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/

The Case of the Tilted Clubhouse: A Geographical Detective Story

Today, technologies like Google, Siri, and Wolfram Alpha can answer virtually any question in milliseconds. So it’s refreshing to come across a mystery that takes a little longer to unravel. I recently found the solution to a minor historical puzzle that’s been gnawing at me for almost two years, ever since I moved to the … Continue reading “The Case of the Tilted Clubhouse: A Geographical Detective Story”

Point, Shoot, Print: Picplum Aims to Make Photo Printing Effortless

It should be far easier to order prints of the photos you snap with your digital camera or smartphone—that’s a no-brainer. But San Francisco-based Picplum is one of the only companies that’s actually working to make the process simpler. For comparison, here’s how ordering a print works on a competing site, Yahoo’s Flickr. This will … Continue reading “Point, Shoot, Print: Picplum Aims to Make Photo Printing Effortless”

YottaMark’s Investors Double Down on Food Tracing Technology

Fresh, local, organic, seasonal, sustainable—in the food world those adjectives go together so often that there’s an acronym for them, FLOSS. But if Redwood City, CA-based YottaMark has its way, there will soon be another letter to add: T, for Traceable. As a hedge against fraud, counterfeiting, relabeling, and other common supply-chain hazards, YottaMark has … Continue reading “YottaMark’s Investors Double Down on Food Tracing Technology”

Gantto Helps Managers Chart a Way Around Project Delays

Say you’re making pasta with fresh marinara sauce for dinner. “It’s not uncommon to see a young, new cook spend 10 minutes chopping the vegetables and then 10 minutes cooking the sauce,” say Chris Carlson. “Then they put on the pot of water, and that takes 10 minutes just to boil. And then they add … Continue reading “Gantto Helps Managers Chart a Way Around Project Delays”

The Bar Is Rising in Casual & Social Games, Says GSN’s Davin Miyoshi

If you only followed Zynga’s stock price, you might think the entire business of games on Facebook was in free-fall. But many of the big developers of social and casual games are doing just fine, according to Davin Miyoshi, vice president of social games at GSN, which operates a major game studio in downtown San … Continue reading “The Bar Is Rising in Casual & Social Games, Says GSN’s Davin Miyoshi”

The Event Event: A Photo Gallery

We went “meta” in San Francisco this Tuesday, staging an event that was all about—you guessed it—events. The “Event Event” featured an on-stage conversation with all three founders of San Francisco-based Eventbrite—Kevin Hartz, Julia Hartz, and Renaud Visage—along with Eventbrite board member and former Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty. The gathering attracted a capacity crowd to … Continue reading “The Event Event: A Photo Gallery”

See You Tonight in San Francisco at Xconomy’s Event Event

Today’s the day I’ve been telling you about for a couple of months now: It’s your chance to catch Eventbrite co-founders Kevin Hartz, Julia Hartz, and Renaud Visage, along with Eventbrite board member (and former Ticketmaster CEO) Sean Moriarty, in conversation with yours truly at the Greenstart cleantech accelerator in downtown San Francisco. The theme tonight … Continue reading “See You Tonight in San Francisco at Xconomy’s Event Event”

The Next Internet? Inside PARC’s Vision of Content Centric Networking

The Internet may be hurtling toward collapse under the strain of too much traffic. But PARC research fellow Van Jacobson thinks he knows how to fix it. He’s done it before. Back in the mid-1980s, when the Internet was seeing its first modest surge in usage, Jacobson noticed that data packets were piling up on … Continue reading “The Next Internet? Inside PARC’s Vision of Content Centric Networking”

SportStream’s App Bottles the Social Media Explosion in Sports

I don’t have much of a head for sports. If you said “ERA” my first thought would be Equal Rights Amendment, not Earned Run Average. And being a cable TV cord-cutter, I never watch televised games. But I do know about iPads, social media, and next-generation-TV technologies. So at the risk of sounding like a … Continue reading “SportStream’s App Bottles the Social Media Explosion in Sports”

