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I am not a fan of hockey. I make no apologies for that, but I do love seeing hockey live. No other sport beats it. So when I sat down with Josh Schachter, the founder of startup HockeyBarn.com, I expected to have to make myself concentrate really hard to appear interested as he rattled off things like shots on goal and the mystical notion of icing. Instead, this passionate young entrepreneur wowed me with a very cool social media idea.

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It just so happens that more startups fail than succeed. It just so happens that startups have more ideas before breakfast than most of us have in our lifetime; it's just that sometimes they don't wake up until lunch. It just so happens that startup founders can be a little eccentric (and passionate and blindly brilliant and single-minded and stubborn).

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Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz is a geek at heart. Maybe the ponytail gives it away, or maybe it's the jabs he takes at his handlers (the bomb-sniffing dogs roaming Startup Camp were interesting), or that he has one of the Internet's most popular blogs, but now he needs to grind his way through the discomfort of poor quarterly financial results and 2,500 layoffs. He faced the public challenge here at Startup Camp, by talking about what Sun is and hinting at some announcements for tomorrow.

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We've been covering BlueCat's fantastic management appliances for years, and its Proteus IP Address Management has always fared well in some of our product comparisons. At this year's Interop, BlueCat announced version 2.5.

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Zude is a clever company. It has managed to create a platform where you can build a more personalized social network environment whether you're a nontechnical user or a developer (see our video below). But now it is taking the platform further, perhaps even into the dangerous (but fun) waters of data portability.

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Each year Interop presents its "best of show" awards. This year featured several products from Cisco (some developed in-house, some acquired), and the usual lineup of upstarts (Palo Alto Networks, Mellanox Technologies, Splunk, Spigit). Cisco managed its share of awards, most notably for its Nexus 7000 data center switch, but the upstarts also had their turn.

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Most IT executives I talk to are baffled by Web 2.0. Don't get me wrong, they get excited about the technology like anyone else, and arguably they understand its inner workings better than some of the Web 2.0 cognoscenti. Where they stumble is on its applicability in the enterprise. They struggle to ignite the flame. They need to come to fun events like Ignite.

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A few more mashups from Mashup Camp, including video interviews. This time a smaller player, Denodo, and some unlikely big dogs, Intel, and IBM.

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Thankfully, as the popular press tries to make anything that is a combination of two things a "mashup," the trend is actually now toward building enterprise-class services to create enterprise-class mashups. The litany of companies (new and old) we talked to at the recent Mashup Camp in Mountain View, Calif., was a respite from the Map + Something Else mentality of the early mashup days.

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Polycom made a series of announcements a couple of weeks ago at VoiceCon, including some new applications, integration with Microsoft OCS, and a new version of its rugged wireless phone for the small and medium-sized businesses.

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SecureLogix was an early pioneer in voice over IP security. I remember several years ago, when I was running Network Computing, we gave it our product of the year award. So it's no surprise to see the company still plugging away in 2008. The question is, really, to what end, and I put that to CTO Mark Collier.

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I had fun catching up with my old pal Alan Cohen, now VP of Cisco's Enterprise Solutions, to talk about all of the work his company is doing in unified communications.

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The unified communications space is very hot right now, and Digium, with its open source approach, is getting plenty of notice. We caught up with them at VoiceCon a couple of weeks ago.

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As voice over IP becomes a routine part of any corporate enterprise, the goals also are starting to change. The big topics include telepresence, unified communications, and federated presence. Unified communications seems to be the big buzzword today, but we've been talking about it for years.

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Syspine was showing a key system based on Microsoft's Response Point speech engine at VoiceCon. This is intended for the small or medium-sized business, according to Syspine's Jerry Moore, and it's pretty elegant and simple. Or as Moore says: "A poor man's communications system."

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It's always interesting seeing a company as it's just coming out of hiding and starting to market its product. Mapness is just such a company, and you could sense the wide-eyed fear of expectation as Wojciech Kosinski talked about this online journal site.

