I picked up The Start-up of You, the new book published this week by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and journalist-entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, with some trepidation. I feared that the title was intended literally—that this would be one of those dreary business books that spends seven chapters twisting reality to fit its gimmicky metaphor. (I’ve got … Continue reading “LinkedIn: The Missing Manual Worth Reading”
Author: Wade Roush
Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco.
Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.)
I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia.
I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats.
My personal site: waderoush.com
My social media coordinates:
Twitter: @wroush
Facebook: facebook.com/wade.roush
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/waderoush
Google+ : google.com/+WadeRoush
YouTube: youtube.com/wroush1967
Flickr: flickr.com/photos/wroush/
Pinterest: pinterest.com/waderoush/
Former Sun CEO’s New Venture: A Healthcare Locker for Families
Jonathan Schwartz, the former Sun Microsystems CEO who sold the server-and-software maker to Oracle for $7.4 billion in 2009, was in the hospital for surgery a couple of months ago. When he went to get an MRI, he noticed that the imaging machine was hooked up to a Sun workstation. Sun’s most famous tag line … Continue reading “Former Sun CEO’s New Venture: A Healthcare Locker for Families”
Greenstart Targets Cleantech Software Startups in Second Round
The founders of Greenstart, the San Francisco-based venture incubator for cleantech startups, believe a new chapter is opening in the energy business—and they’re changing their program to keep up. The second class of Greenstart companies arrives today for its 12-week session of product iteration and intensive mentorship. Conspicuously missing from this group are any companies … Continue reading “Greenstart Targets Cleantech Software Startups in Second Round”
Stanford StartX Graduates Tackle Cell Therapy, Mental Health, Batteries
Nine startups graduating from the Fall 2011 session of StartX, the startup accelerator for Stanford students and affiliates, shared their wares with investors and journalists last night at AOL West in Palo Alto. Below are some quick summaries pulled from my notes, as well as videos from the live-stream webcast of the event. All of … Continue reading “Stanford StartX Graduates Tackle Cell Therapy, Mental Health, Batteries”
AllTrails and National Geographic Team Up to Get Hikers Oriented
The United States is essentially an unpopulated wilderness. If you scattered the citizenry evenly across the country, we’d each have a luxurious eight acres to ourselves. But here’s the weird thing: In a country where the outdoors is so vast, people rarely go there. Even folks who think of themselves as outdoorsy types don’t leave … Continue reading “AllTrails and National Geographic Team Up to Get Hikers Oriented”
HAXLR8R Opens a China-Based Accelerator for Hardware Startups
Over the last week, 10 lucky companies have been getting the calls from HAXLR8R: they’ve been admitted to the inaugural session of the startup world’s newest venture incubator. Following the popular model pioneered by TechStars and Y Combinator, HAXLR8R will provide teams with a stipend of $6,000 per founder and about three months of mentorship, … Continue reading “HAXLR8R Opens a China-Based Accelerator for Hardware Startups”
Geeking Out with Evernote: The Photo Gallery
In the nearly five years since we started Xconomy, I’ve looked forward to few events more than our Silicon Valley “Xconomy Xchange” forum last night with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, and Morgenthaler Ventures partner Gary Little. I’m a longtime power user of Evernote’s online notekeeping application—it’s installed on my Mac, … Continue reading “Geeking Out with Evernote: The Photo Gallery”
Xconomy Is on Google+!
All the cool kids were doing it, so we just couldn’t resist. We’ve created an Xconomy page on Google+, where we’ll share several of our most interesting stories every day. We’ve also added Google+ sharing buttons to all of our stories here on the site—you’ll find them in the sharing box at right, and at the … Continue reading “Xconomy Is on Google+!”
