In the nearly five years since we started Xconomy, I’ve looked forward to few events more than our Silicon Valley “Xconomy Xchange” forum last night with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, and Morgenthaler Ventures partner Gary Little. I’m a longtime power user of Evernote’s online notekeeping application—it’s installed on my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone—and interviewing Libin and Evernote’s biggest investors in front of a live audience was a little bit like being a Trekkie on stage with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Gene Roddenberry. Except, Libin is funnier.

We’ve got photos from the event in slide-show form below. Many thanks to Hanno Botha, newly wedded husband of Xconomy San Francisco’s director of business development Rachel Botha, for playing Peter Parker. (Hanno and Rachel are no relation to Roelof.)

While I’m thanking folks: I want to extend a special thank you to Microsoft Silicon Valley for hosting the event, especially to BizSpark evangelist Brett Laffel, operations manager Sherree Curtiss, and Paul the A/V technician. We’re also grateful to event sponsors Silicon Valley Bank and Turnstone (which showed off its forthcoming iPad app, complete with Evernote integration), event partners Dealmaker Media and Plug and Play Tech Center, design sponsor Mixtur, and Xconomy’s regular lineup of underwriters and venture members. Ching Wu at Morgenthaler Ventures, Andrew Sinkov at Evernote, and Mark Dempster at Sequoia Capital provided invaluable help spreading the word about the event.

Quite a few people tweeted from the event. You can get a look at the conversation by searching Twitter for the hashtag #xcevernote. One of the most tweetable gems of the evening was Libin’s formulation of Libin’s Law: “In a startup, you have to multiply Moore’s Law by Murphy’s Law. Every year, there are twice as many things that can go wrong.” On the final page in our photo gallery, you’ll find a Storify compilation of notable tweets from the event.

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	L to R: Wade Roush (Xconomy), Gary Little (Morgenthaler Ventures), Phil Libin (Evernote), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital).
	Photo by Hanno Botha

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All the cool kids were doing it, so we just couldn’t resist. We’ve created an Xconomy page on Google+, where we’ll share several of our most interesting stories every day. We’ve also added Google+ sharing buttons to all of our stories here on the site—you’ll find them in the sharing box at right, and at the bottom of each story column.

We’re excited to have another great outlet for our content and a new way to engage with our readers online. We’re looking forward to some lively discussions and debates (and hopefully a few +1′s, too!). So please add us to your circles. Who knows, maybe you’ll even let us crash a hangout or two.

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Perhaps you’ve been meaning to buy a ticket to our big Silicon Valley event with Evernote CEO Phil Libin tonight, but you keep forgetting. Well, now’s the time to take action. We still have some tickets available online for $50 ($40 if you work for a startup)—but a walk-in ticket tonight will cost you $95.

Of course, if you’re one of Evernote’s 20 million users, you’d be very unlikely to forget something like that. The company is all about remembering the important stuff in your life—hence the elephant logo.

Now, if your promise to customers is that you’ll protect their digital memories forever, then you sort of have to plan for the long term. But that’s not how most startups think—they’re usually focused on the next product release, not the next decade or the next century. So the message Libin has been sharing lately about wanting Evernote to last 100 years or more is logical, but at the same time pretty radical.

That’s why I wanted to get Libin on stage at an Xconomy event—so that I could ask him how a startup CEO manages to think about the long-term even as he deals with the here-and-now demands of employees, customers, and investors.

And when you have an entrepreneur who says he’s not too concerned about getting acquired or planning an IPO, it takes a pretty special type of investor to back him. That’s why I also wanted to bring in Gary Little from Morgenthaler Ventures, one of Evernote’s earliest backers, as well as Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital, which recently acquired a larger stake in Evernote by buying out previous investor Troika Dialog.

It’s this very pattern of secondary trading—with newer investors buying out older ones—that could help Evernote get really big without having to worry about going public. Tonight, I’ll be asking Little and Botha how working with Evernote is different from working with their other portfolio companies—and whether Evernote’s serial fundraising strategy can work more broadly.

Of course, we’ll also geek out a bit about Evernote itself, which is one of my favorite online tools. So register now. Meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, here’s an archive of all of my major pieces about Evernote.

Can Evernote Make You Into a Digital Leonardo? (July 2008)

Online Notebook Smackdown: Evernote vs. Springpad (April 2010)

The Rise of Evernote: An Interview with CEO Phil Libin (June 2010)

Evernote Opens a Trunk of Goodies for Online-Notes Fans (July 2010)

Sequoia Leads $20 Million Round for Evernote—Q&A with CEO Phil Libin (October 2010)

Xconomist of the Week: Phil Libin, Evernote, and the Death of the Exit (October 2011)

“Independent of Exit”: Talking Evernote with Morgenthaler’s Gary Little (January 2012)

Evernote Wants to Make Your Memories More Magical (January 2012)

How to Be a 100-Year Startup (January 2012)

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Xconomy held its first Big Apple tech event (well, mostly tech, since there was one life sciences company on hand) on Wednesday. We called it New York’s Venture Emergence, and a fantastic crowd of nearly 250 turned out to the Apella Center on East 29th Street for an afternoon of startup snapshots, VC-entrepreneur stories about building great companies, and keynote chats featuring some of New York’s hottest emerging companies and investors.

On the VC side, speakers included Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Nick Beim of Matrix Partners, Todd Dagres from Spark Capital, Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures, Michael Greeley from Flybridge Capital Partners, and Dennis Purcell of Aisling Capital.