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Lots of talk this week about OpenSolaris from Sun as the market treads gently on what it may mean. Is this Sun doing the right thing or chasing the latest trend? Similarly, Sun was at our Startup Camp in London last month, rubbing elbows with and offering help to fledgling startups left and right. What gives?

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It's somewhat hard to categorize Polish startup Flaker, and without playing around with it (it's in private beta at the moment), it's difficult to see how powerful it might be, but it's an interesting idea: take user activities on Web services and aggregate those into a profile.

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I have a friend who develops mobile applications. It's just him in his pajamas in his basement, cranking out code for every mobile phone platform (native OSes and some of the mobile portals). To keep up with user feedback and bug reports, he farms out code fixes to a huge web of developers-for-hire. It's dicey, but it works for him, especially since the work can be small, but very interrupt-driven. In a sense, that seems to be what Peopleperhour, a new U.K.-based startup, is providing.

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Eseye is a 3-month-old startup we met up with at Startup Camp in London last month. It essentially provides embedded device makers with the ability to link those devices back to the enterprise network using a mobile network. The beauty of this is it makes those devices infinitely smarter: You can send or receive data from them, making them a form of Web appliance.

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It's the question of the NCAA tournament. Everywhere you turn, people are chanting "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" and nobody really knows what it means. We asked people all weekend, and we got as many answers as people we asked. Some talked about the bounty of limestone in Kansas, others about choo-choo trains and still others about mythical birds. Some even went zen on us . . . one person's response: "It's everything." Another's: "What isn't it?" After Monday night's impressive performance (yes, I know, I was wrong) the answer is easy: It means "winner."

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The Riverwalk might as well be called The Mississippi Riverwalk, because Memphis owns this town this weekend. Despite a thoroughly impressive win over North Carolina, Kansas could bring Phog Allen back from the grave -- hell, they could bring James Naismith back and throw in Roy Williams to boot -- and they won't beat the (formerly known as Memphis State) Tigers. They are that good.

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Underneath the city of San Antonio, Texas, right next to The Alamo is the Riverwalk, the bastion of faux-Mexican restaurants and shopping that is serving as the thrumming hub of this year's Final Four. The restaurants are jammed, the waiting time is legendary, cabs are impossible, and walking is an exercise in frustration, unless perhaps you are Derrick Rose and you can prance magically along the water.

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Every year since 2000 I have gone to the Final Four. If you like college basketball, you must somehow find a way because it is an experience you cannot miss. I have been fortunate enough to watch my alma mater play in two Final Fours and win a national championship. I've watched Duke fans cry until blue paint streamed down their cheeks. Those are just some of the pleasures of March Happiness.

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I will normally turn down the sound on a game involving the vocal assault rifle of Dick Vitale. It's just my taste, which doesn't tend toward an unnatural love affair with Mike Krzyzewski or the barracks sadist Bobby Knight ("Robert Montgomery Knight"). But I appreciate what Vitale brings to college basketball.

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At Startup Camp in London, I met Nick Halstead, the erstwhile founder behind fav.or.it, a new blog aggregation site that's been widely discussed in the, um, blogosphere (there's a dog chasing its tail somewhere in that statement).

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When we held Startup Camp in London, WatZatSong was one of the more intriguing new ventures. Raphael Arbuz' project lets the community help you figure out songs that you know some lyrics to, or a tune stuck in your head.

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When North Carolina won the national championship over Georgetown in 1982, Michael Jordan was the precocious teenager alongside tournament MVP James Worthy. His game winning shot that night was his introduction into our collective consciousness. But thanks to modern technology, there are very few surprises now when it comes to college stars.

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It's Easter Sunday, so it's fitting that I ask forgiveness for my serious addiction to basketball, an affliction that I don't suffer alone but one that has me concocting work-related reasons to watch basketball, pursuing every possible technology angle behind the games and ignoring every single priority in my life. They don't call it March Madness for nothin'.

