Alexis C. Madrigal

The grand old magazines of the world have had a hell of a time getting their content into digital form. While I think a business case can be made for building out an archive, creating the focus and finding the money to do so has been tough. Many of the magazines with long, glorious histories (our own included) have not built proper homes for their content from 1961, let alone 1861.

Check out the new Scientific American archive on Nature.com. It's glorious. Not only has every article been scanned from 1845 to present, BUT -- and this is important -- each one is fully searchable and linked with the traditional table of contents. Each article is available in its original format, too, which makes for fun serendipitous encounters with weird stuff. They've also made it easy to link to any individual article. Take the March 23, 1909 issue. I can see at a glance that all of these awesome articles are contained within:

• Burchell's Zebra
• An Alcohol-Acetylene Mixture for Internal-Combustion Engines
• Latest Designs of the Motor in Warfare
• How Compressed Air Raised a Sunken Ship. The Remarkable Salving of the Steamship " Bavarian"
• Controlling Torpedoes by Wireless Telegraphy
• An Interesting German Flying Machine
• The Story of a Silk Hat

Not on the slate of stories is a short item on a "dry shampoo," which sounds intriguing, indeed.

Watching tens of thousand Bay Area residents take to the streets yesterday, including thousands from the University of California, Berkeley, it's impossible not to hear the echoes of the 60s and 70s protest movements centered in the region. It was not surprising to see many #occupyoakland supporters tweeting, "We're making history today" because the East Bay has so much existing protest history. There's a tradition into which people can connect their current struggles.

That said, this protest is at least trying to break free from the warmed-over Dylanness of many marches. That got me thinking about other attempts at outsider protests and a strange piece of fiction by solar pioneer Steve Baer called, "The Sun Riots." Baer, who has run a successful solar company for decades, imagined a protest in a dystopian future that used the sun as its weapon against authority. I'm not endorsing the violence, but I think everything from the tone to the metaphorical message bears inspection.

The lower floor offices of city hall and the police department have been gutted by fire. Black streaks surround the windows which are now shiny with aluminum foil. The police are still unable to confiscate mirrors; the matter is in the courts.

A week earlier at a demonstration a large van was driven next to the crowd. The driver, a swarthy man of about 40, opened the back doors and began passing out one foot square mirrors. "Give 'em some sunshine."

A few dozen mirrors began playing beams of sunlight on a police car that had been dogging the rear end of the demonstration. The officers were caught by surprise. The driver managed to back the car down the street, but not before his partner, panicked by the glare and the rapidly rising temperature, had jumped out and run. More and more mirrors were out in the crowd now. The crowd glinted like a bank of crystals.

The mirrors couldn't reach the police car, which had found protection behind a drive-up liquor store. The man with the van now stood on top of the store. "Let's burn it up, yeh -- this!"

His voice is hoarse and breaking. A few mirrors flit across the van and the man on top. More focus on the tin side. The man climbs off. People are pulling the last mirrors from inside the van as the others begin to focus on it. There are 800 mirrors out in the street.

The crowd is silent. The blob of brilliant light on the side of the truck is fringed with trembling squares of light flitting in and out of target. You can hardly hear a noise. Then the sheet metal side of the van "oil cans" as the van swells. A few more moments and smoke appears. The crowd has results. That was at 11:0am -- by dark there have been 100 fires.

The police appear with arc welders' masks. They fire on the protesters. The demonstrators disperse, but the light keeps coming. More mirrors appear on the street. Funny shaped mirrors -- mirrors with ornamental frames, tiny pocket mirrors in the hands of children.

Smoke is seen from another part of town. Television crews arrive. The footage in the evening news across the nation is over-exposed -- an occasional clear image and then the picture goes white and overexposed.

The mirror crowds are completely silent. They move everywhere on foot. A secretary at City Hall says, "They just looked so funny -- a whole crowd of them standing just as still as could be holding onto those mirrors and then pretty soon the store across the street was burning."

"Get those damned kids with mirrors off the street."
"But officers, I'm just usin' this mirror 'cause I'm comin' my hair -- no law against combin' your hair, is there?"

Dozens of youths in the street combing their hair peering into gigantic foot square mirrors.

And that's it. Just that snippet. What a strange mix of metaphorical energy policy statement and protest fiction.