WePay Discovers Its Hidden Talent: Social Risk Evaluation

WePay has come a long way from its humble beginnings at Boston College in 2008, where co-founders Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman created it as a way for groups like fraternities or ski-weekend buddies to collect and spend money. The company moved to the Bay Area in 2009, went through the Y Combinator startup program, … Continue reading “WePay Discovers Its Hidden Talent: Social Risk Evaluation”

In Kuato’s Game World, Knowledge is Power, and the AIs are Friendly

Your spaceship has crash-landed on an alien world. You are apparently the last survivor. The ship’s electrical and life-support systems are failing, the atmosphere outside is poisonous, and hostile life forms are intruding. To stay alive, you’re going to have to fix some things, and that’s going to require some computer skills. Fortunately, “Alice” is … Continue reading “In Kuato’s Game World, Knowledge is Power, and the AIs are Friendly”

Not All E-Mails Are Created Equal; SaneBox Knows the Difference

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column on ways we can work together to restore e-mail sanity. I argued that e-mail overload has a simple cause that’s often overlooked: we’re all sending each other too many messages. We can try all the time-management tricks and software plugins in the book to deal with … Continue reading “Not All E-Mails Are Created Equal; SaneBox Knows the Difference”

Xamarin Beckons Windows Developers to Build iOS and Android Apps

Nat Friedman was nearing the end of an 18-month trip through Uganda, Thailand, and Cambodia with his new wife Stephanie when he got an urgent call from his old business partner Miguel de Icaza. Back in 1999, Friedman and de Icaza had co-founded a startup called Ximian. The company was best known for launching an … Continue reading “Xamarin Beckons Windows Developers to Build iOS and Android Apps”

Diffbot Is Using Computer Vision to Reinvent the Semantic Web

You know how the Picturephone, a half-billion-dollar project at AT&T back in the 1960s and 1970s, turned out to be a huge commercial flop, but two-way video communication eventually came back with a vengeance in the form of Skype and FaceTime and Google Hangouts? Well, something similar is going on with the Semantic Web. That’s … Continue reading “Diffbot Is Using Computer Vision to Reinvent the Semantic Web”

Students Connect Outside the Classroom in Piazza’s Online Forums

This spring, Piazza founder and CEO Pooja Sankar accepted an invitation to an event at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., celebrating the achievements of women. The Naval Observatory is better known as the Vice President’s Residence. Sankar knew that she would have about 10 seconds in the receiving line to explain Piazza to … Continue reading “Students Connect Outside the Classroom in Piazza’s Online Forums”

Bay Area BizTech News by the Numbers

The last week has been a busy one for startups and venture firms San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Here are a few of the items that caught our eye, arranged from biggest to smallest: $3.23 billion—Total venture-capital investments in Silicon Valley for the second quarter of 2012, according to data in the quarterly PriceWaterhouse/NVCA MoneyTree report, … Continue reading “Bay Area BizTech News by the Numbers”

Can Anyone Catch Khan Academy? The Fate of the U in the YouTube Era

Traditional American universities are suddenly running scared of the Internet, and for good reason. They successfully weathered the rise of online, open-enrollment degree programs like the University of Phoenix, but now they’re confronting a much more terrifying enemy: YouTube. Not just YouTube, of course—there’s also Vimeo and 5min and iTunes U and TED and the … Continue reading “Can Anyone Catch Khan Academy? The Fate of the U in the YouTube Era”

Is Mobile Photo Sharing Still Broken? Kicksend Thinks So

It’s really, really hard for people immersed in the technology world to remember a day when they weren’t so savvy about gadgets and software and the Interwebs. To you and me, the idea that someone might have trouble e-mailing the vacation photos on their smartphone to a friend or family member seems snicker-worthy. But to … Continue reading “Is Mobile Photo Sharing Still Broken? Kicksend Thinks So”