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Damn these brackets. Let me tell you how bad it is. After round one, my colleague Mitch Wagner was ahead of me. This is a guy we had to explain the tournament to; a guy who sent out an e-mail about our Hoop Madness site with the subject line "NBA Tournament."

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How can you lose with someone named Fabio at the helm, talking about how his company, Veedow.com, will do for shopping what Pandora does for music? Veedow will customize a recommendation-based social shopping site based on the items and styles that appeal specifically to you.

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Traditionally, Ruby On Rails developers have had difficulty taking applications from their development systems to deployment (difficulties not experienced developing with PHP, ASP, or Java). But Brightbox, a U.K.-based startup showing off its wares at Startup Camp in London recently, specializes in Rails hosting.

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Today, CBSSports.com issued an additional 250,000 VIP passes for its exclusive March Madness on Demand (MMOD), a service that lets you watch every single game of the NCAA basketball tournament online, regardless of local blackouts. A VIP pass gives you priority access over others. The final VIP passes in the initial 500,000 allotment were claimed via registration earlier today and, given what CBS Sports officials say is typical, the highest demand for access will take place the morning of the first games while worker productivity, at least for those companies not specifically blocking access, drops faster than a brokerage house market cap.

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Bracketology is clearly an obsession. I've written so far about two different applications written to help people fill out their March Madness brackets. (I know I keep saying this, but don't forget to join the InformationWeek bracket). This is about a third program, this one built by the Spotfire team at Tibco. Spotfire is an enterprise analytics platform that specializes in interactive visualization.

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Having trouble with your brackets? I've got your answer. Thanks to Coke Zero and the folks at Crispin Porter and Bogusky, a boutique creative design shop, you've now got Bracket-O-Matic. Just use the nifty sliders to select the values you think are important and voilà, you've got your bracket. But don't stop there. You can put that bracket right into the CBS Sports.com bracket (including the one you belong to with InformationWeek; password is biztech).

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Last night, watching all of the experts reach the same, boring conclusions (only Bobby Knight colored outside of the bracket lines picking Pittsburgh to win it all) it became clear that only by sheer luck or insanity could you pick a Marquette or a George Mason (or Pitt) to get to the Final Four. There are so many factors to consider, but it always comes back to the number one seeds. But we live in an Information Age, so why not use technology. And that's just what two professors have done to create Dance Card (to predict at-large tournament berths) and Score Card (to predict the tournament winners).

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RPPtv sounds a little too good to be true: A Web-based uploading, sequencing, editing, and output program for consumers and broadcasters. It's also free, available any day from RPPtv's site or as a Facebook application.

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We already have some clues about this year's Cinderella, the team that somehow every year spoils all the fun (see also: make mad in march; anger) for top seeds but actually makes it that much more interesting for viewers. Mostly they come from mid-major (a term that smacks of "not quite good enough") conferences, and most of those conferences have finished their yearly tournaments by now; the winners get automatic births (ah, to be born).

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One day after the official launch of Hulu's Internet TV service, Thursday's New York Times warned of a bandwidth crunch on the Internet in the not-too-distant future. Video traffic on YouTube alone, data showed, was as much as all Internet traffic in 2000. Next week begins CBS Sports.com's March Madness On Demand, and for now neither CBS Sports, nor its key partner, Akamai, are worried.

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You may have heard about bands discovering a fan base (or vice versa) on MySpace or YouTube; or about the launch of some new Web TV show on YouTube which makes its way onto regular television because of its popularity (to some degree, South Park is a great example). Now, thanks to fun startup WebCanvas, artists can have the same opportunity. The WebCanvas presentation at Startup Camp last week in London was impressive in its creativity. But these guys, who finished second in Camp voting for best Startup, have some work to do in several areas.

