The earthquakes and storms stayed on the opposite coast last week, leaving the Bay Area to focus on what it does best—churning out new ideas and new startups. To wit:
—Y Combinator, the famed venture incubator in Mountain View, CA, held its semi-annual Demo Day. (Demo Days, to be precise, since the 63 startups had to give their presentations three times to accommodate all the alumni and investors who wanted to watch.) I summarized the on-the-record presentations in two parts: Aisle50 through MongoHQ in Part 1, and Munch on Me through ZigFu in Part 2.
—Hipmunk, a travel search startup that emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2010 session, shared some good news to mark its first birthday: it has crossed the 1-million-searches-per-month threshold. I interviewed CEO Adam Goldstein about the company’s progress.
—I profiled Flite, the San Francisco startup formerly known as Widgetbox. CEO Will Price told me the remarkable story of Flite’s pivot from running a platform for Web widgets to running a cloud-based rich media advertising service.
—Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple shook loose a torrent of anecdotes and analysis last week. Curt Woodward, my Seattle-based colleague, spoke with Seattleite Kevin Pedraja, who had a telling story to share about a customer-support call from Jobs himself.
—Flickr was once the hottest photo sharing service on the Web, but many users (me included) feel that it’s lost its mojo as part of Yahoo. My Friday column asked “What Comes After Flickr?” and surveyed some of the newest cloud photo sharing options.
—I was too busy last week to keep up with all the funding news, but I did make note of a $3 million funding round for iScience International and a $15 million round for Sentilla.