Xconomy Event Tonight: Building the 100-Year Company at Evernote
Perhaps you’ve been meaning to buy a ticket to our big Silicon Valley event with Evernote CEO Phil Libin tonight, but you keep forgetting. Well, now’s the time to take action. We still have some tickets available online for $50 ($40 if you work for a startup)—but a walk-in ticket tonight will cost you $95. … Continue reading “Xconomy Event Tonight: Building the 100-Year Company at Evernote”
EMC’s Comeback in Server-Side Memory: Q&A with Pat Gelsinger
In enterprise data centers, servers and storage go together like hot dogs and buns. One isn’t much good without the other. But if your specialty is baking buns, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve the dogs. And that, in essence, is one of the limitations that Hopkinton, MA-based … Continue reading “EMC’s Comeback in Server-Side Memory: Q&A with Pat Gelsinger”
10 Apps & Sites That Bring Back the Joy of Reading
You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride. So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web? Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide … Continue reading “10 Apps & Sites That Bring Back the Joy of Reading”
The Web Without the Muck: A Long Interview with Longform.org
The Web, as we’ve known it, is all about velocity. It wants you to move along. Click here! Go there! Watch this! As a result, it’s never been a great place to settle down and focus for the 30 minutes it might take you to read an 8,000-word article—the sort of long, in-depth non-fiction that … Continue reading “The Web Without the Muck: A Long Interview with Longform.org”
How Trulia Soared Through the Housing Crash
No journalist can resist a good horse race. That’s why most stories about Trulia, the San Francisco-based real estate search company with 17 million users per month, also mention Seattle competitor Zillow (NASDAQ: [[ticker:Z]]). After all, both companies were founded in 2005, and both offer fancy map-driven interfaces for canvassing rental listings and houses for … Continue reading “How Trulia Soared Through the Housing Crash”
Apple Textbook Controversy Isn’t About Books-It’s About Teaching
I don’t think there’s ever been a textbook that made it this easy to be a good student. —Roger Rosner, vice president of productivity applications, Apple Whenever a company as powerful as Apple, Facebook, or Google announces a big new product push, it evokes wonder and acclaim from some observers, head-scratching and horror from others, … Continue reading “Apple Textbook Controversy Isn’t About Books-It’s About Teaching”
Yahoo Challenges Apple with a Cocktail of Mobile Publishing Tools
This is a story about what goes on under the hood of your smartphone or tablet device. It’s also about Yahoo, the troubled Santa Clara-CA based advertising and information giant. But Yahoo doesn’t make a single mobile gadget of its own. So what’s the connection? It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: [[ticker:YHOO]]) has ambitious plans … Continue reading “Yahoo Challenges Apple with a Cocktail of Mobile Publishing Tools”
How to Be A 100-Year Startup: Video from Evernote CEO Phil Libin
When most startups reach a certain age—seven years, maybe nine; certainly, by the time they get acquired or go public—they stop being startups. They get slow and cautious. They lose the will to wow customers with unconventional ideas. Evernote hasn’t reached that age yet. And CEO Phil Libin hopes it never does. In a video … Continue reading “How to Be A 100-Year Startup: Video from Evernote CEO Phil Libin”
Joyent, TRUSTe, Mykonos: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers
Time once again for our irregular, data-driven roundup of local deals, M&A, and other news, from biggest to smallest. The truth is, it’s been a slow week since our last local deals roundup on January 17. $2.89 billion—The total amount invested in venture-backed companies in the San Francisco Bay Area in the fourth quarter of … Continue reading “Joyent, TRUSTe, Mykonos: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers”
The 10 Social News Apps You Need to Try
Once upon a time, there was a magical innovation called RSS, for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It freed news articles, podcasts, and other content from their original homes on the Web and allowed news junkies to follow their favorite publications and blogs through story streams called news feeds, which could be bundled … Continue reading “The 10 Social News Apps You Need to Try”
SOPA-PIPA Protests Blossom Across the Country
