Please join us for True Open Mic Portland!

True Ventures will host open office hours for entrepreneurs on Thursday, April 22nd from 3:00pm to 5:00pm PDT at Urban Airship in PIE at the W+K building. Come pitch us your ideas, tell us your stories, ask us for advice, discuss the state of the economy, or just come for a chat. There will be no projectors or executive summaries. Just 7 minutes of you, your idea, and your story.

The address is 1227 NW Davis Street, Portland, Oregon. Look for the big Urban Airship banner in the window, and you will know that you are in the right place.

The Portland Python Users Group is hosting a sprint February 26 at the headquarters of Urban Airship. The space has room for at least 40 people, but be sure to sign up here!

The group plans to spend some time on Fabric's multiprocessing branch, even including a look into a Python 3 port. Eric Holscher, one of the organizers of the sprint, plans to focus on Django features for 1.4, including forms improvements.

Flatland and Alfajor will also get some love and might see some Python 3 work as well. Last, but certainly not least, co-organizer Dan Colish plans to hack on PyPy, from 2.7 compatibility to benchmarking and testing on the platform. Join any of them or bring your own projects -- it's a day of hacking, fun, food, and friends.

On top of all of the third-party projects, they may spend some time on core development topics such as Python 3 features, doc and code bug fixing, and writing new tests. For those interested in starting on core development, we wrote a guide just for you: Beginners Guide to Python Core Development.

If you're interested in joining their sprint, don't forget to sign up. If you have questions, contact Dan and Eric.

This month's topic: Lean Mobile Data and Open Source: Storage, Messaging and Analysis

This talk will provide a overview of Urban Airship's core data warehouse architecture - a system designed to handle capture, intake and analysis of data for 100s of millions of mobile devices with near real time precision. The talk will touch on Urban Airship's use of HBase, Hadoop Core, ZooKeeper, Kafka as well as home-grown services. Time permitting, the talk will also cover how Urban Airship takes a lean approach to working with volumes of data including the use of ad-hoc tools such as Pig and Cascading as well as how the company leverages the data architecture for fast customer discovery and innovations.

Speaker: Erik Onnen

Erik Onnen is the Hadoop and Analytics Lead at Urban Airship, the Portland-based leader in mobile application engagement services. He has over 10 years in distributed systems experience including the design and implementation of multiple "big data" systems. Erik joined Urban Airship in October of 2010, prior to that he was a Principal Engineer at Jive Software.

PJUG meetings start with some time to eat and socialize (pizza and beverages are provided), followed by the featured speaker, then Q&A, discussion, sometimes a drawing to give away swag. :)

Though we like knowing how many people to expect, you don't have to RSVP, on Upcoming or otherwise. Go ahead and just show up!

Many people also go for a drink and further discussion following the meeting, at a location determined ad hoc (lately, Trees restaurant in the same building).

http://twitter.com/pjug http://pjug.org/ (join our mailing list, linked from the website!)

Urban Airship powers the world's most successful mobile apps. It is great for brands because it make makes mobile apps far more engaging, effective, efficient and profitable. It is also one of the hot new mobile technology startups in Portland that is breathing excitement into the Portland entrepreneurial ecosystem and making the world take notice. In fact they were recently named as one of the Top 25 Mobile Companies by tech news site Informilo. With $21.6 M in funding and a potentially huge marketplace of app developers, Urban Airship is considered “one to watch”.

Come to OEN's April PubTalk and hear from Urban Airship’s CEO, Scott Kveton. He will share the story of Urban Airship’s journey since being founded in 2009. He will also share his goals for Urban Airship’s future and insights that entrepreneurs should think about as they work to make their own startup take flight.

Speaker: Urban Airship – Scott Kveton, Co-founder and CEO Scott Kveton is the co-founder and CEO of Urban Airship based in Portland, Oregon. He is widely recognized as an expert on mobile app strategy and cloud infrastructure. He speaks frequently on app monetization, engagement and the developer ecosystems around the various mobile platforms. Prior to starting Urban Airship, Kveton had more than a dozen years of experience building technology, developing business strategy and leading engineering teams with companies including Amazon.com, Rulespace, JanRain and Vidoop.

Unfortunately, I have had to cancel this event. December turns out to be a very difficult month to book speakers and I wasn't able to put together a sufficiently compelling slate of speakers.

I'm going to try really hard to re-schedule the event for early 2013, and will keep everyone posted.

In town for OSCON? Take timeout to meetup with fellow hackers over drinks at Dig a Pony - a 15 minute walk straight down MLK, or a 5 minute streetcar/bus ride.

Big ups to awesome sponsors Mashery, Twilio, TokBox, SendGrid, Urban Airship, ESRI Labs, ProgrammableWeb and Silicon Florist!

apihour