PDX Web Innovators

It's become a tradition for me to look back at the year in Portland Web Innovators meetings. We try to get fun, conversation-provoking topics and speakers. I think we did a good job in 2009.

One of the changes versus other years (you can see my 2007 and 2008 recaps) is that we consciously started to move to more business/startup topics, but still keep things focused on the web. Other events, like Refresh Portland (with whom we partnered in November), are covering design. And the user groups have always covered the really techy topics better.

This was also a full year of Demolicious, the quarterly event to see what others are working on. I'm looking forward to more of these in 2010, starting with our very next meeting in January.

A Look Back At 2009

• January, Demolicious
  An Open Laszlo Project, Foodisms, Mugasha and Sunago
• February, Let's Make Money
  Portland Ten's Carolynn Duncan talked about bootstrapping and revenue models. Always one to get people involved, she led attendees in a startup exercise, as well.
• March, Firefox 3.1: The Future Was Yesterday
  Mozilla developer Dietrich Ayala talked about features of the new Firefox, upcoming versions and showed some great visions of what it might look like in the near future.
• April, Demolicious
  I Need to Read This, MioWorks, Black Tonic, Avatari, and VoteFair ranking.
• May, The Story of Rumblefish
  Paul Anthony talked about his business, which invented "sonic branding" and created a music licensing service to get artists paid.
• June, APIs: How Earth Shaking Could They Be and Why Haven't They Shaken The Earth Yet?
  ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick led the longest-titled meeting in the history of Portland Web Innovators. It was also a great look back at the promise of APIs and a discussion of what's possible.
• July, Demolicious
  A busy one: BrowserMob, MobSpot, Total Event Manager, Yak Theater, iAte, and SMART@znmeb.
• August, No meeting (another tradition)
• September, Open Source to Venture Capital
  New Portlanders and master Puppeteer Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs talked about his transition from system administrator to open source project owner to company founder.
• October, Demolicious
  Lucidium, Tweetybot, Dashrep, Simler, and Intel platform goodness.
• November, Mobile: A Look Back, A Look Ahead
  We partnered with Refresh Portland for Mobile month. This meeting was a discussion led by Elia Freedman. Elia has been in mobile for over a decade and shared his vision, which is informed by more than just the iPhone.
• December, No meeting (recover from one holiday, prepare for another)

What's coming in 2010? In a big way, that's up to you. What do you want to hear about? Who do you want to see talk? Let us know in the comments and we look forward to an innovative new year!