When I heard over the weekend that Portland-based startup Vidoop apparently was shutting its doors, first reported by TechCrunch and then picked up by Silicon Florist’s Rick Turoczy, the first thing I thought was, “Damn, there goes the Next feature for July.”

Admittedly, that’s a pretty selfish thing to think, but we had a feature ready to go on Vidoop’s new CAPTCHA innovation (the company makes Internet security technology). Contributing writer Adrianne Jeffries had interviewed Vidoop software developer Benjamin Stover about using image recognition to fool the robots. It was a nifty idea: the CAPTCHA displays images and asks the user to click several of them in order, which is an easy instruction for a human to follow, but not so much for the web-trolling bots.

Well, sorry Vidoop. You’d been through two rounds of layoffs and it stinks to see another tree fall in the Silcon Forest. And that CAPTCHA idea sounded pretty good. But what about me? Each month we spotlight innovation in our magazine on our Next pages and it’s pulling teeth to get companies to tell us about their cool stuff. So here’s your chance once again. Got a great product, process or idea to share? Just reply here. And do it soon enough and you could be featured in our July issue. We have an opening.

Innovation comes in all colors. Monday night the magazine celebrates its first annual 100 Best Green Companies to Work For in Oregon. Our green governor, Ted Kulongoski, will join us at the Gerding Theater to honor those companies that operate their workplaces with sustainable values. We get to sip Full Sail beer, hear the Portland Cello Project and hand out some very deserving awards (made of recycled glass and organic cotton, of course).

And I’m going to use this as a really transparent segue into proudly announcing that Oregon Business itself won 11 awards this past weekend from the regional Society of Professional Journalists. Notably, Managing Editor Ben Jacklet won awards for five of his outstanding stories: Pollution for Sale, Don’t Panic/Panic; The Party’s Over; Drinking Age; and Nike in China. Former ME Abraham Hyatt took a first place for State of Addiction, an analysis of the state’s dependence on lottery dollars. The managing editors of this magazine are clearly where the talent sits. But hey, I hired them, so I am claiming the credit for being smart enough to do that.

Robin Doussard is Editor of Oregon Business. www.twitter.com/robindoussard

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