* First things first: All Xconomy fans are invited to an open house tomorrow (Monday April 18) at Xconomy San Francisco — aka my live/work loft — for our spring open house. Join me and my Seattle colleague Luke Timmerman from 5:00 to 8:00 pm at 699 Mississippi St, Apt. 206, in the Dogpatch/Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

* Even more important: we’d love to see you at Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021. The centerpiece of this May 17 evening event at SRI International in Menlo Park will be an intimate on-stage chat with visionary thinkers Larry Smarr from Calit2, Dan Reed from Microsoft, and Bill Mark from SRI. We’ll debate what comes after the smartphone and tablet era. Will we even have computers on our desktops or in our backpacks or pockets in 10 years’ time? Or will they simply melt into the background, becoming part of the furniture in our homes and workplaces? If you register by April 21, you’ll get a steep discount for this event, which will also feature lots of time for networking before and after the main talks.

* I’ve been really excited lately about the iMovie app for the iPad 2. This goes beyond my usual gadget-geek fascination with new Apple products. Now that I can shoot video and edit it on the iPad 2, I find that it’s a lot easier to create video add-ons for my feature stories, and even to publish items consisting mainly of video. If I’d had an iPad 2 last summer, I definitely would have used it to shoot the World Wide Wade Goes West video travelogue series.

–Exhibit A was my story about GiftRocket, a Y Combinator-backed company that’s out to replace traditional retail gift cards with smartphone-based, location-aware gift certificates; I supplemented the story with a quick interview with GiftRocket co-founder Kapil Kale, shot right here at Xconomy San Francisco.

–Exhibit B: a video report from the BASES BT E-Bootcamp, a student-run entrepreneurship competition at Stanford.

–Finally, my April 8 column was an extended look at iMovie and how the iPad’s big touchscreen changes the whole experience of video editing.

* Speaking of video, I wrote a long analysis of ShowYou, a new social video browser app for the iPhone and iPad. Created by Remixation, the San Francisco startup behind video curation site VodPod, the ShowYou app is a simple yet powerful tool for exploring the Internet videos that your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

* Here’s a story you would have missed if you only read Xconomy’s San Francisco pages. In a story for Xconomy New York (which we launched on April 4), I interviewed Foursquare product manager Siobhan Quinn, a veteran of Google’s Blogger team, about the differences between working for Google and Foursquare, and about the cultural constrasts between New York and Silicon Valley.

* I visited a Potrero Hill startup called TuneUp Media and wrote a feature about the company’s software, which cleans up the missing track information in your iTunes music library. The company is working to add new social discovery features to keep users engaged after they’ve cleaned their music collections.

* We don’t cover the Silicon Valley legal community very often, but when six patent litigators at Wilson Sonsini defected to Latham & Watkins, it seemed like the story was worth a look.

* Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $23 million Series B investment in Practice Fusion, a startup that’s offering a free, Web-based, advertising-based electronic medical records system for small physicians’ practices. I had a great conversation with Ryan Howard, Practice Fusion’s dynamic founder and CEO.

* Blinkx, a video search company I profiled back in November, acquired a Massachusetts-based online ad network called Burst Media. The acquisition has the potential to turn Blinkx into a major online media network. More to come on that.

* The Experience Project in San Francisco formally launched a free platform to help non-profits manage online fundraising campaigns — and to help big companies publicize their own philanthropic efforts in the process. I interviewed founder Armen Berjikly and CEO Peter Jackson.

* I interviewed Gigamon CEO Ted Ho about how he and his co-founders bootstrapped the networking equipment maker for years without taking a dime of venture capital.

* My April 15 column was a grab bag with pointers to a baker’s dozen fun websites, essays, and apps that I’ve stumbled across in my recent online travels, e.g. the retro-mytho-poetic iOS game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and an amazing cookbook from O’Reilly Media called Cooking for Geeks. (I recommend the Eigen Pancakes.)

Thanks for reading, and I’ll hit you with another update around April 30.

I also began a series of feature profiles of the new YC companies, starting with Taskforce, which helps you manage your e-mail inbox by converting e-mails into tasks on a to-do list. Next on the list was Noteleaf, which has a nifty service that taps into your Google calendar and your LinkedIn account to assemble mobile-optimized dossiers on your contacts; you get a link to the dossier 10 minutes before a scheduled meeting, right when you need it.

Rounding out my YC W11 coverage, I wrote about HelloFax, an eFax competitor that’s winning praise for its easy-to-use electronic signature system; the site lets you sign documents electronically and send them to any fax number, a service that (let’s all hope) could hasten the demise of fax machines. Over the coming week or two I’ll be writing profiles of at least three more YC W11 companies, including Lanyrd, TellFi, and Earbits.

