Valley View: Tune In For Hot Trends, Cool ToysValley View: Tune In For Hot Trends, Cool Toys

The Valley View episode discussed in this article was filmed on December 7, 2011. The full archive of the show can be seen in the video embedded at the bottom of this page.

This week, information debuts a new show, called Valley View, streamed live from our San Francisco headquarters. Our lineup of guests includes HP Chairman Ray Lane, Box.net CEO Aaron Levie, and Omar Baldonado, the head of product management for BigSwitch, a company that has become synonymous with OpenFlow, the hottest topic in data center networking.

But that's not all. Tis the season, so we'll help you with some of your holiday shopping, especially for the technology lover in your life. We'll be showcasing some of the hottest new gadgets in technology -- from companies like Zeo, Logitech, Solar JOOS, dBLogic, Looxcie, Roku, Gameloft, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

By the way, we're going to give many of those toys away to our online viewing audience.

While anyone can view the Valley View livestream, you must register to be eligible to win some of the holiday gift bags--but don't worry, it's a quick and easy (short form) registration.

HP's Ray Lane, who is also a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has been in Silicon Valley for a long time. He and HP CEO Meg Whitman have a formidable challenge in front of them, which includes recapturing HP's reputation as an innovator and creator of technology. Lane and the HP board installed Whitman less than three months ago and already the new CEO has made some quick, tough decisions, spoken plainly about the rocky road the company has been on--and will continue to be on for the next year or more. Whitman recently said that the company would invest more in R&D, and that 2012 would be a bit of a rebuilding year for HP.

We'll ask Lane about some of the company's latest moves and about his confidence in Whitman's ability to instill enthusiasm within HP. Just two weeks before the HP board ousted former CEO Leo Apotheker, Ray Lane came to our information 500 conference and spoke clearly about some of HP's missteps, defended its strategy, and painted a rosy picture of the company's future. It was a dynamic and exciting conversation at a very unstable time in the company's journey, and Lane did not shy away from it. I expect more of the same on Valley View.

Box.net CEO Aaron Levie also doesn't shy away from controversy. While his company is often seen as a competitor to the likes of DropBox, Levie has his sights set on companies like Microsoft and Oracle--purveyors of what he has cast as antiquated software stacks. Instead, Levie sees businesses wanting to put collaboration at the center of end user computing experiences. Levie is not only full of energy about collaboration, but also loves to take a few shots at his competitors, often to great comic effect. We'll also ask Levie to go beyond the rhetoric and actually show us how Box.net accomplishes what he espouses.

Finally, we want to geek out a little on Valley View, so we've picked one of the hottest data center networking topics: OpenFlow. This is an emerging standard made for the modern era of virtualized server environments. As a software-defined way of controlling the flow of traffic, it completely changes network architectures. BigSwitch is one of the early players with actual product, and its founders have been in on the birth of OpenFlow. We've asked the company to show us how it works and they'll be doing so on the Valley View Whiteboard with information's Art Wittmann, who has written about the promise of OpenFlow.

We hope you'll join us. The show will be archived, and we'll also publish each of the segments for your viewing pleasure; if you'd like to do a little background reading before the show, we've posted many related articles on the Valley View page.

We'll broadcast Valley View monthly to start, and we're already working on our lineup for January and February. So stay tuned.