When Amazon announced the Kindle Fire at the low, low price point of $199, tech commentators (myself included) were impressed. For a couple hundred bucks, you'd get a (presumably) good e-reader with the web browsing capabilities of the iPad shrunk into a small 7" form factor. Amid the excitement, most people forgot all about the Barnes & Noble Nook color, which has always been an interesting proposition at only $250.

Today, B&N touched off speculation they could be planning a price cut to their Nook when they sent out invites to an event on Monday. If the Nook does end up retailing for $199, consumers will have two very legitimate options for a sub-$200 tablet. In one corner, the battle-tested Nook. In the other, the unproven but very promising Kindle Fire. We'll be looking at both for upcoming holiday gift guide. What are you thinking, though? Do you even have the Kindle Fire and Nook in the same mental bucket?

Google finally (finally!) released a native iOS app for Gmail today. Now, millions of iPhone users are debating whether to switch from however they were checking their mail to the new app. Let's review the options.

• Many people simply ran Gmail into Apple's email client. This works well enough, but you lose some of Gmail's special features. For example, the handling of Gmail's "Important" messages leaves a lot to be desired. And, of course, Apple's native app still doesn't let you attach images from within the email writing pane.
  
• Others used the Gmail web client, which retained many of the desktop web's features, but somehow never felt polished. The lack of true offline compatibility is also annoying to anyone who takes the subway.
• There are some third-party apps, but none seems to have conquered the market. 
• Now, the new official Gmail app.

I see the new Gmail app as a mild improvement over both the native Apple client and the Gmail web app. It's not going to blow your mind, but the switching costs are pretty low, too. You can use it for a while and then switch back if you find tics that annoy you. For me, the ability to attach images to in-progress emails combined with the passable UI mean that it'll probably become my default, even given all its flaws.

WASHINGTON -- After seven days and a couple thousand miles, your Start-up South adventurers, Sarah Rich and I, are back in the District of Columbia. From Richmond to New Orleans, we found dozens of entrepreneurs who form an astonishingly vital start-up scene in the southeast.

Here's a big takeaway from all that driving and fried food: the mid-size southern city has some advantages over the big four cities (NYC, LA, DC, SF). For one, many of these communities offer substantial support in the form of tax credits, office space, incubators, and other more informal help. Second, everything is cheaper, especially real estate. Third, to build a company in one of these places is to become a part of it. While founders come and go among the masses of Silicon Valley startups, each of these companies means something to Chattanooga or Shreveport or Durham. The mayor, whoever he or she is, knows them. Last and most squishy, a sense of place can be a competitive advantage. Whether it's Moonbot Studios immersion in Louisiana storytelling culture, Atlanta's We&Co creation of a gratitude app, or Rebirth Capital bringing peer-to-peer lending to a resurgent New Orleans, the way a place imagines itself can get into the blood of a company, giving them fresh eyes to see new business opportunities.

There were all kinds of predictions about the end of geography stemming from the rise of the Internet. As our own Richard Florida and others have shown, place, per se, didn't stop mattering in the Internet age. But the number of places that can matter has increased. Given the right combination of art, culture, and capital, a startup can draw customers from anywhere (everywhere!) and create a thriving business in any city.

Along our trip, we took portraits of the people who were starting companies and driving the creative economy. Take a look. These are some of the faces of southern innovation.

ATLANTA -- Event planning is one of those businesses that has resisted the pull of technology. Even browsing rentable locations is really difficult, as any newly engaged couple finds out. That's surprising to me, given the path that travel planning has taken.

But now, a host of companies are trying to bring some innovation to the space. One of those companies is LeadingSpaces, which is launching in New York, but is based in Atlanta. The site is simple: it's a matchmaker for venues and people looking for venues. It's a little bit like AirBnB for event spaces.

LeadingSpaces has some serious competition though in two sites with silly names: Venuetastic and Eventective. Keep your eye on all three. Someone has got to succeed in this space.

ATLANTA -- Let me make a gross (though flattering) overgeneralization about the South: people here are gracious. Everyone says their thank yous. So, it was with considerable delight that I met the makers of We&Co, an app for people to thank service people at restaurants and beyond. Could this app have been built outside the South? Of course. But would anyone have thought to do it? I don't know.