Meanwhile, I’m still making the rounds among startups from earlier Y Combinator classes. This week I took a look at Anyleaf, which is out to replace the old-fashioned supermarket circularwith geographically targeted e-mails that round up the best deals at local grocery stores. Anyleaf recently launched a nice iPhone app that lets you check deals while you’re in a store.

But believe it or note, there was also some non-YC news in the second half of March. Inkling, which produces interactive college textbooks for the iPad, struck major deals with McGraw-Hill and Pearson; the publishers both invested in Inkling and opened up their backlists for conversion to Inkling’s platform.

Speaking of books, the company that’s been called “the Netflix of college textbooks” — Chegg – overhauled its website to integrate the technology of two startups it acquired last year, CourseRank and Cramster. Now students can browse courses and get homework help at the same site where they rent books. The idea, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig told me, is to put the company’s brand in front of college students every day, rather than just the handful of days each semester when they’re ordering and returning books.

O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo took place in San Francisco this week, and I used the opportunity to catch up with a bunch of local companies, including Cloudkick, a 2009 Y Combinator startup that was recently acquired by Web hosting company Rackspace. I talked with Alex Polvi, Cloudkick’s 25-year-old co-founder and CEO, who’s now site manager for Rackspace’s Bay Area outpost, and found out what it was like to rocket from incubator to acquisition in less than two years.

As most of you know, I publish a column every Friday called “World Wide Wade.” My March 25 column was about the way today’s personal technology is adding at an ever-increasing rate to the “consumer surplus.” That’s the idea from economics that we often get more value from things than we actually pay for them. My argument was that gadgets that are also open software platforms — such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones — get more useful and more valuable over time thanks to new apps and free software updates.

My April 1 column, though, was about a case of software misfiring and costing consumers more time. Specifically, I looked at Priority Inbox, a feature introduced by Google as part of Gmail in August 2010. The system is supposed to help you sort really important e-mail from the piles of stuff you can probably ignore. I tried Priority Inbox for about seven months, and found that it actually made the task of managing e-mail more stressful, not less.

In a bit of non-Xconomy news: I recently spruced up my personal blog, Travels with Rhody, which I invite you to visit. Also, I finally snagged an iPad 2, on my fifth attempt. (The secret, it turns out, is to get up at 5:00 a.m. so that you can be 40th in line at the Apple Store instead of 400th.) As a test of the gadget’s video capabilities, I took Rhody and the iPad 2 on a quick video tour of the neighborhood last weekend, and put the clips together into a three-minute ditty using the new iPad version of iMovie. It’s called “Flowers of Potrero Hill” and you can watch it here. Today I’m packing up my original iPad for its journey up to Alaska, where it will have a new adoptive family — my brother Jamie and his wife and young kids.

That’s all for now — thanks for reading and I’ll hit you with another update in a couple of weeks.

* I spent the whole week of March 7 visiting Xconomy’s home office in Cambridge, MA. It was great reconnecting with my friends and colleagues around Boston, but I was in town mainly to emcee our annual Mobile Madness event, which, I’m glad to report, was a big success. I wrote up a post-game report about the lessons learned, and we also published a gallery of photos from the event.

* A small thing that made me absurdly happy: on March 9, my January series Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity got picked up by Longform.org and widely retweeted, propelling it to #3 on Xconomy’s list of top stories that week.

* Don’t believe everything you see on YouTube or Vimeo. A satirical video about the sanitary hazards of cash — posted by Jumio this week to build buzz around its forthcoming digital-payments technology — wasmisinterpreted by Huffington Post readers and others as a serious attack. I got the back story about the video from Jumio and Nick Markham, the LaunchSquad video producer who plays “Sebastian Cole” in the video.

* I read Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, and found it, well, enchanting. It’s a short, profitable read for anyone committed to spreading a cause.

* In a sobering moment for Apple fans, an Ontario company called Blaze published results of a study finding that the mobile Web browser in the latest Android phones is 52 percent faster, on average, than the mobile version of Safari on the iPhone 4.

* My longest story of the month to date was an in-depth look at Enphase Energy, a company that sellsmicroinverter technology that’s transforming the way residential and light-commercial solar arrays are installed and monitored. Venture firms such as Kleiner Perkins like Enphase because the technology makes installing a rooftop array so simple that a general contractor or non-specialist electrician can handle the job, potentially removing one of the big barriers to the spread of home solar energy.

