Lunch 2.0

I spent some time at BarCamp Portland last weekend recruiting hosts for Lunch 2.0 here in Portland and talking to people about why they should host and/or attend.

It looks to be a busy summer, based on the positive reactions, and Open ID provider Vidoop will be kicking off the summer’s festivities on May 28, 2008.

Hosts: Vidoop
Where: 117 NW 5th Ave, Suite 210, Portland, OR 97209
When: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 from 12:00 to 2:00 PM
RSVP on Upcoming

Good news if you attended last month’s lunch at eROI, Vidoop is in the same building in Old Town, so you’ll know how to find them. The address is different because they have a separate entrance.

Gaia Borgias Brown from Wieden+Kennedy is planning something really great, which will take a little time to organize, so while we wait with baited breath, Vidoop has stepped up to fill our stomaches and minds with bacon.

From what I hear, this will be a cool time for Vidoop. Apparently, their entire Tulsa office is transplanting itself to Portland this month, in an epic roadtrip. So, this will be a great chance to welcome them to Portland and give them a taste of how we do Lunch 2.0 here.

Here’s a blurb on Vidoop:

Our Mission
One username. No password.

When it comes to identity and security, the Internet is a crazy place. In real life, you don’t change your name at every store you visit. And you don’t protect your house with a front door made of cardboard.

But online, that’s exactly what we see happening. Users have separate identities at each site they visit, translating to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of usernames and passwords they have to remember. And companies spend fortunes securing their servers against attack only to have their users’ accounts compromised by passwords that can be easy to guess or steal.

For more, check out their site, and definitely take time to mouse over their corporate photo for an Easter egg. Good stuff.

If you’re wondering about the bacon meme, make sure to ask Scott Kveton, VP of Open Platforms at Vidoop, Chair at the OpenID Foundation and Chief Portvangelist.

Upcoming Events

• Wednesday, May 9th: SocialText, Palo Alto, CA
• Friday, May 12th: Yahoo!, Burbank, CA
• Monday, May 15th: Xoriant, Sunnyvale, CA
• Wednesday, May 28th: Vidoop, Portland, OR <-This event.

Alright, Socialtext is hosting all of us a free lunch @ their office on Wednesday May 7th so come by people and eat their generous lunch. If you don’t know who and what they do, here is a snip of their description.

About Socialtext:

As a wiki culture, we’ve had amazing success and wikis have become an essential tool for public and private groups world-wide. The next step in the evolution is putting people in the center of the discussions, and that’s what the newest release of Socialtext’s wiki is focused on. Come join us to check out the exciting new product release at Socialtext (if you missed it at the Web 2.0 Expo), and chat it up with us. We’ll even feed you!

http://www.socialtext.com

Time and Date: Wednesday, May 7, 2008

SocialText HQ

My name is Andrew Warner and I want to encourage you to bring Lunch 2.0 to your city or your office. I’m not one of the founders of Lunch 2.0, but I’ve helped bring it to Los Angeles and San Diego and I’ve watched it grow the startup communities in both cities.

Organizing Lunch 2.0 has done a lot to help grow my invitation site and I want to play it forward by doing what I can to help you bring it to your city. Contact me through my blog and let’s talk.

If Lunch 2.0 is already in your city, consider bringing it to your office. To explain the benefits of inviting the community into your office, here’s a video I shot of Woody Pewitt talking about his experience bringing Lunch 2.0 to his company.

When: Friday, May 9 - Noon to 2:00

Where: Yahoo’s Burbank Office

RSVP & Details: On Mixergy

I’ve wanted to do a Lunch 2.0 @ Yahoo! for months. Thank you Steve Morin for making this happen!

Xoriant will host Lunch 2.0 May 15, 2008.

Xoriant Corporation is a specialized product engineering services firm with extensive experience in social networking and internet-based consumer sites, using frameworks to shorten clients’ time-to-market, for personalization, Ecommerce, mobile, audio/video streaming, flash/RIA, backend data integration, analytics, crawlers and more.

