Lunch 2.0

Yesterday, about 50 geeks and non-geeks gathered at AboutUs.org in their sweet, newly-remodeled space in the Olympic Mills Commerce Center for the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. The event felt very Portland with no formal agenda and no presentations, just a good lunch with good people.

Ray King kicked off the lunch with an introduction. Then Ward Cunningham, the wiki-father, took the chair for a few minutes. Finally, Mark Dilley talked about the Portland chapter of Wiki Wednesday, and we were off to mingle, chat and chomp on pesto sandwiches and pasta. Oh yeah, and Josh Bancroft had an Eee PC to show off to the gadget-hungry.

Check out some pictures from Eddie Awad and Aaron Hockley.

One of the few I took was of Web Worker Daily blogger Jason Harris and his classic geeky name tags. Only at a Lunch 2.0 would you have attendees identifying themselves by name and Twitter handle. Portland has embraced Twitter and has a very active group of tweeters, so I guess this makes sense.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the event, and lots of people asked when the next one was. We’re hoping to keep a regular pace, not every week though. This is Portland. We like to take it easy. Maybe every six weeks, maybe more often if we get lots of requests to host.

Speaking of hosts, Andy Van Oostrum wants to bring the next Portland Lunch 2.0 to eROI. We’re ironing out the details now, probably early April.

If you’re in Portland or interested in the scene here, check out these sites:

• Fast Wonder: Dawn Foster has a hand in just about every techie gathering or event in Portland, including Lunch 2.0 which she helped organized, natch.
• Silicon Florist: Rick Turoczy knows all about the startup scene in Portland.
• Portland on Fire: Raven Zachary set out on a quest to profile a Portlander every day in 2008, not just geeks, but anyone. Very cool stuff that highlights the diversity of the Rose City.

Again, big thanks to Ray, Keith, Mark, Ward and the whole AboutUs crew for their hospitality and swag. Everyone knows you can never have too many coffee mugs, and I’m enjoying this morning’s coffee in my brand new AboutUs mug, w00t!

Upcoming Events

Yes I’d like to confirm the rumors that Silicon Valley Web Builder (SVWB) is planning a Documentary Film about Browsers and Web 2.0 in Silicon Valley. SVWB is the Media Sponsor for 7th Annual Macworld Final Cut Pro SuperMeet organized by SF Cutters. Who will think a film group needs a web group to get the words out? I shared my dream plan to the film group leaders and professionals over the past few months. Not only no one tease or laugh at me, but these film professionals also encourage me to stay on my dream plan by sending me many supporting emails. After months of research, our production unit has gathered sufficient information as a starting point. The missing part is funding on film equipments. Any help out there?

What Chuck and I have in common? Like Chuck on TV Series, I was the only one board member left with the visual database of people and past history from the last web organization I served on. Like Chuck, I am geek by day and I am geek action figure by night in building and restoring a web group in Silicon Valley from scratch. Like Chuck, we receive good care from organizations like SD Forum and other industry groups. Like Good Luck Chuck, I do occasionally bring good luck charms to things we covered. The latest is OpenSocial. I’ll tell you more later.

The film is to promote peace and freedom within Browsers as an effort to spark innovation and breakthrough technologies. Like the movie “National Treasure”, I think the secrets lie within Browsers. Web is our National Treasure.

I urge all the internet leaders to focus on innovation rather than protecting old technologies. I urge Bill Gates to untie the lock between Operating System and Internet Explorer. Many users using second-handed computers in recycle markets and other countries can’t upgrade their old browsers to latest versions due to the lock. Bill, just free the users!

Our photo gallery from our 1st Hackathon

http://picasaweb.google.com/thewebsig/OpenSocialHackathonEpisodeI

Here’s the free food part. Our 2nd Hackaton is hosted at University of Phoenix (UOP) San Jose campus, the same education institute that hosted this year Superbowl. UOP is providing the state-of-the-start facility like spacious classroom, wireless, outlet, white boards, food and drink. UOP management team is giving us almost their entire classroom building. Hi5 is shipping their entire platform team including their founder to support our event for the entire Sat afternoon. Of course, action figure like myself carry heavy boxes of prizes. Indeed we are in Mission Impossible style.