Companies presenting included bitly, Gilt Groupe, Armgo Pharma, Simulmedia, BarkBox, and Gotham Greens. We also heard from HackNY and Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket—on the day Facebook filed to go public.

We snapped a lot of pictures of the speakers—and our audience. Following is a selection of shots of both. We hope you enjoy them.

A great thanks to our venue host, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and our fantastic event sponsors: Cooley, EisnerAmper, Halloran, IDA Ireland, and TriNet. Special thanks as well to the National Venture Capital Association and New York Angels, which went above and beyond to help with this event.

And thanks most of all to all of you who came to see it, and made such a great crowd. I hope we got a picture of you.

(Xconomy digital media intern Teddy Worcester contributed to the production of this slideshow)

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	New York’s Venture Emergence — The crowd gathers
	Photo by Keith Spiro Photography courtesy of Kendall Press

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Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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When most startups reach a certain age—seven years, maybe nine; certainly, by the time they get acquired or go public—they stop being startups. They get slow and cautious. They lose the will to wow customers with unconventional ideas.

Evernote hasn’t reached that age yet. And CEO Phil Libin hopes it never does.

In a video released yesterday by Evernote, Libin says he wants the booming online-notekeeping company to be alive 100 years from now—but as a nimble, fast-moving competitor, not a museum relic.

Evernote made the video to help Xconomy spread the word about our February 7 event in Mountain View, “The 100-Year Company: An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia.” If you’re a Silicon Valley startup founder, engineer, product manager, or investor, this is a must-attend event where you’ll hear Libin, along with key Evernote investors Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital and Gary Little from Morgenthaler Ventures, share the company’s secrets for staying young while getting big. Here’s Libin in his own words:

There are two passages in the video with particular potency for startuppers. If you’re going to throw yourself wholeheartedly into building a company around your idea, Libin asks, why settle for the standard Silicon Valley exit scenario of getting acquired by a bigger company?

“Making any kind of company is so much work, and you put so much time into it and so much energy, any kind of a startup, it becomes your main passion, it becomes your quest, your mission, for years, for you and your co-workers and for your founders. So I think if you do anything other than try to build for the long term, you’re frankly selling yourself short,” Libin says. “It’s going to be just as much work to make a company that you’re going to sell in three years as to make a company that’s going to last for 100 years.”

But Libin isn’t promoting longevity for its own sake. “Of course our big challenge isn’t just to make a company that’s around for 100 years,” he says in the video. “It’s to make a company that’s a 100-year startup.”

If you want to go long in this way, it helps to build a team of investors who believe in the 100-year philosophy—and it really helps to show the kind of explosive growth that justifies the big bets being put on the table. At the moment, Evernote is doing both. We’ll delve deeper into the company’s success strategies with Libin, Gary Little, and Roelof Botha at Microsoft Silicon Valley the evening of February 7. Register for the event now—while you’re still young.

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The speaker list for Mobile Madness 2012 keeps getting better and better. I’m still plugging away at the agenda, but wanted to post a quick update here.

Boston’s premier conference on mobile software and devices, if I do say so myself, takes place the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. The theme for Mobile Madness 2012 (Xconomy’s fourth annual spring mobile event) is “total mobility”—the idea that mobile is finally everywhere in our lives, and is impacting a much wider swath of technologies, businesses, and industries than ever before.

To that end, we are assembling a cast of compelling characters the likes of which I haven’t seen before in one place. Already confirmed are folks like Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Lars Albright, CEO of Session M; Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; and many more.

Here’s a sampling of new speakers we’ve just recruited for the event:

—Tom Burgess, CEO, Linkable Networks. Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL in 2007), will join our distinguished panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” which will discuss our region’s rich history in mobile software and the areas in which local companies can continue to lead the world. The panel also includes the founders and former CEOs of m-Qube (bought by VeriSign), Enpocket (Nokia), and Quattro Wireless (Apple), all recent success stories.

—Ernie Cormier, CEO, Nexage. Cormier previously ran mobile gaming startup Zeemote, and before that was chief commercial officer of Virgin Media. He will bring his deep perspective on advertising platforms to bear on the recent explosion of business opportunities in mobile ads and marketing. Nexage is an up-and-coming company that represents some of Boston’s strengths in this sector.

—Chris Lynch, CEO, Vertica (acquired by HP last year). Lynch will talk about the intersection of mobile software and “big data” analytics—a hot topic as pertains to the business of mobile apps and advertising/marketing platforms. Lynch, a veteran of DEC, ArrowPoint, and Acopia, sees big data as one of the trends that will lead a resurgence in the Boston tech scene—and he’ll tell us how mobile businesses can harness this trend.

—Chuck Kane, Director, One Laptop Per Child Association. Last but certainly not least, Kane (who is OLPC’s former president) will give a special demo of the new OLPC XO-3 tablet computer that made such a big splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this month. Kane says he’ll also show us the XO-1.75 model (also a tablet), which is shipping now.

We’ll have more updates on Mobile Madness 2012, so watch this space. If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate.

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Cloud-based notekeeping service Evernote found its first 20 million users through sheer geek appeal. Hardcore users (full disclosure: that includes me) love the ability to upload Web clips, documents, images, audio files, and other materials to Evernote’s online notebooks, then search and retrieve them at will, from virtually any device. They also like features such as Evernote’s ability to recognize and search the text in photos and scanned documents.

