Next Valley View: Cloud, Baseball IT, And More

InformationWeek is hosting another episode of its live Web TV series, Valley View, on Wednesday, May 23 at 4 pm PT. We'll feature a little bit of enterprise mobile, a little bit of enterprise social, a little bit of cloud management, and some amazing technology that's being used to change lives. To top it all off, we'll be joined in our San Francisco studio by one of our favorite CIOs.

My Valley View co-host, David Berlind and I first met Framehawk at the recent Under The Radar conference in Mountain View, California. The Framehawk approach promises to let an enterprise turn corporate-grade applications into mobile apps easily and securely, and in the native mobile target environment. It seemed almost too good to be true, so we asked Framehawk CEO Peter Badger to come demonstrate the technology live. We think you'll be impressed, too.

InformationWeek has written a great deal (and stirred some controversy) about the real cost of the public cloud. As companies move more applications to cloud-based environments, they'll definitely need to understand and manage their spending. Cloudability claims to help enterprises do just that, and we'll have the company's co-founder and CEO Mat Ellis demonstrating the technology for us.

We enjoy seeing the many different approaches to enabling the social enterprise, and we've featured several on our show. There hasn't been a company that has emerged as a dominant player in this space--one that's able to tap into the collective knowledge of an entire company or department, fostering a broader sense of collaboration. But there are plenty of companies with new ideas. Spigit has been around for a little while, though, and its technology not only promises to help organizations capture employee ideas, but also incorporates notions of crowdsourcing and game mechanics into the process. If you're as confused (but interested) as I am, you'll enjoy the demonstration from the company's VP of Product, Hutch Carpenter.

For an extra-special treat, we've invited Neurosky to come demonstrate brain-computer interface technology. The company makes what is essentially a consumerized, medical-grade EEG, and Neurosky works with researchers and developers to create all sort of applications--many in gaming and communications--that can help people deal with things like ADD or cerebral palsy. Neurosky promises that we'll get to try out some of its focus and relaxation games.

Finally, we will feature Bill Schlough, the CIO of the 2010 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants. Schlough is perhaps one of the most innovative IT executives in sports today. The Giants are one of very few sports franchises to use dynamic, market-based ticket pricing. They have also solved the challenge of enabling the social-crazy, mobile-crazy crowds that attend Giants games. Schlough was recently named Chairman of the San Jose Giants, one of the organization's minor league clubs. In other words, he's a CIO with a much broader purpose.

Also, at the end of our show, we pick a couple of random companies (by way of a drawing) to tell us about their technologies, in what we like to call the Elevator Pitch portion of the show.

You can watch the show live on our Valley View Special Report page, and if you'd like a chance to win some prizes, please register to watch. Also, for anyone in the San Francisco area, come on by our studio at the UBM TechWeb headquarters to be part of the live audience--we'll have refreshments, food and we'll also give away some prizes there, too.