Where: 1248 Reamwood Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 [Map]
When: noon, May 15, 2008
Why: Free food and geek talk
RSVP: Upcoming, limit 200

Not an official Lunch 2.0 event, but Citrix is hosting a seminar on “Application Delivery: The Challenges and Opportunities in 2008″.

Topics: NetScaler and “Virtual Workplace Continuity”
Date: Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Location: Citrix Systems, Inc, 4988 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA 95054 ( the corner of Great America Pkwy and Tasman)

Given the limited space, please RSVP to karen.stafford@citrix.com by April 28th

There will be a Q&A session after the presentation. A light lunch and beverages will be served. We look forward to seeing you at the event.

Citrix is the global leader and most trusted name in Application Delivery. More then 200,000 organizations rely on Citrix to deliver any application to users anywhere with the best performance, highest security and lowest cost. Come listen to some of the major Application Delivery problems of 2008 being addressed by Citrix from it’s technical staff. We will be discussing leading edge technology. Don’t miss an opportunity to hear from the leaders.

No one seems to notice why I name our event “Ruby Romance”. This has to do with The 3rd Annual Ruby Conference Keynote Speaker Tim Bray and the return of “Indiana Jones. Tim Bray, with his “Indiana Jones” trademark hat, is our internet pioneer. He launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0 and co-edited “Namespaces” in XML between 1996 and 1999. Like Indiana Jones, Tim is romancing the stone Ruby in his Adventure 2.0 at Sun Microsystems.

Indeed Tim Bray resembles the professor Indiana Jones while our feature guest, David Heinemeier Hansson, reminds us of the handsome young indy. I am so excited that DHH accepts our invitation to appear at a late night geek gathering. DHH doesn’t mind our bold move to name our geeky event as Late Night Ruby Romance. Surprisingly many Web 2.0 geeks including numerous startup CTOs rather romance with the Rails Creator on a late Saturday night in a tiny Gelato shop in Palo Alto downtown. Our event registration received over 800 page views.

Our Conference speaker Microsoft John Lam asked our conference attendees about the feeling of supporting Ruby scripting within Browser. He didn’t hear much noises from the audience yet I almost jumped out from my chair. I want to be sure that I yell out loud enough here. Allowing Ruby to interact with entire DOM tree directly within browser will rescue the web where many web developers are frustrated with JavaScript redundancy and complexity. The ability to reduce the no. of lines of codes with Ruby will make the browser load page faster, reduce human errors and reduce the debugging time. It helps developers to gain high performance on app and lower the expensive bandwidth cost associated with social networking app and mobile app.

With the releases of Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.0, this would be an exciting year in web development world. Come and join us in this romantic gathering with Rails creator DHH and gain insight of “Indiana Jone” adventure of Rails 2.0!

Romancing the Ruby with Web Builders and Software Developers
The 3rd Annual Ruby Conference – Joint Reception
Date & Time: 4/19/2008 Sat 4-6pm
Location: Tech Museum

Late Night Ruby Romance with Rails Creator David Heinemeier Hansson
Date/Time: 4/19/08 Sat 9pm until we can’t eat any more Gelato
Location: Michael’s Gelato & Cafe
Address: 440 University Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301
RSVP: http://latenightrubyromance.eventbrite.com

Note: DHH blogs about our Romantic evening.

Bess
Founder of Silicon Valley Web Builder (SVWB)

Host: Experian Interactive Media

When: Tuesday, April 29

Where: Santa Monica

RSVP: on Mixergy

(Mixergy is an invitation site that helps guests mix & mingle.)

Space is limited. The guest list will probably close within a week.