But to grow to its first billion users—and CEO Phil Libin thinks that’s a realistic goal—the company may need to stop thinking about features and start thinking about experiences.

“The mainstream isn’t looking for fantastically powerful solutions. They are looking for real, elegant, magical solutions. And it turns out it’s much harder to build those,” Libin says.

But the Mountain View, CA-based startup has begun to move in a more magical direction. In the last couple of months, the company has rolled out three mobile apps and one Web app that tie into its central notekeeping service but are designed to offer dedicated, simple solutions to common problems, such as remembering the people you meet (Hello), keeping a record of your favorite meals (Food), learning new subjects (Peek), and clearing away distractions for a more streamlined reading experience on the Web (Clearly). And last summer, Evernote hired the Australian creators of a drawing app called Skitch and came out with a free tablet version of the image-annotation tool.

It might seem to outsiders as if Evernote has taken a left turn, forsaking its identity as an online personal archive in order to go after the sexy new thing, i.e., mobile apps. But in fact, it’s all part of a deliberate strategy to “add structure, intelligence, and context” to the information people are already storing in Evernote, Libin says. “If Evernote 1.0 was ‘Whatever you put in you can get out in the same format many years later,’ the next phase is ‘Whatever you get back is better’—it has been illuminated, so to speak.”

Libin says he means that in the medieval sense of an illuminated manuscript, such as a Bible decorated with initials, miniature illustrations, and other marginalia. “We really want your memories to be better—to have additional context and beauty in them,” he says. “One of the first steps is to start creating beautiful experiences for certain types of memories. They all live in the central Evernote location, but there are custom experiences for capturing and recalling particular things, like food, and people, and other stuff in the future.”

How Evernote designs these new custom experiences will be one of the themes of a public Xconomy event in Mountain View, CA, on February 7, where I’ll be interviewing Libin on stage, together with Evernote investors Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital. The evening’s main point will be to dissect the idea of the “100 year company,” that is, Libin’s plan to keep Evernote independent and ensure its long-term survival through serial secondary fundraising rounds. But there’s so much to say about Evernote’s app strategy that this will be a big topic as well. (Register for the event before January 24 to get the saver rate.)

I didn’t want to wait until February 7 to learn more about the app strategy, so I connected with Libin (pictured above right) for a long conversation on Friday. I started off by asking whether Evernote ever expected to have 20 million users—a milestone it announced it had reached shortly after the new year. “Yes, in the sense that when we were raising money, our business plan has us getting to 20 million right about now, so it’s exactly what we told our investors,” Libin answered. “On the other hand, we never actually believed it, so getting there is quite shocking.”

But as mind-blowing as it can be to actually hit one’s business-plan projections, Libin says he keeps reminding himself that there are still 6.98 billion people on the planet who aren’t yet using Evernote. Even if you narrow that down to the people with some access to smartphones and the Internet, “that’s probably 2 billion people right now who are easily within reach, and in 10 years, more like 4 billion,” he says. “So having a couple of billion users is not … Next Page »

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Day in and day out, venture capitalists ask questions of entrepreneurs—some might say grill them. But on February 1, at Xconomy’s New York Venture Emergence forum, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, who’s now CEO of luxury online marketplace 1stdibs and chairman/co-founder of Group Commerce, will help us turn the tables. Rosenblatt will be the moderator of a fireside chat with legendary investors Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Todd Dagres of Boston’s Spark Capital.

Rosenblatt knows both men well. He and Wilson served on the Twitter board together—Rosenblatt is still on it, while Wilson is no longer a director. And Rosenblatt knows Dagres through Spark Capital’s investment in Group Commerce.

He has some great questions ready for the both of them. I spent some time on the phone last week with Rosenblatt—who outlined his plans. I can’t reveal his specific queries, so as not to ruin the surprise for Wilson and Dagres and let them get too prepared. But I can say they will cover the gamut of how to start companies (and who should start them), how to mentor and grow them, the latest trends and their downside, and a lot more. The discussion should be of immense interest to entrepreneurs and hopeful entrepreneurs, not to mention anyone interested in entrepreneurship, investing, and innovation. “I’m an operator, not an investor,” Rosenblatt says. “And the questions will be for the most part from the point of view of companies—not investors, but entrepreneurs…Hopefully, they are questions that will be helpful for you in relating to investors.”

Rosenblatt plans to leave plenty of time for audience questions as well. But just in case you are shy, or he doesn’t get a chance to call on you, feel free to share yours beforehand. Just put them in the comment stream below, or send them to events@xconomy.com. We’ll do our best to make sure they get addressed.

The keynote chat between Rosenblatt, Dagres, and Wilson is just one part of a star-studded afternoon that includes another keynote chat with Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket, and featured talks with the founders and founding investors in Gilt Groupe, bitly, Simulmedia, and more.

We hope to see you there. Get your tickets soon—space is limited for this great event and Early Bird registration ends tomorrow.

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Earlier today I grabbed some time with Gary Little, who’s been a partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures since 1998 and has led the company’s investments in Evernote, the fast-growing Silicon Valley startup that aims to help you “remember everything.” I’ve long been intrigued by CEO Phil Libin’s publicly stated ambition to make Evernote into a company that lasts 100 years or more (“We don’t want to exit, we want to build a permanently great company,” Libin has said). Little, who’s on the startup’s board, agreed to share his own thoughts about that in a live, public chat on Twitter.