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The monumental imperative to save our planet requires launching ourselves over what seems an insurmountable hurdle involving the orchestration of global agreement and policy combined with individual actions that manifest themselves as a nebulous series of micro decisions. So good luck with all of that and call me when the polar bears and penguins are tanning themselves on Fire Island. Or maybe we should completely re-examine our own lives like Saul Griffith, MIT PhD, chief scientist at Makani Power and the most fascinating presenter (despite some 70 slides) at ETech last week.

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I have a friend who does everything in Excel. I mean EVERYthing. If he were ever to write a novel, I am convinced he would do it in Excel. He obsesses about balancing his books at home on Excel; organizing trips in Excel. So when we went to Italy a couple of years ago and shared expenses, he built us a handy spreadsheet. There was nothing complicated about it, but its elegance and logic just made everything tidy -- well, except the part where I owed him money. Now I don't need the spreadsheet, though. Enter Scred, one of the attendees at last week's Startup Camp in London.

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There's nothing more charming than a humble entrepreneur like MySQL co-founder David Axmark. Zero ego, maximum success, achieved from a place of pure personal passion and the observation of need rather than blatant commercialization. Axmark made it clear to the Startup Camp audience in London this past weekend that while most companies start up with a business plan that includes an exit strategy, Axmark and his partner Monty Widenius started simply to create, to fill a need, because it was fun.

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My colleague, David Berlind, held Startup Camp in London Friday and Saturday, for an eager crowd of hotshot startup companies interested in sharing experiences, getting feedback, or maybe just looking for that gentle pat on the back to keep them going through 18 hour workdays and family sacrifices. Startup Camp is but one in a series of what Berlind calls "unconferences" where there is no structured agenda except for the one the crowd creates when they arrive. This is the "format for you to share your common passion for being an entrepreneur," Berlind told the crowd.

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One of the most exciting concepts demonstrated during ETech was a data visualization concept, a phenomenally attractive and useful way to find information so quickly and thoughtfully, it seems at once elegant, clever, and obvious. The company: Stamen, a design studio in San Francisco. The application: Like anything in the visual world, it's easier if you just see it, but it involves a series of sliders that make underlying data come to life as you stretch the boundaries of the information you're looking for.

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When wildly successful startup companies review history, it can often seem instead like a revisionist history; as if success ever happens according to a perfectly mapped out vision. There are two key distinctions when it comes to Salesforce.com: first, many of its early employees came from Oracle or Siebel or both, so the templates for success (in some cases for better or worse) had been somewhat molded and embedded; second, regardless of any contrived formula, there are phenomenal lessons other startups should ponder.

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Nearly every company these days is racing to that next big thing to ensure their product or service is being seen by the masses. Portals and search engines have been, and will continue to be prominent. But there has been a stampede toward social networks as companies figure out how best to traverse that world, how to be visible without tarnishing the social environments sites like Facebook and Bebo and MySpace have tried to create. MixerCast has taken an interesting stab at helping big brands effectively use these platforms.

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It was hard to tell if there were more social network platforms at O'Reilly's ETech/Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) than there were companies looking to fund them. The parade of ideas gets a little bit weary, the eyes blur when trying to distinguish between one or the other, the amount of data required by each is a bit staggering, and it's often hard to tell a friend from an acquaintance, a widget from an midlet (if you combined them would they be a midget?), a twitter from a clatter. So here's another: IntroNetworks.

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Some companies here at ETech are so new they don't even have business cards yet. Jing Chen flew in a mere hour before she was expected to demo K-Factor Media's Developer Analytics at AppNite in San Diego, and it turned out to be one of the more compelling early success stories. In the not too distant future, she won't have to be giving out slips of paper with her e-mail address instead of business cards.

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Recommendation sites, like Yelp, have been great, successful experiments in building sustainable social networking communities. Hungry Machine, one of the ETech AppNite presenters, has tied a series of vertical recommendation ideas to the existing social communities, like Facebook. There are a few key differences, however.

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