I really like this idea for a bunch of reasons. First, like the much-ballyhooed Oink, it gets past just rating buildings and more towards rating the actual experience of a place. Second, because servicepeople claim themselves through the app, it allows a great serviceperson who works for a faceless company to capture a little bit of the extra value they create for themselves. This is precisely how things should work. Third, the data they're generating is immensely valuable and almost impossible to discover other than through word of mouth. How awesome would it be to find a place to grab a great drink by looking at the area's bartenders rather than the area's bars? Fourth, there are a lot of companies trying to offer rewards for customers now. But they generally feel very corporate. We&Co would allow individual service people to provide rewards for their customers in a way that might feel nice and personal, rather than institutional and as forced as 'flair' at a fern bar. Fifth, the app's design is slick.

That's Jared Malan, one of the company's co-founders, and TJ Muehleman, the CTO, at the top of this post.

ATLANTA -- There is a very definite center to the Atlanta startup scene: it's the Starbucks located at 5th and Spring, just across I-85 from Georgia Tech's main campus.

"Most of the cool startup stuff is happening within half a mile of here," Stephen Fleming, a long-time venture capitalist and technologist who runs GT's Enterprise Innovation Institute, told me.

We met at an event organized by a constellation of Atlanta startup community groups -- Startup Chicks, Atlanta Startup Drinks, Startup Riot, the Advanced Technology Development Center --  and sponsored by MailChimp, an email marketing startup that I've actually used myself.

The city's entrepreneurs made an impressive show of force. Dozens of them came out to talk about their ventures with us -- and with each other. We were blown away by the number and variety of startups, particularly in a town where there are just a handful of venture capital firms. We'll have individual profiles of several companies going up in the next day.

I was also impressed by the number of groups here providing support for startups. The array seemed dizzying, so this morning, I asked Fleming, is always triple-booked, if he's not quadruple-booked, to draw me a quick map of Atlanta's startup ecosystem. Let me walk you through it.

At the center sits Georgia Tech, which should surprise no one. The students and faculty are technologists and they have a lot of ideas for products and companies. The university has built some structures around that including the Advanced Technology Development Center, run by Nina Sawczuk, and VentureLab, directed by Keith McGreggor. VentureLab works directly with professors to spin companies out of their research. ATDC is a little different. It's the longest-lived startup accelerator in the country. While they are open to working with all of Atlanta's approximately 500 startups, they provide office space and more intensive services to a smaller group of companies. (The main offices are about 100 feet from that Starbucks.)



Most recently, Georgia Tech created Flashpoint, which as an attempt to run a YCombinator like incubator on a college campus. They have a beautiful space that is across the street from the Starbucks. We met a very promising entrepreneur in their inaugural class, James Harris, who has just created N4MD ("Informed") to enable curators to create social magazines. The service allows anyone to automatically create a good-looking magazine from curated content, and Harris wants his product to be the platform that monetizes that curation.

"We think the curator nation is going to develop and someone is going to have to help them make some money," Harris said.

It's fascinating, too, that as magazines struggle for coherence online, curators are taking the individual stories publications produce and turning them into focused, niche products. Harris said that a Google executive, for example, wants a publication about yarn bombing, where knitters go out and knit around real-world objects in the middle of the night. No one could ever devote a publication to such a niche phenomenon, but there is someone out there who could curate one.

Media is a hot topic for other Georgia startups. This is, after all, home to Turner Broadcasting. We particularly liked the Savannah-based startup rappidapp, which takes the coding out of developing simple mobile apps. We actually wish we'd known about them before the trip because we could have created an app that would have let you track the entire Startup South odyssey.

The demo we saw was actually an app they built in a single night for the VentureAtlanta conference, which is going on this week. That conference provided a much-needed opportunity for local companies to get in front of investors.

This post was written within 100 feet of the Starbucks at 5th and Spring.

SAVANNAH -- "I didn't want to make a better backpack, I wanted to change the way people carry stuff," Jamie Bowerman, a Savannah College of Art and Design master's student tells me. He's a long-time tinkerer whose invented all kinds of crazy things, all of which failed, he said. When I asked him what his "awesomest failure" was, he didn't miss a beat. In glorious detail, he described a game system he designed for swimming pools.

