Time for the summary of last week’s news from Xconomy San Francisco.
—On the heels of Y Combinator’s climactic Winter 2011 Demo Day on March 23, I continued my profiles of “YC W11” startups with a look at HelloFax, which lets users paste signatures into digital documents, thereby hastening the demise of the fax machine.
—I also wrote about a summer 2010 Y Combinator startup—Anyleaf, which aims to replace the old-fashioned supermarket circular with location-targeted e-mails rounding up local grocery deals.
—And wrapping up the YC-related news, I interviewed Alex Polvi, co-founder of YC-backed Cloudkick, which was bought by Rackspace in December; Polvi told me what it was like to go from incubator to acquisition in under a year.
—My weekly column focused on the flaws in Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature.
—We also had several items from my colleagues around the Xconomy network. As Curt reported from Seattle, Amazon muscled in on Apple’s turf by introducing Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, which let users store and stream their music from Amazon’s cloud servers.
—Contributor Elise Craig wrote a piece about Catch, the everyman’s online notekeeping service (it competes with Evernote, but “you don’t have to be an organized person to use it,” CEO Steve Brown argued).
—Tom Lee in Detroit wrote about the departure of Paul Krutko, formerly chief development officer for the City of San Jose, for Ann Arbor, MI, where he’ll head up business accelerator called Ann Arbor SPARK.
—Bruce, our San Diego editor, noted that tech employment is rebounding in Silicon Valley and other parts of California.
—And Greg sent a piece our way that sheds light on HP’s acquisition of Massachusetts-based Vertica.
—Speaking of acquisitions, Salesforce.com bought Radian6, Cisco Systems bought NewScale, and eBay bought Pennsylvania-based GSI Commerce (but Boston-based RueLaLa won’t be coming along for the ride).
—And in other deals news, Tabula raised $108 million, Clever Machine raised $3.25 million, Adap.tv raised $20 million, Aerohive raised $25 million, Citrusleaf raised $2 million, Brightsource Energy raised $200 million, Affine Systems raised $5 million, and Qwiki raised an additional $1 million.