Little tossed off some great insights, as well as a few funny lines. For readers who may have missed the live chat, I’ve embedded a curated Storify version below. And for those interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be hosting Little, Libin, and another Evernote investor, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, in person at a February 7 event called “Xconomy Xchange: The 100-Year Company—An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia.” (The event is set for 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Microsoft Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA; to get a ticket at the early-bird rate, register before January 18.)

If you really want to help people store their memories online permanently, you do have to think about how to make sure your company, or at least its computer servers, will be around decades from now. But there’s a problem: venture capital funds, traditionally the only entities willing to invest in risky high-growth businesses at the early stages, generally want to earn their money back on a much shorter time scale—10 years at the most.

Libin’s strategy so far has been to raise multiple rounds of venture funding, each dramatically larger than the one before, and use part of the money to provide liquidity for early shareholders (including employees). That helps to stretch out the time before a company has to think about getting acquired or going public. And in fact, if you think of an IPO or acquisition as just another in a series of liquidity events, it can make a company “independent of exit” altogether, in Little’s words.

But it’s only a plausible strategy, he acknowledged today, if a company can justify much higher valuations in each funding round. Finding investors willing to buy in at those levels takes “either huge growth, or huge cashflow,” he said in the tweetchat. “Growth firms invest in growth. LBO [leveraged buyout] firms invest in cashflow.”

Fortunately, Evernote has been demonstrating such growth. When Morgenthaler first invested, the startup had fewer than 5 million users. When we started planning our February event last year, it had 16 million. Now it has 20 million. Word of mouth has been powering new sign-ups so far, with Japan emerging unexpectedly as Evernote’s hottest market. The main challenge for Evernote right now, Little says, is “continuing to recruit the world’s best people” to keep the growth going.

Here’s the Storify version of the chat. We hope you can join us on February 7 to keep the conversation going.

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If you tune your Twitter client to the hashtag #xcevernote this Friday at 11:00 am Pacific time / 2:00 pm Eastern time, you’ll be able to join me and Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, for a public conversation about what it takes to build startups that will survive and thrive over the long haul.

It’s all part of the run-up to our big February 7 forum, “The 100-Year Company: An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia,” where Little will be onstage with Evernote CEO Phil Libin and Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha for a live interview focusing on Evernote’s audacious goal to stay in business into the 22nd century. (You can register for that event here.)

Most venture-funded companies have trouble looking beyond the next decade, since the perception that is the “exit”—the day when they’ll be acquired or go public—needs to come within the 10-year lifespan of a venture fund. But Libin says he wants Evernote to be around at least as long as the digital memories it’s storing for more than 16 million users, and he envisions using serial fundraising rounds to make sure early investors see some return. That, in theory, will lessen the pressure for an IPO or an acquisition and free Evernote to focus on improving its growing collection of cloud-based memory-keeping tools.

Morgenthaler led a $10 million Series B funding round for Evernote in 2009 and also contributed to a $20 million Series C round in 2010 and an even bigger $50 million round in 2011. On Friday, you’ll have a chance to quiz Little about why Morgenthaler believes in Evernote’s technology—and also find out what he thinks about Libin’s serial fundraising philosophy. As a veteran of Apple, Sun, IBM, and TRW, Little also has more than a bit of experience working for organizations with big visions for the future. So he’ll likely offer perspectives on the tensions between short-term profitability and long-term thinking in technology companies.

So, join us on Twitter this Friday at 11:00 am Pacific. Remember, the hashtag for following the chat is #xcevernote—and we hope to see you again at Microsoft Silicon Valley, which is hosting the February 7 event.

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The challenge of writing a year-end “top stories” post is that a list of headlines is too particular to illustrate what really happened over the last year. Sometimes the outlines of the big trends only become clear when you step back, look at the whole year’s output, and see what groupings naturally emerge.

That’s why I want to start off this list story by looking at five important clusters of technology stories we covered extensively this year. Each cluster includes five or six stories that examined the bigger trend from different angles.

That’s followed on page 2 by a list of the most significant Bay Area life sciences and energy stories of 2011, and then by a rundown of our top 10 traffic-getting stories.

THE BIG STORIES IN TECHNOLOGY

1. The Rise of Smartphones and Tablets

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 1, New Frontiers of Speech Recognition (1/3/11)

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 2: Changing the Equation in Machine Translation (1/5/11)

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 3: Computer Vision Puts a “Bird on Your Shoulder” (1/6/11)

The iPad Finally Has a Worthy Rival: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 (5/13/11)

Dear Apple: Go Big with Siri and Nuance in iOS 5 (6/4/11)

Siri, Apple’s New Old Personal Assistant App, Points Toward A Voice-Activated Future (10/5/11)

2. Apple, iOS, and the Death of Steve Jobs

Here Are Six Features Apple Should Include in the iPad 2 (And They’re Not the Ones You Think) (1/7/11)

With iMovie on the iPad 2, Video Editing Is Fun Again (4/8/11)

Will Apple’s iCloud Finally Kill Off iTunes and End the Scourge of Sync? My Week in Apple Hell (7/8/11)

How Steve Jobs Rewired Our Lives—and Raised Our Expectations (10/6/11)

Saint Steve? Not Exactly. Apple and the Power of the Dark Side (10/7/11)

Steve Jobs’ Dying Realization about Biology and Technology (12/5/11)

3. The IT Transition in Healthcare

Epocrates Preps for IPO—And For Push Into Electronic Medical Records (1/25/11)

HealthTap Seeks to Arm Healthcare Consumers with Better Answers, and Better Questions, Before They Go to the Doctor (4/19/11)

