Restarting this newsletter: The biggest Xconomy SF stories of the last 12 months

[Wade Roush]

Hello friends,

It's been more than a year since my last update to this Google Group -- you may even have forgotten that you were subscribed! The purpose of the group is simply to give members an easy way to follow what I've been working on lately at Xconomy San Francisco.

I'll attribute the long hiatus to the fact that I took up long-distance running, which has been consuming my weekends for the last year. But it's time to revive the group updates. In this edition I'll hit on a few of the big themes I've been following over the last 12 months.

* Accelerators, accelerators, accelerators. While continuing to follow the granddaddy of all Silicon Valley startup accelerators, Y Combinator, I've also covered the rise of specialized accelerators in healthcare (Rock Health), cleantech (Greenstart), hardware (Lemnos Labs, HAXLR8R), media (Turner Media Camp), and even prisons (San Quentin's The Last Mile). In November I was featured in a PBS NewsHour report on accelerators by Hari Sreenivasan.

* When it comes to transparency and openness, Google is the opposite of its rivals Apple and Facebook. Following up on my big January 2011 story on Google's vision of augmented humanity, I was fortunate to get the access I needed to do big stories on Google's efforts to reinvent public transportation, the Google-sponsored race to put robot privately built rovers on the Moon, and how the Google M&A team works to ensure that Google's acquisitions have a higher-than-average sucess rate.

* Robotics has been a big preoccupation for me this year. I wrote about the effects of robotics on unemployment, the rise of open-source robotics at Willow Garage, and the need for venture capitalists to pay more attention to robotics. Most of those stories emerged from the research I was doing in preparation for our first-ever forum on the future of robotics in Silicon Valley on May 3.

* I'm convinced that way we experience television and movies will be drastically transformed over the next five years. I wrote about several startups working to make that happen, including Dijit Media, Prescreen, and Flingo. I also suggested that your next TV will be a tablet.

* In a story that's close to my heart, there's been an amazing resurgence of long-form journalism on digital platforms lately. In this area, I took a close look at Flipboard, Zite, Longform, and Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later). In February I did a roundup of 10 apps and sites that bring back the joy of reading.

* Just because I'm a vegetarian doesn't mean I don't like to eat. I put together the most complete list of food-tech startups anywhere on the Web, and I've had the privilege of moderating a series of Food Startup Meetups in downtown San Francisco (see the videos here and here.)

* In the "miscellaneous fun" category, I wrote about a project to turn the Bay Bridge into a giant LED display, the rebirth of multimedia edutainment software at Touch Press, progress on bike sharing in Boston and the Bay Area, the revolutionary new Lytro light field camera, and a new Emeryville startup called Madefire that has invented a new visual grammar for digital comics.

* Xconomy hosted a series of great events the Bay area in 2011-2012, including the robotics forum, our first-ever CEO summit in Napa Valley, and a forum featuring Evernote and CEO Phil Libin's vision for building a 100-year company. I hope you'll join us at the Greenstart accelerator in downtown San Francisco on August 7 for our next big event, an conversation with Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz on the rise of the online-to-offline economy.

* Finally, I'm preparing for my first real race -- the San Francisco Marathon, which is coming up on July 29. So if anybody has advice about the last few weeks of marathon training, I'm all ears!

Thanks for reading.

--Wade