If you are a relative newbie to the whole multimedia/tech scene like myself, Portland is a great place to be.  If you look hard enough, you can find a geek gathering almost every night.  I found such a gathering this evening, put on by PDX Web Innovators.  Demolicious showcases…”the great stuff your fellow Portlanders have been working on.  Several ten minute demos of new products and side projects”.  Tonight there were five demonstrations:

Kevin Chen (MetroSeeq):

Any product that grew from a college student’s free food association is alright in my book.  MetroSeeq uses Google maps to provide users with targeted, local information about businesses in your neighborhood offering coupons, discounts and deals.  Both business owners and users can aggregate coupons and deals.  Having trouble deciding what to have for dinner?  Spin MetroSeeq’s “Wheel of Meals” for several cheap options.

Don Park (Do It Yourself FriendFeed):

Those of you whores with thousands of friends need a way to find those friends on other networks.  I am still new to social networking, so I will let Dawn Foster explain…”You can manage your own friend lists with rel=”contact” in a regular html page, and you can also use rel=”me” to connect pages that describe you. XFN Spider can look at those me links, spider to the friends listed on those pages, create an OPML file and get all of this information in an rss reader”. (Fast Wonder)

Matt King (Interface Content Management Framework):

Coming soon from Instrument, a “CMS (content management system) that builds CMS’s” or a CMS framework.  For someone like myself that is interested in building content managed sites, this is cool.  It should make my life easier.  I will look for it when it is released.

Mounir Shita (GoLife Mobile):

GoLife Mobile is open source technology that “…lets software developers easily create useful, useable, personalized mobile software that run(s) on any of our user’s phones”. (GoLifeMobile.com)  Their built-in advertising generator automatically generates revenue for your applications and objects and shares it with you.

Lev Tsypin (Green Renter):

Once again, Portlanders are leading the way in the whole “green” movement.  Green Renter provides information about green residential and commercial rentals in the Portland metro area.  They also allow building and property owners to promote their properties and provide detailed information about what makes their properties green.  Green Renter hopes to be the resource for sustainable living in Portland and plans to expand to other cities.

There are so many exciting things happening in Portland.  I am happy to be part of such a thriving, creative and nurturing scene.  I am looking forward to the next event put on by  PDX Web Innovators.