In other news:
--
What is Quora? Maybe, like me, you've been wondering exactly what the Silicon Valley-based question-and-answer site is trying to do, and why. Well, I talked with co-founder and CEO Adam D'Angelo and lieutenant Marc Bodnick, and I've finally got some answers for you.
-- If you're a foodie, you've probably heard of Epicurious and Allrecipes. You may not have heard of Yummly. But already, the Redwood City startup is
the Gooogle of recipes, and I'm betting their advanced search technology (and their sweet new iOS app) is going to make the company into one of the central information brokers in the food world.
-- Can ideas from the "lean startup" and "customer development" movements work for life science companies, which traditionally have higher costs and longer paths to market? Startup guru Steve Blank used to think the answer was no, but he's
changed his mind, and now he's teaching a whole course on entrepreneurship to life science startups at UCSF.
-- After reading two fantastic new books about San Francisco -- David Talbot's
Season of the Witch and Gary Kamiay's
Cool Gray City of Love -- I was inspired to write my own paean to San Francisco, offering a few theories about why the city is always reinventing itself -- and our larger economy and technological infrastructure along with it. I called it
The Winds of the Future: Five Ways San Francisco Stays Innovative.
-- Speaking of books, I
interviewed Scott Berkun, author of a fascinating new book called
The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. It's an account of his time as a team leader inside Automattic, the company behind the WordPress publishing platform, which is famous for letting all of its employees work remotely. That's not an arrangement that will work for everyone, Berkun said. "People who struggle to want to go to work and manage their time and manage their attention will probably have a harder time, because they don't have a boss checking them every day and looking over their shoulder." The only person looking over my shoulder is my dog, and he usually just wants food and walks.
-- The Rock Health accelerator for digital-health startups launched 10 new startups at its fifth demo day. I was there and
took lots of pictures.
-- Speaking of accelerators, there's a
new startup accelerator in town for early-stage companies building tools for software developers. It's called Heavybit Industries, and it's intended to help companies deal with the unique challenges of selling software to other software companies. "We think of it as grad school compared to Y Combinator's undergrad," says co-founder James Lindenbaum.
-- Also speaking of accelerators, Evernote announced at its EC3 conference that it has picked six startups to join the inaugural class at its new
Evernote Accelerator, a month-long program designed to help teams improve their Evernote-connected products.
That's it for now -- I've got some travel coming up, so you'll probably see my next update in mid-November. Thanks for your support!
Wade Roush | Chief Correspondent and San Francisco Editor, Xconomy