A new kind of electronic business card and video sender
http://corp.eyejot.com/ is a way to create video mail, but now it's also a way to make a new kind of business card. One that has ability to post a video message to people who follow up with you. Here founder/CEO David Geller shows me what he's been working on and talks to me about the Seattle startup scene, which he's been a part of for quite some time.
FluidInfo brings a new kind of real-time database to the Web
http://fluidinfo.com/ here I talk with the founders of Fluidinfo, which brings to the web a new kind of unstructured database. Now, that sounds boring, but this is pretty mind-blowing stuff that lets you do all sorts of new things and will bring even more to us soon. Useful for getting info out of the new real time social web, like Twitter.
Make computers do what they are supposed to do with Puppet Labs
Google uses it. Zynga uses it. Nasa uses it. So does Rackspace and many many other companies. What for? Puppet Labs helps you manage your computers. Here's what Puppet Labs does, and how it fits into the world. We talked with a couple of the execs at the Open Stack Design Summit (they announced support of OpenStack at that event). http://puppetlabs.com/ has more about puppet labs. We also discuss community and how Puppet sees the value of that community and how they tend to it.
Check out this Silicon Valley pressure cooker: A mansion full of entrepreneurs
http://blackbox.vc/ Put a dozen entrepreneurs in a Atherton, CA mansion and you get a real pressure cooker that's getting tons of interest. The day I was there Tim Draper, famous VC, dropped by, and here we drop in on an evening party they were holding to raise money for Hacker Dojo. In this hour you'll meet the founder of the mansion, plus most of the companies that were there in April 2012.
The state of the cloud, from exec at VMware
VMware is the most used virtual machine producer out there. What's that? Virtual machines run on servers underneath all sorts of useful things and, so, it's always interesting catching up with Tod Nielsen, co-president of VMware's application platform. Here he talks about its latest Cloud Foundry news as well as how VMware views the fight between Open Stack and Amazon and other things that are happening in the cloud.
Way over the freaky line (but very cool) is PlaceMe, journaling app
Everyone I've shown this app to today (it came out last week) says "that's freaky." What does it do? It captures a ton of data on your phone as you move through the world. Right now it keeps a list of places. But here I sit down with founder Sam Liang for a discussion about just what data it captures, how that data could be used, and how he's going to get people to cross the freaky line. This is the future folks and, it, is, indeed, freaky. Learn more at https://www.placemeapp.com/placeme/ It's a free Android or iPhone app.
If Evernote and Pinterest had a baby: Springpad
The smart notebook arrives with Springpad. Here's my first look. More on its blog at http://springpad.com/blog/2012/04/the-new-springpad/
The guy who houses hundreds of startups: Plug and Play's Saeed Amidi
He owns the building where Google and Paypal got their starts. In his many locations around the world you'll find hundreds of startups (in the Sunnyvale headquarters alone there are more than 200 startups). It's rare that you get to spend more than an hour with a guy like this who has invested in, and advises, so many startups. He explains how Silicon Valley works and gives entrepreneurs many tips. Learn more at http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/
Geeky time (for developers only): Iron.io scales your apps with hosted message and worker queues
IronWorker from http://www.iron.io is a platform for scaling web applications. It is a massively parallel worker platform. Write your own workers and then run thousands of tasks in parallel to do things like crawl the web, process big data, send out mass notifications, and more. Here I meet with the team and get geeky.