The backpack you see above, though, is not a failure. It is the result of a successful Kickstarter fundraising drive, and Bowerman promises it will be the "world's greatest backpack." It converts from backpack to messenger bag to bike saddle bag -- and it's being built with a modular design that lets you customize its pockets and look.

SAVANNAH -- When you're used to big-city connectivity, the spottiness of road bandwidth can drive a reporter nuts. There you are, barreling along on I-85, trying to upload some audio, and you realize you don't have access to a cellular data network. Or you do, then you don't, then you do, then you don't.

So, fresh off the often-rural drive through South Carolina from Durham to Savannah, I was open to Murel Sharpe's pitch for her company Evoca. The service sends any voice recording to the cloud. You dial a number, record your message, and Evoca stores an MP3 of the audio on the Internet. Evoca has lots of competitors (including two I've used, Audioboo and Soundcloud), but I really like the way they tie the all-over cellular voice networks into the Internet. They put the bandwidth burden on themselves, which is mighty useful when the pipe you've got is small.

While most of the entrepreneurs launching companies at Durham's Startup Stampede offices are building software, Rob Cotter wants to change the way transportation is done. He's working on a series of solar electric tricycles that, in his words, "fill the space between a bike and a car." Organic Transit's products are street legal and get the equivalent of 1800 miles per gallon. The base price of one of the vehicles is $3,400.

The vehicles aren't in production yet, but Cotter said that a lot of early interest has come from businesses that want to use the trikes as delivery vehicles. He's ready to go as soon as the right investment partner turns up.

Cotter has been at alternative vehicles for a long time. 25 years ago, Cotter built a human-powered vehicle that was clocked at 62 miles per hour. (He even became vice president of the Human Powered Vehicles Association.) Now he thinks the time is finally right for his ideas to go mainstream.

DURHAM -- In the basement of the American Tobacco campus, you'll find Joystick Labs, a videogame-startup accelerator. There is a big difference between what Joystick does, and what other similar organizations do, John Austin, the outfit's managing director explains.

"The difference between an accelerator like Joystick Labs and accelerators like YCombinator and TechStars is that those places are trying to get things started. Because we're funding mostly mobile games for iOS that only take months to develop, we can actually help people get things finished."

Austin is like the greatest Little League coach you ever had -- and he does, in fact, coach baseball in his spare time. He worked in games for decades before deciding to head up the accelerator.

We met two of his teams in the offices at American Tobacco. The first team, Lab Rats Studio, was composed of local guys working on a 3rd-person shooter. The levels we saw played smoothly and featured graphics that looked to be on-par with early PS2 games. They'd done an excellent job and hoped that the release of their game in the next few months would allow them to make game development their full time jobs.

But I have to confess that we really fell for the second team. wefiends was founded by Nick and Kevin Barrios, along with their friend, Samantha Fung, who creates original music. The team, shy and self-effacing, recently moved from Los Angeles to Durham because of Joystick Lab's support. Their game looked wonderful. It was a time-management game in the style of the Sims or Diner Dash that puts you in control of "making a movie." The graphics are slick and the demo of the gameplay had that out-of-control feedback loop quality that seems to make those kinds of games impossibly addictive. We particularly liked Fung's music, which will play after you complete a movie in the game, and changes based on the kind of movie you were nominally making. In the embedded video, we hear the epic and western tracks.

Wefiends proves a greater point for Joystick, too. If you build a program that supports startups, they will come. Even from Los Angeles. Wefiends:

Lab Rats:

The research triangle down here in North Carolina is a well-known hub of innovation. With vertices in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, the area is packed with world-class universities and the kinds of minds those places attract. It's even got one of those acronymic institutes that seem to do prodigious amounts of research, RTI International. The region has been particularly strong in biotechnology spun out of Duke, the University of North Carolina, and Wake Forest.

We came down in search of a different kind of story, though. We heard that there was a nascent startup scene that had taken hold in downtown Durham, formerly one of the most crime-ridden areas in all of North Carolina*. The community and business leaders of the city have put huge resources into revitalizing downtown, particularly around the 1-million square foot complex at the American Tobacco Historic District. Dozens of companies have taken up residence there, including HTC's American R&D unit and scores of small companies in the basement of one of the buildings. The American Underground, as its known, is home to Joystick Labs, a videogame startup incubator, and a half-dozen other companies. The region's angel investors are known to prowl the starkly lit hallway peering through the glass windows.

