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In the final part of this three-part video interview series with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, we talked about the role of social networking, not just in winning a political race, but in ongoing government -- in building participation among citizens. He talks about his successes and failures, and what he's learned along the way.

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In the second part of our three-part video interview series with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, we talked about the role technology can play in the transformation of a city, including addressing the growing digital divide, the progress on STEM in San Francisco, and the role the Bay area will play, as a hub of technology innovation, in helping lead the way to economic recovery.

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In a wide-ranging interview with InformationWeek, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom talked about DataSF.Org, the role of social networking in politics and running his diverse city, and the role of San Francisco in the digital world. In the first of three in this video series, Newsom discusses how his city has embraced the "open and transparent government" concept.

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DataSF.org is San Francisco's major foray into open and transparent government; it is the city giving its vital data back to its citizens. We talked with the city's mayor, Gavin Newsom, several members of his technology team, led by CTO Blair Adams, and some of the early developers who have already built applications around the data. We've captured all of this in a new video documentary.

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It's exciting to see this part of SAP: nimble, open, swift, even on demand. Last week, the company began showing pre-beta versions of several new software as a service technologies, code named 12 Sprints and Kona, one meant to provide a collaborative decision-making environment, the other to provide users with an on demand BI experience. We got an up close look, and filmed it, ReviewCam style, and even took a glance at SAP's newest BusinessObjects Explorer.

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The World Wide Web is becoming the World Wide Watch -- a creepy place where people talk about behavioral targeting and learning your intent. The goal is less nefarious, because implied in that is the ability to offer consumers more meaningful content. Startup Atigeo promises to make this all palatable by giving users access to their social profiles, including how that profile is acted upon.

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Wells Fargo's Executive Vice President of Information Services, Wayne Mekjian faces all of the challenges most bank IT executives face, like an increasing focus on security and privacy and a move to consumer friendly services like mobile banking. But he's also had to digest the integration of acquisitions. And yet, the bank still manages to focus on innovation. Mekjian shared some of his challenges and innovations in a video interview.

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Windows Live Photo Gallery and Movie Maker come with Windows 7, but are free to download and will make working with your photo images insanely easy. Movie Maker is also a pretty nifty tool -- and one that should make YouTube happy, because I can see many families posting simple slide shows from this tool.

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Windows 7 is being hailed as the operating system that Microsoft finally got right. Time will tell of course, but there's sure a lot to like at first glance. We got some demonstrations of a few of the end user productivity enhancements from Microsoft. In the first part of our video demonstration, we'll look at the new Taskbar and similar features.

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As critical and operational applications drive today's business, one of the biggest challenges most organizations face is how to scale those applications (especially as they become distributed) and their data. Facebook is a great example of one of the most distributed, massive applications around. At Web 2.0, Facebook's VP of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, talked about how they tackle this challenge.

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HP unveiled its MagCloud offering at Web 2.0 Summit this week. It's an impressive service that gives would-be publishers a cost-effective and cost-predictable way to easily publish content, all on-demand. We got a hands-on demonstration.

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WOWD is a new search engine that made its debut at Web 2.0 Summit this week. Mark Drummond, WOWD's CEO provided an explanation and demonstration on stage. (Video included.)

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LendingClub offers an online service that lets borrowers borrow, and lets investors invest in that borrowing. We sat down with LendingClub CEO Renaud Laplanche to get a demonstration of this fascinating model.

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At the Web 2.0 Summit this week, Evan Williams, CEO of the ever-popular Twitter, danced lithely around the question of his company's future revenue model -- a question that continues to dog the industry, but doesn't seem to faze Williams much at all. (Video clip included.)

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Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts got the Web 2.0 Summit started this week talking about everything from its beta Fancast service to net neutrality and bandwidth capping to social networking. The only thing he couldn't talk about was its rumored work on acquiring NBC, but he did discuss the company's broader push into the content business.

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PayPal President Scott Thompson announced at Web 2.0 this week that his company will be opening up its platform to developers, which should be good news, especially to startups.

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Nokia had a variety of devices on display at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, none more compelling than the N900, which is the first phone in its portfolio to run the Maemo Operating System. We got a quick demo in the Ovi Lounge.

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As we launch into another exciting week of Web happenings, I had a chance to conduct a video interview with the Web 2.0 Summit Chair, John Battelle about what we could expect to see this year. You can see the interview at our Live Web 2 Summit TV site. We'll stream selected content live, and on demand, throughout the conference on that site. The lineup is pretty impressive, but after talking to Battelle, I'm even more excited. Here's why.

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One of our top five InformationWeek 500 award winners was Cincinnati Children's Hospital. In our video interview with CIO Marianne James, it was clear that her focus is being a part of the hospital's business, and making the hospital's business leaders a part of hers. This is a story of inclusion, which has bred extraordinary growth for this community hospital.