About Experian Interactive:
Experian Interactive Media is part of Experian and is made up of a set of brands including: http://LowerMyBills.com which connects consumers with service providers that offer competitive rates on home loans and other recurring monthly bills, http://ClassesUSA.com which connects prospective students with colleges and universities, http://InstantApprovals.com which matches consumers to the credit card that fits their lives, http://ExpertsOnCredit.com which provides informational content regarding credit-related topics and Affiliate Fuel which provides these groups, and other external companies, with pay-for-performance marketing solutions. Together, these companies share the common goal of helping consumers make critical decisions that impact their financial situations.

Based in Santa Monica, California, Experian Interactive Media is a profitable and growing group.

Host: Microsoft

When: Friday, April 25

Where: San Diego

RSVP: on Mixergy.com

If you’re not in San Diego, please forward this to someone who is. Help get the word out.

Microsoft has been very supportive of the SD Web community. They’re hosting BarCamp San Diego and now Lunch 2.0.

If you want to join us, RSVP here.

BTW, just about everything you need to know about San Diego tech is on this site, that the local community leaders built.

About Microsoft:
I usually use this space to tell you about the company that’s hosting us. Since you already know about Microsoft, I’ll just use this part of the post to thank Woody Pewitt for volunteering his company so often.

. . . did Portlanders chomp at the second installment of Lunch 2.0 yesterday afternoon at eROI?

Before the answer, here’s a recap. About 60 people wandered in and out of eROI to enjoy the good company and grub. I had to head out early, but when I left, the place was buzzing.

I saw a lot of new faces, in addition to some I’d seen at the first Lunch 2.0 at AboutUs. It helped to have huge name tags, with plenty of room for name, company and most importantly, Twitter handle.

Twitter is our communication channel of choice here in Portland. According to TwitterLocal, Portland is number 14 on the list of the top Twitter locations. So, here in PDX, it’s best to introduce yourself first by handle first, then by real name.

Andy Van Oostrum kicked off the lunch with a short bit about eROI, and then the eating began. After some chomping, Andy picked winners for eROI swag out of the business card fishbowl, and even if they didn’t win, everyone went home full.

Since I didn’t stay long, here are some reactions I collected from Twitter.

harrisja : @jkuramot lunch 2.0 was really great today. great venue and great company. the food totally rocket too

ryanbuch : after the fact, but Andy did an awesome job w/ Lunch 2.0 at eROI today. Great to connect w/ a bunch of tech twitter geeks in P’town.

vidoop : Portland Lunch 2.0 was lots of fun… such a long walk back down to 2nd floor *whew* check out http://calagator.wordpress…. for mo’evnts

bobuva : Met some great people at Lunch 2.0! Portland is where it’s at if you’re technical and want to make the world a better place

xolotl : thanks @eroi for a fantastic lunch 2.0!

dodeja : just got back from lunch 2.0 @eROI meet a few cool people

simBateman : Back at the office after meeting a ton of people at Lunch 2.0. That was a good time

donpdonp : at backspace cafe for the afternoon after a fun lunch 2.0. thanks @eroi!

pixelmatrix : back from lunch 2.0! was fun guys

grigs : Had fun at Lunch 2.0. Thanks to eROI and @voostru for hosting. Thanks to @jkuramot for organizing.

alexcwilliams : Good crowd, good coversations at lunch 2.0, looking forward to the next one. Who wants to host?

Big thanks to Andy, Ryan, Alex and the eROI crew for opening their offices to Lunch 2.0 and providing tasty food from their neighbors, Good Taste Restaurant.

Plans for the next installment have already been hatched. I spoke to Gaia Borgias Brown about bringing Lunch 2.0 to Wieden+Kennedy next.

If you’re in Portland and are on the fence about Lunch 2.0, check out Rick Turoczy’s 5 Reasons to Attend.

Portland has a myriad of other activities, if you want to mix and mingle. As proof, the monthly Portland Werewolf session was last night, just hours after Lunch 2.0.

If you made it this far, here’s the answer: we downed 100 pounds of tasty Chinese food yesterday, w00t!