Business & Technology Nexus

This July 4th I’m traveling to Portland, Oregon. Portland, for those that don’t know, is arguably the US capital of open source. I was surprised to find it a hotbed of open source thought leadership and activity, and I’m told it’s been that way for some time. It’s wonderful to sit in a Starbucks and hear conversations about networked innovation and the darwinism behind the success of Linux. It’s great stuff.

Here in Silicon Valley, most of the coffee conversations sound more like the guy in this short and funny video by StoryStream courtesy of YouTube. No offense Palo Alto!

I’m hoping to catch up with a new friend of mine, Scott Kveton, while I’m up there. Scott was Director of OSU’s Open Source Labs, and I first got to know him in that capacity. He’s a firehose to talk to – lots of experience and insightful commentary on the community.

He’s just now taking on the CEO role for JanRain, a firm that has some really cool technology for individual authentication for users applicable to both the business and consumer spaces. Identity management is a pain most of us wish we had to deal with a lot less, certainly in our everyday web experience but also within the enterprise. I’m hopeful Scott will hit a homerun with JanRain & wish him the best. Who knows, maybe Coupa’s products will be able to take advantage of OpenID someday.