Date/Time: 2/23/2008 Sat 1-6pm
Same weekend as Oscars 2/24 Sun
Location: 3590 N 1st St # 100, San Jose, CA 95134

Registration RSVP
http://opensocialhackathonii.eventbrite.com

To: Zachary Levi, Adam Baldwin, writers and producers
Apple pie Apple pie. I’ve watched every single episode of Chuck online. It is very cool to show Sarah Walker to use her iPhone, Chuck used image software to find clues and his new iphone in his action. It is so cool to show the geek girls jumped in, kicked butt, and rescued Chuck on the Stanford Episode. Sure geek girls like to kick butts and rescue guy geeks in troubles. I would be thrilled if any cast member will visit us in Silicon Valley and drop in our events on your break times (contact: thewebsig@gmail.com). The latest storyline is around the security issues on social networking and the increasing number of high profile politicians and presidential candidates and their family using these social networking sites without checking how to delete personal sensitive information like buying habits. I also like to point out NBC executives make some smart decisions in using Ruby On Rails on their Hulu.com TV project. Ruby is the “new” diamond.

Note: I decide to chat a bit more especially our officers have been complaining that we didn’t receive much credits and recognition from our latest efforts.

Bess
SVWB Founder

Hi all, just a quick reminder that we’ll be having a fun Valentine’s Day lunch @ Blurb tomorrow. Hope to see you all there!

Upcoming Events

• Thursday, February 14 – Blurb, San Francisco <- This event!
• Friday, February 15 – blist, Seattle
• Wednesday, February 27 – AboutUs.org, Portland
• Wednesday, February 27 – Oversee, LA
• TBD – Blue Lava Technology, Honolulu, HI

Host: Oversee.net

When: Wednesday, Feb 27 @ 12:05 – 2:00

Where: Downtown LA

RSVP: on Mixergy.com

If you’re not in LA, please forward this someone who is.

Oversee.net just moved into a beautiful new office. I went to check it out as preparation for this event and I think you’re going to love it.

If you’re coming, please RSVP so we can get you on the list and to help Oversee.net validate your parking.

About Oversee.net:
Founded in 2000, Oversee.net is a technology-driven online marketing solutions company, with two primary divisions — Oversee Domain Services and Oversee Marketing Services. Headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Portland, Oregon, San Mateo, California, and Pompano Beach, Florida, the company has over 200 employees. Some of Oversee’s key brands include SnapNames®, DomainSponsor™, Moniker® and Low.com™. Oversee has been growing profitably since inception.

On the heels of the highly successful Ignite Portland 2 and just before Startupalooza, Portland will host its first Lunch 2.0.

Hosts: AboutUs.org

Where: 107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520, Portland, OR 97214

When: February 27, 2008 from 12:00 to 1:30 PM

RSVP on Upcoming.

If you’re not in Portland, but know someone who is, please spread the love. Everyone is invited.
Here’s a blurb on AboutUs:

AboutUs is a wiki whose goal is to create a free and valuable Internet resource containing information both about websites and other community created topics/information. The site was pre-populated with information about many different websites and thousands of updates are now being made by people each day.

For more information, check them out here.

Update: The venue can only hold about 60 people, and we already have 43 attending on Upcoming. So, the guestlist is closed. Never fear, there will be more, bigger, and better Lunch 2.0’s in Portland. 

Upcoming Events

• Tuesday, February 12 – TBA, Mountain View, Silicon Valley
• Thursday, February 14 – Blurb, San Francisco
• Friday, February 15 – blist, Seattle
• Wednesday, February 27 – AboutUs.org, Portland <- This event!
• TBD - Blue Lava Technology, Honolulu, HI

We’ve got a Valentine’s Day Lunch 2.0 coming up in SF next week, hosted by Blurb. Come on out and get some love!

Hosts: Blurb
Address: 580 California, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94104
Date: Thursday, February 14th, 2008
RSVP on Upcoming

Here’s a little bit about Blurb:

Don’t be fooled by our financial district address and the fact that we help you make good-old-fashioned books. Blurb is disruptive, empowering, social, and agile. We’re also nice. And really big on sushi, so come meet us and get in on that action.

At this lunch we’ll discuss how Blurb is democratizing the publishing industry and allowing anyone to be a published author. We’ll also make print-on-demand technology sexy and talk about our cross-platform Java Swing app and Ruby on Rails website. You can also see some of our books and get a true feel for what we do.

See you on Valentine’s Day!

The Amsterdam Lunch 2.0 goes from success to success with eBuddy hosting us last Friday. Founders Jan-Joost Rueb and Onno Bakker welcomed us to the company and gave us the inside scope on eBuddy’s impressive successes in the web-based and mobile messaging fields. Their presentation is online (1 mb PPT) for those who are interested. One memorable point was all the phones buzzing with the news of Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo was a sign of the speed at which information travels (But who was up at 4 am in Silicon Valley passing on this information to us in Amsterdam?). Photos from the event are marked on Flickr with the lunch20ebuddy tag.