Eventbrite Passes $1 Billion Mark; Learn from Its Founders on Aug. 7

San Francisco-based Eventbrite clearly doesn’t use summertime as an excuse to slack off on its mission to democratize the event business. In the last couple of months the company has overhauled its iPhone app, geared up its operations in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal, and celebrated passing the $1 billion mark in gross ticket … Continue reading “Eventbrite Passes $1 Billion Mark; Learn from Its Founders on Aug. 7”

Ooyala: The Online Video Startup That Isn’t Out to Destroy Hollywood

“Ultimately, Silicon Valley has to stop trying to kill Hollywood and start helping it evolve.” So says Sean Knapp, co-founder and chief technology officer at Mountain View, CA-based video management startup Ooyala. It’s not a common viewpoint among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who are usually pretty blunt about their disdain for the movie and TV industries. … Continue reading “Ooyala: The Online Video Startup That Isn’t Out to Destroy Hollywood”

The Innovation Lessons Marissa Mayer Will Take to Yahoo [Video]

Timothy Koogle, Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Tim Morse, Scott Thompson, Ross Levinsohn, Marissa Mayer. One of these names is not like the others. When you list the eight people who have led Yahoo since 1995, counting the interim leaders Morse and Levinsohn, the obvious anomaly is Mayer. At 37, she’s the youngest person … Continue reading “The Innovation Lessons Marissa Mayer Will Take to Yahoo [Video]”

7 Ways We Can Work Together to Restore E-Mail Sanity

Just like you, I’m locked in a perpetual battle against e-mail. I spend the whole day fending off the incoming messages, like some cranky old dude standing on his porch with a weed whacker. I feel compelled to do this, because if I don’t, my inbox will quickly swell beyond my ability to tame it. … Continue reading “7 Ways We Can Work Together to Restore E-Mail Sanity”

Crocodoc’s HTML Document Viewer Infiltrates the Enterprise

It wasn’t that long ago that you could only read Word documents in Word, you could only view PowerPoint decks in PowerPoint, and you could only read PDFs in Acrobat. But without fully realizing it, we’ve come to the end of an era—the era when reading a digital document required a specialized document viewer (usually … Continue reading “Crocodoc’s HTML Document Viewer Infiltrates the Enterprise”

Insta-Friends? Spanish Hacker Reports Big Instagram Privacy Hole

Instagram was never the most private of apps. The photos you share there are public by default, meaning they’re visible to all of your followers. And you can “follow” any Instagram user you like—unless that user has selected the “photos are private” option in the app’s privacy settings. In that case, the user has to … Continue reading “Insta-Friends? Spanish Hacker Reports Big Instagram Privacy Hole”

Data, Analytics, & Finding Your OKM: Mixpanel Goes Beyond Page Views

What’s the true measure of success for a startup? That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you work at Path, the San Francisco-based mobile social network, it’s probably not useful to obsess over how many people have downloaded your iOS or Android apps, or even how often the apps are opened or how … Continue reading “Data, Analytics, & Finding Your OKM: Mixpanel Goes Beyond Page Views”

For Stealth HD’s Video Software, A Panorama of Applications

In 2007, Bill Banta got discharged by the U.S. Navy’s fighter pilot training school because he failed an eye exam. Today, his Silicon Valley startup is building video software that could help pilots by giving them eyes in the back of their heads. You could call that irony, or serendipity. After all, if Banta had … Continue reading “For Stealth HD’s Video Software, A Panorama of Applications”

What the Higgs Boson Owes to the World Wide Web

Quick: Name the greatest thing ever to come out of CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research. If your answer is the Higgs boson, the existence of which was more or less confirmed this week by two teams working on parallel experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), I respectfully disagree. The greatest thing to … Continue reading “What the Higgs Boson Owes to the World Wide Web”

CityPockets, Reborn as Reclip.it, Puts a Pinteresting Spin on Saving

If you blinked during the second week of May, you might have missed the fact that a Silicon Alley daily-deals-resale company called CityPockets had disappeared from the New York startup scene, only turn up in Silicon Valley a week later with a new name, Reclip.it, and a new focus, as a sort of Pinterest for … Continue reading “CityPockets, Reborn as Reclip.it, Puts a Pinteresting Spin on Saving”

