Are you a software developer who’s got the skills to pay the bills? Or do you know one?

Here at AboutUs we’re entering a period of growth, and expanding our team of builders to meet the demands of this new chapter in our company’s history.

AboutUs is a small, growing, venture-backed and profitable company based in Portland, Oregon.  Our office is open, our culture is entrepreneurial, and our people are skilled, creative and driven. We launched AboutUs.org in 2006 and it’s now one of the most visited places on the Internet. Now we’re tackling the Saas space with our SEO and website analysis tool, and we’re gaining traction.

Our work environment is ideal. There are more windows than walls in our spacious office. Our desks are on wheels, with 30″ cinema displays mounted on adjustable arms. The views of downtown and northeast Portland are unmatched. We play music, share laughs, and fly paper airplanes from one end of the space to the other.

We play harder than less successful companies work. Our ping pong table subs as a conference table. There’s lunch hour yoga once a week. The kitchen and refrigerator are always stocked. We strive to ensure you arrive each morning to find engaging, challenging, and rewarding work.

We’re looking for someone to impress us, and then grow with us. We offer competitive salary and benefits in a great work environment. For more information, visit our Careers page.

Want to pitch to hundreds of investors?

Here at AboutUs, we’re great fans of Oregon Entrepreneurs Network. We love the support and help that OEN offers entrepreneurs who are building Oregon’s next great companies.

In that spirit, we want to let all Portland entrepreneurs know that next Friday, 14 October, is the deadline for applying to Round 2 of OEN’s Seed Oregon PubTalk. It’s an opportunity to get your pitch in front of active investors and receive candid and valuable feedback.

The Seed Oregon PubTalks are also a chance to win a slot at OEN’s Angel Oregon, the state’s biggest angel investing conference. That’s where entrepreneurs get to pitch their startups to hundreds of investors. Entrepreneurs chosen to participate in Angel Oregon get professional coaching from experienced investors who know what other investors are looking for, not to mention the chance to meet people who want to invest in your idea.

So get on it! Fly on over to OEN to learn more about Seed Oregon and how to apply.

Sam Blackman photo courtesy of Elemental Technologies

Last night’s OEN awards left award winners, nominees and audience members alike with warm hearts and smiles on their faces.  The award ceremony was a true celebration of the best in Oregon entrepreneurship.  Ray King, our founder and CEO, kept up the jovial energy throughout the ceremony with his witty anecdotes, not to mention his amazing Madonna impersonation.

And now for the winners…

Kudos to long time AboutUs friend Sam Blackman, who won the Individual Achievement award.  It was a double win for Sam and his team – Sam’s company, Elemental Technologies, also won in the Working Capital category.  We’re especially proud of Elemental, as they are an AboutUs sister company – we are both funded by Voyager Capital.

Wendy Strgar, CEO of Good Clean Love, kept the crowd laughing with her sincere and amusing acceptance speech for her company’s win in the Development Category.  Strgar highlighted her company’s core values by emphasizing how important good sexual health is to everyone’s health and happiness. Her cheerful attitude and sincerity were contagious.

Finally, Avnera Corporation, manufacturers of wireless audio technology, won in the Growth Stage category.  Avnera is growing like crazy and creating more jobs in Oregon.  Avnera produces wireless speakers, surround sound and whole home audio, in addition to multi-point wireless voice applications for headsets and microphones.

AboutUs congratulates all nominees for their hard work.  We commend all of you for building fabulous companies in Oregon and wish you much future success!

We were all so proud when AboutUs founder and CEO Ray King won the individual achievement trophy at the OEN Tom Holce Entrepreneurship Awards in 2009. Tonight, Ray will be the emcee for this year’s award ceremony, and we’ll be there to cheer him on.

OEN, or the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, has been encouraging and educating both entrepreneurs and investors for 20 years. The group has facilitated funding and training for dozens of now-successful Oregon companies, making a significant impact on our state’s economic development.

Tonight’s event will honor companies in the development stage,in the working-capital stage, and in the growth stage. OEN will also honor one entrepreneur in the Individual Achievement category, and will honor Gerry Langeler, a founder of Mentor Graphics and managing director of  venture capital firm OVP Venture Partners, for lifetime achievement in entrepreneurship.

We’re proud of all the nominees, and want to make sure you have a chance to find and read about every one of them. With no further ado, here they are:

Development Stage category
Expressive Labels of Portland, also known as NoSkinny,  provides a unique social shopping experience for bigger teens, making them the envy of their skinny peers.

Gamma Therapeutics Inc. of Portland is an early-stage biotechnology venture developing a novel class of solutions for cardiovascular disease diagnostic testing, surgical therapy and military medicine.

Good Clean Love of Eugene is a sexual health company that designs and sells premium quality organic/natural intimacy products and provides educational resources for building healthy relationships.

Working Capital Stage category
Elemental Technologies of Portland creates and sells video processing technology that helps content programmers, service providers and broadcasters deliver video to TVs, PCs, tablets and mobile phones.

Jama Software of Portland sells its Web application, Contour, to Fortune 500 companies that need a collaboration tool for big projects, from space rockets to healthcare systems to innovative software.

Pulse Health of Portland sells breath technologies that identify health risks through measuring aldehydes, known indicators of free radical damage.

Growth Stage category
Avnera Corp. of Beaverton sells analog systems-on-chip that enable high-fidelity wireless audio products at affordable prices.

