Josh Williams and Mark Frohnmayer of GarageGames will both present, and later in the day will demo GarageGames’ new 3D gaming platform, InstantAction.
GarageGames began shaking up the multi-billion dollar games industry when it was founded in 1999. They offer the professional-quality Torque Game Engine development suite to developers and educational institutions at hundreds of dollars per license when comparable technology suites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are a game developer and publisher focused on creating fun, innovative titles and offering developer-friendly terms in an industry whose typical publishers are considered as notoriously draconian as the music industry’s labels.
GarageGames launched InstantAction in early 2008. InstantAction is a web-based games platform that enables 3D graphics and action-oriented multiplayer games to run in popular web browsers. InstantAction games combine the rich artistry and viscerally engaging interactive experience of high-end games with the web’s ease of access and social connectivity.
Josh Williams is the CEO and CTO of GarageGames. He started with GarageGames as an intern in 2004, working for free, and quickly moved on to managing technology development and then business development and operations, becoming CEO of the rapidly growing company at the age of 25. He is an avid gamer, and is passionately devoted to fostering innovation and change that benefit developers in the games industry and gamers around the world.
Mark Frohnmayer’s passion for game software development began at the age of 7 when his parents bought the family an Apple II computer. After graduating from Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he began a career in games, eventually co-founding Garage Games in 1999. He is currently incubating several startups that range in purpose from electric vehicle design, game production, next generation communication software and indoor plants. Mark is also involved with progressive Oregon politics as a volunteer and Lane steering board member of the Oregon Bus Project.
Sidecar was conceived out of the frustration of running client beta programs where there was inconsistent user feedback from multiple disparate systems like surveys, forums, emails, & bug tracking systems, all of which typically lived outside of the product. Sidecar was built to consolidate user feedback from within the product itself and consists of two primary components:
Sidecar Dialog Widget- A configurable widget for your web site that lets you collect feedback from your users, publish tips and help, and get new insights from your users – all with a single line of code on your site
Sidecar Insight Dashboard- The dashboard is a hosted, web-based software application designed to organize and optimize user feedback. Configure your Sidecars, get a quick view into your best-performing pages, and see trouble spots faster than ever.
Greg Rau is the Co-Founder & Principal of the StepChange Group, an online product design and development firm based in downtown Portland. StepChange brings together expertise in product development with market engagement. Prior to starting StepChange, Greg spent 6 years as Vice President of Sales & Consulting for Unicru, a human resource software company, which was acquired by Kronos in 2006. Greg is a Portland refugee from the great San Francisco “crash” of 2000, following 5 years in the Web 1.0 startup world including stints at BigWords & Computec Media.
Ever had an idea? One you were so excited about you wondered who else might find it interesting and how you might be related to each other? That desire to follow ideas around the world and meet like-minded friends of friends was the catalyst for Fyreball, brainchild of Pete Parsons, former Studio Manager at Bungie. Starting out as a global game of pass-it-on, Fyreball evolved into a rich, playful alternative to email and instant messaging; it’s the cushiest way to put together the richest blog page imaginable and blast it to some or all of your friends in seconds.
Michael Evans, CTO. Armed with a Computer Science degree from Dartmouth, Michael toiled in the game industry from 1996 to 2006. He held multiple senior roles within Bungie. He was Lead Engineer and Project Lead on E3 best of show winning PC/Mac game Oni. After Oni he led the multiplayer experience on blockbuster videogame mega-hit Halo: Combat Evolved. He continued in his senior role at Bungie as an Engineering Lead on Halo 2. Other important roles include experience at Rare helping deliver the title Perfect Dark Zero for the Xbox 360 Launch. In addition, he worked on the game technology team at Apple Computer back when they made cool games for Mac.
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.
Hideshi Hamaguchi, COO of LUNARR, has been known on both sides of the Pacific as one of the leading minds in creative concept/strategy building and decision management. Before starting LUNARR, Hideshi was Director of New Business Planning Group, Matsushita Electric Works (known for their Panasonic and National brands) in Japan, and Executive Vice President of Panasonic Electric Works Laboratory of America, Inc (R&D company in US). Also, From 1998 to 2000, he served as a strategist at Ziba Design in Portland.
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