iMovie, ShowYou, Beyond Mobile, & More Xconomy News

[Wade Roush]

Hello friends -- time for the semi-monthly roundup of the stories crossing my desk.

* First things first: You're all 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.