Durham is a fascinating example of what happens when a community bands together to try to attract entrepreneurs. They've set up all the mechanisms and institutions to foster innovation and now they're waiting to see if startup culture can take root. The city itself has "great bones," as they say, with a dense downtown core filled with beautiful old-timey architecture. They even have some inspiring local business history to draw on. Durham was once known as "The Black Wall Street" because of the preponderance of successful African American-owned businesses on Parrish Street.

The biggest problem entrepreneurs here have is finding money. Very little of the nation's venture money is sloshing around the area, particularly for standard technology, and some firms feel more comfortable having their portfolio companies a little closer to Sand Hill Road.

Judd Bowman is one of the area's big success stories. In 1999, he co-founded a ringtone platform, Motricity, instead of going to Stanford. That company eventually went public. When Bowman was starting up his next venture, Appia, he got early funding from North Carolina backers, but for bigger rounds, he had to reach out to other investors, mostly the big guys in California. One offer his company got stuck a clause into his term sheet that Bowman would have to move to Silicon Valley. He didn't want to move, though, so he turned them down and went with another group of investors including Google's Eric Schmidt. Appia is now the sixth-largest app store out there, with the majority of his business coming from places like India, Mexico, and South Africa.

We met 10 other local entrepreneurs trying to follow in Bowman's footsteps at the shared home of the Durham Stampede, a city program that provides free office space for fledgling companies to get off the ground. As we walked around the room, I was struck by how similar these entrepreneurs were to others I'd met in California and New York.

It occurred to me that there is now a national startup culture that you can tap into, following the latest industry gossip on Techcrunch, soaking in Paul Graham's wisdom, and finding funds on Kickstarter. Entrepreneurs now share a common language and value-system inherited from Silicon Valley, no matter where they're located.

When you talk to them, it's shocking how often the quality of the non-technology scene in the Research Triangle comes up, specifically the food. Bowman summed it up like this. "You've got good music, good restaurants, good bars, top-tier universities," he said. "Those are the ingredients you need to mix together to have the right people in an area to make it work."

I think Durham is one big, Groupon-like success story away from a wave of coverage about how good the area is for tech companies. I'm not sure that we met that company's founder today, but you never know.

* We heard this particular piece of local lore several times, but after receiving an email from a reader, we looked deeper and the lore doesn't hold up to statistical scrutiny. Durham and Raleigh both have higher than average crime rates for North Carolina, but downtown Durham specifically does not have a remarkable statistical profile.

Images: American Underground in Durham. Top: the hallway of startups. Bottom: Jeremy Ellison (left) and Matthew Raimundo of Two Toasters, a mobile software services firm.

The trip from Washington DC to Richmond is too easy. Barreling down the highway with no pit stops, it took little more than an hour and a half. We hit the main cobblestone strip on Cary Street a bit before noon, so we had some time to kill. We checked in on the Farmhouse Cafe and puttered around The Martin Agency admiring its bigness for a few minutes, then headed down to see the lofts that line the James River. We heard tell that a beautiful two-bedroom apartment in the old Lucky Strike building there goes for a mere $1,500 a month. If you live in San Francisco, New York, or Washington, that probably makes you want to cry. Right across the street, there is a beautiful running path underneath an old elevated train track along the water. Woodlands lie behind the metal trusses and the sky reaches up and out. Richmond is gorgeous and its setting fortuitous. The beach is an hour away, as are the mountains. It's a bit like a lot of places in California, but it doesn't feel anything like California. It's old, historically enriched.

I say enriched because it's not as if history is easy around here. Every time the past comes up, I wonder if everyone is thinking about slavery and how this was the capitol of the Confederacy, and how this is not *only* the former seat of the Confederacy. Most of the time I am thinking about slavery, how it shaped the cities socially and how those values got imprinted into the very streets themselves.

