Valley View: Windows Phone 8 Up Close

This week's Valley View, our live, monthly Web TV show, featured established players like Microsoft, Texas Instruments and SugarSync, plus newer companies like Dwolla, Exec, ClearStory and Kaggle. We heard about Windows Phone 8, e-payments, big data, the cloud and much more.

We featured a deeper look at Windows Phone 8, including some of the new devices that run it (from Nokia, HTC and Samsung), and talked about the work that Microsoft still has to do to effectively compete with Apple and Google. Microsoft Windows Phone exec Greg Sullivan acknowledged that his company was clearly the challenger in the mobile space right now. Sullivan showed us a few of the key features of the new mobile OS, including what's new for the enterprise.

We also talked about the future of money with Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla, a company that not only competes with the likes of PayPal, but also aims to change the way money moves, to make electronic payments more secure, more efficient and less expensive.

You can watch all of that and more in the video embedded above. The episode also includes our fast-paced Elevator Pitch segment, where three hot companies (SugarSync, Kaggle and ClearStory) pitch us, our audience and our judges on what's great about their technologies.

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.)