Rick Turoczy’s Oregon-centric Silicon Florist is a must read in these parts. West Coast cities (Seattle, Portland, Bay Area and San Diego) have always been hot beds of mobile development.
But Portland has a large base of Open Source developers (Linus Torvalds lives here), and it has Intel’s largest workforce (some 17,000 people). Soon the region’s 1.2 million population will be enveloped in Clearwire’s Mobile WiMAX cloud now installed on more than 300 cell sites.
Next week WhereCampPDX, October 17th-19th, will gather geo-geeks of all stripes for a weekend of location-based fun. WhereCamp started in the Bay Area in 2007 as an extension of the Where 2.0 conference.
Last week Rick posted a round up of Six Portland-area mobile app developers and consultants to watch. He says to watch these people:
- Avatron Software (Vancouver, WA): Avatron’s Air Sharing says it’s the easiest way to view your documents on the go. Their application was downloaded by nearly one million users in its first week, and “is well on its way toward becoming the most popular iPhone application, ever”.
- Cloud Four (Portland, OR): Have done the interface design for the Mobile Wall Street Journal app among other things.
- FreeRange (Portland, OR): Creates mobile feed readers used by the Wall Street Journal and Portland Trail Blazers among others.
- GoLife Mobile (Hillsboro, OR): Building a Java-based framework that runs on practically any handset. They see information flowing between devices and networks, providing personal, context sensitive services.
- Don Park (Portland, OR): Dailywireless.org co-founder Don Park has an Openmoko open-source phone and is developing a mobile social location applications for Android.
- Raven Zachary (Portland, OR): Creator of iPhoneDevCamp, chair of the upcoming iPhoneLive conference, and consultant to a number of iPhone developers in town and around the nation.
- BONUS! Mobile Portland (Portland, OR): If you really want to stay in tune with what’s happening in the Portland mobile development scene, there’s no better place than the Mobile Portland group. Holds regular meetings to discuss topics affecting the mobile scene.
Way to go, Don!
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