Doximity: A Mobile Facebook for Doctors, but With Real Privacy Protections (6/21/11)

Practice Fusion Bids for Dominance in the Doctor’s Office with a Free, Ad-Supported Electronic Health Record System (11/10/11)

Why Mint.com for Health Is a Terrible Idea, and How Keas Pivoted to the Fun Stuff (11/18/11)

4. The Rise of the Cloud

Okta: Helping Companies Maintain Visibility Despite Cloud Cover (1/27/11)

Engine Yard—The Ruby on Rails Company Salesforce.com Didn’t Buy (1/31/11)

Adam Wiggins on Heroku’s Pivot, Building a “Washing Machine” for Web Developers, and Joining Salesforce.com (5/24/11)

Born from NASA, Nebula Aims to “Disrupt and Democratize” Cloud Computing (8/11/11)

Death of the Salesman? Marketo Is Automating Sales Relationships—And Growing Like Crazy (11/8/11)

5. The Incubator Explosion

White House Startup Investment Coincides with Sweeping Changes for TechStars, Y Combinator, Other Incubators: A Road to Recovery, or Another Bubble? (2/1/11)

Will the Internet Venture Incubator Model Work in Cleantech? Greenstart Is About to Find Out (6/14/11)

There Is an Incubator Bubble—And It Will Pop (8/12/11)

Rock Health, A New Incubator for Healthcare IT Startups, Names Its First Class (6/2/11)

Greenstart Hatches Four Startups, Proving Accelerators Work in the Energy Business (12/9/11)

Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program (12/19/11)

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Some of San Diego’s biggest tech news last week came out of the mHealth Summit near Washington, D.C. But we’ve rounded up all the other tech news too.

—San Diego-based Mingle, an Internet holding company operating Climber.com and several affiliated businesses, said it acquired Sunnyvale, CA-based Affinity Circles to expand its job hunting and recruiting capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed, although VentureWire pegged the deal at about $1 million. Mingle CEO Michael O’Brien told me he plans to hire another 20 to 30 employees in 2012.

—Did you notice anything different about Xconomy last week? Just in time for the holidays, we completed an extreme home-page makeover, the first in a series of changes that are intended to make Xconomy more convenient and usable. We also moved our Xconomy headquarters in Cambridge, MA. We’re interested in your feedback, so please send us a note via editors@xconomy.com. If any of this suggests that Xconomy is growing and extending its reach into the innovation community, we are!

—After launching its ViaSat-1 satellite in October, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) has begun a different sort of countdown. ViaSat said last week that its satellite-based Internet service is expected to begin through Wildblue Communications before December ends. ViaSat-1 is the highest capacity communications satellite ever launched into space, and download speeds for households in Wildblue’s sparsely populated service areas are expected to range from 2 megabits per second to more than 10 megabits per second.

—During the mHealth Summit near Washington D.C. last week, San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, established a $100 million wireless health investment fund, and launched 2net Platform, a platform for distributing data from the potpourri of wireless health sources. As part of its new platform, Qualcomm also introduced the 2net Hub, a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet and serves as a gateway to the technology-agnostic, cloud-based 2net Platform.

—Other news from the mHealth Summit: Aventyn, a private health IT company based in Carlsbad, CA, said it has partnered with Annapolis, MD-based Zephyr Technology in an international, multi-center clinical study testing mobile technologies for remotely monitoring heart failure. Aventyn said the companies are working together to use Zephyr’s heart monitoring technology, which uses an Android smartphone to transmit data, with Aventyn’s remote patient monitoring and chronic disease management system.

—Independa also had news from the 2011 mHealth Summit this week. The San Diego startup unveiled Artemis, a wireless technology platform used to connect to a variety of in-home sensors for the elderly. Independa said the technology is intended to help relatives and caregivers monitor the vital signs of independent seniors, as well as room temperature, smoke, flooding, and other safety factors.

—The San Diego-based Endeka Group, a wireless Internet services provider and managed services operator, said recently it arranged $4.2 million in venture debt financing through the Agility Lease Fund of Prescott, AZ, and Trinity Capital Investment of Los Angeles. The two privately held firms specialize in financing and consulting for the broadband industry. Founded in 2004, Endeka provides wireless broadband services to campuses, military bases, hotels, convention centers, ships, and other locations.

—As part of an industry challenge to reduce the planning and installation costs of solar energy projects, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $700,000 to the San Diego-based California Center for Sustainable Energy. The team will use the funding to develop standardized rules for permitting and interconnection processes to streamline rooftop solar projects, with the idea of fostering the adoption of solar projects throughout Southern California. Considerable barriers remain to scaling up solar, according to Andrew McAllister, director of planning and strategy at the nonprofit center.

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[Update: Noon ET, 12/9/11] We’re less than a week away from Xconomy’s biggest event of the year for the Boston biotech community, “The Genetics Institute Impact.”

This is shaping up to be a truly special reunion for the people who built one of Boston’s pioneering life sciences companies, and who are still making waves in the industry today. [Update] More than 270 people have registered, and we are sold out for the festivities next Wednesday evening, Dec. 14, at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

The agenda will be a little different from some other Xconomy events. We’re going to start off by inviting a handful of Genetics Institute alumni to share a favorite anecdote from their days at GI. These could be tales about ups and downs, thrills, horrors, or just plain funny or embarrassing moments that revealed a lot about what made GI such a great adventure. I don’t know what the speakers plan to say, but I’m sure it will be short and sweet and memorable.

