at #4.  The list was compiled using data from ZoomProspector.com, which has some pretty interesting stats for Bend.

Personally, my gut is telling me this is a bit optimistic on BW’s part.  Certainly there’s a lot we could be doing to be a better spawning ground for startups.  But Bend does have a lot going for it.  (I obviously voted with my feet when I moved here a few years ago so I can’t be all that pessimistic, right?)  ’Would love to see comments on how people feel we compare to other cities on that list.

BTW, Mike Berkley is attributing our ranking to Dick Luebke, but I don’t know the details behind that:

All because of @rluebke RT @tomturnbull: Bend, OR makes Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s top ten cities for startups http://bit.ly/aAP2XY

Anyone out there care to elaborate on this?

[UPDATE: Dick says, "nope, not me" (see his comment below)]

I’m typing this from my Macbook while sitting in a barge on the Nile. Yup, *that* Nile.  The one in Egypt.  I’m on vacation with my family and having a great time enjoying everything this country has to offer.  It is a land of contrasts – for example I have a megabit ethernet connection running while directly outside the window people people live in 3rd-world squalor. Mud-brick houses, subsistence living, the whole shebang.

One of the big differences between America and “all d’em fuhreners over there” is in how far behind the curve we are when it comes to the use of our mobile networks.  The first time I saw someone use a cell phone as a data modem was in Turkey while sailing on the Mediterranean.  We were sailing along a barren stretch of coastline where it never occurred to me there might be cell phone coverage, when I noticed the boat crew happily surfing the Internet.  At first I thought they must be using some sort of satellite phone.  But no, they had  simply tethered the captain’s phone to a laptop.  It was frickin’ cool!

So for our Egypt trip, which we’re doing with a small group of friends and family, I was a little more prepared.  The website for the barge company said there would be Internet access, but I’ve learned to be very skeptical about these sorts of claims when traveling abroad.  Too often I’ve found myself having to fiddle with network settings while sitting on the steps of some coffee shop that’s closed for the evening, trying to pirate myself a bit o’ WiFi love.  It turns out I was right to be a little skeptical.

When I asked the crew of the barge about Internet access, they handed me a little white USB dongle – a 3G mobile modem for laptops.  Had I been just one person with a Windows laptop, this wouldn’t have been an issue (in theory) – the crew said I could just plug it in and it would auto-install all the software I needed.  But I had a MacBook, and 15 other people that I knew were wanting to surf the web on various devices (iphones, kindles, blackberries, netbooks, etc.)  Trying to get each and every person’s computer working with this egyptian 3G modem… well… not the way I wanted to spend my vacay.  The solution turned out to be pretty straight-forward.

First, after using the crew’s computer to locate and download the software I needed to get the mobile modem running on my Mac, we had to figure out how to x-fer it to my MacBook.  In the U.S., the solution is simple: “Just use a memory stick”. But over here?  ”Just use Bluetooth”.  ’Turns out both our laptops had bluetooth support and it was a simple matter to pair them and transfer the install package.  And so I soon had my Mac connected to the net.  But what about everyone else?

Fortunately Macs have a nifty little feature called “Internet sharing”.  Instead of using the built-in wireless to connect to a wifi access point, your Mac can actually become a wifi access point.  After enabling this feature, it wasn’t long before we had a lounge full of people surfing the web on their mobiles and laptops using my little ol’ MacBook as the access point.  Problem solved.

Meanwhile outside our barge window a man and his son in a rowboat are slapping the water with oars and sticks, driving fish into their nets, exactly the way it’s been done around here for thousands of years.

‘Just got back from playing with an iPad over at the Connecting Point store on Franklin.  They have a couple demo models you can play with.  And as of 3pm, they still had about half of the fifteen units they were allocated available for sale, although they did sell two while I was there.  But… no long lines, no huge wait to play with the demo units.  They did say their Medford store sold out pretty much as soon as they opened.  (‘Has me wondering what that says about Bend’s appetite for technology in general, that.)

I won’t bore you with a long review – there are plenty of those out there – but here’s my short version …

Nice display, nice form factor.  Pretty much feels like exactly what it is – a mutant size iPod Touch (or iPhone sans phone, take your pick).  The sales guy was talking up how much faster the CPU is, and I guess it was better.  But, frankly, I work on a MacBook all day long, not the iPhone that I have collecting dust somewhere on my desk, and so the performance wasn’t really anything to write home about.

As a device to do work on it’s not super-thrilling.  Mostly because the keyboard is still pretty hard to use.  You still make lots of typos.  Worse, Apple still forces you to switch between number .vs. letter modes when typing, just like on the iPhone.  On the iPhone, that makes sense – there’s so little real-estate – but the iPad is a lot bigger and they could have easily put a row of numbers along the top and provided a more traditional typing experience.  ’Would make it a heck of a lot easier to do significant amounts of typing (or enter passwords).

At first none of the apps really won me over either.   Don’t get me wrong - Labyrinth HD is beautiful and fun; browsing in Safari on the crisp, clear display is a joy;  videos on YouTube are very watchable, etc.  But, again, I’m used to my MacBook (plugged into a Dell 24″ monitor, woot!) so at a gut level it was all very *meh*.  It wasn’t until the very end, when on a whim I launched the Star Walk app that I had that “uh oh, I might actually have to buy this!” moment.  If you’re a star-gazer of any sort, Star Walk is simply awesome! It is exactly what a star map should be, and the iPad is exactly the device you want it on.  The only thing that would make it better is real GPS support so that it automatically oriented itself with the direction you were facing/holding the iPad.

That is going to be what drives the iPad’s success. Not the hardware (cool as it is), but rather that for just about everyone there will be at least one app among the 1,000′s available on the App Store that gives them that “Holy sh*t!” moment.  So I guess get your butt down to Connecting Point, try one out, find that one app for you, and save Bend the embarassment of being the only city in the country that doesn’t sell out on iPads today.

Fast on the heels of Facebook’s recent move into Prineville, Google appears set to make their own entry into the rapidly developing market for cheap, affordable, green power here in Central Oregon.

I was hanging out at Thump Coffee this morning and overheard mayor Eckman congratulating Jim Clinton on how their negotiations with “The Goog” are proceeding. (I’m assuming they were referring to Google… who else could it be?). Anyhow, apparently in exchange for favorable tax and permitting exemptions Google will be opening up a 140,000 sq-ft data center on the site of the Old Crane Shed building.  And get this, in a move inspired by the REI-Old Mill building deal, the City Council is asking that Google restore the Shed to it’s original condition as part of the deal.

Anyhow, I’m on the hunt for more details, so if you Twitter-heads can help spread the word I’d appreciate it (short link to this post: http://goo.gl/xY5E).  And if you hear anything, drop me a comment here, eh?

While reading this SlashDot post on how Facebook has harassed litigated convinced a researcher to delete the dataset he compiled by scraping 200M Facebook user profiles, I found myself wandering over to a paper by said researcher in which he talks about how the data showed seven distinct geographic social networks in the U.S. One of which, the “Nomadic West”, he describes as follows:

The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities, it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county. For example, Boise, ID, Bend, OR and Phoenix, AZ all have much wider connections than you’d expect for towns their size

We’ve all kind of known that Bend was a bit different – that we have a pretty mobile population here – but it’s pretty cool to see that backed up by real data.  If you’d like to explore the map further, check out the U.S. Cities tab on the FaceBook Profile map.

(Hmm.  ’Think this might be a useful argument in Sunriver’s bid for Google Fiber?)