* A few weeks ago I profiled Animoto, whose cloud-based technology turns users’ photos and videos into slick musical slide shows. This week the company launched a partner program that will make it easier for users of other sites, such as Kodak Gallery, to create their own shows.

* I published the first part of a long interview with Steve Blank, the Silicon Valley startup guru who came up with the notion of “customer development” and who is arguing these days that traditional business schools aren’t equipped to train entrepreneurs. He’s calling for a new era of “entrepreneurship schools.”

* HubSpot, a marketing technology company in Cambridge, MA, that I covered several times during my days as Xconomy’s Boston editor, got a big cash infusion from Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Salesforce.com, among other investors. “It pains us to acknowledge that a company from Cambridge, a bunch of MIT engineers and Sloan grads, have managed to outmaneuver a couple of companies here in the Valley,” Sequoia partner Jim Goetz joked during a press conference about the funding.

* AdGrok, part of the summer 2010 class at Y Combinator, opened its slick Google Adwords management interface to the public. Co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez gave me a walk-through.

* In my March 4 column, I shared the specs for an as-yet-unbuilt tablet application that I’d like to see someone create; it depends on cameras, so it would be perfect for the iPad 2. It’s a consumer-oriented app called “Leonardo’s Notebook” that would allow users to emulate the Renaissance master by collecting and curating multimedia materials in digital journals. If you’re a mobile developer in search of a cool project, have at it!

* Our phones have changed a lot in the last few decades, but the experience of making a call really hasn’t. A new Silicon Valley startup called Thrutu introduced an app for Android phones that lets users exchange photos, maps, location data without interrupting a call and without switching apps. I’m waiting for the iPhone version of the Thrutu app, which is supposedly coming later this year; the startup is owned by UK-based wireless equipment maker Metaswitch.

* Alas, I didn’t get an invitation to Apple’s iPad 2 unveiling in San Francisco on March 2, but I followed the live blogs (Engadget’s was the best, as usual). Afterward I went back to compare the actual specs for the iPad 2 to a list I published in January of the features I thought should be added to the device. Turns out that Apple delivered on at least a couple of them.

* I put together an in-depth analysis of Altius Education, the venture-backed, San Francisco-based company working to reinvent the community college experience through an online program called Ivy Bridge College. Founder and CEO Paul Freedman told me how the company has managed to raise graduation and transfer rates at Ivy Bridge to about 60 percent, far above the national average of 20 percent at two-year colleges.

* For a while now my default flight search choice has been Hipmunk, which has a cool interface that displays the most convenient flight options on a single page. This week the Y Combinator-based startup unveiled a hotel search service that uses some very slick map-related visualization tricks to categorize hotel options in hundreds of cities by price, quality, and proximity to the fun stuff.

* Did you know that there’s a weather insurance company in San Francisco that sends checks to farmers automatically after extreme weather episodes? I didn’t, but it turns out it was founded five years ago by a couple of ex-Googlers. Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and a syndicate of other investors announced that they had put $42 million into the company’s Series B round.

* I published the second part of a two-part column called “Seven Questions That Will Decide Mobile’s Future.” I wrote these two columns as a kind of personal study guide for Xconomy’s upcoming Mobile Madness 2011 forum in Boston on March 9, but hopefully they’ll be useful to other readers as well. It’s a pretty long read, so I also put together an Instapaper-friendly single-page version of the two columns together.

* I love to travel, and I also love digital mapping tools, so I was really impressed by the way new startupRoom 77 uses Google Earth to give prospective hotel guests a simulated view out the window of every room in 500 hotels. The company’s service is sort of like SeatGuru for hotels, allowing you to preview (but not yet reserve) specific rooms within the hotels it has indexed.

* Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only super-smart twenty-something CEO in Palo Alto. I’ve been following Box.net’s Aaron Levie for a while now, and he gave me the inside story of Box.net’s recent $48 million fundraising round, announced February 24. Unlike many other Web 2.0 startups, Box.net needs some serious capital to grow, given that it needs actual data centers to support its cloud-based system for business document sharing.

* An outrageous fraction of the electricity generated by power plants — something like 10 percent — is lost during AC-to-DC conversion before the power gets to our computers and other appliances. There’s a company in Goleta, CA, called Transphorm that’s been working for years on gallium nitride-based electronics for far more efficient power converters; the company came out of stealth mode on February 23 and announced that it had collected $20 million in a round led by Google Ventures, which gave me the occasion to write a long feature.

* There’s a San Mateo, CA, startup called BookRenter that’s giving Chegg a run for its money in the college textbook rental market. I wrote about the company’s recent $40 million fundraising round and got a close look from CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia at the company’s computational strategy, which involves treating book rentals as if they were microloans.

