Obama's Incubator Nation, a Rash of Startup Uncloakings, Inside Engine Yard and Eventbrite & More Xconomy News

[Wade Roush]

Hi there -- just relaying the latest from Xconomy's San Francisco bureau (i.e., me).

There was an amazing rush of news affecting tech entrepreneurs and in the Bay Area and nationally over the last two weeks -- starting with President Obama's tech-heavy State of the Union address and continuing with the developments at Y Combinator (where every startup won a $150,000 lottery), the unveiling of the White House's Startup America initiative, and the creation of the TechStars Network (the incubator is open-sourcing its model to 15 other accelerators). I tried to make sense of it all in one mega news analysis.

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 about how 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.

Thanks, and I'll hit you with another update in a couple of weeks.