Embargoes, Personalized Health, Public Radio & More Xconomy News

[Wade Roush]

Time for an update from Xconomy San Francisco. It's been three weeks since my last summary, but there aren't quite as many stories to tell you as there usually would be, mainly because I've been wrapped up in event planning and outreach work. (That's the flip side of being a media and events startup!). 

* The main event I've been producing is Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021. The centerpiece of this May 17 evening forum at SRI International in Menlo Park will be an intimate on-stage chat with visionary thinkers Larry Smarr from Calit2, Dan Reed from Microsoft, and Bill Mark from SRI. We'll debate what comes after the smartphone and tablet era. Will we even have computers on our desktops or in our backpacks or pockets in 10 years' time? Or will they simply melt into the background, becoming part of the furniture in our homes and workplaces? We'll try to zero on on the trends shaping opportunities for entrepreneurs over the coming decade. 

I've also lined up short presentations from the CEOs of TRUSTe (on the future of privacy), Anybots (on the future of robotics) and DrChrono (on the future of healthcare). Last week I published a Q&A with Bill Mark previewing many of the themes of the evening, including work at SRI on conversational software and smart spaces. If you'd like to attend Beyond Mobile on May 17, let me know -- I can get you in at a discount. You can also compete to win a pair of free tickets to Beyond Mobile this week by tweeting your zaniest predictions about the future of computing using the hashtag #XconPredicts.

* My most recent column, "The News Embargo Is Dead. Tech Crunch Killed It. Let's Move On," has stirred up a bit of a ruckus. In the piece I declared that I'm no longer going to agree to be pre-briefed by tech companies or their PR firms under embargo. I'll just evaluate stories after they're public, and decided then whether they're worth the signature Xconomy treatment. I've been building up to this decision for a long time, but was prompted to make it official after yet another case in which TechCrunch went to press early with an embargoed story I was also covering. 

The comment section of my column was pretty active over the weekend. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington himself left a comment, claiming that TechCrunch has never broken an embargo. His implication was that in the cases where TechCrunch seemed to be publishing stories before the agreed embargo time, they'd been authorized to do so by companies or their PR firms who gave them an earlier embargo. Of course, an embargo where one party gets special treatment is no embargo at all, and if Arrington is to be believed, then the PR community (and not just Arrington himself, who long ago proclaimed "Death to the Embargo") shares in the blame for the breakdown of the embargo as a reliable way to manage news. It's a rotten system that I'm happy to walk away from.

* One of the most interesting companies that I covered in April was HealthTap, which emerged from stealth on April 19 with an "expert health companion" website that helps users with health complaints zero in on personalized information about what conditions might explain their symptoms. CEO Ron Gutman told me the system -- whose resources so far pertain only to pregnant women and moms with infants -- is not intended for self-diagnosis, but rather to help arm patients with smarter questions once they get to the doctor's office. I published a video interview with Gutman to go along with this story (something I've been doing more and more often lately, given how easy it is to shoot and edit video on the iPad 2.)

* There's a San Francisco startup in the smartphone-app space that's growing by leaps and bounds, and it's not a game company. It's Life360, maker of iPhone and Android apps that family members can use to track and alert each other for safety purposes. In a profile of the company I focused on the fine line Life360 co-founder Chris Hulls is attempting to walk; he feels that fears about sexual predators and other supposed hazards confronting children are overblown, yet in some ways the apps, and the company's marketing, play to those very fears.

* I could barely believe my eyes when I got a newsletter from KQED announcing that the station would be offering a pledge-free streaming version of its broadcast to listeners who ponied up $45 before the start of the current spring pledge drive. As a huge NPR listener, I detest pledge drive season -- the biggest problem being that the pledge breaks continue even after you've called in your pledge. This new approach totally fixes that. I was so excited that I called up some folks at KQED and elsewhere, and learned that the pledge-free streaming idea has been kicking around the public radio community for a while, but KQED is the first to muster the courage to try it. If the experiment is successful, it could transform the way public radio stations raise money. But it's also raising concerns about whether offering a separate "premium" broadcast is consistent with the mission of public radio.

* The Startup America Partnership, a public-private initiative to foster entrepreneurship and job growth, has a lot of big-name supporters and, now, one smaller one: San Francisco-based IndieGoGo. One of the oldest "crowdfunding" sites, IndieGoGo predates its better-known competitor KickStarter and is a place where artists, musicians, craftsmen, and small business owners can appeal directly to netizens for the money they need to pursue various causes. But does this kind of fundraising actually create jobs? I debated that with IndieGoGo founder and CEO Slava Rubin and Startup America CEO Scott Case. 

* I have a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with e-mail -- I get about 300 messages a day and it's hard to find the discipline to properly respond to all of them, or even just to file them away or delete them. But I've found a tool that really helps -- it's called The Email Game and it was invented by Baydin Software, a transplant from Boston led by Alex Moore. My April 22 column was all about the game, which helps you process your e-mail faster using game elements as points, rewards, and a countdown clock. I'm proud to report that the Email Game recently helped me whittle down an inbox with more than 5,000 messages in it to zero.

* A San Francisco startup called Bo.lt came out of stealth mode on April 21 with a Web page cloning and editing tool that could be a boon for companies with large websites to manage, but my attitude was that it could also turn into a copyright nightmare. Bo.lt says it thinks marketers will use the cloning tool to build sites with lots of similar pages where just a few elements vary on each page -- think real estate listings. But it also wants average Web surfers to use Bo.lt to virally copy, modify, and share Web pages as part of their social media diet. That's the part that struck me as anathema for Web publishers, who generally like to maintain control over what their content says and how it's presented.

* Qwiki came out with an iPad version of its nifty rich-media reference website, which is sort of like Wikipedia meets Flickr meets HAL. In my opinion, Qwiki makes a lot more sense on a location-aware, touch-driven platform like the iPad than it does on the desktop Web.

* Speaking of tablets, I covered a Summer 2010 Y Combinator company called E la Carte that finally went public with its plans to sell special restaurant-hardened tablet computers to eateries, where guests can use them to browse menus, order food, play games while they wait, and pay for their meals.

* I was involved in a couple of cool events -- on April 18 Luke Timmerman and I put out the wine and cheese and threw our second big Xconomy open house in the Bay Area. We were thrilled by the large turnout. On April 27 I moderated a fascinating panel discussion at San Francisco's TechShop on the connections between the maker phenomenon and entrepreneurship.

And, of course, I spent a lot of time doing new interviews and collecting material for the stories I'll be telling you about in future updates. Thanks for reading.