* I wrote a quick update on Traackr, a Boston-born startup that helps marketers identify influential social-media users. The company is raising Series A funding from Bay Area investors and is the latest startup to join the ongoing trickle of Boston-area startups to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

* Not new but possibly useful: I created an Instapaper-friendly single-page version of my three-part January series, “Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity.”

* As a way of prepping for my emcee role at Mobile Madness, our big upcoming mobile event in Cambridge, MA, I began a two-part column on what I consider to be seven of the most important unanswered questions about the future of mobile. In Part 1, I asked who the new gatekeepers will be in the mobile-app world and what kinds of friction they’ll impose; whether the new world of mobile app development will be open or closed or something in between; and whether wireless operators will be able to provide affordable 4G connectivity. In Part 2, next week, I plan to delve into questions about mobile payments, enterprise adoption of mobile platforms, the role of context and location-based services, and what comes after the current smartphone and tablet era.

* GravityEight is a new startup in Marin County founded by Dave Wamsley, formerly of AdAuction and Campsix. I talked with Wamsley about the company’s aim to become the central hub where users store and compare quantitative data on their progress toward wellbeing in eight specific areas such as health, finances, career goals, relationships, and community.

* In terms of sheer page views, my biggest story of the month by far was my piece on Crocodoc, a Y Combinator-backed startup that makes Web-friendly document sharing tools. Last week the company introduced the world’s first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, which for some reason got people a lot more excited than I was expecting.

* I reconnected with Rudy Adler, one of the co-founders of online memorial site 1000memories, and wrote about the Y Combinator company’s $2.5 million fundraising round, which brought in big-name investors like Greylock Partners, Ron Conway, and Mike Maples. In an interesting twist on its original mission, 1000memories has become the home of a page commemorating scores of people who died in the anti-government violence that preceded Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt.

* I finally found time to write up a long-delayed story about oDesk, the Redwood City, CA-based creator of afast-growing distributed work platform that allows companies to more easily find, hire, and pay remote workers. I’ve talked to more than a few startups who are using oDesk’s services to manage teams of developers in places like Russia and Pakistan.

* SearchReviews, a new startup aggregating consumer reviews of gadgets, travel destinations, kitchenware, and everything else you can think of, came out of stealth mode. I talked with founder and CEO Ankesh Kumar.

* Have you ever played around with Xtranormal, the free movie-making program that puts your script into the mouths of cute animated characters? Quite a few Silicon Valley wags evidently have, and in my February 11 column I rounded up my favorite startup- and tech-related Xtranormal cartoons, including the classic Lean Startup cartoon, a must-see for all Eric Ries / Steve Blank fanboys.

* I wrote a breaking news story about 500 Startups’ new accelerator program in downtown Mountain View, and gave thumbnail descriptions of the dozen startups accepted to the program so far.

* I was about to sit down and write a profile of pariSoma, the coworking space in San Francisco when I decided that it was more urgent to compile a directory of tech-startup-friendly coworking spaces all over the Bay Area. They’re multiplying rapidly, and each space has its own unique vibe and selling points. I found about 22 spaces altogether — more if you count the operations with multiple locations.

* Once that was done I actually did write my pariSoma profile. The Howard Street operation is about to move around the corner to much more elegant digs that will hold about four times as many companies.

* The Crocodoc story may have won more page views, but my most meaningful story this month was my profile of Astia, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that runs accelerator programs for women-led startups in the Bay Area, New York, London, and India. Astia CEO Sharon Vosmek explained the strategies the accelerator has used to boost the success rate for its member companies to astronomical levels — 60 percent of companies win funding or get acquired within a year of joining the program. The secret, in a word: community.

* I’ve been following animated slideshow service Animoto for a while, from a distance; they interested me because they were one of the first startups to make serious use of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure a few years ago. I finally got a chance to interview Animoto CEO Brad Jefferson, who filled me in about recent upgrades to Animoto’s service. You can now make slides shows in high-definition, and by switching to Amazon’s cloud GPUs Animoto was able to speed up the rendering process by a factor of 10. Here’s a high-def slide show I made using photos from a recent weekend jaunt to Sonoma County.

* After catching up with Sidereel co-founder and CEO Roman Arzhintar, who is one of the funniest Bay Area startup leaders I’ve met, I wrote a profile of his company, which has become the leading independent guide to Internet TV options. Having “cut the cord” and given up cable TV in favor of Internet video a couple of years ago, I find the startup’s collection of schedules and sources pretty useful.

That’s about it, aside from numerous smaller news briefs, which I never bother to include in these updates.