This is the case, even though a lot of the people we meet aren't from Richmond. They've inherited the legacy of the town and now have to decide what to transmit down the line, even in the context of quick interviews about their startups. A white guy from Denver living in Richmond has to answer for the actions of white Virginians in 1863, whether he likes it or not. To say that the earliest slave auctions in Richmond occurred in Old Manchester is to make a statement about who you are. And to not say something about the slave auctions is to make a statement about who you are, too. I'm not saying that one is always better than the other; it doesn't feel like a one-size-fits-all type decision.

Either way, you can't ignore the past the way you can in some other parts of the country. This forced consideration of the actions of those who came before you has got to be a good thing. It must be a throat-constricting reminder that you are a creature of your own time -- and as many earlier ones as anyone remembers.

We turn around and drive back past the lofts and turn left at 14th, heading over the river to a formerly independent town called Old Manchester. We cross a small bridge over the James, pass one of those glorious old grain piers, and a ratty building that proclaims, "WE BUY CANS." The three-minute voyage feels like the transition one makes crossing under the Gowanus Expressway on the way from Carroll Gardens to Red Hook. There are fewer pedestrians and fewer trees, and there is less charm. The sun reflects off of everything, even on an early afternoon in autumn. Also, there are artists and lofts lurking. We are told that all of the Reynolds Wrap in the world used to be produced in this part of town.

Our destination was the Corrugated Box Building, a huge, open space redesigned by the Richmond architects, 3 North. You can read about the people we interviewed here. Suffice to say that we were as impressed by the building as by the companies. The only bad thing that happened was that we had to leave because we'd budgeted a depressingly short stay in town. For example, we didn't even get to try the Vietnamese place run by a Belgian beer-obsessed proprietor, Mekong.

The drive from Richmond to Durham passed quickly. I'm not going to say that stretch of I-85 wasn't beautiful. At times it was. The road headed towards the horizon, the trees closing in on our future to form a V with us at the wide end of possibility. The sun kept getting caught behind the few tufts of clouds, rays spilling around the edges, almost as if they were annoyed that such a small clump of moisture could thwart them. The leaves, too, were nice. Three hours is not a long time when you're in road trip blogging mode.

Durham was an interesting town to pull into. We came upon what looked like a charming old southern town, entered a ratty liquor store area of town, then hit the downtown seemingly out of nowhere. We headed for the American Tobacco Historic District, which has become a major hub of technology innovation in this area. We typed up our Richmond adventures, then had a terrific dinner with some local entrepreneurs at Dos Perros in downtown and headed to Whiskey, a dark, swanky bar that was half Tom Waits and half Frank Sinatra.

Throughout the night, I batted around a thesis. I wondered if the minimum viable innovation ecosystem has shrunk in the past five to ten years. Now, the network you can draw on to make a company work includes your entire digital network, not just the people you can go have coffee with. That new cyborg reality could help mid-sized cities like Richmond and Durham compete with the supersized innovation clusters. Because if you can start a tech company in a beautiful, affordable, educated town instead of scraping by in Menlo Park, why wouldn't you? Right now, it seems like startups in these cities spring from locals who don't want to leave, but I wonder if outsiders will figure out that these southern cities will welcome them with open arms. When you start hearing about kids moving to Durham to start a new company, then we'll know the town's truly arrived. I wouldn't be surprised if that day's not too far in the future.

More tomorrow from Durham, before we head off to Savannah.

RICHMOND -- Marc LaFountain may be the luckiest man in Virginia. After he got hooked on Tumblr early (he was one of the first 18,000 users), he cold-emailed the tiny team running the site and offered his services doing technical support for the site's bloggers. At the time, Tumblr founder David Karp and developer Marco Arment were running the site as an offshoot from their web design consultancy. They didn't have time to help out the blog platform's mushrooming user base. "I just wrote them and said, hey, I'm one of your earlier and most passionate users and I would really love it if you would give me the opportunity to do tech support for Tumblr. I had a bit of an IT and support background," LaFountain told us. "Tumblr can be such a weirdly informal company in so many ways. David and I traded two emails and we had one phone call -- and I bet the phone call didn't even last ten minutes -- and we decided that OK, I'd work for Tumblr part-time doing support even though we'd never met or even videoconferenced."