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There have been many technology-oriented gatherings (conferences, expositions, etc), but none that rival Web 2.0 Summit for attention, hype and, ultimately, delivering the goods, and this week marks the sixth annual conference. The theme: Web Squared. Techweb and O'Reilly Media will be broadcasting select sessions live for those who couldn't make it.

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There have been many technology-oriented gatherings (conferences, expositions, etc), but none that rival Web 2.0 Summit for attention, hype and, ultimately, delivering the goods, and this week marks the sixth annual conference. The theme: Web Squared. Techweb and O'Reilly Media will be broadcasting select sessions live for those who couldn't make the sold out show.

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This year's InformationWeek 500 awards were well chronicled on this site, but there's nothing like being at the InformationWeek 500 conference and the elegant gala we throw for our winners. We've captured the ceremony and the awards for you to watch, including special presentations of our top five, a look behind the scenes at our preparation and winners in several elite categories.

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Working alongside Progressive Insurance business leaders, CIO Raymond Voelker's team developed an application -- called "Name Your Price" -- which flips the online auto-insurance quoting practice inside out. Instead of entering the features you want and getting a price, you can use the apps sliding bar to select a price and see what kind of insurance you can get.

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A friend of mine writes for Conan O'Brien. I knew he would do great things because not only did he test out of high school a year early, but he was a bigger smart ass than me. He took me to the Friar's Club once for dinner and broke his job down for me: slip in around 9 am, read newspapers for a couple hours combing for current events, and then write jokes. When the day was done, all the writers would go see whether their jokes made it on the show. On a good day, two or three make it. Now ain't that the life?

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This won't surprise you: Salesforce.com wants every application it runs to be in the cloud. Now getting there hasn't been easy, but the company's Vice President of Enterprise Strategy (and former CIO), Trae Chancellor, sees all of the upsides (including proving the viability of his own company's business model, one supposes).

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OK, this is fun: Electronic signature in the cloud. I know, it sounds small, but how many documents do you sign? What about your employees (HR forms)? Your sales team (contracts)? EchoSign lets you create a workflow to do this, from delivery to the actual signature to the storage and management. And all in the cloud.

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One of the most difficult challenges of Unified Communications has been getting end users to buy in and use the systems. In our final whiteboard tutorial, we discuss getting rogue users and resisters to leverage the technology.

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One of the big hurdles in deploying unified communications, especially where it includes Web-based technology (think Skype, Instant Messaging, even texting), is how to tie all of that rogue communication into your compliance and security policies. That's the topic of our Whiteboard Tutorial today.

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One of the big hurdles in deploying unified communications, especially where it includes Web-based technology (think Skype, Instant Messaging, even texting), is how to tie all of that rogue communication into your compliance and security policies. That's the topic of our Whiteboard Tutorial today.

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Anytime you put a "C" in your title, your shadow grows and there's no place to hide. We decided to put three CIOs in the hot seat, in front of their peers, and in front of a board of directors, American Idol-style. The board was tough, but the CIOs were phenomenal.

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CIOs are an interesting lot, cast as both business and technology leaders. Get them talking about agile development, and the inner geek appears. Talk about net present value, and they grab their lapels and straighten their pocket squares. But today's CIO talks increasingly about the customer, and if our nation's CIO, Vivek Kundra is paid every time does, he might be able to help bail out both the banks and the car companies.

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The 802.11n task group formed in January 2004. Two weeks ago, it ratified the wireless standard. Two years ago, we started seeing implementations. The world works this way. If it was just a faster WiFi that would be unfathomable, but many predict this could be the true replacement of the wired edge network.

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A common theme heard these days among enterprise architects is the increasing need to bring together network designers, application architects and information security teams for any sizable project, and that includes unified communications, especially because those communications often involve customers, not to mention many more parts and pieces.

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I don't know what term was in vogue when, I just know my generation has never stopped hearing about the concepts behind unified communications. Unified messaging. Convergence. VoIP. IP Conferencing. IP Video. Much of it is a reality today, but one thing it's not (yet) is unified. Our video whiteboard tutorial series attempts to get under the surface.

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Project Management, which is, by its nature, a collaborative activity, is perfect for the cloud. To be sure, there are plenty of offerings now. We took a more in depth, hands-on look at TrackerSuite, a pure-play, hardcore project management suite from Automation Center.

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Sychron is a compelling platform for provisioning and managing virtual desktops, and while it can make managing VMWare's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V much easier, it is also going up against capabilities both companies offer. In our latest ReviewCam, we took a hands-on look at some of the product's capabilities and they seem pretty impressive.