Here were the other stories on my plate, in reverse chron order:

* In my February 4 column, I took a close look at The Daily, the new iPad-only newspaper from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. I’m not super impressed by the writing in The Daily, but I love the multimedia content and the innovative format and design. I think Murdoch’s gambit is going to force other news operations to raise their games and think more carefully about how to take advantage of mobile touschreen platforms and how to price their content.

* EveryTrail, a Palo Alto-based startup that makes a great GPS app for producing map-based slide shows, was acquired by Massachusetts-based review site TripAdvisor. After writing the breaking news story on the acquisition, I talked with a TripAdvisor exec about how EveryTrail’s publishing platform might be integrated with TripAdvisor’s own mobile products.

* Hearsay, founded by former Salesforce exec Clara Shih, unveiled a social media management platform designed to help corporations with lots of local branches manage the social media activities of their branch managers. Shih (who is super-smart, by the way) said the key problem Hearsay is trying to solve is “How do you align your local branches and representatives around your corporate brand and industry regulation, while empowering those branches and representatives to express a unique and authentic voice?” I can see how Hearsay’s platform would appeal to the “corporate” in corporate/local organizations — we’ll have to see whether the local reps really like it.

* I talked with the founders of MassiveHealth, a stealth-mode company working on mobile apps to help people manage chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. Co-founder Aza Raskin, formerly creative lead for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, says healthcare “needs to have its design renaissance” and says the startup hopes to do for healthcare what Apple did to disrupt the world of wireless carriers.

* I profiled ReadyForZero, a Y Combinator-backed company that’s created Web-based dashboards to help credit card holders understand their debt situation and pay off their cards as quickly as possible. The startup will earn revenues by referring candidates for lower-interest debt-consolidation loans to Lending Club.

* Foodily, a recipe search startup based in San Mateo, added some key sharing features to its website, with the goal of making meal planning more social. I interviewed CEO Andrea Cutright.

* Everybody in Silicon Valley did a double take when Salesforce.com bought Ruby hosting company Heroku for $212 million in December. I was especially surprised, given that there’s an older, larger, more established, and likely more prosperous Ruby on Rails platform provider just a few blocks away. It’s called Engine Yard, and I got the whole back story about the company from CEO John Dillon and co-founder Tom Mornini — including the likely reason why Salesforce passed the company by (hint, there’s no love lost between Dillon and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff).

* After just two more missions, NASA will retire the space shuttle fleet — what’s left of it anyway. January 28 was the 25th anniversary of the Challenger explosion, and I took the occasion to publish an essay abouthow the disaster changed the course of my own life, nudging me as an space-obsessed 19-year-old college student think more critically about technology.

* Do you have so many subscriptions to cloud-based services you can’t keep track of them all? Think of how much more complicated that problem is for big companies, as the transition from on-premise software to SaaS gains steam. I profiled Okta, a company that came out of stealth mode to offer a SaaS-based way (naturally) to manage other SaaS services.

* Way before anyone even talked about “mobile apps,” there was a company building mobile apps for Palm PDAs — Epocrates, whose medical reference data is used by nearly half of all U.S. doctors. I met with Epocrates CEO Rose Crane and learned about the company’s plans to push into the electronic medical records business. Last week Epocrates priced its IPO and raised at least $57 million in working capital.

* I had a fascinating chat with Kevin and Julia Hartz, two of the three co-founders of online ticketing startup Eventbrite, and wrote up a piece about the company’s origins as well as lessons the Hartzes have learned about how to scale up a startup fast.Obama’s Incubator Nation, a Rash of Startup Uncloakings, Inside Engine Yard and Eventbrite & More Xconomy News

* For my January 21 column, I reviewed a couple of e-book titles for the iPad that the New York Timespraised recently as “superbooks”: Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters. I found both titles sorely disappointing, probably because I’ve been a student of multimedia design for about 15 years now, and I have a pretty good sense of what I’d expect from a “superbook.” These two apps aren’t it. They only scratch the surface of the capabilities of the iPad. I didn’t put this into the column, but I’ve been having more fun recently with The History of Jazz from 595 Dreams, which arranges its subject material in much cleverer ways. But it’s not a book — and maybe that’s a key distinction. It could be that the book metaphor is too confining for the tablet platform.

* I surveyed reaction across the blogosphere to the news that Google co-founder Larry Page will resume his old role as CEO while current CEO Eric Schmidt kicks himself upstairs to executive chairman (and co-founder Sergey Brin becomes, well, co-founder). I thought most of the instant analysis was overwrought, considering that the same triumverate will be running the company as before; they’ll just have different titles. If a more substantive organizational shift is underway, Google hasn’t let on about it yet.

