The challenge of writing a year-end “top stories” post is that a list of headlines is too particular to illustrate what really happened over the last year. Sometimes the outlines of the big trends only become clear when you step back, look at the whole year’s output, and see what groupings naturally emerge.
That’s why I want to start off this list story by looking at five important clusters of technology stories we covered extensively this year. Each cluster includes five or six stories that examined the bigger trend from different angles.
That’s followed on page 2 by a list of the most significant Bay Area life sciences and energy stories of 2011, and then by a rundown of our top 10 traffic-getting stories.
THE BIG STORIES IN TECHNOLOGY
1. The Rise of Smartphones and Tablets
Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 1, New Frontiers of Speech Recognition (1/3/11)
Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 2: Changing the Equation in Machine Translation (1/5/11)
Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 3: Computer Vision Puts a “Bird on Your Shoulder” (1/6/11)
The iPad Finally Has a Worthy Rival: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 (5/13/11)
Dear Apple: Go Big with Siri and Nuance in iOS 5 (6/4/11)
Siri, Apple’s New Old Personal Assistant App, Points Toward A Voice-Activated Future (10/5/11)
2. Apple, iOS, and the Death of Steve Jobs
Here Are Six Features Apple Should Include in the iPad 2 (And They’re Not the Ones You Think) (1/7/11)
With iMovie on the iPad 2, Video Editing Is Fun Again (4/8/11)
Will Apple’s iCloud Finally Kill Off iTunes and End the Scourge of Sync? My Week in Apple Hell (7/8/11)
How Steve Jobs Rewired Our Lives—and Raised Our Expectations (10/6/11)
Saint Steve? Not Exactly. Apple and the Power of the Dark Side (10/7/11)
Steve Jobs’ Dying Realization about Biology and Technology (12/5/11)
3. The IT Transition in Healthcare
Epocrates Preps for IPO—And For Push Into Electronic Medical Records (1/25/11)
Doximity: A Mobile Facebook for Doctors, but With Real Privacy Protections (6/21/11)
Why Mint.com for Health Is a Terrible Idea, and How Keas Pivoted to the Fun Stuff (11/18/11)
4. The Rise of the Cloud
Okta: Helping Companies Maintain Visibility Despite Cloud Cover (1/27/11)
Engine Yard—The Ruby on Rails Company Salesforce.com Didn’t Buy (1/31/11)
Born from NASA, Nebula Aims to “Disrupt and Democratize” Cloud Computing (8/11/11)
Death of the Salesman? Marketo Is Automating Sales Relationships—And Growing Like Crazy (11/8/11)
5. The Incubator Explosion
Will the Internet Venture Incubator Model Work in Cleantech? Greenstart Is About to Find Out (6/14/11)
There Is an Incubator Bubble—And It Will Pop (8/12/11)
Rock Health, A New Incubator for Healthcare IT Startups, Names Its First Class (6/2/11)
Greenstart Hatches Four Startups, Proving Accelerators Work in the Energy Business (12/9/11)
Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program (12/19/11)
