ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb is thrilled to announce the first in a series of local RWW meetups. These meetups, made up of ReadWriteWeb readers like yourselves, should be an excellent way to have some great, thought-provoking discussions and meet other tech enthusiasts in your area.

Our inaugural meetup will be held in the city with the highest concentration of ReadWriteWeb writers, Portland, Oregon, on October 13 at the Green Dragon. Richard MacManus, our esteemed Founder and Editor in Chief, will even be there, all the way from New Zealand, so if you're in the area, please do stop in and say hello. Click here to RSVP, we'd love to see you there!

How many times have you found yourself in possession of a whole lot of digital content that should be tied to a very specific physical place, maybe even a particular spot in a room, but with no easy way to tie together the two dimensions of online ephemera and real-world location? Maybe that doesn't happen to you very much yet, but if you worked at a museum - it would happen all the time. And wouldn't you like to imagine yourself working at a museum? I suspect you would.

The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.

During an event at Alpha Broadcasting's new Bing Lounge in downtown Portland today, Microsoft announced the launch of its first hyperlocal Bing product: a food cart finder that provides Portland's food cart-crazy population with access to menus, directions and reviews for over 250 food carts. While this is obviously a very local story right now, Danielle Tiedt, the general manager of marketing for Bing at Microsoft, told us that while this is Microsoft's first foray into hyperlocal services, the company plans to expand its efforts both in Portland and the rest of the country over the coming months.

In February, Portland, Oregon Mayor Sam Adams announced the city would put $500,000 towards a seed fund to help encourage regional startups. And on Friday of last week, the Portland Development Commission announced it had finally chosen the five local business leaders to help launch the fund, predicting it would be "open for business" by the fall.

As our "Never Mind the Valley" series demonstrated, startup communities are thriving outside of Silicon Valley. A panel at WebVisions 2010 today in Portland< Oregon made a strong case for fostering community not merely in a city in general, but in specific working environments. Bac'n.com's Jason Glaspey, Silicon Florist's Rick Turoczky, Urban Airship's Scott Kveton, and Nedspace's Josh Friedman shared their experiences with co-working.

In this week's ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup - our digest of the best posts from the past week - we discuss why HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, where the best school for majors in entrepreneurship are, and how for the most innovative entrepreneurs, it all starts with "why." Also this week we revealed some secrets to social media, and added to our continuing series chronicling startup communities with profiles of both Boston and Portland.

When asked what shapes Portland's startup culture, Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy named 3 defining aspects of the industry - hardware roots, open source projects and iPhone development. Turoczy has been in Oregon for the past 15-years and started Silicon Florist as a way to cover the region's early stage startup scene alongside other Portland tech sites like Mike Rogoway's Silicon Forest blog and Strange Love Live.
Since then he's watched his town grow into a bustling tech hub and enjoyed every minute of it. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Turoczy and a few other Portland influencers to get a feel for the scene.

A group of podcasters in Portland, Oregon have teamed up with internet friends around the world to create a new type of charity fundraiser, a live streaming telethon. Called 30 Hour Day, the event begins this evening. It will use streaming media services to deliver the content, the Causes Facebook application to collect donations, and Twitter to spread the word.

30 consecutive hours of music, variety acts, podcasts and other entertainment will raise money for local charity organizations. Will it work? Portland has a deep community of geeks and connections all around the web, so perhaps this group will be able to keep people entertained around the clock.

We like to report good news, not just because it makes us all feel good, but because when a company is doing something positive during a downturn, it indicates something pretty interesting about that company. That is why Jobwire reports on new hires when all the other news is about layoffs. In that same spirit, The A-Team will be a monthly wrap-up of all the Series A VC financing rounds in web technology. To close a Series A VC round these days, you have to be pretty special.