Reading List: Top 50, 'Valley of Death,' and Tech Titans Go Lunar

The Techwire team scans hundreds of headlines and websites every week, looking for news to share. Sometimes we come across pieces that are worth a read, but not in our lane. Here are some links to stories and essays that we think you’ll find engaging and illuminating.

Mapping the beginnings of GIS: How far back can we track GIS’ roots? Who knew that the genesis of GIS may have been a guy sitting on a train in the late 1800s, watching conductors punch holes in tickets? Who knew that would one day play a role in the development of the first database, which would eventually shape the field of GIS? It’s fascinating how these kinds of events are all over the timeline of the history of GIS. Here’s an interesting read on the topic.

How big is YOUR safety net? What do people expect from government, from the federal level down to the local town council, when it comes to accessing what we call the social safety net? Code for America — never an organization to do things small when they can go big — has examined the online social safety net platforms in all 50 states. “We analyzed every online instance of each state’s applications across five core safety net programs screen by screen — more than 75 applications in total,” CfA explains in the introduction to its findings. “We chose to focus on SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, WIC, and LIHEAP because these are large federal programs that states (and sometimes counties) have considerable leeway to implement. The data collected is current through January 2019.” It’s worth a read.

Nope, it’s not lunacy! Believing in life beyond our own horizons has always been the mark of a visionary. So it is in commerce — and in extraterrestrial colonization, as this story from Bloomberg News shows: “ … There’s a new entrant in this new space race, a nonprofit organization called the Open Lunar Foundation. Based in San Francisco, it’s a group made up of tech executives and engineers — many of them with former ties to NASA — who have serious ambitions to create a lunar settlement.”

An innovator opens up: The first director of the Innevation Center at the University of Nevada, Reno, reflects on what he’s learned while helping early stage companies navigate the challenging yet exciting and rewarding entrepreneurial journey. He discusses the “Valley of Death” in entrepreneurship, what it’s like to be a startup CEO, and why initial business plans are so often wrong.

For workers, which startups are best? LinkedIn has surveyed its members, and the results are in on which 50 startup companies are the best places to work. “These are the companies we track in the 3rd annual Top Startups ranking: the ones that are growing massively, scrambling industries, shifting talent flows around the world and, often, altering how we work and live,” says the story. No spoilers here, other than to note that the No. 1 company is based in San Mateo and has been written up in Techwire recently.