Last Friday, BoomTown paid a visit to James Joaquin, who has just been officially appointed the new CEO of Foxmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed start-up that makes a free bookmarking and password syncing add-on for the Firefox browser.

The San Francisco-based company had also has gotten $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures earlier this summer. Initially, Foxmarks had been founded and seed-funded by Kapor, the well-known tech entrepreneur, and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

With the arrival of Joaquin, Foxmarks is trying to move into a mode of carving out a business with its assets, including using its data and expanding beyond the Firefox browser.

Here is the video interview with Joaquin about all that and more:

Former Yahoo Senior Vice President Tim Cadogan will take the CEO job at OpenX, the popular open-source ad server start-up, backed by Index Ventures, Accel Partners and others.

As part of the change, the company will move from its London HQ to Los Angeles. OpenX has about 30 employees, including 10 developers in Poland, but not all will be moving West.

Cadogan was with Yahoo (YHOO) for five years, in its search unit and later as SVP for ad products, including playing an important role in the launch of its Panama ad search product. Previously, he was an early member of the GoTo.com team and went to Yahoo just before it acquired Overture.

Cadogan will now run OpenX (which recently changed its name from OpenAds), which makes the leading open-source ad serving software, catering to about 30,000 Web publishers on 100,000 Web sites in more than 100 countries.

Until now, OpenX has been helmed by James Bilefield, another former Yahoo exec, who was also VP of Global Business Development and GM of European operations for Skype.

OpenX has raised about $21 million in funding since 2007. Besides Index and Accel, other investors include First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Former AOL head Jon Miller also recently joined its board as chairman.

“With open-source software, there is a lot of potential for business disruption and to open up the market,” said Cadogan in an interview with BoomTown from London. “You have not really seen open-source models really applied to the ad space until now…but there is a big business in giving publishers a really robust offering and a platform where they can also share what they build.”

While he is not exactly minty fresh–in fact, the founder and CEO of Mint is much more circumspect and cool than any 26-year-old I have met recently–Patzer does stand out in a sea of over-touting Web 2.0 entrepreneurs as someone who might actually have created a business with some substance to it.

Rather than offering dopey widgets that let you throw food at each other or yet another version of a social network or the umpteenth music download-share-compare whatever, Mint feels different.

The free Web-based service is aimed at a younger demographic interested in finding a way to manage money better, in learning about their spending habits, in being alerted to unusual activity and even in saving some cash by finding better rates on things like bank accounts and credit cards.

It might sound crazy in these frothy Web times, but the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up certainly has the potential to be actually useful and relevant to consumers and has a doesn’t-make-me-scoff-out-loud business plan that focuses on lead generation for sponsors.

Mint now claims 100,000 users since its launch last fall and is expanding its features to allow users to track investments, student loans and mortgages soon too.

Mint has not escaped the bubble, of course, having received about $5 million in funding from Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and a number of prominent angel investors, such as Ron Conway and former Yahoo exec Geoff Ralston. That’s a lot of money for a company with a lot of possible pitfalls.

While there are a few Web competitors, such as Wesabe, the biggest challenge is that Patzer is taking aim at desktop software packages like Intuit’s Quicken and Microsoft’s Money. The pluses of those solutions is that users feel more secure when financial data lives locally than they might loading it up to the Web.

More significantly, giants like Intuit are moving services online too, as with the recent Quicken Online, which makes for a mighty foe to Mint.

Still, Intuit has been woefully slow online and Patzer is obviously nimbler. And he counters that he is using heavy-duty encryption, as well as a number of methods to keep data anonymous, which make the information safe.

Well, we’ll see how it all turns out, as everyone is going to have to battle security concerns and convince people to trust them with important financial information on the Internet. But, it is clear that it is an interesting space to watch.

And, better still, it is–thank you, thank you–not a food fight.

Here is the video I shot with “Mint Guy” Patzer during lunch this past week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Mint was showing off its service a bit: