Code Benders

Posted by Taus October 19, 2011

Last week at the Bend Venture Conference, Central Oregon’s newest (and only) business accelerator was unveiled. VentureBox is a business accelerator focused on supporting concept stage startups. The initiative is a program of the Tech Alliance and is committed to Central Oregon’s entrepreneurial community and helping turn innovative product and service ideas into great companies.

Although a much larger group of mentors will be announced, the current team is pretty impressive and represents management, finance, technology and other key skills for early stage companies. VentureBox will be offering mentorships, infrastructure and a milestone-based program to develop startups into investment-ready enterprises.

We think that VentureBox has great potential to help diversify the Central Oregon community and create sustainable, living wage jobs. That’s why we’re proud to be supporting and participating in the effort!

Posted by Taus December 26, 2009

File this under “Make Local Habit”…

I met a couple of college students that were starting a CSA here in Bend. They were handing out leaflets at the market to build some interest and see if they could get enough families to support a weekly drive over the Cascades to bring back local, organic produce.

So I jumped at the chance to help. Just a short while later, we had a a Facebook group going and WordPress site up and running. Between the two, we’ve got over 100 people that have expressed interest. We’re still sort of in beta on the site and planning a more robust member management system. But for now, it’s looking pretty good.

Check out Bend CSA and if you live in the area sign up!

Posted by Taus October 23, 2009

In anticipation of 350.org‘s global day of action tomorrow, we are happy to announce that our development has beta launched the Unite Now Activist Network.

This project has been fun and intense. With only 8 weeks to conceive, design and program this social network for activism, the challenge was significant. To jump start the project, we looked at several open source Rails projects, but ultimately decided to leverage TOG, with hosting by Engine Yard and storage on S3.

There are a lot of features still hidden under the hood and we’ve got lots more to do on the site. So stay tuned – we’ll update the project soon.