* I profiled vChatter, a Facebook-based video chat service that markets itself as a “safe” alternative to ChatRoulette (i.e., no naked guys). The company just picked up $350,000 in new seed funding.

* Just before Christmas I drove down to Santa Clara for an interview with Sehat Sutardja, CEO and co-founder of Marvell Technology Group, the fast-growing maker of low-power chips for disk drives, mobile and game devices, and tablet computers. Sutardja gives only a handful of interviews a year, so I didn’t want any of my material to go to waste. I wrote it up in the form of two Q&As, the first focusing on his remarkably hands-on management style at Marvell and the second on Sutardja’s childhood in Indonesia, his training as an electrical engineer, and his decision to start Marvell back in 1995.

* It’s hard to believe, but Xconomy has been around for three and a half years now — enough time for a lot of other companies to come and go. I wrote a piece about Tilera, a maker of multicore chips that I first profiled back in 2007. At the time, there were at least three or four companies working to put scores of processing units or cores on a single chip, but Tilera is the last one standing. Last week the company collected $45 million for a big push into cloud computing.

* My January 14 column was a meditation on the future of long form journalism on the Web. At Xconomy we break up any story longer than about 600 words into multiple pages. But we can tell from our Web analytics that readership drops off drastically after the first page or two — a sign (as if we needed one) that people don’t like to read long pieces on the Web. I took solace in the invention of tools like Instapaper — a great tool for the iPad, iPhone, and Kindle that lets you save long articles for leisurely, offline reading later — and in Dave Winer’s My.ReallySimple project, which could make it easier for Web users to send long-form content to whatever reading platform they prefer.

* Back in November, I had a long visit with TripIt CEO Gregg Brockway, but I never had time to write it up (I’m chagrined to say that my story backlog is still several months long). Then Seattle-based Concur announced it was buying TripIt for an impressive $120 million. So I was able to supplement our breaking news story with an in-depth Q&A about how Brockway and his co-founders came up with the idea for a service that would collect all your trip information via e-mail and let you manage it in one place online.

* After profiling Y Combinator-backed Bump Technologies last fall, I had a chance to reconnect with CEO David Lieb and co-founder Jake Mintz. They just collected $16 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors, and they talked with me about how they plan to use the money to expand on their nifty, bump-activated service for transferring data between mobile phones.

* There’s a changing of the guard underway at the venerable and celebrated Palo Alto Research Center: Mark Bernstein is retiring and handing over the reins to Steve Hoover, a Xerox veteran. I interviewed Hoover about his background and his plans for PARC.

My biggest recent project was a three-part series, published last week, about Google’s vision for an “Age of Augmented Humanity” when our mobile devices will find what we’re looking for even before we know we want it. The series focused on three disciplines – speech recognition (Part 1), machine translation (Part 2), and computer vision (Part 3) – where Google innovations are making smartphones far smarter and, once again, changing the way we access the world’s information.

Some of my key stories from the end of the year:

* I talked with AngelPad co-founder Thomas Korte about the philosophy beyind the new San Francisco-based venture incubator.

* I had a chance to ask ex-Facebooker Dave Morin about the guiding ideas behind the Path mobile photo-sharing app.

* A huge crowd turned out for my November 30 on-stage chat with Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz. We plan to publish a video from the event at San Francisco’s KickLabs soon, but this November 17 pre-interview with Moritz hit on several of the points that came up during the event, including the new array of funding choices facing early-stage startups.

* I profiled an interesting San Francisco startup called Stipple that’s making it easier for publishers to annotate and monetize images on the Web.

* My November 19 column compared Apple TV and the Roku Player as options for people contemplating cutting their cable TV subscriptions. I’ve been cable-free since March 2009 and haven’t missed it a bit.

* Without many people realizing it, StumbleUpon has emerged as the Web’s second largest source of social media traffic, after Facebook. I talked with founder and CEO Garrett Camp about the company’s fascinating odyssey from tiny Canada-based startup to eBay subsidiary and back to independence.

* Sunnyvale, CA-based Ruckus Wireless has developed beam-forming antennas that extend the range and reliability of Wi-Fi signals, and I talked with CEO Selina Lo and other executives about the startup’s plans to help big wireless operators offload 3G and 4G traffic to local Wi-Fi networks.

* I took a long look at Blinkx, a seven-year-old video search company that took the unusual route of going public on the London Stock Exchange.

* To assist holiday shoppers, I published a gadget gift guide and a list of iPad apps that would make great virtual stocking stuffers for people receiving iPads as holiday presents.