CircleUp Brings Crowdfunding, Of a Sort, to Non-Tech Firms

A common complaint among technology entrepreneurs back in the mid-2000s was that there weren’t enough angel investors willing to help small startups get off the ground. Bootstrapping and “friends-and-family” funding would only take you so far, and if you didn’t already have a couple million in annual revenue, the venture funds just weren’t interested, creating … Continue reading “CircleUp Brings Crowdfunding, Of a Sort, to Non-Tech Firms”

What Apple’s New Podcasts App Means For Listeners—And for Apple

Without warning or fanfare, Apple introduced a new Podcasts app this week that gives users of iPhones, iPads, and iPods a much simpler way to find and listen to downloadable audio shows. Pundits had been expecting the move as part of the introduction this fall of iOS 6, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating … Continue reading “What Apple’s New Podcasts App Means For Listeners—And for Apple”

“Engineering is For Helping People”: Xconomist of the Week Yoky Matsuoka

We had an amazing lineup of speakers at our first-ever forum on the future of robotics at SRI International in Menlo Park back in May. But I was especially excited to have the opportunity to do an on-stage interview with Yoky Matsuoka, whose pioneering studies of “neurobotics” have brought us closer to a future where … Continue reading ““Engineering is For Helping People”: Xconomist of the Week Yoky Matsuoka”

Explore the Online-to-Offline Economy with Eventbrite on August 7

In its infancy, toddlerhood, and adolescence, the Web was pretty much stuck in its own little world. Most Web content and service providers were keen to keep people online for as long as possible (think Farmville). But as the Web matures, it’s going through an interesting transformation. It’s turning outward and taking a more practical, … Continue reading “Explore the Online-to-Offline Economy with Eventbrite on August 7”

Meet Siri’s Little Sister, Lola. She’s Training for a Bank Job.

Whatever you want Lola to get, Lola will get it for you. As long as it has something to do with your bank account. Lola is a new virtual personal assistant that BBVA Compass, the North American subisidiary of Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Viczaya Argentaria, started testing on its website Tuesday. She’s the co-creation … Continue reading “Meet Siri’s Little Sister, Lola. She’s Training for a Bank Job.”

Can We Be Too Connected? A Harvard Scholar Explores Interoperability

If you’re fond of delicious ironies, as I am, there’s a new book that will leave you positively gorged. It’s called Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems, and last week I got to speak with one of its authors, Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey. The central irony that fascinates Palfrey and … Continue reading “Can We Be Too Connected? A Harvard Scholar Explores Interoperability”

Madefire’s Comics Bring a New Visual Grammar to the iPad

Allow me to geek out for a moment. (Okay, for the entirety of this article.) I was 13 years old in 1980, when George Lucas released The Empire Strikes Back. Like every other boy my age, I had enjoyed Star Wars, but I can’t say that I’d been bowled over by it. I saw it … Continue reading “Madefire’s Comics Bring a New Visual Grammar to the iPad”

HAXLR8R Startups Report Back from Shenzhen, the Hardware Candyland

HAXLR8R may sound like a geeky vanity license plate number, but it’s actually a Shenzhen, China-based startup accelerator—one of a new breed of business incubators, along with San Francisco-based Lemnos Labs, focused on hardware startups rather than software companies. I profiled HAXLR8R back in February, when it had just admitted its first batch of startups, … Continue reading “HAXLR8R Startups Report Back from Shenzhen, the Hardware Candyland”

Vindicia Helps Subscription Providers Keep a Bird in the Hand

Cloud commerce is here to stay. The advent of subscription-billed digital delivery has brought massive, recurring revenues to the media and content industries, as well as makers of consumer and enterprise software. So if you asked software companies, media giants, and game publishers whether they’d prefer to go back to the days when they sold … Continue reading “Vindicia Helps Subscription Providers Keep a Bird in the Hand”

