Crocodoc, Astia, Coworking Spaces, 7 Big Questions about Mobile, & More Xconomy News

[Wade Roush]

It's Presidents' Day, which means one less story to write, which means I have a few extra moments to catch up on other things like this twice-monthly story roundup. To those of you who are new to this Google Groups list: welcome and thanks for subscribing. Following are summaries of my major stories from the last two weeks, in reverse chronological order as usual:

* As a way of prepping for my emcee role at Mobile Madness, our big upcoming mobile event in Cambridge, MA, I began a two-part column on what I consider to be seven of the most important unanswered questions about the future of mobile. In Part 1, I asked who the new gatekeepers will be in the mobile-app world and what kinds of friction they'll impose; whether the new world of mobile app development will be open or closed or something in between; and whether wireless operators will be able to provide affordable 4G connectivity. In Part 2, next week, I plan to delve into questions about mobile payments, enterprise adoption of mobile platforms, the role of context and location-based services, and what comes after the current smartphone and tablet era.

* GravityEight is a new startup in Marin County founded by Dave Wamsley, formerly of AdAuction and Campsix. I talked with Wamsley about the company's aim to become the central hub where users store and compare quantitative data on their progress toward wellbeing in eight specific areas such as health, finances, career goals, relationships, and community. 

* In terms of sheer page views, my biggest story of the month by far was my piece on Crocodoc, a Y Combinator-backed startup that makes Web-friendly document sharing tools. Last week the company introduced the world's first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, which for some reason got people a lot more excited than I was expecting.

* I reconnected with Rudy Adler, one of the co-founders of online memorial site 1000memories, and wrote about the Y Combinator company's $2.5 million fundraising round, which brought in big-name investors like Greylock Partners, Ron Conway, and Mike Maples. In an interesting twist on its original mission, 1000memories has become the home of a page commemorating scores of people who died in the anti-government violence that preceded Hosni Mubarak's resignation in Egypt.

* I finally found time to write up a long-delayed story about oDesk, the Redwood City, CA-based creator of a fast-growing distributed work platform that allows companies to more easily find, hire, and pay remote workers. I've talked to more than a few startups who are using oDesk's services to manage teams of developers in places like Russia and Pakistan.

* SearchReviews, a new startup aggregating consumer reviews of gadgets, travel destinations, kitchenware, and everything else you can think of, came out of stealth mode. I talked with founder and CEO Ankesh Kumar.

* Have you ever played around with Xtranormal, the free movie-making program that puts your script into the mouths of cute animated characters? Quite a few Silicon Valley wags evidently have, and in my February 11 column I rounded up my favorite startup- and tech-related Xtranormal cartoons, including the classic Lean Startup cartoon, a must-see for all Eric Ries / Steve Blank fanboys.

* I wrote a breaking news story about 500 Startups' new accelerator program in downtown Mountain View, and gave thumbnail descriptions of the dozen startups accepted to the program so far.

* I was about to sit down and write a profile of pariSoma, the coworking space in San Francisco when I decided that it was more urgent to compile a directory of tech-startup-friendly coworking spaces all over the Bay Area. They're multiplying rapidly, and each space has its own unique vibe and selling points. I found about 22 spaces altogether -- more if you count the operations with multiple locations. 

* Once that was done I actually did write my pariSoma profile. The Howard Street operation is about to move around the corner to much more elegant digs that will hold about four times as many companies.

* The Crocodoc story may have won more page views, but my most meaningful story this month was my profile of Astia, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that runs accelerator programs for women-led startups in the Bay Area, New York, London, and India. Astia CEO Sharon Vosmek explained the strategies the accelerator has used to boost the success rate for its member companies to astronomical levels -- 60 percent of companies win funding or get acquired within a year of joining the program. The secret, in a word: community.

* I've been following animated slideshow service Animoto for a while, from a distance; they interested me because they were one of the first startups to make serious use of Amazon's cloud infrastructure a few years ago. I finally got a chance to interview Animoto CEO Brad Jefferson, who filled me in about recent upgrades to Animoto's service. You can now make slides shows in high-definition, and by switching to Amazon's cloud GPUs Animoto was able to speed up the rendering process by a factor of 10. Here's a high-def slide show I made using photos from a recent weekend jaunt to Sonoma County.

* After catching up with Sidereel co-founder and CEO Roman Arzhintar, who is one of the funniest Bay Area startup leaders I've met, I wrote a profile of his company, which has become the leading independent guide to Internet TV options. Having "cut the cord" and given up cable TV in favor of Internet video a couple of years ago, I find the startup's collection of schedules and sources pretty useful.

That's about it, aside from numerous smaller news briefs, which I never bother to include in these updates. Thanks for reading! I'll hit you with another roundups in a couple of weeks.