* It turns out Facebook is a terrible place to find a date. I wrote a story about Triangulate, a Silicon Valley startup that recently shut down its Facebook dating network, called Wings, and reinvented the service as a website called DateBuzz.

* I shared my take on Google’s December 7 event previewing its plans for Chrome OS-powered notebook computers. Google sent me (and everyone else who attended the event) a Cr-48 Chrome OS laptop, and I intend to write up some of my impressions of the device soon.

* O’Reilly Media’s News Foo meeting in Phoenix, December 3-4, was one of the most stimulating conferences I’ve been to in years. In many ways, I came away more optimistic about the future of journalism.

* I had the opportunity to visit Tibion, a company marketing a “bionic leg” — actually, a battery-powered robotic exoskeleton — designed to help patients recover movement control after a stroke. I even tried the leg myself, as the video accompanying the piece illustrates.

* On December 14 Xconomy San Francisco turned six months old, and to mark the occasion I published a list of our top 10 infotech and life sciences stories since June 14, 2010.

* I wrote about TechShop’s expansion to San Francisco and posted a long podcast interview with founder Jim Newton and CEO Mark Hatch (see page 4). The Menlo Park, CA-based company offers access to a jaw-dropping array of industrial tools and shop equipment on the health-club model ($100 a month). Some cool companies like Dodocase have come out of TechShop, and I expect that the San Francisco location will become the seat of a minor entrepreneurial renaissance.

* In a column inspired by Devin Friedman’s excellent GQ article “The Viral Me” (which I urge you to read), I argued that tech startups in the New England area encounter too much friction when it comes to funding and cultural acceptance, and that startups in Silicon Valley don’t encounter enough.

* I profiled SunRun, a San Francisco company helping to spread residential solar power to consumers in seven states. It seemed to me that SunRun’s financial and business-model innovation have been as important to its prospects as it software innovation.

* A San Francisco startup called Streetline launched its parking-spot-finder app for the iPhone in Hollywood. I got the background on the company from CEO Zia Yusuf.

* I had a long sit-down with Marvell CEO Sehat Sutardja, and published a quick piece about his views on Microsoft’s move to release a version of Windows that runs on ARM processors (he isn’t impressed). We’ll publish the entire interview with Sutardja soon.

* And in my first column of the new year, I offered a list of six features Apple should build into the iPad 2, beyond the easily predictable ones like cameras.

Whew! My aim is to post these updates a little more frequently from now on, so they won’t be nearly as lengthy.

I have to start out with a plug. My top work priority right now is filling the seats at Xconomy’s first San Francisco event, an exclusive chat on November 30 with famed Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz. I’ll be talking with Moritz about the trends shaking the venture industry and all the new funding options available to startup founders, among other topics. I’d love to see you at the evening event, which will be held at San Francisco’s Kicklabs incubator; you can register at Eventbrite.

Speaking of events, the folks at the Y Combinator continue to set a high standard. At YC’s “Startup School” event on October 18, I was most fascinated by talks from Quora founder Adam D’Angelo and investor Ron Conway, as well as Jessica Livingston’s onstage interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which I captured on video.

And speaking of Y Combinator, I continued my series of profiles of summer 2010 graduates from the startup incubator with a look at OhLife, which makes it easier to keep a daily journal by sending out daily e-mail prompts asking “How did your day go?” All you have to do is reply to the e-mail, and your answer goes into a private locker on OhLife’s site. Simple and brilliant.

While I was in Alaska, we published the longest story I’ve ever written for Xconomy — look at ShopWell, a Palo Alto, CA-based spinoff of renowned design consultancy Ideo. The piece was so long we had to break it into three parts, looking first at the company’s basic mission of providing personalized nutrition ratings for common products in supermarkets; then how Ideo attracted capital for the venture and engineered the spinoff; and finally, how the startup plans to win customers and make money (it sees shoppers as a giant focus group for information-starved product developers and marketers at the big food makers).

I stirred up some controversy among my Boston-area readers with a semi-serious October 29 column arguing that one way for startup entrepreneurs in Boston and other technology hubs to catch up with their peers in Silicon Valley would be to drink more and throw more parties. I pointed to the noticeably higher volume of after-work socializing among startup types here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and speculated that this form of networking is actually one of the keys to the region’s innovation ecosystem. Some of the commenters were indignant, but most said that the pace of partying in Boston already seems to be picking up, which is a good sign.

I’m using a new Web browser these days: RockMelt, from the startup of the same name, which came out of stealth mode this week. In my November 12 column I reviewed RockMelt’s innovative new social-media features, but expressed puzzlement over all the emphasis on a PC-only tool at a time when mobile apps and devices are finally unchaining us from our desktops.

