In this second part of a conversation with Puppet creator and Reductive Labs founder Luke Kanies, we talk about bootstrapping an open source company. More so than just finding a need and the code to fill it, Luke walks us through the personal risk management thinking he went ...

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 ...

In our startups in Bangalore series, we bring you a video interview with Professor Tom Binfod and Ione Binford, co-founders of Read-Ink Technologies. The moved to Bangalore more than five years ago to work on their handwriting recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) products.

What is it like to ...

Umang Gupta is CEO of Keynote Systems. I caught up with Umang at the Pan IIT Global Conference in July and talked to him about entrepreneurship and what it takes to do startups and run your business.

Umang wrote Oracle’s first business plan and went on to co-found Gupta Technologies and ...

We visit Scott Elrod (PARC) again to have a look at the new concentrated solar PV system designed at PARC with Solfocus, a start-up incubated at PARC. It’s a clever device that is designed to reduce the amount of silicon needed in PV systems per Watt produced.

I like ...

I love this interview with Scott Elrod, manager of the hardware systems group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, for short). PARC, under the creative and enthusiastic leadership of Elrod, has ventured into the clean technology area. Recently, PARC worked together with the start-up SolFocus on the development ...

Last week, we talked with Nick DeMonner, Lisa Hansen and Mike Minardi about the cookbook they’ve written that is aimed at start-ups. This week, we learn about their San Jose start-up, called BzzyBee. It’s an online collaborative writing tool for classrooms that lets teachers see how much students have ...

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 ...

The tech media and blogs buzzed recently over the launch of ooma, a Palo Alto start-up that’s promising free long distance calls for life. CEO Andrew Frame explains how ooma works (you need to buy a $400 box, first). And he answers questions about the cost of the box ...

Sam Sethi is a London-based technology entrepreneur and consultant. Sam recently launched BlogNation, a worldwide network of blogs focusing on Web 2.0, mobile and enterprise startup space in 22 countries around the world (except the United States).

Sam was known in the blogosphere for the good coverage he did at ...

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 ...

Proto.in is a bi-annual event in India that showcases technology start-up companies and innovative products.

Organised by The Knowledge Foundation, a national network of entrepreneurs and technology enthusiasts, the second edition will see participation from 23 startup companies carefully chosen from a list of 120 nominations. Each startup will get ...

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 ...

Everywhere you look, it seems, you’ll find another story on cleantech. If you’re curious about the investment community around this fast-growing (and increasingly-hyped) industry, you’ll want to hear what Erik Straser has to say.

Erik Straser leads the cleantech investment of Mohr Davidow Ventures. It’s his job to seek out promising start-ups in solar energy, biofuels, energy storage, industrial biotech and clean coal.

Raj Jaswa, president of The Indus Entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley chapter talks entrepreneurship in this interview. I was curious to find out about the early days in Silicon Valley (the late 1980s and early 1990s) when being an entrepreneur was not an easy task, especially if you were an ...

Apple’s iPhone has created quite a bit of hype in India since Steve Jobs unveiled it in January of this year. (India’s mobile phone market is growing by a few million subscribers every month.) I caught up with two techies — Thiyagarajan (Rajan) and Rajiv, who have their fingers on ...

Nishith Desai’s international law firm is a key player in India, specializing in tax law and strategy. His 30-year old company’s focus is on globalization of Indian corporations, international listings, M&A transactions, joint ventures and strategic alliances, complex information technology and business-process outsourcing transactions.

His company helped set up the ...

Anu Shukla is a serial entrepreneur who is currently busy with MyOfferPal, her third start-up, now in stealth mode (it recently received VC funding).

At the recent TiECon, Anu introduced and moderated the session with Meg Whitman, head of eBay. I caught up with Anu afterward to talk about entrepreneurship, ...

Business Technology is HP’s strategy for the enterprise. Olivier Helleboid, VP Adaptive Infrastructure at HP, talks about how customers have benefited from HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure approach. Learn how a company can use its information technology infrastructure as a strategic asset.

Learn more about HP’s Business Technology

Who hasn’t wished that customer service could be better online? A San Francisco start-up called Satisfaction will launch in the next month or so with the aim of improving online customer service by tapping the collective knowledge of users. The Web application is akin to message boards and will ...

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 ...

Sunil Maheshwari and Lekh Joshi are co-founders of Mango Technologies, a Bangalore- based mobile start-up. Both are first-time entrepreneurs who have 20 years of experience between them working for various mobile companies in India.

Sunil and Lekh are bullish about the growth opportunities for mobile companies in India, and believe ...