It’s not just Wikipedia that’s throwing its weight today behind the movement to stop the controversial anti-piracy bills moving through the U.S. Congress. While the English version of the world’s most-visited encyclopedia site has gone dark for the day to call attention to the perceived dangers of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect … Continue reading “SOPA-PIPA Protests Blossom Across the Country”
Evernote Wants to Make Your Memories More Magical
Cloud-based notekeeping service Evernote found its first 20 million users through sheer geek appeal. Hardcore users (full disclosure: that includes me) love the ability to upload Web clips, documents, images, audio files, and other materials to Evernote’s online notebooks, then search and retrieve them at will, from virtually any device. They also like features such … Continue reading “Evernote Wants to Make Your Memories More Magical”
Symantec, PivotLink, Splunk: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers
It’s time for our irregular, data-driven roundup of high-tech fundraising, M&A, and IPO news from around the San Francisco Bay Area. $100 billion—The potential valuation of Facebook in an IPO tentatively planned for late May, according to a story yesterday from Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. Facebook hopes to raise $10 billion in the offering, according … Continue reading “Symantec, PivotLink, Splunk: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers”
“Independent of Exit”: Talking Evernote with Gary Little
Earlier today I grabbed some time with Gary Little, who’s been a partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures since 1998 and has led the company’s investments in Evernote, the fast-growing Silicon Valley startup that aims to help you “remember everything.” I’ve long been intrigued by CEO Phil Libin’s publicly stated ambition to make Evernote … Continue reading ““Independent of Exit”: Talking Evernote with Gary Little”
With TV App, Dijit Hopes to Ride Out the Coming Apple Revolution in TV
I have a lot of Apple gear, and I’m pretty happy with it. There’s just one problem. The better Apple’s stuff gets, the less patience I have for everyone else’s clunky hardware and software. Televisions and all the boxes we hook up to them are the worst offenders. No two TV manufacturers or set-top-box makers … Continue reading “With TV App, Dijit Hopes to Ride Out the Coming Apple Revolution in TV”
VirtuOz Says Virtual Agents are “Siri for the Enterprise”
2011 was a very big year for natural language processing (NLP)—the science of teaching computers to communicate with humans in plain English (or French, or Japanese). First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven … Continue reading “VirtuOz Says Virtual Agents are “Siri for the Enterprise””
Rock Health Gathers Healthcare & Technology Stars: A Photo Gallery
In short order, startup incubator Rock Health has become one of the Bay Area’s hubs for entrepreneurs working on technology ideas that could change healthcare delivery. Formed last year to test whether the startup accelerator model pioneered by organizations like Y Combinator and TechStars will work in the healthcare industry, Rock Health has already graduated … Continue reading “Rock Health Gathers Healthcare & Technology Stars: A Photo Gallery”
Ex-Groupon Exec Puts Indie Movies Online at Startup Prescreen
When Shawn Bercuson and his family went to Park City, UT, exactly one year ago, they may have been the only people not in town to attend the famous Sundance Film Festival, which is held there every January. “I do enjoy movies, but my family and I go skiing every year during Sundance,” he says. … Continue reading “Ex-Groupon Exec Puts Indie Movies Online at Startup Prescreen”
Google Revamps Search Results To Feature Personal and Social Content
Google is changing its mind about what’s relevant. In a sweeping technical overhaul that will start to go into effect today, the search giant is altering the way it ranks search results to highlight content that users have shared, or that has been shared with them. If you’re logged into Google (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GOOG]]), links to … Continue reading “Google Revamps Search Results To Feature Personal and Social Content”
Join Us Friday for a Tweetchat with Evernote Board Member Gary Little
If you tune your Twitter client to the hashtag #xcevernote this Friday at 11:00 am Pacific time / 2:00 pm Eastern time, you’ll be able to join me and Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, for a public conversation about what it takes to build startups that will survive and thrive … Continue reading “Join Us Friday for a Tweetchat with Evernote Board Member Gary Little”
