Sep
24
2007
Nicole Vogel of PORTLAND MONTHLY won the OEN’s 2007 Award for Entrepreneurship for Individual Achievement at the Oregon Entrepreneur Network’s dinner on Thursday night.
Nicole is the first media person in (my) memory to win, or even be nominated for, this annual award. Which is exactly why you probably won’t see much serious coverage in certain other local media. That’s not a complaint, but it is kind of funny for someone seeing all this from the outside. But you may remember this story, an exception to the provincial rule, in the PORTLAND BUSINESS JOURNAL almost three years ago. In the piece, Richard Meeker of WILLAMETTE WEEK graciously tipped his hat to PM’s successful launch and then added,
“the real test will come in the next two years. The questions are: Will they be able to sustain circulation on a monthly schedule? And will advertisers get results? I hope the answer to both questions is yes.”
At the time I thought Richard had indeed hit on two key questions, with the implicit assumption that the content had to be good enough for readers. Looking back, I don’t think it was that simple. We can talk about that over coffee some other time.
In the end, the real test for an entrepreneur is building a profitable and growing business. The business is clearly growing, with acquisitions, launches, fat issues, tons of ads and continued wide newsstand distribution. The magazine has won “national” awards for content. According to Nicole, as quoted in the Salute to Winners section included in in last week’s BUSINESS JOURNAL, profits are around 18%. Sure, I know. But come on, even if you move a few points either way…
Congratulations, Nicole.
Sep
24
2007
…with Branson and Rutan at the controls.
While searching on Google Blog Search for an unrelated Portland topic, this item popped up within a blog titled HBCC UFO Research:
Posted: September 23, 2007
Date: September 10, 2007 Time: Approx: 3:00 a.m.
Brian, I live on a floating home on the Columbia River in Portland OR, USA. Early in the morning of Monday, Sept. 10, close to 3:00 a.m. I saw an object, glowing a amber gold or perhaps light orange shimmering light traverse the sky from the SE to the NW in less than three seconds. Ovid, shimmering, hard to focus on because as I later surmised, it appeared to be cloaked in an energy field. About the apparent size of the fingernail on my little finger held at arms length, it was extremely fast and was perfectly silent. Glowing - not brightly, perhaps just three or so shades lighter than the night sky, it was not a plane. It was not a satellite, it was very high, perhaps outside of the earth’s atmosphere.
It was deeply unsettling.
I’m writing you because of the article about the orangish object seen on the previous Sunday evening in Sidney. I know a little about vectors and trajectories and this object I saw could have well been over BC when it did its little “blip blip” shimmy, changed trajectory and simply utterly disappeared. Poof.
Good thing our floating home friends are scanning the skies ’round the clock and checking in with the authorities in Canada.
wikipedia link here cool drawings here
Any other sightings?
Sep
21
2007
I mentioned in an earlier post that an Ignite Portland event was in the planning stages. Some of the details were just announced: The event is scheduled for Thursday, October 25, 2007, at Wieden & Kennedy (224 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR) evening start time to come. For more details tune into the Ignite Portland site .
Sep
17
2007
Looks like some sharp Portlanders are bringing an Ignite event to Portland. Ignite events are a kind of geeky idea smack-down in which interesting or cool concepts are presented to the audience in short, timed, bursts of Power Point and performance. Sure sounds like fun. Folks at O’Reilly Media were behind earlier Ignites. It’s not clear from the Portland blog what role they’ll play in Portland. Here is the Ignite Seattle! site. And check out a video or two here. Here is how they do it in Boston.