Mark Zuckerberg, Aneesh Chopra, Apps for Runners & more Xconomy news

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Wade Roush

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Oct 17, 2010, 5:54:06 PM10/17/10
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It's been a couple of weeks since my last update on what's been keeping me busy at Xconomy, so here goes. (Hello to my newest subscribers; thanks for joining.)

My mini journalistic coup this month was scoring an interview with Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States. We talked about healthcare IT policy, and how Chopra is trying to create new opportunities for entrepreneurs by opening up government data that they can deploy in Web and mobile apps.

Remember how you were politely invited to join this Google group, and then decided for yourself whether to join? Well, none of that happens with the recently overhauled Facebook Groups feature; your friends can add you to groups without your permission, and it's up to you to unjoin if you're displeased. In an essay that started out as an angry review of The Social Network (I thought the film unfairly savaged Mark Zuckerberg), I ended up speculating about why Facebook seems so consistently inept at judging how to roll out features that affect users' control over their profiles and their data.

As an experiment, I published a list of 10 startups I'm planning to profile in the coming weeks and invited readers to reach out with tips and context. These are all companies where I interviewed the founders days, weeks, or months ago, but haven't had time to write up my stories yet. My story backlog is actually about three times longer than the published list, but I didn't want to give away all of my surprises.

Speaking of my out-of-control backlog, Xconomy San Francisco is hiring. If you know a talented writer in the Bay Area who understands technology and business and can handle life at blog speed, please let them know about the opening. 

When it comes to all the recent sniping between VCs and super angels, I've been trying to stay above the fray while I work on a longer-term analysis. But I did get a chance to speak with two sharp attorneys at Dorsey & Whitney, which serves many top Silicon Valley venture firms, about the results of their recent survey of more than 360 early-stage entrepreneurs. The survey focused on funding -- where startup founders have been getting it and where they expect to get it. The bottom line is that VCs ought to be worrying about competition from regular angels, not super angels.

My attempt to get into a regular running routine is being hampered by ankle trouble, but I did manage to run far enough to gather data for a head-to-head review of two pretty cool fitness tracking apps for the iPhone. One is RunKeeper, from FitnessKeeper, whose hyperkinetic founder Jason Jacobs was a character in several of my stories for Xconomy Boston (including this one about the time Jacobs ran the Boston marathon in an iPhone costume). The other is Runmeter, from a San Francisco startup called Abvio. My verdict: Runmeter will probably appeal more to gadget geeks, while RunKeeper has great community features for runners interested in building up some social support for their habit.

I don't meet many CEOs who are as enthusiastic about their businesses as Conrad Burke at Innovalight. The Sunnyvale, CA, startup makes a "silicon ink" material that can be printed on top of standard photovoltaic panels to increase their electrical output. Burke told me how he originally wanted the company to go into the solar panel manufacturing business -- they even built a demonstration assembly line.  But Burke took a smart turn amidst the economic crisis, toward making the company into a supplier to the huge solar manufacturers in China. Things are going so well that the company has opened a sales office in Shanghai.

In other news:

Talking to the guys at CarWoo, a Y Combinator-backed startup that launched nationally this week and revealed that has raised a nice chunk of Series A cash, made me feel much better about the prospect of buying my next car (an inevitability in the next year or two as the repair bills for my 2000 Accord escalate).

I took a somewhat skeptical look at Viewdle, a San Jose startup that's been talking about its face recognition algorithms since 2007 but still hasn't brought anything to market. The company announced October 5 that it had raised another $10 million in financing and that it plans to bring consumer-oriented products to market early next year.

Somehow I'd assumed that dot-com high flyer LookSmart was dead and buried -- but it's not, and I had a fun visit with company vice president Gill Brown, who filled me in about the lawless world of second-tier search engines. Today's LookSmart is trying to make it safe for advertisers to publish AdWords style ads through these venues, where they can get pretty good conversion rates without having to pay as much per click as they would on Google or Yahoo/Bing.

That's all the news from Mississippi Street. My next note will probably come to you from Fairbanks, Alaska, where I'll be spending the first week of November, getting to know my new niece Lucy.



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