On that score, regular readers know how much I love my iPhone and iPad, and I’ve had fun reviewing a number of iOS mobile apps for lately. One was AudioPress, a new iPhone app for organizing and accessing your favorite podcasts, streaming radio stations, and spoken-word articles. In a slide-show-style post on October 22, I also wrote about my 10 favorite photography apps for the iPad, from Color Splash to Flickr Photo Map.

Finally, I managed to whittle away at my thick notebook of reported-but-as-yet-unwritten startup profiles. I took a close look at Zoho, which is challenging Microsoft and Google in the area of cloud-based enterprise productivity applications. I also wrote up my extensive interview with Vivek Ranadivé, founder and CEO of TIBCO Software, whose systems for real-time event monitoring and response powers the businesses of companies from Wall Street to the Las Vegas Strip. I also had fun profiling social media marketing startupFlowtown and dot-com-bust survivor BroadVision and covering the first crop of startups from San Francisco incubator AngelPad, the creation of seven ex-Googlers.

The recently overhauled Facebook Groups feature is rather impolite; your friends can add you to groups without your permission, and it’s up to you to unjoin if you’re displeased. In an essay that started out as an angry review of The Social Network (I thought the film unfairly savaged Mark Zuckerberg), I ended up speculating about why Facebook seems so consistently inept at judging how to roll out features that affect users’ control over their profiles and their data.

As an experiment, I published a list of 10 startups I’m planning to profile in the coming weeks and invited readers to reach out with tips and context. These are all companies where I interviewed the founders days, weeks, or months ago, but haven’t had time to write up my stories yet. My story backlog is actually about three times longer than the published list, but I didn’t want to give away all of my surprises.

Speaking of my out-of-control backlog, Xconomy San Francisco is hiring. If you know a talented writer in the Bay Area who understands technology and business and can handle life at blog speed, please let them know about the opening.

When it comes to all the recent sniping between VCs and super angels, I’ve been trying to stay above the fray while I work on a longer-term analysis. But I did get a chance to speak with two sharp attorneys at Dorsey & Whitney, which serves many top Silicon Valley venture firms, about the results of their recent survey of more than 360 early-stage entrepreneurs. The survey focused on funding — where startup founders have been getting it and where they expect to get it. The bottom line is that VCs ought to be worrying about competition from regular angels, not super angels.

My attempt to get into a regular running routine is being hampered by ankle trouble, but I did manage to run far enough to gather data for a head-to-head review of two pretty cool fitness tracking apps for the iPhone. One is RunKeeper, from FitnessKeeper, whose hyperkinetic founder Jason Jacobs was a character in several of my stories for Xconomy Boston (including this one about the time Jacobs ran the Boston marathon in an iPhone costume). The other is Runmeter, from a San Francisco startup called Abvio. My verdict: Runmeter will probably appeal more to gadget geeks, while RunKeeper has great community features for runners interested in building up some social support for their habit.

I don’t meet many CEOs who are as enthusiastic about their businesses as Conrad Burke at Innovalight. The Sunnyvale, CA, startup makes a “silicon ink” material that can be printed on top of standard photovoltaic panels to increase their electrical output. Burke told me how he originally wanted the company to go into the solar panel manufacturing business — they even built a demonstration assembly line.  But Burke took a smart turn amidst the economic crisis, toward making the company into a supplier to the huge solar manufacturers in China. Things are going so well that the company has opened a sales office in Shanghai.

In other news:

Talking to the guys at CarWoo, a Y Combinator-backed startup that launched nationally this week and revealed that has raised a nice chunk of Series A cash, made me feel much better about the prospect of buying my next car (an inevitability in the next year or two as the repair bills for my 2000 Accord escalate).

I took a somewhat skeptical look at Viewdle, a San Jose startup that’s been talking about its face recognition algorithms since 2007 but still hasn’t brought anything to market. The company announced October 5 that it had raised another $10 million in financing and that it plans to bring consumer-oriented products to market early next year.

Somehow I’d assumed that dot-com high flyer LookSmart was dead and buried — but it’s not, and I had a fun visit with company vice president Gill Brown, who filled me in about the lawless world of second-tier search engines. Today’s LookSmart is trying to make it safe for advertisers to publish AdWords style ads through these venues, where they can get pretty good conversion rates without having to pay as much per click as they would on Google or Yahoo/Bing.

That’s all the news from Mississippi Street. My next note will probably come to you from Fairbanks, Alaska, where I’ll be spending the first week of November, getting to know my new niece Lucy.