Here’s an interesting request from Krissa at Idaho TechConnect:
Know of any video game developers in Boise (or Idaho)?
The new SBIR solicitations from Dept of Defense are out and there is a huge demand for those skills. Rick and I were trying to think of companies in Idaho that might be interested and came up blank.
Follow-up to the previous post about SEO maven Josh James appearing on Channel 6 about Idaho’s hot springs. Good work, Josh!
DRUPAL USERS GROUP
Ok. If you are a DRUPAL dork ; ) then have we got an event for you: Boise Drupal Users Group Meeting:
Date: Thursday August 7, 2008
Location: 1037 E. WINDING CREEK DR. EAGLE, ID 83616
Time: 5:20 pm
Topic: Drupal 101
Meeting host Joshua Brauer plans to show the “Understanding Drupal” video to kick the meeting off. I have seen some wicked-cool Drupal projects here in the Valley lately (e.g., Eric Hildreth and Michael Samuelson’s new Idaho Commission for Libraries site covered in press all over the Northwest) so the Drupal group I am sure has good things to come.
For more information, visit the Boise Drupal User Group page, or you can tweet Joshua @brauerranch.
BOISE TWEETUP
MetaGeek CEO Ryan Woodings is organizing a tweetup for next Tuesday:
Date: Tuesday August 5, 2008
Time: 12:30 pm
Place: Opa on Eight Street in Downtown Boise
Topic: $5 burgers (and brew??)
Either way we’re talking about a good deal for lunch, and the remarkable company of at least two brilliant, young, and handsome tech CEO’s. After this plug, I know there will be more plus probably half of BYP now that they know we’ll be there. So the question isn’t whether you’ll be there, it’s whether you’ll be wearing your nametag with your Twitter ID on it. If you do tweet this event, PLEASE use the hash tag #OpaTweetup.
Idaho agency goes high tech with…librarian blogs? | KTVB.COM | Idaho News
More well deserved coverage for the cool Library project.
ID agency goes high tech with…librarian blogs? - Northwest - The Olympian - Olympia, Washington
2 days after our own mention of the libraries project (http://bit.ly/1XARoD), which had greater detailed in the comments, we see coverage around the Web of the very cool project.
Google BSU and get a top three finisher
more coverage for the BSU marketing team. interesting to note that this comes after our own Chris Blanchard’s coverage 
Moffatt Thomas - C. Clayton Gill - Things to Consider When Starting Up a Company in Idaho
Things To Consider When Starting Up a Company in Idaho – A Lawyer’s Perspective
Not very pretty, but it sure seems to hava lot of good info.
Not only does the Treasure Valley have people with great tech skills, we’ve got skilled technicians that also care about their community. I just found out that local SEO guru Josh James of JTree.net will appear on the Channel 6 “Boise Green Living” segment on Wednesday and Thursday night (by the way I noticed that Channel 6 can definitely use some SEO help - take a look at the URL for the Boise Green Living page). Being an SEO/SEM guy, I know that Josh is monitoring his brand as my friends over at Tricycle would say, so no doubt we’ll get a link to whatever video footage appears online.
Are you doing something cool in the community that we need to know about? Drop me a line.
Straight from the Boise State News site . . .
A Boise State University student team has been named a finalist, placing in the top three out of 700 competitors, in the Americas region of the 2008 Google Online Marketing Challenge.
As regional finalist, Team AdHype — Lisa Chipman, Trevor Herbst, Kasey Keller, Chris Mendonca and Lisa Mooers —will be invited to spend a day at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a hands-on exercise for undergraduate or graduate students in which they must use online marketing via sound marketing analysis to optimize, manage and update a Google AdWords campaign.
Student teams recruit a small-to-medium business that has a Web site but doesn’t currently use AdWords. The team then works with the business to set up an AdWords account and structure an online marketing campaign.
Boise State’s Team AdHype worked with a sporting equipment online retailer. Christoph Schneider, a visiting faculty member in the Department of Information Technology and Supply Chain Management, served as faculty adviser.
“With more than 700 teams participating from this region, being among the top three is an outstanding achievement,” said Pat Shannon, dean of Boise State’s College of Business and Economics.
