Y Combinator, E-Textbooks, the Consumer Surplus, & More Xconomy News

[Wade Roush]

Time for a semi-monthly update on the stories I've been covering for Xconomy San Francisco. A special welcome to the 60-plus friends who joined this list after I sent out a new round of invitations a couple of weeks ago.

If you're looking for a source of tech-startup stories, the Y Combinator venture incubator in Mountain View is a bottomless well. The big Y Combinator event in March was Demo Day for the winter 2011 batch of companies. Of the 43 teams who presented to investors, 19 were still in stealth mode, but I wrote up a detailed debrief on the other 24 "YC W11" companies, many of which are attacking serious problems like electronic medical records. (See my answer on Quora to a question about which YC company has the best prospects.) 

I also began a series of feature profiles of the new YC companies, starting with Taskforce, which helps you manage your e-mail inbox by converting e-mails into tasks on a to-do list. Next on the list was Noteleaf, which has a nifty service that taps into your Google calendar and your LinkedIn account to assemble mobile-optimized dossiers on your contacts; you get a link to the dossier 10 minutes before a scheduled meeting, right when you need it.

Rounding out my YC W11 coverage, I wrote about HelloFax, an eFax competitor that's winning praise for its easy-to-use electronic signature system; the site lets you sign documents electronically and send them to any fax number, a service that (let's all hope) could hasten the demise of fax machines. Over the coming week or two I'll be writing profiles of at least three more YC W11 companies, including Lanyrd, TellFi, and Earbits.

Meanwhile, I'm still making the rounds among startups from earlier Y Combinator classes. This week I took a look at Anyleaf, which is out to replace the old-fashioned supermarket circular with geographically targeted e-mails that round up the best deals at local grocery stores. Anyleaf recently launched a nice iPhone app that lets you check deals while you're in a store.

But believe it or note, there was also some non-YC news in the second half of March. Inkling, which produces interactive college textbooks for the iPad, struck major deals with McGraw-Hill and Pearson; the publishers both invested in Inkling and opened up their backlists for conversion to Inkling's platform. 

Speaking of books, the company that's been called "the Netflix of college textbooks" -- Chegg -- overhauled its website to integrate the technology of two startups it acquired last year, CourseRank and Cramster. Now students can browse courses and get homework help at the same site where they rent books. The idea, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig told me, is to put the company’s brand in front of college students every day, rather than just the handful of days each semester when they’re ordering and returning books.

O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 Expo took place in San Francisco this week, and I used the opportunity to catch up with a bunch of local companies, including Cloudkick, a 2009 Y Combinator startup that was recently acquired by Web hosting company Rackspace. I talked with Alex Polvi, Cloudkick's 25-year-old co-founder and CEO, who's now site manager for Rackspace's Bay Area outpost, and found out what it was like to rocket from incubator to acquisition in less than two years.

As most of you know, I publish a column every Friday called "World Wide Wade." My March 25 column was about the way today's personal technology is adding at an ever-increasing rate to the "consumer surplus." That's the idea from economics that we often get more value from things than we actually pay for them. My argument was that gadgets that are also open software platforms -- such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones -- get more useful and more valuable over time thanks to new apps and free software updates.

My April 1 column, though, was about a case of software misfiring and costing consumers more time. Specifically, I looked at Priority Inbox, a feature introduced by Google as part of Gmail in August 2010. The system is supposed to help you sort really important e-mail from the piles of stuff you can probably ignore. I tried Priority Inbox for about seven months, and found that it actually made the task of managing e-mail more stressful, not less.

In a bit of non-Xconomy news: I recently spruced up my personal blog, Travels with Rhody, which I invite you to visit. Also, I finally snagged an iPad 2, on my fifth attempt. (The secret, it turns out, is to get up at 5:00 a.m. so that you can be 40th in line at the Apple Store instead of 400th.) As a test of the gadget's video capabilities, I took Rhody and the iPad 2 on a quick video tour of the neighborhood last weekend, and put the clips together into a three-minute ditty using the new iPad version of iMovie. It's called "Flowers of Potrero Hill" and you can watch it here. Today I'm packing up my original iPad for its journey up to Alaska, where it will have a new adoptive family -- my brother Jamie and his wife and young kids.

That's all for now -- thanks for reading and I'll hit you with another update in a couple of weeks.