Once those remembrance talks are done, I’ll moderate a 20-minute keynote chat with GI’s longtime CEO Gabe Schmergel and the company’s scientific co-founders—Tom Maniatis and Mark Ptashne.

I’m sure these guys could carry on all night. On yesterday’s prep call, Maniatis and Ptashne started jogging each other’s memory banks, revealing tales about former Harvard University president Derek Bok and legendary former CBS chairman Bill Paley (a GI investor). I could have listened for hours, but the goal is to ask just a few questions, and keep the program brief. That way there will be plenty of time for catching up with old friends.

Besides the talks, we will have a cool memorabilia display to check out thanks to contributions from Dale Blank, Gina Nugent, and others. If you have photos from GI in some kind of electronic format like jpeg or gif, now’s the time to send those my way so I can make this display even better. Just shoot me a note at ltimmerman@xconomy.com. And if you have some favorite music that people at the company used to like to listen to—and it’s on CD, Pandora, or at least something other than vinyl or cassette tapes—let me know. I’m taking suggestions for what ought to be on the GI soundtrack.

Here’s the actual program, which we will print up for those of you there at the event. If you couldn’t tell, I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of fascinating people at this event and learning a bit more about a special time and place in the history of the biotech industry. Those of you who show up early at 4:30 pm can get a jumpstart on networking before the program starts at 5:30 pm. See you there Wednesday evening.

4:30 pm—Registration/networking

5:30 pm—Host welcome, Koch Institute

5:35 pm—Introductions, Xconomy

5:40 pm—Remembrance talks

Adelene Perkins, CEO, Infinity Pharmaceuticals

Tuan Ha-Ngoc, CEO, Aveo Pharmaceuticals

Tony Evnin, partner, Venrock Associates

John Knopf, CEO, Acceleron Pharma

Abbie Celniker, CEO, Eleven Biotherapeutics

Sha Mi, Distinguished Investigator, Biogen Idec

5:55 pm—Keynote chat

Gabe Schmergel, former CEO, Genetics Institute

Mark Ptashne, co-founder, Genetics Institute

Tom Maniatis, co-founder, Genetics Institute

Luke Timmerman, national biotech editor, Xconomy (moderator)

6:15 pm—Networking

7:30 pm—End

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Regular visitors to Xconomy.com may have noticed that we did some redecorating over the weekend. Our new look and feel, courtesy of the crazy talented Rob Hunter of True Italic in New York, is the first in a series of changes we’ll be making over the next few months—all aimed at making it easier and more enjoyable for you to read our stories, learn about our events, and soak up the wisdom of the Xconomists.

I know it’s de rigueur for these sorts of posts to step you through each change we’ve made and the rationale behind it, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about our readers in four and a half years, it’s that you guys are exceptionally savvy consumers of online media. Given that, we’d love to get your reactions to the new design—and your suggestions for the next round of changes—unbiased by our own opinions. (Not that you couldn’t guess that we think it’s awfully purdy.) So please send us any comments or questions at editors@xconomy.com.

We look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, let me give a big thanks to Rob, and to our CTO Emeritus Andrew Koyfman, who as per usual convinced WordPress to do things it really didn’t want to do. And stay tuned, because there’s more to come…

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I’m a power user of Evernote, the Web-based notekeeping service used by more than 16 million people around the world. I’ve got Evernote’s applications and extensions installed on my Mac, my iPhone, my iPad, and my Web browser, and I’ve saved thousands of items in the system, dating back to June 2008 (the wildflower photo below was my very first one). I use Evernote to store everything from news clips to recipes, and from audio memos to tax returns. It’s one of the technologies that allows me to lead a nearly paperless existence.

But for me, Evernote isn’t just a great tool—it’s a great story. I’ve written nearly a dozen Xconomy articles chronicling the growth of the Mountain View, CA-based startup, and in the process I’ve gotten to know its leader Phil Libin as one of the funniest and most insightful CEOs in Silicon Valley CEOs. (We’re glad to count Phil as an Xconomist.)

That’s why I’m excited to announce that Phil himself is joining us for Xconomy San Francisco’s next big live event, coming up February 7. It’s called “The 100-Year Company—An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia,” and it’s the latest in our “Xconomy Xchange” series of on-stage chats with leading entrepreneurs and investors. This is going to be my big chance to grill Phil—as well as two of Evernote’s leading investors, Gary Little of Morgenthaler Ventures and Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital—about all of the big and little decisions that go into building a consumer Internet service that lasts.

We just opened ticket sales for the event, which will take place at Microsoft Silicon Valley in Mountain View. Register now and you can get in at our super saver rate—the price goes up after December 21.

The title of the event is a reference to Libin’s philosophy about building long-term value for customers. If you want to create something of lasting quality, Libin argues, you can’t focus on short-term concerns like who’s going to acquire your company, or when you might go public. You have to think bigger, and think longer. “We don’t want to exit,” Libin has stated. “We want to build a permanently great company. Our goal is for people to still love Evernote a hundred years from now.”

My starting point for the February 7 event will be to take Libin’s statement at face value, and ask what strategies you need to think about if you really want your company to last 100 years—and pay back its investors in a reasonable time along the way.

Libin’s solution to the quandary, which he partially laid out in an interview with me in October, is to rely on multiple rounds of private fundraising. Some of the money you raise in each new round can be used to pay off investors in earlier rounds. Even an IPO, in Libin’s view, shouldn’t be viewed as an exit—it’s “just another in the long string of partial liquidity events where some investors leave and some come in.”

