After rushing downtown to make the OEF PubTalk, I then rushed over the river for the first PDX Web Innovators meeting. It was interesting going to the PubTalk first because part of the vision I had for PDX Web was the ability for early stage companies to demo/pitch/present. Even after seeing that the PubTalk is built for this kind of thing, since it’s more general purpose entrepreneurship and the pitches are really short, I think that PDX Web can support that idea exclusively for web/mobile companies.

Whether or not we get to that point though, it’s still a lot of fun hanging out with other web people. For people who follow the web all the time, it’s not everyday that you meet people that read the some stuff you do and share the same ideas. Just to run down who was there:

Maybe it’s not that surprising, but just about everybody had their own web shops. The discussions were a great mix of design, programming, blogs, podcasts, business. I’ll try to remember some of conversations:

Rails was a big topic. I hadn’t even realized Portland was such a leader in Rails development (With the O’Reilly Rails book author in Portland and his company Planet Argon being a big Rails shop), and I pride myself on knowing a lot of stuff.

Ray and Kandace talked a bit about their web-based, hosted CMS package, Ladybug. Sounds like a great tool for Flash (and non-Flash) sites. I believe we have our first presenter for next month.

Marcus shared some his experiences with software in the Music business and Tables Turned, his team’s initiative to let podcasters legally play music. Billboard wrote it up, and it sounds like it’s getting some great traction among the labels.

Jacob talked about his work in design (you have to check out the design on BePrivy), email marketing and learning Rails. I wrote about email newsletters before, so you’ll have to let me know how far off-base I am.

Adam and I discussed his work on Best Places, and some of the issues they were working out, including the transition to ASP.NET 2.0, something I’ve been spending a lot of time on lately. Adam has a lot of biz ideas going too, including the just released onBlOCK spam fighting service.

There was some interesting talk about business models, design, and adsense and how ugly sites seem to do so well. Scoble’s post on anti-marketing design is an interesting follow-up on that topic.

I talked a bit on NetworthIQ (shocking I know): specifically about funding options, APIs, Quicken integration, and growth of the site.

I missed the topics from the other end of the table, so feel free to join the converstation with your own writeups.

So, where is this going to go? Sounds like everybody was up for getting some space and a projector for next month. Definitely keep the social aspect, but add a presenter or two. We can take that conversation over to the google group.

Thanks for coming everybody and we’ll see you next month.

Tags: pdxwi, pdx, portland