EthicsPoint of Lake Oswego sells enterprise risk awareness solutions that help organizations align their governance, risk and compliance processes with overall business strategy.

Full Sail Brewing Co. of Hood River makes and bottles a range of popular beers.

Grape Solar of Eugene provides solar panels and related products and services to American consumers through national retail chain stores and online retailers.

Individual Achievement category

Sam Blackman, co-founder, CEO and chairman of Elemental Technologies

Robert Judge, executive vice president and general manager of Wellpartner Inc.‘s Contract Pharmacy Services

Chris Marsh, co-founder and CEO of Pulse Health LLC

We haven’t announced it yet – but since we just got an email from a panicked customer who has been working diligently to get his Site Report to green – thought we would say a little something.

That is right, last week we rolled out the ability for the AboutUs Site Report to automatically check 100 links on your website, previously it was 50.

You might have more errors than you previously did – as did our panicked customer – because we have doubled the number of pages checked.

We also plan to add features to the Site Report in the future – so new errors might shed light on more problems. That is why we offer the Site Report as a monthly subscription – for monitoring purposes.

You might remember, Ray won the Entrepreneurship Award for Individual Achievement a year and half ago. Check out his invitation for entrepreneurs in the Portland, Oregon area to join OEN.

Chris of the Dutch lighting company RoseDesign.nl (visit), recently found AboutUs and editing a wiki!

“I discovered AboutUs.org when I viewed my ip details on DomainTools.com.

To my surprise a wiki page about my website existed. I decided to edit it, filled in my company information, website title and micro summary, even tried the wiki text.

Later after reading an article on do-follow links on AboutUs.org I asked for a review. The page needed more work however, so following the suggestions provided by Mark Dilley and with his help I continued to edit the wiki text , also adding links and a logo.

Soon we were both satisfied with the result, and I now have what I hope is an informative AboutUs.org wiki page which also links to my website.

In conclusion learning how to do this has been an interesting experience that I would recommend to others.”

Chris Rose 26-5-2011

How would you like to be able to see with Google eyes, and be able to understand what your local business website is about? If Google does not understand what it is about, then very likely your potential customers are not even going to get the chance to see it.

Many local business owners nowadays are beginning to understand why it is important to have a business website; however they tend to know very little about how a website should be set up, or the reasons why it is important that the search engines can understand it, before they can present it in the local searches.

Now you have the chance to be able to check how your website is seen by the search engines by using the new SEO (search engine optimization) website report by AboutUs.org.

With the SEO website report you can now see with Google eyes how good your website’s on-page optimization is, the report gets its information about your website, in exactly the same way that Google sees, when they crawl it.

The sad fact is that local business owners tend to use a local website designer, who knows little or next to nothing about SEO to set up their local website for them, and then wonder why their website is not being found by their local customers.

Wouldn’t it be better then to check out the home page of a website designer or SEO company, before you engage them to do this work for you? Of course it would, and you can do this using the free service offered by AboutUs.org, you can check out any website homepage that you want to, including your own.

AboutUs.org have now taken this a stage further by introducing an in-depth service, allowing you to analyze up to 50 pages of your website, with helpful tips on how it can be improved for the search engines, and for your local prospective customers, although there is a small monthly payment of $9.95, which I believe to be excellent value for money.

In my own quest for perfection, I stumbled upon AboutUs.org some time ago, and have found their reports invaluable to my efforts, and I have also used the free report to check out not only my websites, but also those of my competitors as well.

This has been an eye opener for me, and I must say that I am surprised to find that some large national company’s websites are not very well optimized, particularly as these companies are using SEO “experts” to do the work for them, at a substantial monthly fee.

At least now that you are aware of these facts, you will be able to avoid making these mistakes, and hopefully save some time and money as well, maybe you can even do this type of work for yourself, with a little help from AboutUs.org, and it won’t cost you anything to at least try out the free version, before making a decision about the paid for one.

I do hope that by now you understand the importance of good on-page optimization for your local business website. I believe that you can see the value of this information, and perhaps you may even pass it on to others, who may also be able to benefit from it.

We were excited today to meet Nick Burrus in person! Nick is a longtime member of AboutUs, and has enthusiastically contributed to many of our projects over the past few years.

Nick and his dad, James, were en route from their home in California to Seattle, where they’ll depart for an Alaskan cruise. It’s something Nick’s wanted to do for years. We were flattered when James said that coming to our office and meeting us was actually the part of the trip that Nick was anticipating most eagerly.

As for us, meeting Nick was like meeting a celebrity who’s also kind of a pen pal. You get to know someone over the Web, and it’s exciting to finnnnaalllly meet them in person!

Matt Bernier and business partner Tony Kimberly own Spotted Koi, a Denver, Colorado, firm that creates websites and web-based tools for business owners. Matt also owns LaunchYourProject.com, where he publishes press releases or descriptions of people’s projects, along with links to their site.

Links on LaunchYourProject.com are free, and like DoFollow links on AboutUs, are given solely to spread good information to people via the Web.

We’re proud of the review of our new Site Report that Matt published today. Here are some highlights:

The Site Report will scan your site for all the big on-page SEO things that you need to optimize…

With the Site Report from Aboutus.org, you can have them do all the heavy lifting…

This tool is super easy to use, has tons of great information and is laid out in such a way that you can find information quickly.

If you’ve got a new product or service you want to publicize, get in touch with Matt. He’s a community-minded technology guy, for sure.