TaskRabbit Burrows Further Into New York, Buys SkillSlate
Entrepreneurs in the crowdsourced-services niche must be feeling a lot like the knights battling the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail these days. San Francisco service-networking site TaskRabbit, fresh off a $17.8 million funding round, is eating up the competition. According to an e-mail received Tuesday night from TaskRabbit marketing staffer Johnny … Continue reading “TaskRabbit Burrows Further Into New York, Buys SkillSlate”
Piazza, Klout, Lithium: Bay Area BizTech Deals by the Numbers
Time for our first deals roundup of 2012. As usual, we’re gathering some of this week’s most interesting investment and M&A updates from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and arranging them in order of descending value. $75 million—The size of a planned IPO by San Mateo, CA-based health benefit management firm Extend Health. $53.4 … Continue reading “Piazza, Klout, Lithium: Bay Area BizTech Deals by the Numbers”
Gathering Around the Tablet: A Glimpse of the Future
How will the media habits of families, especially those with young kids, evolve in the era of the tablet computer? I got an interesting perspective on that question over the holidays, which I spent with my brother and his family in Alaska. Jamie and his wife Jen Athey have two loveable children, aged four (Kieran) … Continue reading “Gathering Around the Tablet: A Glimpse of the Future”
At Freestyle, Investing Is A Family-Friendly Alternative to Startup Life
Josh Felser has three kids. Dave Samuel has four. You won’t hear any highfalutin business-speak from these former tech entrepreneurs about why they started Freestyle Capital, their San Francisco-based seed-stage investing fund. They say they did it because they recognized that it’s pretty hard to create a business and be an involved parent at the … Continue reading “At Freestyle, Investing Is A Family-Friendly Alternative to Startup Life”
Coffee & Power Puts A Jolt of Creativity Into Crowdsourcing
After building a vast virtual world with a complex internal economy sustained by the labor of more than a million active users, what do you do for an encore? For Philip Rosedale, the founder and former CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the answer was to try to recreate some of the … Continue reading “Coffee & Power Puts A Jolt of Creativity Into Crowdsourcing”
The Big Stories of 2011 at Xconomy San Francisco
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 … Continue reading “The Big Stories of 2011 at Xconomy San Francisco”
15 Great Apps for that iPad Under the Tree
The iPad 2 won’t be the only tablet turning up as a holiday gift this year: it’s finally got some real competition in the form of the more affordable Kindle Fire. But let’s face it: you don’t buy (or give someone) a Kindle Fire because of the apps. The device is designed primarily as a … Continue reading “15 Great Apps for that iPad Under the Tree”
Jawbone, Stion, Houzz: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers
Time for our data-driven roundup of the latest deals news from around the San Francisco Bay Area. $17 to $18 billion—The approximate amount Yahoo could raise by selling off its stakes in China’s Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, according to reports today from Fortune and Dow Jones VentureWire. Yahoo’s board is reportedly considering the transactions this … Continue reading “Jawbone, Stion, Houzz: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers”
Mindjet Reaches Cloud Altitude with Mind-Mapping Tools
Ask Scott Raskin to name the number-one innovation that changed the world of project management and business collaboration, and he has a surprising answer: the whiteboard. It’s not that the answer is nonsensical—Raskin may well be right. It’s that it’s coming from the CEO of Mindjet, a San Francisco software company devoted to helping workers … Continue reading “Mindjet Reaches Cloud Altitude with Mind-Mapping Tools”
Could RockMelt Become the New Third Party in the Browser Campaigns?
The United States seems stuck with a two-party political system. We don’t always have the same two parties—the Whigs were replaced by the Republicans in the 1850s, for example—but there doesn’t seem to be space in the American psyche for a third major player to take root. Could something similar be true of the Web … Continue reading “Could RockMelt Become the New Third Party in the Browser Campaigns?”