Overall, more than 1,600 teams from 47 countries participated in the challenge. More information on the winners and finalists is available at http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/2008winners.html.
From the editors at TechBoise, congrats! You’re making us proud! (Link to story on Boise State Site available here)
Well, if you were there you know that the TechBoise event on Wednesday at the Water Cooler was a winner! It all seems to be coming together for this nascent group. The event was the largest ever with over 50 people in attendance, pizza and beer provided by Mark Solon of Highway 12 Ventures, and three presenters that gave brief pitches about the technology they are developing for the mobile market. This all comes on the heels of the biggest week ever for the blog. Readership and RSS subscriptions are at an all time high!
For the recap - T-sheets, Push Mobile Media and Mobile Data Force talked about their successes and failures, their goals, and working in Boise. It is incredible to see the level of innovation that is happening here, and the excitement pouring from the entrepreneurs that congregate at the TechBoise events.
Now is the time when I wish I had better chops as a society reporter. Let me tell you who was there in case you weren’t - I saw bigwigs from Commerce (Don Dietrich and Brian Dickens); CEOs a plenty - Ryan Woodings (metageek), the Tricycle Team, J. Glerum (Check a Biz), Geroge Seybold (Seybold Scientific), Leo Geis (Idaho Airships), Rick Ritter (Idaho TechConnect); there were corporate types there too - Tac Anderson (HP) of course and others; as noted Mark Solon of Highway 12 represented the VC crowd. I saw Steve Nipper IP law guru kicking about (have we protected all the TechBoise assets, Steve??).
I know lots of you were following the live tweets from the event, and Pronetos CMO Wyatt Werner has some pictures that I know he is going to send me to post. If you missed the Tweet stream, Josh James massive SEO/SEM guru compiled them all here. Here are all the tweets related to the event, according to a fast Google site search (since as Brian Harrison pointed out we weren’t organized enough to use the #tag).
What’s on tap for the next TechBoise?? How about some suggestions people? We seem to have a real SEO/SEM capacity building here - maybe something on that. When I’m out in town I also am seeing some cool eGov stuff happening. Leave a comment and we’ll get another rousing rendition of TechBoise brought to you soon.
I feel that now is a good time to restate our commenting policy. I have even built it its own page.
Everyone is encouraged to share their opinion. As a rule we do not allow anonymous commenting on the site. I believe it keeps the conversation more civil.
If you have something to say, then say it. Unless you have a really good reason, like job security, don’t hide behind anonymity.
We only require a real, first name and a valid email address. We never reveal or use the email addresses in any way except to validate that this is a real person.
If you want to take potshots then do it over on the *news* sites. This site is meant to foster discussion.
As such, profanity, personal attacks and offensive content will not be published.
Thanks for your participation. I am very pleased with the growth in the site and since I’m not selling adds I don’t care about number of hits or page views, I care about quality discussion. Let’s keep the conversation going.
I wasn’t able to attend Mark Rivers City Club speech but there seems to be a lot of reactions out there to it.
The Boise Weekly has a very short post regarding his comments about the Boise Hole:
But either way, the vacant lot at the corner of Eighth and Main is overvalued and underutilized, Rivers said. Rivers reminded the gathered city fathers and mothers that The Hole is just one project among many downtown.
The Guardian has their usual slant on anything that effects taxes:
When asked how much his projects contribute to the Boise City tax base, he danced around, but never came up with the truth which is NEARLY NOTHING…most of his tax money goes to the CCDC so it can subsidize more growth.
The IBR has a little more complete coverage and a lively discussion in the comments:
“If you think you can stop this growth, it’s coming,” he said. “We have to be smart with how we react to their arrival. Infill development is the answer clearly.”
Chris mentioned Richard Florida in his last post, and I know that these are the same principles that drive Mark and the types of developments he does. It’s why Mark put up almost all of the money for the WaterCooler.
I personally think that a vibrant downtown is critical to the right kind of growth. We don’t need anymore sprawl. We need smart growth. We need to keep the young talent we have (cool downtown’s are a proven attraction) and we need a place where the Creative Class can mingle together and share ideas (once again a cool downtown works well for this).
