How do you condense all the essentials of our business down onto just a few PowerPoint slides, and still communicate the depth the board needs? The answer lies in knowing what the Board needs to know versus what new management teams think the Board wants to know.

For example, many companies think that in presenting financial results they should focus on recent history, only. But Boards care about history only to the extent it foreshadows the future. So ? this dashboard provides the template to do both.

Many companies think that showing sales results is important, but again the future is more important than the past. This template helps lay out the sales funnel in a systematic yet simple way.

Gerry Langeler will share the dashboard template OVP Venture Partners gives all its startups, and will explain why each element has stood the test of time.

OVP Venture Partners announced that it led two rounds of financings worth a total of $15 million.

High-profile venture capitalist Dave Chen said he is shifting to part-time status at OVP Venture Partners to give him time to concentrate on sustainability and emerging markets.

Portland Business Journal - April 13, 2007
by Aliza Earnshaw
Business Journal staff writer

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Stuart Cohen, formally CEO of OSDL who left during the merger with FSG, has started his own for-profit company focused on applications built on an open stack using open source methodologies. Cohen wanted OSDL to focus on more than just Linux, including open source applications, but the OSDL and FSG were really focused on Linux. Forming the Collaborative Software Initiative was a way for Cohen to lead a company focused on open source applications. This initiative is funded by OVP Venture Partners and has a strong advisory council including industry luminaries like Brian Behlendorf, Dan Frye, and Eben Moglen. They are also partnered with IBM, HP, and Novell.

According to eWeek, the company will

"focus on building non-competitive, essential software for vertical industries in a collaborative environment that helps companies solve shared IT problems. The business model for Collaborative Software Initiative is simple: Develop and support essential code that does not exist today and that meets the needs of competitors in vertical industries, such as financial services, at a significantly lower cost than if the companies were to develop such code internally or outsource it?and then support it."(Quote from eWeek)

This is an interesting model, but the details are still unclear:

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The smell of money and a clear front-runner in an upcoming mayoral election bring out the blue ribbon panel folk for Sam Adam's Creative Capacity Committee.

If you've been asleep, Adams' convened several gatherings to make the case Portland's arts community, using a new set of data and arguments, could ? possibly ? make a case for support from industry and the general population.

Three committees, and a detailed web site has launched to explain the Creative Capacity strategy: (links here to PDF files) a steering committee made up mostly of business-people and various politicians, a strategy committee made up of art types and art administrators, and a coordinating committee made up of City Hall and RACC brass, with their facilitator / consultant.

So who have been selected for these committees? And perhaps more importantly, what are their affiliations? (Much of the information below is available on the Creative Capacity web site, but in a PDF form which is less searchable than a HTML web page.)

Steering Committee Members

Martin Medieros, Chair - ...

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) in Beaverton, OR has just eliminated 9 technical and administrative positions at the labs. A staff of 19 people remain at OSDL including Tom Hanrahan in engineering, Diane Peters for legal work, Linus Torvalds, and Andrew Morton.

ZDnet writes that ?CEO Stuart Cohen resigned to pursue opportunities with higher-level open-source software,? and that ?Cohen's resignation as CEO was coincidental and independent of the other changes at OSDL?. According to ComputerWorld, Cohen will be working with Portland and Seattle based venture capital firm OVP Venture Partners. Mike Temple will be moving the COO position into the CEO role.

The now smaller OSDL will focus on the following:

...