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Every time I'm around information security people I get scared. Their understanding of the potential for vulnerability is daunting enough, even when they aren't consistently flaunting the dangers. Lieberman Software's president, Phil Lieberman, must have started at least 30 sentences with "But what's really scary . . . " We were just missing the marshmallows and hooting owls, and all we were talking about was managing passwords.

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It's time for another episode of TechWeb's Valley View, our live web TV show. We're taking a decidedly hard core turn toward a more demonstrable and hands-on version in deference to the re-launch of Network Computing, complete with Whiteboard Tutorials and ReviewCam demos, covering topics such as storage infrastructure, virtualization, cloud computing, WAN acceleration, and disk storage security.

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When we look back, years from now, this decade's Internet Search may seem prehistoric. Perhaps that's why so many companies (including the usual suspects) have begun working toward an enlightened future. Thomson Reuters is one such company, and its OpenCalais project provides what the company likes to call semantic plumbing; you can see what that means in our ReviewCam.

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Document management. Boring, but necessary, right? Just to spice it up, put it in the cloud on Salesforce.com's App Exchange platform or Oracle's OnDemand Suite, and what you get is document management that starts to mean something from a customer-centric point of view. What you've got is Sharemethods.

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Used to be you'd send a snappy little e-mail, carbon copy your boss to cover your ass, and life was grand. I grew up on PROFS and then cc:Mail when we went to "store and forward" systems (whatever that meant). It was cute, a novelty, like Twitter but without all the vitriol. Now it's subpoena material, proof of your negligence, or maybe just your nonchalance. You write it and it lives forever, by law. From thus emerges companies like Greenview Data keeping everything in its cloud-based e-mail archiving system.

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I first wrote about emwave HeartMath earlier this year after trying it out at the Consumer Electronics Show. Now it's available on the Mac and I've had a chance to use it over the course of a few days. This is such a nifty little program: inexpensive, easy to use and good for the heart and soul. It may not be what you'd call enterprise-class software, but any HR department would do well to get its high-stressed employees a copy of this (which is to say, these days, everyone).

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Because Silicon Valley is still THE hotbed of innovation, it's high time we created a talk-show platform to get inside the companies, demonstrate the new technology and rip apart the most compelling topics in the valley. So we've created "Valley View," a live Web TV experience from TechWeb and InformationWeek. In the pilot show this Thursday at 4 p.m. PST we'll feature live demonstrations of SAP's fledgling software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and Sybase's enterprise mobile solutions; we'll talk with both VMWare and its latest pending acquisition, SpringSource; and we'll get some analysis and insights from our senior editors on the latest news.

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It started as a coincidence, turned into a real possibility and resulted in a bona fide solution to my problem. At the risk of translating my giddiness into hyperbole, the idea behind GeniusRocket (and CrowdSPRING, the company that led me there -- see a ReviewCam of CrowdSPRING here) is well on its way to becoming THE new model for custom service exchange on the web. I'm sold, if for no other reason than because it delivered.

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Magnify is a hosted solution for managing and publishing video on the web. It shares many of the traits that similar, competitive solutions have, but it's got two features that caught my attention. First (and this is a small one), it auto-tweets any new video you publish; second (and this is a big one), it lets you integrate your video with video on other public web sites. We've captured some of the nuances in a ReviewCam video.

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Are you logged into Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? LinkedIn? What about your e-mail? Any Wikis? All at the same time? Are you crazy?! Now, if you could just take your social and business relationships with you around the web, getting and giving feedback, learning and sharing along the way . . . Glue, from two-year-old startup AdaptiveBlue, is just scratching the surface of this concept, and demonstrated its technology in our latest ReviewCam.

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I'm a sucker for anything I can try before I buy, so I am now officially a glutton for crowdSPRING, a suckling newborn (14 months) in the marketplace of, well, online marketplaces; and in this case, a marketplace for creative design talent which -- let's face it -- we all need at some point. LG recently used crowdSPRING to design a new mobile phone, giving away $80,000 in awards according to the company's co-founders.

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Publishing video is exciting, but it's not easy. It requires a hefty infrastructure to store and deliver it, and systems that can manage and organize all of that video content. Video hosting and content management is big business these days and new companies are constantly emerging in this space. I had a chance to take a look at Delve Networks' offering, and while it offers most of the basic features that others do, it has some pretty compelling aspects to as well.

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I've always admired McAfee. Its customers and product reviewers typically have great things to say, its CEO, Dave DeWalt is smart and humble and laughs at himself easily. Those things all matter. But now it seems marketing and corporate messaging are getting in the way and I am growing concerned that maybe there's not much innovation left or, like any decent company growing up before our eyes, it aspires to raise its profile but is doing so through song and dance instead of technology innovation.

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This week Enterasys announced its NAC business had grown 317 percent year over year, which seemed unfathomable given Dark Reading's report (using Infonetics research) that NAC appliances have been hardest hit by this year's economic woes.

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