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The Jet Propulsion Lab will begin pilot testing startup Socialcast's social networking software for potential use by NASA. The space agency is interested in using Socialcast for knowledge transfer as Apollo-era employees retire.

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Or Microsoft or Cisco or VMware or...? A Swiss technologist's book says a culture that values risk-taking is Europe's missing ingredient.

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Three years after signing its first electronic "John Hancock," DocuSign has now inked more than 9 million digital signatures. As companies look for ways to introduce eco-friendly business processes, more are signing, virtually, on the dotted line.

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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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Proclivity Systems, which predicts trends with its e-commerce "predictive engine," is looking like a trendsetter itself. The New York startup has moved into Fifth Avenue office space, and upscale retailer Barneys New York is a reference customer. Founder and CEO Sheldon Gilbert recently took a break from selling software to be photographed for Men's Vogue.

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Vidyo, which began shipping its videoconferencing-over-IP system in March, has just won the startup category in this year's Best Of Interop competition. Vidyo promises to make low-cost, high-quality videoconferencing an option for more companies.

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The biggest choice I face in launching my Web 2.0 site is that of underlying technology platform. So I'm throwing the question open: Should I go with a Microsoft software stack or open source?

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Online ad firm Yodle has become an authorized reseller of Google AdWords. Yodle specializes in helping small, local businesses -- beauty salons, landscapers, and limo companies, for instance -- place online ads and convert them into customers.

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David Hirsch, one of the guys who helped establish Google's New York City presence, is about to launch a New York-based venture angel fund that invests in tech startups. Hirsch's Metamorphic Venture will focus on interactive media and mobile technologies.

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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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Budding entrepreneurs mingled with startup veterans at a meeting this week hosted by the Pittsburgh chapter of TiE, a national association that promotes entrepreneurship and innovation. You could read volumes on how to start a company, but nothing's more valuable than talking to people who have done it. Here are some do's and don'ts from the TiE meeting.

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Palo Alto Networks aims to reinvent the firewall. A Fortune 500 customer has bought into this vision.

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Open source software company Marketcetera has secured $4 million in Series A funding. The startup is developing a software stack, due for general release later this year, for automated financial trading.

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VKernel was launched last year to help IT departments track usage of VMware servers and charge business units for the virtual resources they consume. The startup's Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer, which handles the first part of that problem, is due to ship later this week.

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After four years of development, Mojix is about to introduce an RFID system that promises to overcome some of the technical barriers that have hampered RFID's adoption. The company claims its Mojix Star system is more accurate and works at greater distances than other passive RFID systems.

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In uttering those words, Shakespeare's Juliet makes the point that a name is less important than the person or thing it represents. If so, why are so many startups changing their names? Something is rotten in the state of California.

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Venture capital firms invested $29.4 billion last year, pumping $5.3 billion into software companies, $4.6 billion into Internet companies, and billions more into telecom, IT services, and networking companies. How can you keep up with all the new ideas, product development, and emerging companies on the receiving end of that money? Here's my list of online resources.

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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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Cell phone manufacturers aren't the only ones pumping new features and functions into mobile devices. Three startups--Kannuu, Aggregate Knowledge, and Ribbit--are getting into the act, too.

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Self-service customer support sounds like an oxymoron, but Helpstream insists that it doesn’t have to be. The company, which recently secured $8.6 million in series B venture funding, has developed help desk and customer support software that brings together communities of users to assist each other.

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Talk about tilting at windmills. WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene is challenging Microsoft's Visual Studio while simultaneously pointing out the drawbacks of Java development. Keene may be suffering delusions of grandeur--or perhaps he's onto something.

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Tiversa, a five-year-old company based in Pittsburgh, specializes in knowing what kind of content is being shared over peer-to-peer networks. Until now, it's concentrated on helping businesses find and fix data leaks caused by file-sharing users. But Tiversa's got other plans for its technology, including working with advertisers to understand and respond to user activity on P2P networks.

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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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Part of the rationale for Web services has always been that they can tunnel through firewalls, linking networks that are otherwise securely separated. Virtualization puts up similar barriers between applications within a single machine, so will crossing them require similar technology?

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A Seattle man was sentenced yesterday to 51 months in prison for using peer-to-peer networks to commit identity theft. The case highlights a PC security risk that catches many users and businesses off-guard.

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Network management startup PacketTrap has introduced a professional-grade version of its pt360 Tool Suite for network monitoring and diagnostics. The product is aimed at midsize companies, but seems to have caught on with some large corporations, too.

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WebMynd, a startup launched in January, has come out with a browser extension that keeps a record of every Web page you view. It's a nifty tool, but a word of warning to would-be users: You may want to shut it off sometimes.

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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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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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As I write this blog post -- a reflection on Startup Camp London -- I'm on a Boeing 777 that's racing across the Atlantic to Boston's Logan airport. This plane is full of technology. Presumably, the first class cabin has seats that can convert into beds or that can pivot and face a variety of directions. I heard that everyone up there also gets Bose noise canceling headphones. I'm not sure. It's a secretive place that only people who've paid 10 times what I've paid to cross the Atlantic are allowed to see. One thing I do know: several of the entrepreneurs we saw at Startup Camp London will one day be able to buy seats in that cabin. For their entire families.

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Splunk has introduced a new version of its IT search engine, one that exposes APIs and common services so users, developers, and partners can tie in their own applications. "We're opening up the basic platform," says CEO Michael Baum.

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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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WhiteHat CEO Stephanie Fohn says that you need her company's service if you've got a Web site that takes transactions. WhiteHat is a SaaS vendor that offers black-box penetration tests for Web sites.

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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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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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I got good advice from Silicon Valley investors about Project Melville, my stealth-mode Web business, but no money. Everyone agreed my best bet is to bootstrap it. In other words, don't quit my day job, eat brown bag lunches, and pull in a few friends as roll-up-your-shirtsleeves partners.

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How does an up-and-coming Chinese outsourcing company get the attention of U.S. businesses? Augmentum's answer: Don't get painted into the corner of low-end software development and stay close to your customers.

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Event planners for the Software 2008 conference, to be held April 29-30 in Las Vegas, have extended the application deadline for companies interested in participating in the event's Innovation Showcase. The Innovation Showcase has emerged as one of the premier venues for startups and established software companies alike to unveil compelling new products and services.

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On his Pmarca blog today, Marc Andreessen comes out in support of Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Andreessen bases his endorsement on a private 90-minute meeting last year in which, he says, Obama "grilled him" on the impact social networking would have on politics.

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Darwin would have liked our industry. Evolution is constant and predictable, and it's particularly so for Ethernet, from its original 10 Mbps incarnation to the current 10 Gbps version -- pricing, power consumption, and port density follow a similar trend line. But just because the evolution happens, doesn't mean that it's easy.

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You have to admire a technology company that can build a business around airborne water particles. FogScreen has done that, with an impressive customer list that includes Disney, Nokia, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Microsoft. Now it's taking its act to Vegas.

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I have an idea for a new venture that seems promising to me. Is it? I'm on my way to Silicon Valley to find out.

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We just wrote about Appcelerator a month ago -- in fact, it was our Startup of the Week. But we got a chance to talk to CEO Jeff Haynie, who gives a great overview of what this company is doing: letting you build rich Internet applications quickly using standard technology like HTML/CSS on the front end and Ruby On Rails, Java, PHP, .Net and more on the back end.

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