The growth is coming. We can either be proactive and attract the type of growth we want or be reactive and continue to complain about traffic, air quality and sprawl (although people are always going to complain about that).
The way I see it (and I’m no expert) but we can either pay for it up front now with taxes, bonds etc and build the infrastructure we’ll need or pay for it later with decreased quality of life.
Let me know am I way off base here? Are there better options than the one’s Mark is proposing? Because if there are, I haven’t hear any.
TechBoise is a blog, and not a news agency, but that is still no reason for us to slip into rank boosterism. At the same time no one here wants to adopt a sky-is-falling tone. Still, amidst all the constant lists that Boise makes for being a great place to live, work, and raise a family, there is other news to consider.
If you follow Creative Class guru Richard Florida, you saw his chatter about Human Development Index and potential implications for America and its communities. Not familiar with the report? The Measure of America website describes the index and report:
The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009, produced by the American Human Development Project, is modeled on the United Nations Development Programme’s global Human Development Report, which has provided authoritative analysis and a ranked index for countries around the world for almost two decades. The Measure of America, published by Columbia University Press and The Social Science Research Council, is the first time the human development approach has been applied in the United States or any other industrialized nation.
In developing the index, the report considers things such as income and growth, but also weighs things such as “quality education, a long and healthy life, personal safety, a secure livelihood, and a say in decisions that affect one’s life.” All that said, you like me, must by now be wondering where Idaho ranked on this index put together by some of the world’s top scholars. We’ll get to that in a moment but let me first say that the report contains a forward authored by an interesting partnership: Nobel Prize winning Economist Amartya Sen, and Venture Capitalist Bill Draper. I’ll get back to the significance of the Social Science/VC partnership in a moment, but let’s look at the Idaho results.
That doesn’t paint a very shiny picture of the state of our human capital here. But there is hope.
As mentioned in a previous post about Vidoop’s move from OK to PDX, we learned an important lesson: that innovation occurs everywhere. We also learned that even tech innovation occurs outside of engineering schools (again see Vidoop). The first point is great news for Idaho - even with human capital trending on the low side all you need is one guy/gal with a good idea to start a spark. The second point is one I want to talk more about.
The big tech innovations in recent years AREN’T technology based - they are SOCIALLY based. Think about it. Craig’s list? Looks like circa 200 web dev. It’s barely anything more than HTML. Facebook and MySpace? Massive technological leap forward? Nope - just the social application of computer code. YouTube? No more difficult than creating an e-mail attachment. Blogger? Word on the web with cloud storage. These ARE NOT massive technological advancements - they are SOCIAL advancements. So what’s the implication? We need MORE partnerships like Amartya Sen and Bill Draper. It’s all fine and dandy when engineering students build a better mousetrap, but when it fails in the marketplace, they’ll need a social scientist to figure out why.
So - with limited human capital in the state here’s the plan: Idaho needs a bigger innovation tent. The engineers are playing, the VC’s are playing - but even we here at TechBoise have not begun to scratch the surface with including some people who are really on the cutting edge when it comes to tech and innovation.
Examples? I can’t disclose some of the projects that are being worked on by digital humanists within certain of our government agencies (but they can if they come here and leave a comment), but the level of technical competence and ingenuity that is coming down thew pike from the Historians at the Idaho State Historical Society, and from the librarians and programmers at the Idaho Commission for Libraries would blow your mind. And what about private sector companies like Blue Cross? Is no one out there cognizant of Microsoft and Google’s efforts to digitize medical records? Do any of us know what is going on with the Blues?
As I also alluded in that previous post, innovation takes care and feeding to nurture. Because we have a smaller pool of human capital from which to draw, and because that pool is not as deep (yet) as our national counterparts we need to follow the example probably unwittingly set by Sen and Draper and expand our innovation tent to include those that we might not ordinarily think of as innovators. We’re fortunate in that it’s FREE to do and we already do a pretty good job networking among the community and finding pockets of innovation no matter where they may be. Let’s do more of that.
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