Zynga, Twitter, NextG: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers
Time for our roundup of the latest deals news from Bay Area technology companies, from biggest to smallest. And today’s biggest numbers are pretty big. $1 billion—The approximate amount raised by social game maker Zynga (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZNGA]]) in its IPO last Thursday. The company’s shares priced at $10 per share, momentarily giving it a market … Continue reading “Zynga, Twitter, NextG: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers”
Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program
In a grand test of whether the Silicon Valley startup accelerator model can help university scientists get promising new technologies to market faster, 21 teams hand-picked for the National Science Foundation’s new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program converged on the Stanford University campus last week. The goal: to review the progress they’d made during an eight-week … Continue reading “Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program”
How To Build a “Lifestyle Business” with 30M Visitors Per Month
In Silicon Valley, there is no more pejorative term than “lifestyle business.” It’s usually applied to companies that do well enough to earn their founders and employees a living—sometimes a very good living—but that will never make anyone mega-rich. Venture capital partners, who have to weed out all but the fastest-growing companies if they’re to … Continue reading “How To Build a “Lifestyle Business” with 30M Visitors Per Month”
Proofpoint, GreenVolts, Prezi: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers
Time for our irregular, data-driven roundup of recent deals news from around San Francisco Bay. From biggest to smallest: $50 million—The amount that Sunnyvale, CA-based Proofpoint hopes to raise in an upcoming initial public offering, according to S-1 registration papers filed with the SEC yesterday. The cloud security company’s leading venture investors include Mohr Davidow … Continue reading “Proofpoint, GreenVolts, Prezi: Bay Area BizTech by the Numbers”
Badgeville’s Radical Idea: Tell Customers What They Should Do
For about six months now, I’ve been trying to get Kris Duggan to change the name of his company. To me, “Badgeville” manages to be both faddish and inaccurate: it tries to snag a little of Zynga’s (fading) Farmville glory, while also suggesting that the Menlo Park startup’s business is all about gamification and virtual … Continue reading “Badgeville’s Radical Idea: Tell Customers What They Should Do”
How Mindflash Disrupted Itself by Taking Training Software to the Web
If you’re a technology company, it’s painful to bury an obsolete product before it’s well and truly dead. Most established companies can’t bring themselves to do it, choosing instead to keep limping down the comfortable old path—which is why they so often lose out to newcomers (can anyone say Nokia or Siebel?). By 2008, the … Continue reading “How Mindflash Disrupted Itself by Taking Training Software to the Web”
Tigo, FanSnap, Soasta: Bay Area Biztech by the Numbers
Start your week off right with our data-driven roundup of deals and M&A news from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. $18 million—New venture funding for solar photovoltaic module manufacturer Tigo Energy of Los Gatos, CA. New investor Bessemer Venture Partners joined all of Tigo’s existing backers in the round, including Generation Investment Management, Inventec Appliances Corp., … Continue reading “Tigo, FanSnap, Soasta: Bay Area Biztech by the Numbers”
Greenstart Accelerator Hatches Four Energy Startups
Will the startup accelerator model that’s proved so popular and successful in the Web and mobile sectors also help to boost entrepreneurship in other industries, such as healthcare and cleantech? In a tottering economy that needs all the job-creating companies it can get, that’s a crucial question. And here in the Bay Area, it’s been … Continue reading “Greenstart Accelerator Hatches Four Energy Startups”
A $100 Gift Card Isn’t Worth $100, Says GiftRocket
If you’ve already bought someone a gift card for the holidays, don’t read the rest of this article. It’ll just make you feel bad. Okay, still with me? It turns out most gift cards are worth less than their face value. Quite a lot less—at least, judging from the resale value of gift cards on … Continue reading “A $100 Gift Card Isn’t Worth $100, Says GiftRocket”
Twilio, Edmodo, Uber: Bay Area Biztech by the Numbers
Here’s your one-stop, data-driven roundup of deals news around the San Francisco Bay Area in the last few days. $110 million—The cash price fetched by Jobs2Web, the San Mateo, CA-based online talent recruiting company purchased this week (PDF) by SuccessFactors (NYSE: [[ticker:SFSF]]). The San Francisco-based maker of cloud-based human resources management software is itself in the midst of … Continue reading “Twilio, Edmodo, Uber: Bay Area Biztech by the Numbers”
Inside Flipboard’s Project to Rethink Its iPad App for the iPhone
Any iPad owner who uses Flipboard a lot knows the familiar disappointed feeling: You left your iPad at home, you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, and you just want to pull out your iPhone and spend a minute or two browsing the app’s beautiful lineup of stories pulled from your Twitter, Facebook, RSS … Continue reading “Inside Flipboard’s Project to Rethink Its iPad App for the iPhone”
Gary Bloom: The Search-and-Rescue CEO Who Sold eMeter to Siemens
Some Silicon Valley CEOs moonlight as racecar drivers, others as winemakers. Gary Bloom, the outgoing CEO of San Mateo, CA-based eMeter, is probably the only one who spends his off hours as an emergency-response volunteer. Bloom trained a Menlo Park, CA-based FEMA disaster team that helped with the federal responses to Hurricanes Ivan and Gustav. … Continue reading “Gary Bloom: The Search-and-Rescue CEO Who Sold eMeter to Siemens”