Sounds good, as long as you can keep it rolling. But the partial-liquidity strategy comes with its own questions. In a market rife with secondary trading, employees are going to want to trade in some of their own options, so how do you keep them motivated? And after the eventual IPO, how do you keep thinking about the next century, when so many public-market traders are focused only on the next quarter? Those are just a couple of the questions I’ll be putting to Libin, as well as Little and Botha, who both sit on Evernote’s board. (You don’t raise nearly $100 million from top-line Silicon Valley venture firms like Morgenthaler and Sequoia unless your pitch accords, in some fundamental way, with their investment theses.)

Then there are the technology questions, which, in Evernote’s case, are pretty cosmic. In the near term, the company strives to make it possible for users to capture digital memories on almost any digital device and keeping it all current, which is hard enough. But what happens when it becomes possible to go beyond cloud storage of digital documents, and start capturing real memories? Libin has talked about Evernote using phrases like “external brain” and “memory prosthesis,” and if Evernote or some future version of it is still around a hundred years from now, it will like be much more intimately intertwined with our cognitive functions. Does that mean Evernote will have to start hiring neuroscientists?

We’ll find out from Libin on February 7. And if you sign up, you’ll be able to ask your own questions—audience Q&A and networking are always a big part of Xconomy Xchange events.

As an appetizer, here’s a video of a fascinating talk Libin gave at Stanford on October 12, shortly after the death of Steve Jobs. Picking up on Jobs’ own follow-your-dream message in his now-famous Stanford commencement address, Libin uses the talk to investigate, in a roundabout way, how entrepreneurs can find a “suitably epic” dream.

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A mini-invasion of tech companies hits Boston today. The clock is counting down for 6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas, Xconomy’s forum this afternoon that features one cool tech company from each of the six cities in our network. The legendary computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, kicks things off with the opening keynote.

We have just five tickets left, and if you act before noon, you can avoid the at-the-door premium. The event starts at 1:30 today at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston, right next to South Station, making for an easy commute. So get those last five tickets here.

The great lineup of people and tech companies presenting today includes: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (Detroit); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego); and Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston).

We also have a few bonus features—a special demo from MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard of some of the technology behind Affectiva, her company that enables computers to understand your emotions. Finally, we’ll have a handful of quick presentations from up-and-coming area startups, and a lot of great networking.

So act quickly—and get those tickets. See you soon.

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From innovative games and e-commerce platforms to operating systems and cloud infrastructure—not to mention the networks that keep all that data flowing—innovators in the Pacific Northwest stand at the intersection of nearly every powerful force in mobile computing.

That’s why we’re so excited for our next big Seattle tech event, Mobile Madness Northwest, coming up Tuesday, Dec. 6 at F5 Networks.

Along with our event partners at the Washington Technology Industry Association, we’ve assembled a fantastic crew of entrepreneurs, investors, and executives to discuss the latest developments in this very fast-moving, highly competitive portion of the industry. In fact, we’ve had more requests for speaking slots than we can handle—which bodes pretty well for next year’s edition.

Today, we’re announcing the formal agenda for Mobile Madness Northwest. And it’s the last chance to get the special Saver Rate tickets, which expire after today, so act now and register.

It’s a half-day program with plenty of time for networking, some thoughtful panel discussions and presentations, demos from innovative startups, and drinks and light food.

Our startup presenters will be folks from these five companies—some you may have heard of, some you might not know yet—focusing on an array of markets and technologies: Zaarly, Glympse, Iota, Point Inside, and Beamit Mobile.

Stay tuned for some more news about special giveaways from our sponsors. But for now, check out the program, get your tickets, and we’ll see you there next Tuesday.

Xconomy’s Mobile Madness Northwest
Presented with WTIA 
F5 Networks, Seattle
12/6/11

12:30-1:30 pm
Networking and Registration

1:30-1:40 pm
Welcome and Introductions

1:40-2 pm
Keynote
Tom Alberg, Madrona Venture Group
As a key executive with McCaw Cellular, Tom helped build the Northwest’s leadership in the wireless industry. Now, as managing director at Madrona, he helps find and fund innovative startups all across the technology field. Tom will discuss the region’s position in the current landscape, and look ahead to how innovators can stand apart.

2-2:30 pm
Mobile DNA Takes Over
Our panelists look at the convergence of the Web and mobile computing—why Web-based applications will save mobile from fragmentation, how the ideas developed for mobile-phone software will connect everything around us, and how innovators with strong mobile roots can capitalize.
Tom Huseby, Voyager Capital
Chris DeVore, Founders’ Co-op
Brian Fling, Pinch/Zoom

2:30-3 pm
Never Stop Playing: The Transformation of Gaming
With the surge in powerful devices, the gaming industry is quickly moving from a fixed production model into a service-delivery business, where users can be engaged on several platforms throughout their day. Our panel discusses how this shift is changing the required skills, the business models, and the entire means of production for game companies.
Bernie Yee, Bungie Aerospace
Giordano Contestabile, PopCap Games
David Bluhm, Z2Live
Cameron Myhrvold, Ignition Partners (moderator)

