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.

Marshall always leads great discussions and the June Web Innovators meeting was as expected: great! For me, it was a trip back to 2006 when I first met Marshall at a PDXWI meeting discussing... you guessed it, APIs.

Another home-grown conference. If you haven't already signed up for next week's Open Source Bridge, now is the time. It's a developer conference, though there's also a business track. Plus, it's in town at the convention center and cheap: only $150 with the user group code "osb4224"

Full event info:
Open Source Bridge
June 17-19, 2009
Oregon Convention Center
http://opensourcebridge.org/attend/

The business-minded web innovators will want to take note of the Internet Strategy Forum Summit on Thursday July 23rd at the Governor Hotel. There will be thought leaders and other web famous speakers including Jeremiah Owyang. These experts will share their experiences and ideas on how to best leverage the Internet and integrate it into your overall business strategy.

Portland Web Innovators was founded because we don't just like the technology or the design. Yes, those are a big part of our craft. We also want to work on fulfilling projects, for companies that do good stuff. For many of us, we want to start our own companies. In fact, many Web Innovators already have.

At the May meeting, you'll hear a story of how one guy did it. Paul Anthony started in his dorm room in 1996. That's a pretty humble beginning and I hope his story will inspire you. Join me to hear about the success he's made over more than a decade.

At the most recent meeting, I invited people in the audience to mention upcoming events of interest to fellow designers, programmers and web businesspeople. I'd like to do the same thing on the Web Innovators site. Let's continue to get Portlanders out from behind their screens and talking to each other.

Despite the meeting being scheduled on April Fools Day, there was another great round of demos this quarter, without a joke in the bunch. If you're interested in taking the stage in July, let me know.

Dietrich Ayala from Mozilla led an excellent discussion about the future of web browsing at the March meeting. He started by telling us that Firefox 3.1 is yesterday... literally. As in, the next major release of Firefox will now be called Firefox 3.5.

We had ten excellent gatherings in 2008. New Year's Day seems like an apporiate time to look back, as we get excited for 2009.

Mobile Web with Jason Grigsby: It was hard not to be excited about the mobile web and the possibilities after Jason's presentation (slides and audio).

Getting Down to Business: Attorney Kevin Spence and accountant Lynn S. Hoyle answered questions and gave business and tax advice at a busy time of year.

It's been quite a year for the Portland tech scene. Web Innovators itself has gone from cozy gatherings around a table to much larger events. Last night we had more than 40 people together at CubeSpace to talk about 2008 and look ahead to what we need to do in 2009.

There was nobody better to lead the discussion than the Silicon Florist himself, Rick Turoczy, who has been a true cheerleader for the community the last year.