Next Valley View: Tech's Feisty Upstarts

In creating Valley View, our live monthly Web TV show, we set out to cover a wide variety of subjects. You'll find our November 28 Valley View program (11 am PT) to be the epitome of that notion. We've got a little bit of everything.

In our last Valley View (in October), we sat down with big, established players like Oracle and Cisco, and we heard how changing industry trends and small upstarts were creating market transitions that required these industry leaders to react. For November's show, we're going to kick off with the upstart side of the conversation, focusing on a couple of new companies threatening to unravel established businesses, or established ways of thinking.

In our opening segment, we'll talk with Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla, the new darling in the online payment space. Dwolla's success would threaten not only PayPal, but also credit cards and payment networks, and even the ACH (Automated Clearing House), the massive U.S. network that processes financial transactions.

Exec is a relatively new concierge service. You can hire Exec's employees by the hour to perform a variety of useful tasks, such as running errands. We'll put Exec to the test to see how far we can push the service, and then we'll talk to Exec CEO Justin Kan.

But we won't just focus on the new; we'll also talk to a couple of established outfits, like Microsoft and Texas Instruments. First, we'll have Microsoft's Greg Sullivan, senior product manager, Windows Phone division. Microsoft just recently started shipping Windows Phone 8. We'll have a chance to ask Sullivan how it's going, both on the customer side and on the developer side.

Texas Instruments has been a stalwart in the semiconductor industry for more than 80 years, but that industry has been dominated largely by men. Our own Sylvie Barak, reporter for EETimes, sat down with Dipti Vachani, VP and GM of Texas Instrument's Single Core Processing Unit to talk about being a woman executive in the semiconductor industry.

As always, we'll feature some new technology in our Elevator Pitch segment, where we ask companies to pitch us (as if we were in an elevator) and then face our judging committee. For this month's segment, we've got a couple of big data players: Kaggle and Clearstory, each with a unique approach to this incredibly interesting market. For instance, Kaggle essentially crowdsources the universe of data scientists to help companies solve big data problems. Clearstory tries to make big data more accessible for ordinary business people.

Finally, SugarSync, one of the early players in the personal cloud movement, will talk about how it is evolving to take on fierce competitive forces. The company just announced the beta version of SugarSync 2.0, which has been completely redesigned to make it easier to use. As a long-time SugarSync user, I'm extremely interested to hear more about what the company has done.

Please join us Wednesday, November 28 at 11 am. You can watch live here. And you can register for the show here -- this lets you get a calendar reminder and enters you into a drawing for an iPad Mini, which we'll give away at the end of the show.

Upgrading isn't the easy decision that Win 7 was. We take a close look at Server 2012, changes to mobility and security, and more in the new Here Comes Windows 8 issue of InformationWeek. Also in this issue: Why you should have the difficult conversations about the value of OS and PC upgrades before discussing Windows 8. (Free registration required.)