Can Your Friends Bribe You to Get Healthy? Neuroscience Says Yes

HealthRally is a company that Paul McCartney would understand well. It’s all about getting a little help from your friends. A little help making health-related changes, that is—like quitting smoking, losing weight, or adhering to an exercise program. There’s plenty of science to suggest that these goals are easier to achieve when a person has … Continue reading “Can Your Friends Bribe You to Get Healthy? Neuroscience Says Yes”

TastemakerX Builds a “Taste Graph” to Reward Music Trendspotters

Take a guy with dual lifelong passions for new music and fantasy sports; run him through business school, the dot-com gold rush, and the world of big-brand advertising; and then set him loose in the new world of mobile apps and media sharing. What do you get? For Marc Ruxin, the answer is TastemakerX, a … Continue reading “TastemakerX Builds a “Taste Graph” to Reward Music Trendspotters”

13 Reasons to Be Optimistic About Healthcare, Courtesy of Rock Health

There are many reasons to fear that the healthcare crisis in this country is going to get worse—a lot worse—before it gets better. More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, with costly knock-on effects from heart disease to diabetes. The overall cost of care seems to be spiraling upward unstoppably. The FDA is … Continue reading “13 Reasons to Be Optimistic About Healthcare, Courtesy of Rock Health”

Hamburgers, Coffee, Guitars, and Cars: A Report from Lemnos Labs

Maybe your fallback plan in case your Silicon Valley startup goes bust was flipping burgers at McDonald’s? Well, you might want to rethink that. Even this classic refuge for low-skilled workers is about to be taken over by robots, if Momentum Machines has its way. Momentum is one of four startups emerging this summer from … Continue reading “Hamburgers, Coffee, Guitars, and Cars: A Report from Lemnos Labs”

The TV Revolution Will Be in Slow-Mo, Says Flingo CEO

Henry Blodget, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, argued in a column this week that the television industry could suffer a sudden revenue collapse as consumers shift their TV viewing to on-demand, Internet-mediated services like Netflix and iTunes. Blodget thinks network and cable executives are in denial about the danger—just as newspaper publishers were … Continue reading “The TV Revolution Will Be in Slow-Mo, Says Flingo CEO”

Six Startups Pack their Bags for Turner’s Media Camp

A few days ago I wrote about Media Camp, a new San Francisco-based startup accelerator sponsored by Turner Broadcasting, and said there’d be news soon about the first class of startups admitted to the program. Well, there’s news. Turner unveiled the names of the six startups in an announcement today. The companies, some of which … Continue reading “Six Startups Pack their Bags for Turner’s Media Camp”

With Media Camp, Turner Broadcasting Hedges Against a Digital Future

Every recent tome on corporate innovation preaches the same basic truth: big companies need to keep taking risks on new products and business models, or they’ll eventually lose market share to nimbler upstarts. It turns out that this is easier said than done—and big media companies like newspaper chains and record labels have been among … Continue reading “With Media Camp, Turner Broadcasting Hedges Against a Digital Future”

Leftronic Turns Any Startup Office into a Command Center

Walk into a network operations center for an electrical utility or an ISP, or the command center for a space or military agency, and what do you see? Displays. Lots and lots of displays, showing all sorts of data visualizations. The people who design command centers obviously think this data is mission-critical, or they wouldn’t … Continue reading “Leftronic Turns Any Startup Office into a Command Center”

The Pace of Re-Imagination: We All Live in Dog Years Now

My dog Rhody, an Australian Shepherd, turned 15 a few weeks ago. He’s a living refutation of the old myth that dogs age as much in one year as humans do in seven. By that formula he’d be acting like a doddering 105-year-old, but if you met him you’d agree that he doesn’t seem a … Continue reading “The Pace of Re-Imagination: We All Live in Dog Years Now”

Optimizely’s Assault on the One-Size-Fits-All Web

Dan Siroker has a habit of looking at the future and imagining something very different from the present. Back in 2007, when George W. Bush was still president, he left his plum product-manager job at Google to work for a junior Illinois senator named Barack Obama, as director of analytics for the candidate’s presidential campaign. … Continue reading “Optimizely’s Assault on the One-Size-Fits-All Web”