Fluffy Spider Technologies has been developing embedded software since 1995. A pioneer in the industry, FST has a background in real-time systems, defense, and telecommunications. Between 1995 and 2000, FST translated this fundamental knowledge into producing outstanding solutions for some of Australia's leading process monitoring and control installations (BHP), defense subcontractors (GEC), and later within the emerging mobile telecommunications industry (Vodafone, Optus, and Telstra).

Advantech US is a development-stage company that's pursuing a disruptive roll-to-roll fabrication technology for producing thin-film electronic circuits at very low cost. The company will exploit this technology to manufacture active matrix backplanes for OEM sale and licensing in the developing organic light emitting diode (OLED) display industry.

Dataguise provides automated and advanced database security solutions to help ensure regulatory compliance and protect against data theft. Dataguise's dgdiscover focuses on sensitive data discovery and classification across the enterprise, while the dgmasker product solution provides secure masking of database content with unprecedented flexibility and functionality across heterogeneous environments.

iPipeline provides a next-generation suite of sales distribution software as a "clean technology" to the insurance and financial services markets through its on-demand service. iPipeline's channel solutions for carriers, distributors, and producers automate activities for quoting, forms processing, illustrations development, agency management, requirements ordering, contracting, and content distribution, letting the insurance industry market, sell, and process faster.

We kicked off day 2 of the STVP/AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford with a keynote from Doug Merritt, EVP at SAP. The message from Doug about cloud computing was clear: Change will be constant, the OnDemand model will continue to perform, this is just the beginning, and SAP will be there for the longhaul. This talk starts off with Tony Perkins' intro for the day and rolls right into Doug's talk.

It keeps you honest to get shaken in your boots once in awhile. I had just proudly penned a blog post call the “Join The Open Revolution!” when I was  confronted with the following passage in a book written by Jaron Lanier, the man who coined the phase “virtual reality” and made this year’s Time Magazine Top 100 most influential people.  His new book is called You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, and he expressed his fears  and frustrations right up front.