Travels with Rhody » San Francisco

Mountain Biking Marathon

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 01:52:03 +0000

I took my mountain bike out on a ride around San Francisco yesterday, and somewhat unintentionally, I think I wound up tracing much of the route of the San Francisco Marathon. I realized this when I got home and saw from the readings on Everytrail—the GPS trip tracking software I’d been running on my iPhone—that the mileage was just under 26 miles. Anyway, here’s the full report, maps + photos, from Everytrail:

San Francisco Circuit

Map your trip with EveryTrail

Coming to a Screen Near You: World Wide Wade Goes West

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:55:35 +0000

No self-respecting digital media writer can go on a road trip without documenting the whole thing digitally. Soon after I’d decided to drive from Boston to San Francisco to take up my new post as Editor of Xconomy San Francisco—and recruited my good friend Graham Gordon Ramsay to share the driving—we hatched a devious plan to create a video travelogue. (Okay, partly we were just looking for a way to create fresh content for the site while I’m on the road.)

We put the pilot for the whole series online back on June 14, the day we launched the San Francisco site, and the series will get underway in earnest starting Monday, June 28. You can watch the daily posts at www.xconomy.com/san-francisco or subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/xconomywest. I hope you’ll follow along as we wind our way through Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and of course California, stopping along the way to talk with real people about how technology figures in their lives, what the climate for entrepreneurship is like in their communities, and whether the innovators Xconomy chronicles daily are serving their real needs.

San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:06:16 +0000

I haven’t been updating Travels With Rhody much lately, and today I can finally say why: I’ve been working behind the scenes to help launch Xconomy San Francisco, the newest city in Xconomy’s national network. (Props to Scott Kirsner at the Boston Globe for figuring this out a couple of weeks ago.) The new site went live over the weekend and we’re populating it with our first round of San Francisco stories today, including my story about Siri, the “virtual personal assistant” app created by SRI International of Menlo Park, CA, and acquired this spring by Apple. This post by Xconomy founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi tells the whole story behind the launch and the other changes going on at Xconomy. And to top it all off, we’ve issued an official press release.

The debut of Xconomy San Francisco is a big moment for me, personally, because it represents a chance for me to move back to San Francisco after four years away from The City. I’ve loved being back in Boston since 2007; it was the ideal place for a career switch to online-only journalism. The opportunity to work with Bob, Xconomy co-founder Rebecca Zacks, and the whole Xconomy team has been amazingly fun and educational. And it’s been a huge privilege to cover the burgeoning Boston-area entrepreneurial scene, which is full of brilliant and friendly people. But as Jeanette McDonald sang in her paean to San Francisco in the archetypal 1936 disaster movie, “Other places only make me love you best / Tell me you’re the heart of all the golden west.”

Together with my colleagues—principally, Xconomy Seattle Editor and National Biotechnology Editor Luke Timmerman—I’ll be operating the San Francisco site remotely for a couple of weeks while I wrap up some final tasks here in Boston. (After all, I can’t miss the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship this Thursday!) Then I’ll be hitting the road for San Francisco—and publishing a video travelogue series along the way (details on that here, along with the pilot video in the series).