Techpaulogy

Startupalooza and #drunkgeeking

This weekend's Startupalooza event was a lot of fun. Thanks to all the organizers! While I very much enjoyed learning about some really cool new projects in PDX, as is the case with most structured events, the most rewarding part for me was all the side conversations buzzing in hallways and nearby bars. It's all about the people! It reminded me of one of my side projects, the Entrepreneur Salon, which has been percolating for a year or two. The essence of it is to gather techie folks for informal meetups at local bars, to get together and have fun, with no real agenda -- only time set aside to hear each other's ideas and get the entrepreneurial spirits (literally and figuratively) flowing. I haven't done much with this idea yet, though Scott Kveton just called me out, in his re-cap of Startupalooza:

And, as is the case at any event in Portland, there were the seedlings hatched for new events. One was an impromptu idea that Paul Biggs (aka @techpaulogy) had called #drunkgeeking. Say you’re married, with an SO, etc and they have gotten tired of your inebriated ramblings about technology. Wouldn’t it make sense to find a couple of other nerds you could get your drink on with and then talk about geeky topics? Instead of trying to organize it on a regular basis, why not just use Twitter + the hashtag #drunkgeeking to coordinate on-the-fly events. For example, you could couple this with Unthirsty and find a good happy hour, Tweet “#drunkgeeking in 15 minutes at the Side Door” and see what happens. I love it and am looking forward to it after Paul gets done with his three day pantless bender. :-)

Aside from that latter part about the bender (which may-or-may-not be related to CommandoSEO.com), I must agree. If anyone wants to give it a whirl, that is, getting together ad hoc beer & entrepreneurship/techie meetups, try to send up the bat signal on Twitter: #drunkgeeking. Here is the inagural tweet, and here is the Hashtags page to see how the idea fares.

(Sadly, I won't be able to be involved for a week or two thanks to the current frenzy at Jive -- I've been rallying with our Web Engineers and Design team in the office until 2am every night for the past week, and plan to do so again this week as well).

Jumping Desks - Frogger Anyone?

Due to Jive's rapid growth, there has been a ton of shifting around the office. Lots of cube hopping. So, what better coincidence, than to hop up a floor and over to the next building -- and to end up 10 feet from an old school arcade with Frogger and 8 other games:

It makes up for now being 10 minutes from the sweetest break room in town. (Almost - Guinness keg on tap.)

Streaming Music Showdown - Last.fm vs. Pandora

I've been researching online streaming music tools for a long time, and it usually comes down to Pandora versus Last.fm. Both are free online radio stations essentially, wrapped in rich feature sets. Here's the scoop on both:

• Last.fm is my favorite, as it has the greatest social media / social networking capabilities. You can listen to so much good music, tag it, rate, it, and share it with the music community. Here's my Last.fm music profile, where you can see the level of detail it's capturing and allowing users to play with. It tracks everything - plus it integrates with iTunes, Media Player, etc. It also makes super cool charts to add to your blog that are updated dynamically (see over on the right sidebar). AND, it has its own stand-alone software you can download. Pretty amazing tool. You should definitely check it out, and add yourself as my friend.
• Pandora is also great. It's more hyped in the media, but has a slightly lower list of functionality. Here's my Pandora profile so you can see what's available (more clunky than Last.fm). First off, it's only usable via a Flash-based player in your web browser -- no separate software. They did add social features last week, but with all the pop-up windows and a separate Flash player, it's kind of hard to navigate. Pandora also offers tools for your blog, thought they are less customizable than Last.fm. I applaud them for all the improvements, but until they clean up the experience, I am sticking with Last.fm.

There are also some other options worth mentioning, which are useful or new.

• Pandora.fm is a mashup of Pandora and Last.fm that I use while listening to Pandora. It lets you track your Pandora music in Last.fm. Pretty great way to get the best of both worlds (sometimes Pandora offers a better music selection and offers some new ways to discover music).
• Musicovery is the new kid on the block, but given that it's entirely in a Flash player the user e peirence and overall functionality are still lacking. But, it offers a pretty cool way to visualize your music discovery process. I guess that's where Flash comes in, as a way to very slickly visualize things for Pandora and Musicovery, but it really makes using all of the non-music features (sharing, charting, etc.) a pain.
• Yahoo Music Unlimited is different because you have to pay for it ($6 a month), but I wanted to mention it because it is my second-most used streaming music service after Last.fm. The cool thing here is that you can play ANY artist and ANY song, so you can build specific playlists or play whatever song you want, whenever. Great for DJ-ing parties... the limitations of all the internet radio players above is that you can't select specific tracks or artists due to licensing restrictions, you can only choose genres and see what you get. Other options out there include Rhapsody (more options, more expensive), Napster, and Virgin Digital. What I am really waiting for, however, is for Apple and iTunes to get into the music subscription space -- that would kill all the rest since right now none of the others sync with my iPod. Not sure what the holdup is, since iTunes has been so successful licensing everything else?

Holiday Travel Tools - Finding the Best Flight

The best time to fly, as I re-discover every year, is decidedly NOT during Christmas. This year, however,  I decided to get a little more savvy about the proceedings. Plus, I'm planning a trip to Vegas, so I needed to re-evaluate ways to work the system.

For the past few years, I've relied almost exclusively on Orbitz, sometimes comparing it against Travelocity and Expedia. They end up with pretty similar fares, so I usually stick to Orbitz. The only catch is that you can sometimes get cheaper fares direct from the airline websites, and budget carriers like Southwest and JetBlue aren't even included the aggregate searches (sidenote: I'm still undecided if this helps or hurts them in the long run)... So when I know a route is covered by these carriers, I also look it up on their sites (sidenote 2: maybe travel agents could somehow use this to their advantage, and offer services to find you the best deals on the myriad of non-aggregated carriers).

Anyway, this year I tried out Kayak.com, the newest of the online travel booking websites, which searches all the travel sites -- Orbitz and the individual carriers included. Overall, Iike the no-frills presentation (a-la Goolge), which also has great tools in the left sidebar to slice and dice your flight options after your initial search.

Paired with the historical pricing and future prediction information on Farecast, it almost makes me think I understand how airlines set their fares (other contenders for this feature were FareCompare that has a clunky interface, and FlySpy that is still only out of Minneapolis) to see details about ticket price trends over time.

Finally, both during the booking process and while I was traveling, I relied on FlightStats to check routes, track flights and generally get the 411 on PDX. You can also check your current flight status from your mobile phone, which is pretty cool.