Sky Miles, a rider with Portland Pedal Power, loads up his rig after a delivery in downtown Portland this morning.
(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)

Welcome to “Bikes at Work,” our ocassional series that looks into the people and companies that use bicycles to get work done. (more…)

The King Creamery ice cream trike with menu.
(Photos courtesy Jason King)

Portlanders on cargo bikes and trikes will deliver soup, fresh produce, food cart meals, beer and (of course) tamales to your door.

This summer, add another item to the menu: fancy ice cream.

For $24 a month, you can now be a member of King Creamery’s Ice Cream Club and get a bike delivery of three pints of the Northeast Portland-based King family’s latest ice cream concoction. This month’s flavors: “Banana Stand,” “Peaches & Cream” and “Mint Cookies.”

One-month purchases are also available for $25.

“I’ve been making ice cream for, gosh, it’s been eight years or so,” said Jason King, who co-founded the company this spring with his wife, Yvonne. “My wife wanted to have an ice cream party for her birthday one year, so I bought an ice cream machine, and I really got kind of obsessed with making it.”

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The smartphone camera uses the targets on the
gauges to create 3-D models of your gearing.
(Photos courtesy OTTO DesignWorks)

The rising tide of products that combine physical objects with mobile apps has come to do-it-yourself bike maintenance.

OTTO DesignWorks, a startup based a few miles south of Portland in Wilsonville, says its first product will offer “perfect shifting in under five minutes” for people with Shimano and SRAM 9-, 10- and 11-speed gear cassettes.

As the video below shows, the company sells gauges that can be attached to a cassette and derailleur. Its free mobile app then uses a smartphone camera and photogrammatry — the mathematically intensive process of turning images into three-dimensional modeling — to diagnose the situation and walk someone through the tuning process.

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Rolling Oasis, a Lents-based nonprofit that home-delivers $20 worth of organic produce to its customers each week, is angling to leap from Southeast into Northeast, too.

Proprietor Brandon Rhodes launched the service a year ago and has been delivering since then in his own Lents neighborhood ever since, adding extras like coffee and jam for additional fees.

“We want post-retail grocery innovations to be accessible for all of our neighbors, not just those who can afford it,” Rhodes writes in the description of the new Indiegogo campaign Rolling Oasis has launched to complete the expansion. “Alternative delivery services inflate their prices beyond what you’d find at Fred Meyer — leaving tighter-budget households behind.”

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Knock Software founder William Henderson with a matchbox-sized device similar to the one he’s developed that could sell for $50, last for two years and count every bike that passes by.
(Photos: M.Andersen and J.Maus/BikePortland)

Do bikes count?

A three-person Portland startup that hit a jackpot with its first mobile app is plowing profits into a new venture: a cheap, tiny device that could reinvent the science of measuring bike traffic — and help see, for the first time, thousands of people that even the bike-friendliest American cities ignore.

Tomorrow, Portland’s city council will consider a proposal to become their first client.

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Street Books founder Laura Maulton talks last week with patrons Jonathan and Bam.

After four summers loaded with all the paperbacks you can fit on a cargo trike, Portland’s most public library is rolling merrily forward.
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The Project 529 team in the office on Wednesday. Their new free mobile app makes it far easier to track and report a stolen bike, but the company has bigger plans.
(Photos by M.Andersen/BikePortland)

Working from an office high above Interstate Avenue, a team of Portlanders has spent the last year quietly building what might be the country’s most ambitious bike-specific software company.

Funded out of pocket by three co-founders and led by the lead creator of the XBox, the ten-person company calling itself Project 529 hit the Internet last month with a web and mobile app that aspires to be a next-generation Stolen Bicycle Registry and with an attention-grabbing petition asking eBay and Craigslist to begin requiring serial numbers for the bikes they sell.

But the most interesting part of Project 529, which is pronounced “five two nine” in reference to the hours of rest and recreation, is what it wants to do.

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Sprocket Fly techs Reid Lustig (left) and Sam Appelbaum
(right) with the service’s first client, Aaron Kaffen
of local web services firm Cloudability.
(Photo courtesy Sprocket Fly.)

Portland is great at delivering things by bike: flowers, pizza, beer, plumbing. A new company wants to be a platform for delivering … bike repairs.

The two-week-old Sprocket Fly is a mobile bike repair service that plans to affiliate with several different bike technicians who’ll travel to homes and businesses for on-site repairs.

“I’m not a huge aggressive commuter or biker, but I enjoy biking, me and my wife and kid here in Northeast Portland,” Sprocket Fly founder Dan Hahn said. “One of the things that has always been a pain for us is getting it into the shop.”

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Dave Hoch, co-founder of The Cog Space.
(Photo by J.Maus/BikePortland)

A “recovering SUV driver” with a master’s degree in sustainable business and a job in Portland’s tech sector is setting out to bring two good ideas from the tech industry into the bicycle world: business accelerators and unconference events.

Dave Hoch has just lined up a new co-working space that sets out to serve as an accelerator for Portland’s ever-growing universe of bike-related businesses. Hoch is also hosting an “unconference” event next week designed to bring together people of all sorts interested in “the bike economy.”

Hoch, 33, has been working since December to plan The COG Space. As of this week, he’s sealed a partnership with Forge, a new co-working space for social entrepreneurs and nonprofits that’s planning to open in May at 1410 SW Morrison Street, just west of Interstate 405 near downtown.

Hoch said in an interview last month that in talking with entrepreneurs in the bike world, he’s “hearing they’re really good at their craft, but they’re not business people.”

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Two more bike-based businesses.

Recently I’ve learned about two more Portland businesses that have made bicycles an integral part of their business. Crank Roasting is a new coffee company and Co-Creative Pruning has been in business since 2010. I asked the owners of both businesses to share more about what they do and why they’ve decided to use bicycles.

Cory Love, owner of Crank Roasting:

“I have been involved in coffee roasting over the last 15 years. My love of riding and racing bikes goes back to my childhood – racing BMX through the late 70’s and 80’s and then in my mid 20’s I got into road cycling and racing. As my family and business became busier in my 30’s, I was finding it harder to ride consistently. I started dreaming about a way to be able to have bicycling be integral to my business.”

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