Great post by John Shiple. He talks about a bunch of the different networking events that occur in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. In his post, he mentions the following events / event organizers, and you should visit his post for a bit more on each of them. LA CTO Forum Dealmaker Media Digital Family Reunion Startups Uncensored Social Media Club, LA Twiistup Mindshare LA LA Hadoop Meetup Dorkbot Geek Dinners LA Cloud Computing LA Web Application

Another thing that helped him is that he built relationships before he needed them. Previously, he founded Xinjun Software Limited, where he developed an online gaming platform that connected gamers across mainland China. How to create the one business relationship that will help easily win over others. If you like this interview, vote for it on Hacker News . Imagine if you wanted to start a business and you were able to brainstorm ideas and put together your plan with some of the top internet entrepreneurs, like Max Levchin (PayPal), James Hong (HOTorNOT), and

Varien leverages the power of Open Source technology to help online merchants fulfill their business goals. Blogging helped establish their reputation The feedback that we get obviously helps kind of build that vision and the strategy. Roy Rubin was a student trying to make extra money on the side when he founded Varien, the company that went on to launch Magento, an ecommerce platform that enables billions of dollars in online sales. He came to Mixergy to talk about why Varien grew (it had a lot to do with focus) and how the company launched Magento (his developers

I've helped organize the Los Angeles CTO Forum for almost 10 years. This is a private group of CTOs who are responsible for software development within their companies. They are generally the senior most person responsible for custom software development, database design, database administration, web development, etc. In a recent conversation with a fellow CTO, we lamented about the fact that while there's very active software development and web development going on in Southern California and West As part of doing that, I've had the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different chief technical officers from different kinds of companies over those years.

San Diego-based KidZui, a venture-backed startup which develops a kid-safe Internet browser, said Monday that it has added new social networking features and homework help to the firm's suite of services. In addition, KidZui rolled out a homework help tool which allows kids to find information about subjects they are studying at school. According to KidZui, the new categorized KidZui--which is venture backed by Maveron, Emergence Capital Partners and First Round Capital--said that it will let kids aged 3-12 keep up and connect with their friends, express feelings and opinions, and share content.

El Segundo-based iRise, a maker of software for prototyping web applications and software, is targeting ecommerce retailers with a new set of templates, the firm said Wednesday. According to iRise, it has made pre-configured, business software visualization templates for the firm's products available to ecommerce retailers. The templates help online retailers work through visualization According to iRise, the new templates are available at no charge. iRise provides software which are used by product managers and others to define and create web applications; those definitions

Pasadena-based X1 Technologies, a developer of desktop and enterprise search software, is setting its sights on the eDiscovery market, saying this morning that it has created a new offering specifically aimed at the eDiscovery market. The new tool is focused on helping companies who need to produce electronic documents, due to lawsuits. Cost X1 said it has built a solution, based on its X1 enterprise search technology and professional services, called X1 eDiscovery Search Suite. X1 said the new software will be available in late Q1, with early release available for preview to pre-qualified

Aliso Viejo-based Quest Software disclosed this morning that the firm is planning its own, e-discovery software, which it said it will launch in the third quarter of the year. discovery software is used by companies to store and manage documents and records in relation to legal actions. According to Quest, its e-Discovery Manager will help IT, HR, records managers, and legal investigations E-discovery Pricing on the new software was not released.

Aliso Viejo-based Quest Software said today that it has released new software aimed at the storage resource management market. According to Quest, the firm's new product, Storage Horizon, measures storage usage, helps with provisioning, and provides automated storage analysis and reporting. The SRM product comes from Quest's acquisition of storage software provider MonoSphere in January of this year. The new product is the firm's first product addressing the storage resource management (SRM) market. MonoSphere was venture backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Intel

Los Angeles-based SOA Software, which develops software for the enterprise SOA market, said today that the firm has partnered with Compuware, a provider of software and services for the IT market. SOA software develops products used to manage and build service-oriented-architecture (SOA) projects; Compuware will provide expertise and services in the mainframe industry. According to the firms, the two will partner on accelerating adoption of mainframe SOA. SOA is a set of standards based on XML and SOAP used to connect information from enterprise software products.