Today Xconomy hits a milestone that we’ve all been working toward for several months—well, for several years, really. We’re finally introducing Xconomy San Francisco, our eye on high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship in the Bay Area. I couldn’t be more excited to be coordinating this effort as the company’s new San Francisco editor.
There’s just one catch. I’m not actually in San Francisco yet.
For business reasons, we wanted to launch the San Francisco site by mid-June. But there’s so much happening here in Boston, where I’ve been working as Xconomy’s chief correspondent since our launch in 2007, that I can’t hit the road for another couple of weeks. The biggest thing on our agenda is the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, which will be this Thursday. I’m leading a panel at the event on the New England region’s remarkable cluster of CAD/CAM software companies, and emceeing a lightning-presentation competition that we’re calling the “XSITE Xpo.”
But don’t worry—we’ve got San Francisco covered. Numerous Xconomy staffers have been crisscrossing the Bay Area over the past few months, including our founder and CEO Bob Buderi, our publisher Steve Woit, and our national biotechnology editor and Seattle editor Luke Timmerman. I was in town three weeks ago to find us an office, and Luke was just there last week doing a round of interviews.
On June 27, assuming that the moving truck is all loaded, I’ll pile into my trusty Accord with my dog Rhody and my friend Graham Gordon Ramsay for the 3,300-mile trek to San Francisco. Graham is a professional photographer (not to mention composer and author) and he’s going to be the videographer for a series of vlog posts that we’ll be publishing here, starting June 28. We’ll be traveling through Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and (of course) California. On the way, we plan to stop to interview people about how technology affects their lives, what the climate for entrepreneurship is like in their parts of the country, and what kinds of innovation they’d like to see coming out of places like the Bay Area.
Today we’re publishing the pilot episode in this travelogue series, which we’re calling “World Wide Wade Goes West” in a nod to my weekly Xconomy column. The video is as much an introduction to Xconomy as it is to the series. Click on the YouTube player below to watch. Or if you’re reading this article via RSS or e-mail, head directly over to YouTube. We hope you’ll come back starting June 28 to watch the whole series.
