Rael Dornfest is Founder and CEO of Values of n, a Portland, Oregon company that is passionate about product, cautiously optimistic about software, and fascinated by the clever ways in which people have adapted technology to fit their needs. You’ll find this reflected in Values of n’s products: Stikkit: Little yellow notes that think, and I want Sandy — Your personal email assistant.
Prior to founding Values of n, he was O’Reilly’s Chief Technical Officer, program chair for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which he continues to chair), series editor of the bestselling Hacks book series, instigator of O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts early access program. He built Meerkat, the first web-based feed aggregator, was champion and co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, and has written and contributed to six O’Reilly books.
When not programming, Rael can be found writing all-but-illegibly on whiteboards, sketching on reams of butcher-paper, or expounding on the virtues of same.
Nate DiNiro will demonstrate Earth Class Mail, a system that enables businesses and consumers to manage their snail mail electronically. Earth Class Mail gives people the ability to access their U.S. postal mail online from anywhere in the world, 24×7. The service is used by individuals, small businesses, and major corporate and government enterprises, with users from over 130 countries.
Nate is Earth Class Mail’s Senior Sales Engineer and his focus is on shepherding business and enterprise customers through the transformation from handling mail as paper to their digital mail solution. Nate’s career spans 2 decades of startup and enterprise organizations where he has held a variety of technical and management roles.
MyStrands’ Chief Scientist Rick Hangartner, will discuss and explain the popular Corvallis-based recommendation technology.
MyStrands develops technologies to better understand people’s taste and help them discover things they like and didn’t know about. MyStrands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.
Rick Hangartner is an Engineering and Computer Scientist specializing in AI, signal processing, and stochastic processes. He has nearly 30 years experience developing computing hardware and software in the aerospace, data communications, transportation, and supercomputing industries and possesses a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University.
Kurt Deutscher will give us a a special preview of ExpressionEngine 2.0, the flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website.
Kurt is the Chief Technology Evangelist at EllisLab, the creators of CodeIgniter an open source web application framework based in PHP, and ExpressionEngine the world’s most flexible web publishing system.
Kurt’s diverse career includes over a decade of work in public education before serving in a number of executive, management, fund-development and leadership roles in diverse organizations including Volunteers of America, Earth Share, United Way, the Oregon Zoo and public radio.
Jason Glaspey and Matt King will demo Unthirsty, a popular online happy hour finder.
“Unthirsty is the work of a group of like-minded souls who were always struggling (for obvious reasons) to remember where and
when they last enjoyed that good happy hour. A plan of action was drawn up on beer sodden napkins over bargain pints and some mighty fine nachos. Thus, Unthirsty was launched and dedicated to the good of all mankind’s legally drinking denizens.”
“We love happy hours, and being geeks of the web, figured out a tool was necessary to track them. People talked and names were named, and next thing you know, we had this website where people all over the world were adding their own happy hours and making it happen. Truly a website born of necessity”.
Rick Turoczy is joining us on the Independent Technopreneur panel. Rick Turoczy has worked in marketing communications roles at Portland area startups for more than a dozen years, on both the corporate and consulting sides of the desk. In that time, he has had the opportunity to experience practically every stage of the startup lifecycle: bootstrapping, splashy launches, seeking funding, building a strong privately held presence, riding the IPO roller coaster, and posturing for acquisition. Only that fabled brass ring–profitability–has escaped his grasp. He is currently managing a startup of his own, Return, a communications consultancy that also dabbles in product development. He can be found most readily via Twitter or on his blog about Portland-area startups, Silicon Florist.
Justin Kistner will be joining the Independent Technopreneur panel. Justin began his career as a freelance designer while still studying advertising at the University of Oregon. After several years of successful self-employment, Justin joined Nemo Design and brought his creative web development process and methodology to their growing interactive department. Today, Justin is an independent consultant and entrepreneur. He is working on his first book about corporate blogging, sits on the board of directors of Legion of Tech and authors Metafluence blog.
Seth and Craig are the founders of toonlet.com.
Toonlet makes free, fun, online tools that allow anyone to make webcomics in minutes, starring characters of their own creation!
Sarah Gilbert will be speaking on our Independent Technoprenuer Panel. After receiving her MBA from Wharton and spending a few years in the investment banking industry in New York, Sarah worked as an independent consultant to several technology startups, including Portland’s JanRain, in the areas of operations and strategy. Sarah started out her blogging-for-pay career writing for ParentDish and Slashfood- the foodie blog for geeks. She currently manages and edits several financial blogs for AOL’s Weblogs, Inc., including BloggingStocks, WalletPop, and Luxist, among others. She also co-founded and writes for UrbanMamas and her personal blog CafeMama.