LaFountain kept his day job doing PR for a state agency and worked for Tumblr on nights and weekends. In April of 2008, with Tumblr growth skyrocketing, LaFountain traded some more emails with David Karp, and by the end of the exchange, he'd become their "one-man tech support shop." He'd just become the third employee of one of the hottest startups in the country without ever having met anyone from Tumblr face-to-face.

Fast forward a few years and now 18 people (11 full-timers 7 consultants) work with LaFountain out of the Richmond Tumblr office supporting people in more than half a dozen languages. LaFountain said that Richmond's a great place for finding support talent. The Fortune 500 companies that are or have been located in the area mean that there are a wide variety of people with some IT and tech support experience from whom he can draw.

While it's accidental that Tumblr has a large presence in Richmond, there's nothing about the firm's offices there that seems thrown together. Located at the Corrugated Box Building, an old factory that used to make cardboard boxes that was beautifully renovated by Richmond's 3 North Architects, the office plan is open and fun. A dartboard is encased in a special Tumblr box, and a mannequin named Russell sits off to one side (naturally, he has a Tumblr, too). Beautiful skylights pour sunshine down onto a big table and a bunch of desks loaded with Macs.

RICHMOND - When we arrive to meet Suzanne Davenport, she confides in us that she hasn't told many people about her stealth startup. She's afraid someone will steal her idea because she's sure that there's a market for her idea. Davenport wants to revolutionize project management, tossing away software made for linear industrial production and replacing it with a simple online service that's tailored to the needs of today's service businesses.

Davenport does not have the demographic profile of your typical tech entrepreneur. Born and raised in Richmond, she's a mother of five who spent decades banking, parenting, and project managing. In that last career, she struggled with the tools available for project management. They were either based on old-school Gantt charts like Microsoft Project or too much about building a team like Scrum. So after her stint at Virginia Commonwealth University's executive MBA program, she decided to create her own tool. She found a developer, Josh Golub, who just so happens to be her hairdresser's husband, and has spent the last year working on her web application.

If she's atypical in some ways, Davenport is a model startup founder in others. "After I got my MBA, people asked me, 'Why do you do this? Why don't you get a real job?" she told us. "My answer is that I can't not do this. I'm just driven to make this work."

Davenport's background also gives her an advantage that she shares with many good entrepreneurs: she is her own target customer.  After years of doing project management, Davenport is developing the "system that I wanted to have for myself."

In a few months, her new site will launch at smartprojex.com. Until then, she'll keep honing the product and preparing the business plan from her home near VCU.

Image: Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic.

Richmond is blossoming into a tech hub thanks to a great research university, a big creative agency, and cheap, beautiful real estate.

Richmond used to be a powerful node in the global cigarette trade. Huge brick buildings down by the James River were the center of American tobacco manufacturing for decades. By 1916, a quarter of the cigarettes produced in the country were made right in Richmond. As a southern factory town, the city's long had some innovators. Richmond claims to be where the cigarette-rolling machine was invented and it was certainly home to America's first electric trolley line, courtesy of one pioneering electrician, Frank Sprague.

In the 1980s, the tobacco companies abandoned Tobacco Row. They have morphed into the kind of industrial loft spaces that yuppies love (and others love to hate). In the area near Shockoe Valley and the Row itself, the cobblestone streets and farmer's markets would warm any hardened San Franciscan's heart. This place has charm.

In hearing from dozens of Richmond startups, two institutions stick out as important nodes in the local innovation system. The first is Virginia Commonwealth University. As Richard Florida pointed out, a good university is monumentally important for pumping out skilled people whom startups can hire. In Richmond, VCU is that talent factory.

The second big success factor for RVA (as the locals call it) is The Martin Agency, an award-winning advertising firm that's drawn hundreds and hundreds of creatives to the town. Many of them stay with the company, but other wants new challenges or a different kind of life. Some choose to stick around and build new businesses with the locals.

One can see why. Richmond's quality of life is high. The weather is warm. Housing prices, relative to SF or NY, are low, and the stock of homes is beautiful. The median price of a home is a bit over $150,000; compare that to San Francisco, where an average house will set you back more than $670,00. Locally, there is easy access to the wilds of Virginia. And if you get bored, the Washington-Boston corridor is almost too close.

