I recently met with Omer Shaikh, one of the co-founders of Friction.TV, a British company launching the U.S. Mr. Shaikh used to head Saatchi and Saatchi Interactive and he says he founded Friction.TV to encourage debate. The site has quickly [See the full post…]

Tom Foremski speaks with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, the second-largest open source company, about Silicon Valley and the challenge of managing teams of programmers spread across the world. [See the full post…]

I spent Saturday afternoon crammed into a room in Palo Alto with a couple of hundred people listening to presentations from young developers creating Facebook apps. The enthusiasm was great and there was a sense of being at the start [See the full post…]

Josh Hallett and Alex Kim, from Solution Set, talk about building social media platforms within enterprises and the roadblocks that IT departments create. Lots of good advice on overcoming those obstacles. A Silicon Valley Watcher report from a meeting [See the full post…]

I ran into Anurag Nigam, CEO and co-founder of IncSync recently, and got a quick demo of their 411Sync service. It’s a really easy and quick way to move any kind of information onto your cell phone without requiring any [See the full post…]

Tom Foremski talks with David Thompson, CEO of Genius, an on demand software company with a unique technology that enables sales people to track leads. Genius also announces its first conference, Sales 2.0, in San Francisco at the end [See the full post…]

Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president at Microsoft, heads up its strategic and emerging business initiatives. This means that he and his team work with startups in Silicon Valley and beyond, and with large companies partnering with Microsoft. Mr. Lewin is [See the full post…]

Motorola is aggressively adopting mobile linux as the key operating system for its cell phones. It is launching its first North American cell phone with Linux, the new Razr V8. Tom Foremski talks with Christy Wyatt, VP Ecosystem and Market [See the full post…]

Tom Foremski speaks with Diedier Diaz, SVP for Product Strategy Management at Access Systems Americas. “Access is one of the largest companies you’ve never heard about,” says Mr. Diaz. Its specialty is in creating applications for cell phones. It [See the full post…]

Tom Foremski speaks with Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource about the company’s packaged application suites. Spikesource takes dozens of open source components and combines them into sophisticated enterprise applications. Each suite is tested, and then retested when upgrades and patches [See the full post…]

Sun Microsystems says it has the world’s fastest server microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T2. And it is the first Sun microprocessor that will be available to other companies. What does this mean for Sun? Tom Foremski talks to analysts Nathan Brookwood [See the full post…]

TalkPlus lets you use your mobile phone to make local calls to any city — and have people in any city make a local call to you — no matter where you are. [See the full post…]

Who are you and what do you do? A Silicon Valley Minute pitch from Tim Ferriss, the author of 4-Hour Work Week. [See the full post…]

At MashUp Camp 4 at the Computer History Museum, Plaxo showed its Pulse application, which looks very much like FaceBook, with similar features. Are we heading into a mashup world where everything shares addresses, photos, movies, etc? Does FaceBook [See the full post…]

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is one of IBM’s top strategists. He has been the key open-source evangelist within Big Blue, persuading the company to standardize on Linux as one of its core business strategies.

Linux and the entire open-source movement would have [See the full post…]

Harry McCracken is the editor-in-chief of PC World. He recently resigned when his publisher asked him not to publish an article critical of Apple, fearing Steve Jobs’ reputation for holding long grudges and not wanting to risk the loss of [See the full post…]

Al Saracevic is the deputy business editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. I caught up Mr. Saracevic at a recent conference on innovation journalism at Stanford university. In this segment, he is on a panel and talks about the Silicon [See the full post…]

Fabrik is an interesting Web 2.0 company because of its business strategy: it has combined a Web 2.0 consumer/small business service called MyFabrik, which organizes and stores digital media online — with physical storage such as hard drives and flash [See the full post…]

Susie Wee has a great job — she’s the director of the HP Labs Mobile and Media Systems Lab, which means she works on gaming and entertainment systems. I spoke with Ms. Wee in San Francisco, at an HP Gaming [See the full post…]

Stephan Spencer is the founder and president of Netconcepts, which describes itself as a premier natural search firm enabling a leading tier of the top 200 Internet Retailers to “get found” online. [See the full post…]

Renat Khasanshyn is CEO and co-founder of Apatar, a leading provider of open source software tools for the data integration market. Apatar brings data integration to the companies who previously found proprietary solutions expensive and difficult to implement. Apatar’s goal [See the full post…]

Fergus Burns is the CEO and founder of Nooked, an Irish RSS company that is coming out with Real Simple Shopping, a way to use RSS to sell products and services. [See the full post…]