3:00-3:30 pm
Networking Break

3:30-3:45 pm
Demos from three of our startup presenters

3:45-4:15 pm
BigCo to Startup: The Future of Platforms and Services
Our panelists have deep experience developing products for some of the biggest tech companies in the world. They’re also investors and entrepreneurs who now work with emerging startups trying to disrupt entrenched players. We’ll ask this pair how big Northwest companies like Microsoft and Amazon might challenge Apple and Google in the mobile space, and what role small companies and entrepreneurs can play as those big powers battle it out.
Charlie Kindel, entrepreneur and angel investor, former GM of Windows Phone.
Wesley Chan, partner, Google Ventures, former product lead for Google Analytics and Google Voice.
Chetan Sharma, Chetan Sharma Consulting (moderator)

4:15-4:30
Founder’s Story
Ted Morgan, Skyhook
Ted Morgan’s company, a pioneer in location-based data for smartphones, has partnered with and fought against the biggest players in mobile operating systems and lived to tell the tale. In the spirit of connecting innovation communities, we present this founder’s story from a Boston-based entrepreneur.

4:30-4:40
Demos from two more of our startup presenters

4:40-5:20
Northwest Innovators on What’s Hot, What’s Ahead
Presented by our event partners at the WTIA, this panel of industry leaders will talk about the year gone by and the months ahead for innovators in the Northwest and beyond, from big successes to bigger question marks facing local companies.
T.A. McCann, Gist (RIM)
Geoff Entress, Voyager Capital
Bill Bryant, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Mike McSherry, Swype (Nuance)
Todd Bishop, GeekWire (moderator)

5:20-6:30
Networking Reception

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In a segment featured Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour, correspondent Hari Sreenivasan brings an outsider’s curiosity to the strange, wonderful world of startup accelerators. The eight-minute report features Sreenivasan’s interviews with entrepreneurs and mentors at TechStars, AngelPad, and Y Combinator—archetypes of the venture incubator wave (or is it a bubble?) that we’ve been chronicling here at Xconomy for the last four and a half years.

This is a must-watch piece, for at least four reasons:

1) It’s the best short summary of the startup accelerator concept you’re likely to find—and a great example of mainstream media interest in what’s long been a fringe phenomenon, unknown to middle America.

2) Sreenivasan talked with celebrities of the startup world like AngelPad’s Thomas Korte, TechStars’ David Cohen, Blackbox Ventures’ Max Marmer, and Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa. It’s fun to see them all on camera.

3) The piece featured a bunch of cool startups that you may not have heard of yet but probably will, including Order.In, LendFriend, and Tapviva.

4) There’s a one-minute segment featuring me. It starts at 4:45 mark in the video; in the clip Sreenivisan used, I’m talking about the technological changes that have made it so much cheaper for mobile and Internet startups to get off the ground, and the bubbly conditions this change seems to be fostering in the Silicon Valley startup scene.

PBS NewsHour Shoot at Xconomy San Francisco

Sreenivasan does a thorough job of explaining why startup accelerators exist and how they work, and he conveys authentic flavor by talking to real entrepreneurs. It’s all framed in a way that will make the accelerator phenomenon clear to TV audiences in Idaho or Vermont who’ve never heard of Y Combinator. But there’s also a savvy to the reporting that’s a clear legacy of Sreenivasan’s days as an anchor and correspondent for CNET during the first Internet boom, from 1996 to 2002.

My only role in the NewsHour report was to spend an hour talking on tape with Sreenivasan, here at Xconomy San Francisco back in early October (the photo above shows the KQED crew setting up for the shoot). Another couple of minutes from our conversation made it into a supplement to the broadcast report, published on the PBS NewsHour website under the title “What is a Startup Accelerator?” Both the main report and the supplemental clip are embedded below.

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This is life’s big question: what should you spend your time on?

If you’re starting a company, you probably want to do something fun that lets you be your own boss and maybe, just maybe, gives you a good shot to strike it rich. If you’re an investor, you want to make money and be part of something that could be really big. But what about building something that will change the world? How do you decide what the right idea is—and then how do you make it work as a business?

Here at Xconomy we’re gearing up for a special forum in Boston on Thursday, Dec. 1, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.” This is a chance to interact with some of the most sensational and ambitious tech companies in our national network—and to see how they are trying to change the world. We’ve just posted the agenda for the day here, and you can check out the registration details here.

Stephen Wolfram, the software entrepreneur and big-science mind-bender, will set the table with a keynote on what constitutes a breakthrough idea, and how to execute on the business side of things. Wolfram has plenty of world-changing experience as the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. And if he shares with us the few lines of code that underlie the workings of the known universe, I will consider that a bonus.

Then we’ll have featured presentations on specific ideas, businesses, and challenges from six companies across our network: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (representing New York); Nathaniel Borenstein from Mimecast (Detroit); Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston); Adam Goldstein of Hipmunk (San Francisco); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); and Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego).

In between these talks, and a networking break, we’ll have three-minute “burst” presentations from some of the most exciting startups in the Boston area: Nathan Eagle of Jana, Gina Ashe from Krush, Jeff Seibert from Crashlytics, and Karl Wirth from Apptegic.

We’ll also have a special demo from Rosalind Picard of the MIT Media Lab, who will show you technology from her startup, Affectiva, that will be sure to get your attention. The big vision for Affectiva, and Professor Picard’s research, is to develop computers that can recognize and interpret human emotions from cues like facial expressions, blood flow, and other biometrics.

We’re looking forward to an amazing afternoon of big ideas, companies, and personalities. There are still a few tickets left, but they won’t last for long. Hope to see you at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology on Dec. 1.

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