When The Martin Agency came to town in the 1960s, Richmond was considered a backwater in the advertising world. "People do not come to Richmond, VA for the restaurants," the agency's president Mike Hughes likes to say. It's his reminder for employees that they need to give clients extraspecial service if TMA was going to compete with the big boys on Madison Avenue. Even five years ago, when the advertising site I Have An Idea visited the agency, it called them "the great agency in the middle of nowhere."

Now, though, Richmond has its fair share of creative class amenities. If you want to get a taste of them, head to Cary St and 12th, then walk south. There is a swath of great urban stuff (you know, little bookstores, etc) for 10 or 12 blocks. If I were to draw my own map of Richmond's startup scene, it would have to include the Urban Farmhouse Market & Cafe. It just seems like the natural place to have a quick meeting or sit down with some serious work. It has big beautiful tables and huge windows that spend much of their time open. And not only that, it sits within a stones throw of the Martin Agency.

When we hit town, we'll actually be visiting the area across the river, in old Manchester, a formerly independent town that now has a thriving arts and culture scene along Hull Street. The Plant Zero Art Space provides an anchor for creative endeavors. Right around the corner sits the the Corrugated Box Building. It serves as a hub for tech businesses including a Tumblr office -- the only one outside New York -- and the company developing Tumblr's mobile offering, Mobelux. But we're also talking with people like Suzanne Davenport, a mother of five, who is bootstrapping a company to build a better project management tool. "I started SMART PROJEX here because I live here, my roots are here and my brilliant developer, who is completely invested in this project, is half the cost of a Silicon Valley developer," Davenport told us.

We'll have more from the ground starting tomorrow afternoon. So stay tuned for posts, photos, and video from RVA as soon as we hit the streets.

Update. See stories from Richmond:

• The Guys Who Developed Tumblr's Mobile App Want to Help Your Startup
• How Tumblr Hired Its Third Employee, or the Luckiest Cold Call Ever
• Suzanne Davenport, Mother of 6 (5 Kids, 1 Company)

Image: flickr/ehpien

WASHINGTON -- Our bags are packed and we're charging our gadgets. Sarah and I are hitting the road early tomorrow, aiming to hit Richmond, Virginia, our first stop, by noon. We spent the day doing errands in preparation for the trip: picking up the car, buying a charger we can juice our computers with through the cigarette lighter slot, and researching the towns we're visiting. We have the feeling of static anxiety that comes with knowing that there is nothing you can to prevent all hell from breaking loose in the near future. Over the next eight days, we're going to drive more than 1,500 miles, meet two hundred companies, write 30 posts, visit a dozen cities, and eat as many fried and barbequed items as we can. We've been overwhelmed by the interest in our trip, and now feel we probably needed twice as many days to do the places we're visiting justice.

One thing I've already noticed -- and that we'll certainly explore -- is that you don't tend to find one kind of creative endeavor (i.e. tech startups) without a bunch of other cool stuff around. Where you find startups, you'll also find good music and good food, artists and designers. Our colleague Richard Florida does a thorough job quantifying what creative areas look like, but I swear you could create a startup index based on local dives and diners alone. The latter are even *leading* indicators you might say, as they tend to indicate the presence of the kind of creative people who tend to start technology businesses before they even do so.

Another thing we'll be on the lookout for is how startups outside the major venture capital regions solve the funding problem. We've heard some good stories already about how local economies do it, and we'll bring the solutions they've found to you.

OK, time to go finish packing. We'll see you tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning, Sarah Rich and I head out on a roadtrip through the south in search of innovative startups across the region. From Washington, we're heading first to Richmond, racing down to Savannah, then up to Chattanooga, over to Shreveport, and finishing up in New Orleans next weekend. We're going to be posting a lot from the road, and there are multiple ways to follow us. Here's how:

• Come back to the Startup Nation special report homepage. That'll contain our posts in an easy-to-digest format, along with posts from Richard Florida and others.
  
• Follow the #startupsouth hashtag and us on Twitter (@alexismadrigal, @sarahrich).
• Track our progress on this hacked Google Map. A bonus there is that it contains a bunch of "creation stories" from entrepreneurs all over the southeast.
• Peruse our road triphotos on Instagram (our user names are: alexismadrigal, sarahrich).

Wish us luck. We're really excited about the companies and innovation that we're hearing about. And, FYI, I intend to eat all the okra in the south.