Mobile Madness, the Evils of Cash, iPhone vs. Android, & More Xconomy News

[Wade Roush]

I'm beginning to enjoy writing these semi-monthly roundups of my Xconomy stories. As I rush from one story to the next, it's pretty easy to focus only on the work that's still unfinished and lose track of what's been accomplished. So it's been useful to stop every couple of weeks for a brief look back.

* I spent the whole week of March 7 visiting Xconomy's home office in Cambridge, MA. It was great reconnecting with my friends and colleagues around Boston, but I was in town mainly to emcee our annual Mobile Madness event, which, I'm glad to report, was a big success. I wrote up a post-game report about the lessons learned, and we also published a gallery of photos from the event.

* A small thing that made me absurdly happy: on March 9, my January series Inside Google's Age of Augmented Humanity got picked up by Longform.org and widely retweeted, propelling it to #3 on Xconomy's list of top stories that week.

* Don't believe everything you see on YouTube or Vimeo. A satirical video about the sanitary hazards of cash --- posted by Jumio this week to build buzz around its forthcoming digital-payments technology --- was misinterpreted by Huffington Post readers and others as a serious attack. I got the back story about the video from Jumio and Nick Markham, the LaunchSquad video producer who plays "Sebastian Cole" in the video.

* I read Guy Kawasaki's latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, and found it, well, enchanting. It's a short, profitable read for anyone committed to spreading a cause.

* In a sobering moment for Apple fans, an Ontario company called Blaze published results of a study finding that the mobile Web browser in the latest Android phones is 52 percent faster, on average, than the mobile version of Safari on the iPhone 4.

* My longest story of the month to date was an in-depth look at Enphase Energy, a company that sells microinverter technology that's transforming the way residential and light-commercial solar arrays are installed and monitored. Venture firms such as Kleiner Perkins like Enphase because the technology makes installing a rooftop array so simple that a general contractor or non-specialist electrician can handle the job, potentially removing one of the big barriers to the spread of home solar energy.

* A few weeks ago I profiled Animoto, whose cloud-based technology turns users' photos and videos into slick musical slide shows. This week the company launched a partner program that will make it easier for users of other sites, such as Kodak Gallery, to create their own shows.

* I published the first part of a long interview with Steve Blank, the Silicon Valley startup guru who came up with the notion of "customer development" and who is arguing these days that traditional business schools aren't equipped to train entrepreneurs. He's calling for a new era of "entrepreneurship schools."

* HubSpot, a marketing technology company in Cambridge, MA, that I covered several times during my days as Xconomy's Boston editor, got a big cash infusion from Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Salesforce.com, among other investors. "“It pains us to acknowledge that a company from Cambridge, a bunch of MIT engineers and Sloan grads, have managed to outmaneuver a couple of companies here in the Valley,” Sequoia partner Jim Goetz joked during a press conference about the funding.

* AdGrok, part of the summer 2010 class at Y Combinator, opened its slick Google Adwords management interface to the public. Co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez gave me a walk-through.

That's all the news for the first half of March. I'll send my next update around April Fool's Day.