and views in our Xconomist Forum. The forum is open to anyone. But it is the special home of the “Xconomists,” an elite group of advisors now numbering more than 200 that we have assembled in all of our cities.
Our initial group of more than 40 San Francisco Xconomists (listed here) includes: minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell, now Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley/San Francisco; Curtis Carlson, President and CEO, SRI International; Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director, Center for Open Innovation, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business; Paul Graham, Partner, Y Combinator; Trip Hawkins, CEO and Founder, Digital Chocolate, Founder of Electronic Arts; Regis Kelly, Director, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (Qb3); Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google; Stephen Quake, Professor of Bioengineering, Stanford University and Co-founder of Helicos Biosciences and Fluidigm; Bryan Roberts, Partner, Venrock Associates; Eric Schadt, Chief Scientific Officer, Pacific Biosciences and co-founder, Sage Bionetworks; Sue Siegel, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures and former President, Affymetrix; Chris Somerville, Director, Energy Biosciences Institute and Professor at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Anne Wojcicki, Co-founder and President, 23andMe.
The Xconomists will often take center stage at the events we plan to hold around the Bay Area to bring an even more personal dimension to what we do. In the past year alone, Xconomy has held nearly 20 events around the country. These range from dinner conversations and evening forums to half-day conferences around topics like cloud computing, mobile innovation, smart energy, and the shape of life sciences 20 years. The biggest of our events is a full-day innovation extravaganza, XSITE (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which will take place this Thursday in Boston. Stay tuned for word about our Bay Area events, which will begin this fall.
We are also extremely grateful to be supported in our newest region by an innovative group of charter underwriters and venture members who dare to take the plunge with a startup media company. They are: Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Arch Venture Partners, Fenwick and West, HP Startup Ecosystem Programs, Invest Northern Ireland, J. Robert Scott Executive Search, Schwartz Communications, the Science & Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and SRI International. A heartfelt thank you to all!
Wade and Luke will provide their own overview of their plans for Xconomy San Francisco tomorrow. But you can get started reading their stuff right away, as we debut with Wade’s in-depth look at the Siri “virtual personal assistant” app for the iPhone, and how it came to be acquired by Apple, and Luke’s profile of Genentech’s souped-up version of trastuzumab (Herceptin), the hit drug for women with certain forms of breast cancer. In addition, we have our first guest editorial for San Francisco’s Xconomist Forum. It’s from Venrock’s Bryan Roberts, who offers his take on three things the Bay Area can do to become an even more sustainable place for innovation. Finally, I also invite you to watch this video blog post that Wade prepared as a preview of his upcoming cross-country trip to San Francisco.
We’re extremely excited to finally come to the Bay Area, where I grew up and spent much of my career, and we’ve been deeply encouraged by the enthusiasm and support we have received across the innovation community, which sees a real need for what we are doing. We hope you like what Xconomy is all about, and welcome your comments and ideas at [email protected].
