We had a little scare over the weekend. We went to see Rhody’s vet on Saturday to see about some arthritis medication. (Rhody’s been reluctant to go up the stairs to my apartment lately, which is probably a sign of osteoarthritis and is completely normal for a dog his age.) On examination, the vet thought she felt some abnormalities in Rhody’s spleen/liver area. She did some X-rays, which suggested there might be a mass. We rushed over to a specialty clinic, where they checked out Rhody’s whole abdomen via ultrasound. He’s totally clean — no tumors!

But I spent most of Saturday worrying about all those awful decisions dog owners have to make toward the end of their friends’ lives. That time will come soon enough for Rhody (hopefully not for a couple more years!) but the episode reminded me how much I’m going to miss him when he’s gone.

To celebrate Rhody’s birthday — here’s a link to the Rhody Gallery on Flickr (1,300 photos and counting). And here’s a picture of Rhody at 14 weeks old, back in 2007:

So my project for Saturday afternoon/evening was to take Rhody to the beach, shoot a bit of video, then head home, assemble some music, and put it all together in iMovie. Here’s the result.

* 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.

The music, by the way, is by Winnie Dahlgren, a terrific percussionist based in Boston who has graciously allowed me to use tracks from her album ‘Till We Meet Again for my videos. This track is called “Sunset Over Noyalito Avenue.”

Well, the geniuses at Apple win again. This morning I decided that I was going to do this iPad thing right. So I got up at 5:45 and biked into the city to snag an early place in line at the Stockton Street store.

I arrived at 6:50 a.m. and was 35th in line. I didn’t have to wait long to find out the score: the manager came out to say that he had no AT&T iPads to sell at this location. The choices: a 16GB Wi-Fi model or a 32GB or 64GB Verizon 3G model, in white only. My first preference would have been a black, 64GB, AT&T model, but hey, I’m not patient enough to wait. So I took a ticket entitling me to a white Verizon model. The doors opened at 9:00 a.m., I got my new white iPad with a green smart cover, and I was home by 10:00.

And you know what? The white iPad is already growing on me fast. I just finished getting it all set up (which took a couple of hours because I had a ton of apps, music, and other content to copy over from my original iPad). I’ve been having fun taking some of the new features for a quick spin, including FaceTime (which works great!) and the rear camera. Which is not as terrible as everyone has been saying — yes it’s under 1 megapixel, but if you hold it steady you can take a decent picture with it, like the one below (don’t ask me why it’s upside down — I have a bad feeling that there’s some kind of orientation bug in the EXIF data that’s causing WordPress to turn the photo over). Now I’m going to head outside and try a little videography.

I captured a bit of audio today with my iPhone, using the excellent iTalk app. I converted the AIFF audio file to MP3 using the free Audacity audio editing program and then FTP’d the MP3 to Fused, the hosting provider for this blog. The white noise in the background is from traffic on Interstate 280, which is two blocks away.

Download

Listen:

Mockingbird image from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:

Most of my apps are organized into folders, and I’ve preserved that structure below. I’m not listing bookmarks, but I am including non-universal iPhone apps. By the way, my current iPad is an original 64-gigabyte Wi-FI + 3G model. iTunes shows that it has 59.17 gigabytes of capacity and I’m currently using 30 gigabytes, with 29 left over.

At the very end, I list my most-used apps.

Dock

• Safari
• Mail
• Calendar
• Map
• iPod
• Flipboard

Home Page

• App Store
• iTunes
• Photos
• YouTube
• Contacts
• Videos
• Google
• NYTimes
• Kindle
• Settings
• Reeder
• Instapaper
• WeatherBug
• Pages
• Twitter
• Evernote
• Friendly
• Portfolio To Go

Photos Folder

• Eyewitness
• Beautiful Panoramas
• Heritage (Fotopedia)
• Big Picture
• AliveAlbums
• iSynth
• National Parks (Fotopedia)
• Life
• Colors (Fotopedia)

Photography Folder

• Camera for iPad
• Instagram
• Photogene
• Colorsplash
• Animoto
• PhotoFunia

Location Folder

• Geocaching
• Where
• Everytrail
• Foursquare
• GPS Kit
• Traffic.com
• Geopher Lite
• Yobongo
• SCVNGR

TV & Movies Folder

• ABC Player
• Netflix
• Flixster
• Movies (MSpot)
• TED
• PBS
• Sidereel

Music & Radio Folder

• Pandora
• Public Radio
• NPR
• Magic Piano
• Ocarina
• Magic Fiddle
• Etude
• Glee
• Clock Radio
• Ambiance
• History of Jazz
• Shazam
• Naturespace

Art Folder

• Penultimate
• Sketchbook (Autodesk)
• Louvre
• eCards
• ArtStudio
• iMovie Extras

Action Games Folder

• Mirror’s Edge
• Tilt to Live HD
• RealRacing HD
• Gwarrs: Touch
• DoodleJump
• Fieldrunners
• Game Center
• Angry Birds
• BFBC 2
• Talking Roby
• Tiny Wings

Puzzle Games Folder

• Myst
• Zen Bound
• Morocco
• Pocket Pond
• Koi Pond
• Osmos HD
• Frenzic
• Scrabble
• uzu

Travel & Maps Folder

• Goby
• World Atlas (National Geographic)
• Urbanspoon
• Photo Map
• UpNext
• AllTrails
• TripAdvisor
• Google Earth
• Star Walk
• CityMaps2Go
• Yelp

News Folder

• Pulse News
• Mashable
• Fluent News
• Huff Post
• Nature_HG
• Slate
• NewsRack
• my6sense
• CNN

Magazines Folder

• Esquire
• Wired
• TheNewYorker
• The Economist
• The Atavist

Books Folder

• Best of Times (Vook)
• Poem Flow
• iBooks
• Marvel
• The Elements
• Canyons (Vook)
• Shepp’s Photos (Vook)
• DC Comics
• Google Books
• Net Matters
• Alice for iPad

Reference Folder

• Discover
• Wikipanion
• Epicurious
• Siri
• AppAdvice
• Explor
• Stumbleupon
• Mint.com
• WindowShop (Amazon)
• SearchReviews

Utilities Folder

• Skype
• Remote
• WakeMate
• Magic Window
• Carbonite
• Applausometer
• Calculator XL
• Speedtest
• eBay
• Bump
• Facebook
• Tweetdeck

Business Folder

• iTalk
• Box.net
• GoodReader
• Notes
• WordPress
• Gmail
• SoundNote
• Bento
• Dictation (Dragon)

Most Used Apps, in rough order of usage; it’s not necessarily the same stuff that’s on my Home page, though perhaps it should be!

• Safari
• Mail
• Videos
• NYTimes
• Flipboard
• Instapaper
• Kindle
• Photos
• Twitter
• iPod
• Calendar
• Netflix
• Osmos HD
• The New Yorker
• GoodReader
• Google Earth
• Remote

* 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.