Trutap is a new mobile social networking application whose aim is let people stay connected with friends. Company CEO Doug Richard demonstrated the tool for the Mercury News at the recent TechCrunch40 conference.

So you didn’t make it to the TechCrunch 40 conference, where Mint.com won the honors as the top start-up? Fear not, the Mercury News sat down with Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, for a quick demo of how the online money management tool works.

Online speed dating? Indeed. And WooMe, a San Francisco start-up, is hoping it’s big business. The company launched at the TechCrunch40 conference this week, along with Orgoo, a service that lets users merge all their email and IM accounts into one dashboard. In this video, WooMe’s Stephen ...

The San Jose Mercury News spent a day at the TechCrunch40 conference talking to companies and getting demos of new products. This interview, with Flock CEO Shawn Hardin, is one of several videos we’re publishing from the conference. Tech-watchers will remember two years ago when Flock was being ...

Nick DeMonner, Lisa Hansen and Mike Minardi are trying to launch a start-up into a tough market with just modest funding. Which means they’re cutting costs at every turn. But they’ve found that a low-budget lifestyle doesn’t mean eating ramen every day. The San Jose trio have discovered how ...

A handheld cube that lets you browse your Flickr photos. A headset that uses brainwaves to control how fast a bicyclist pedals. And Megaphone, a game that lets users play against each in public spaces with their mobile phones. Those were some of the concepts on display at the ...

There’s no one right or wrong way to launch a start-up. But there are smart moves an entrepreneur can make - and mistakes to avoid - that can boost the odds of success. STIRR, the valley entrepreneur network, reinvented its monthly mixer this month to showcase something called Founder ...

Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi takes us on a quick tour inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

One of the more talked about valley start-ups in recent months is Spock. Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, Spock is a people search Web site that aims to be the most comprehensive source of information about just about anyone. Spock crawls the Web looking for ...

Botnets, phishing scams, password-stealing trojans — they’re all part of an increasingly professionalized world of online crime that’s costing Americans billions every year. Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec Security Response, tells Mercury News software reporter Ryan Blitstein what the company is doing to protect its customers from ...

Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel in charge of compliance, is the point person for growing criticism of Google’s privacy practices. More than two dozen European privacy regulators have launched an inquiry into Google’s data protection practices. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Google’s pending $3.1 ...

LinkedIn founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman talks with Mercury News venture capital reporter Connie Loizos about where he sees the social networking space headed, as well as his investment strategy these days.

Why is the CEO of blog search engine Technorati stepping aside? Is the San Francisco company really not for sale? And what are its plans for growing into a new media powerhouse? In this interview with the Mercury News, company CEO Dave Sifry answers those and other questions. Sifry ...

Continued innovation is key to the success of most companies, and Yahoo is no different. The Internet giant recently opened an “idea incubator” called “Brickhouse” in the trendy South Park area of San Francisco. Select Yahoo employees will take turns working out of the office - intended to evoke the ...

Learn about business technology optimization, the Mercury and Bristol Technology acquisitions and HP Software.

I had a chance to sit down and talk with Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins about Seagate’s Q3 results. The San Jose Mercury News recently reported that Seagate has revised it’s estimates but Seagate continues to be the big fish in the disk drive waters.

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Every day at CES last week we met with the Retrevo Gang - folks from Retrevo, the consumer electronics search engine, who held court and talked about the latest news - Apple iPhone and other gadgets. On the second day, San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dean Takahashi dropped by ...

If you you dial 911 from a VoIP phone, does the system know to locate you right away? There are a number of companies behind the scenes that ensure your location is immediately apparent to emergency services. Scott Navratil is marketing manager for Dash911, one of those companies. He explains ...

PodTech’s own Robert Scoble is featured today in the San Jose Mercury News also known as the Merc here in Silicon Valley. What’s compelling about the story is the openness of the net and how opportunities are created via transparency. Nice article by Michelle Quinn

The ...

Next week there is a cutting edge conference at Stanford that is free for journalism and innovation professionals to attend. Registration: http://scil.stanford.edu/InJo-2006/signup.fft. Vint Cerf, PodTech, Google, CNet, Tony Perkins, Ross Mayfield, Dan Gillmor, USVP’s Paul Mateucci, and other great folks like Harry McCracken, Michael Kanellos.

Innovation journalism ...