Content-centric networking, the changing face of video, & more Xconomy news

[Wade Roush]

Well, back on July 1st I "restarted" this newsletter. Here we are almost four months later and this is my first real update. So much for new beginnings! 

Before I disappear to Italy for a couple of weeks on my first real vacation in about five years, I wanted to fill you in about some of the most interesting stories I've been covering lately for Xconomy.

- Here's the biggest idea you've probably never heard about: content-centric networking. It could change everything about the way the Internet works.

- The Y Combinator startup school held its Summer 2012 demo day in August; in my post-game report I tried to extract some insight about the main themes YC seems to be pushing its startups to explore. I also published a Q&A with Randall Stross, the author of a new book about Y Combinator called "The Launch Pad."

- Startups have more and more ways to measure and organize their progress, and I wrote about three YC alumni companies helping with that: Mixpanel, Gantto, and Chartio.

- The way people store, search, discover, and enjoy video and TV content is changing fast. I had the opportunity to do in-depth stories on video hosting company Ooyala, video search company Blinkx, and two companies building TV-companion apps: Sportstream (a spinoff of Evri) and Dijit Media (which has released an app called NextGuide).

- SRI International continues to churn out spinoffs exploring different aspects of virtual personal assistant technology. First there was Siri, then TrapIt, then Lola -- and now there's Alice. She's the AI who helps players through a forthcoming educational iPad game from Kuato Studios. 

- Speaking of games, I covered the debut of Nukotoys, which has built two very cool iPad-based kids' games that combine Pokemon-style cards with 3-D game worlds.

- I sat down with Yammer CEO David Sacks to find out why he said yes to Microsoft's acquisition offer.

- I got to write about a company doing real-time panoramic video (Stealth HD), another providing online storage and file-sharing with an obsessive focus on privacy (SpiderOak), and another exploring automated ways to tag Web content (Diffbot).

- Western Union doesn't deliver telegrams anymore, but they want to deliver a knockout punch to competitors in the digital payments market.

- I profiled a company called Reclip.it that successfully landed the dangerous triple-pivot maneuver -- they moved from NYC to SF, changed their name, and entered a new business all at once. 

- Speaking of pivots, I'm organizing an entire event on that theme at PARC on December 4. It's called "The Power of the Pivot" and tickets will go on sale next week -- check Xconomy.com for details. Cheryl Yeoh from Reclip.it will be one of the speakers, as will Rich Aberman from PayPal competitor WePay (which shared some insights with me in August about how it combats fraud).

- My most recent column was about WellnessFX, a San Francisco startup offering a comprehensive battery of blood tests to gauge customers' health. I got tested myself and the results were interesting.

- In a mid-July column I argued that we can only fix e-mail overload by working together. That led to another piece looking specifically at SaneBox, a Boston startup that has changed my life by helping to filter the unimportant and non-urgent stuff out of my e-mail.

- I had great fun doing a bit of geographical detective work using the historical maps layers of Google Earth.

- Confirming my lefty bona fides, and my total non-viability as a candidate for any office, I wrote a column calling on my fellow citizens to stop eating meat, stop driving their cars, and stop watching football. I also wrote about Mitt Romney's assault on green jobs.

- Other columns covered topics such as the Higgs boson, new tools for cross-platform mobile app development, the Speakularity, the best back-to-school apps for the iPad, the rash of bad mobile-phone-related behavior on plane flights, why journalists shouldn't try to think like investors, and the fate of universities in the era of YouTube and Khan Academy.

- In the Department of Miscellanea, I wrote about startups exploring equity-based crowdfunding, HTML5-based document viewers, mobile photo sharing, online car shopping, the casual game market, an app that helps you get to your meetings on time, and tools that help students collaborate outside the classroom.

- I couldn't stop myself from writing an article about Twitter's bloody awful new iPad app.

- In Xconomy news, we had a great "Event Event" in August starring Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz and Renaud Visage, and we launch a drastically improved version of our mobile website. I hope you'll check it out from your smartphone.

That's it for now! I'm signing off until October 9 to enjoy some time in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan. Have a great autumn.

- Wade Roush