One of the first Silicon Valley start-ups to go public in a long while–OpenTable–is expected to come to market this week, with venture firms hoping it will prove a tasty treat for Wall Street.

Whether the $42 million initial public offering of the online restaurant reservation service proves to be a bellwether or not is unclear since its business has–despite strong revenue gains over the last two years–run up operating losses for much of its lifespan of 10 years.

OpenTable’s last three months of results, though, have seen a small profit. It makes money primarily from fees from restaurants it gets for a variety of services.

Revenue for 2007 was $41.1 million and for 2008, $55.8 million.

OpenTable is most definitely a creature of Silicon Valley. Its CEO, Jeff Jordan, is a former top eBay (EBAY) exec, and one of its VC backers is Benchmark Capital, among others. Its venture funding has totaled about $50 million.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the San Francisco-based OpenTable is expected to price from $12 to $14 a share and then begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker stock symbol OPEN later this week.

Proceeds from the sale of three million shares, OpenTable has said in regulatory filings, will net it about $16.1 million, with 48 percent of shares being sold by existing shareholders.

The IPO, underwritten by Merrill Lynch & Co., would value the company at about $280 million, which is about five times its 2008 revenues.

(You can look at OpenTable’s initial public filing in January about the IPO here.)

In BoomTown’s ongoing series, “Microsofties on Parade,” I spent some time earlier this week with Stephen Elop (pictured here), president of Microsoft’s Business division.

Reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer, Elop is a newbie, having gotten to Microsoft (MSFT) only a year ago.

Which is why he is enthusiastic in his determination to tell the world that the software giant has gotten the open religion and is becoming “the most interoperable company in the world.”

Elop said that humdinger earlier this week, when he was in San Francisco for an onstage Q&A with Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo.

The statement was met by a show of “no” hands, after O’Reilly asked who in the audience thought that was true.

Still, Elop pressed on, also hinting that Microsoft’s Office products–Excel, PowerPoint, Word–could even be coming to the Apple (AAPL) iPhone.

“Not yet, keep watching,” said Elop, whose portfolio has purview over Office, as well as the Dynamics business applications division and Unified Communications products.

I suppose Elop can be that cheeky, after a lot of Silicon Valley experience as COO of Juniper Networks (JNPR) and CEO of Macromedia, which was acquired under his tenure by Adobe (ADBE).

Or, it could be that he knows from having five kids–including triplet 10-year-olds–that patience is a virtue and that there might be a day when more hands might shoot up.

In any case, here is a video interview I did with Elop, where he talks about making Microsoft a more open and innovative place, the changing business model of software and more:

At least he’s not going to Microsoft (MSFT)!

But nonetheless, sources said another major Yahoo tech exec and a longtime company veteran, Venkat Panchapakesan (pictured here), EVP of the Audience Technology Group, is readying his departure from the company.

This time, it’s to return to India, where he has long told colleagues he wanted to return.

Sources said Panchapakesan will not be leaving until the end of the summer, but “his departure is well along the road.”

At Yahoo (YHOO), Panchapakesan has most recently been responsible for the company’s overall product technology and platform strategy, such as its open efforts.

He’s an old-timer at Yahoo, having arrived in 1998, and has been involved in the development and execution of technologies for lots of Yahoo products, such as Mail, Flickr, Answers, Groups, Messenger and its content properties.

But recent reorganization of the tech unit, along with Panchapakesan’s interest in working in India, hurried along his leaving.

According to his profile on LinkedIn, Panchapakesan moved to Bangalore, India, to become the CEO of the Yahoo India R&D in 2003, returning in 2006.

Previous to Yahoo, he worked at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

Here’s a video interview I did yesterday at the San Francisco event where Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products.

BoomTown talked with the key movers of the initiatives: Ash Patel, Yahoo’s EVP of its Audience Product Division, and Tapan Bhat, its SVP of its Front Doors, Communities and Network Services.

(You can see screen shots and an official Yahoo video of the new features here.)

The initiatives Yahoo (YHOO) finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (see that video below too).

Yahoo also hosted a session at its Sunnyvale HQ about its open plans in the fall.

And, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.

The changes include some very deft rejiggering of Yahoo Mail, called a “smarter inbox,” with a new dashboard welcome page, easier ways to make connections, more filtered views, updates and third-party apps integrated into the application.

I thought the changes to the mail product were the most interesting, especially given the hundreds of millions of people using the product. It’s an interesting choice for a social entry point, aiming to give nonsocial-networking types enough of a taste of it without inundating them.

Of particular note were the third-party applications, such as for WordPress and Flickr, that launch nicely right in the email program.

Also cool was one app from Xoopit that surfaces old photos and photo links lost in the musty archives of old emails.

Yahoo also debuted an enhanced version of the homepage (previously announced in September) and My Yahoo, as well as a new toolbar and socialization elements added to its popular media properties.

It remains to be seen how popular these changes will become, especially since many consumers already have their social-networking lives on Facebook or MySpace.

In addition, both Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and Microsoft (MSFT) have rolled out similar social and open changes to their sites recently, making it super-confusing for everyone.

But, better late than never, I always say, so here’s Bhat and Patel talking about Yahoo’s new stuff.

I had to load the video onto YouTube, as Brightcove had snafus (also below is Yang talking about the concepts at CES in January 2008):

Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel

Jerry Yang at January 2008 CES

(BoomTown interviewed top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel about the moves here.)

For a look-see, here is a Yahoo (YHOO) video about the launch and some screenshots of the changes (click on the images to make them larger):

Yahoo’s Official Video on Open and Social Launches

Yahoo Mail Main Page

Yahoo Mail Inbox

Xoopit in Yahoo Mail

Toolbar Notifications

Media Integration in Yahoo TV site

Open Applications

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless (VZ) CEO Lowell McAdam jointly. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds and high prices.

The video of the interview is in three parts, all of which I will post this week.

In this second part, McAdam talks about the wireless giant’s open network initiatives and the impact of aggressive efforts by Google (GOOG) in the space, termination fees and subsidy issues, while Martin discusses the key issues the FCC will be facing, including the transition of the broadcast industry from analog to digital and network neutrality.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless (VZ) CEO Lowell McAdam jointly. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds and high prices.

The video of the interview is in three parts, all of which I will post this week.

In this first part, Martin talks about why broadband speed is so slow and prices are so high (the U.S. apparently has density issues!), the difficulty of getting consensus in Washington, D.C. and more open wireless networks, while McAdams discusses the challenges with local governments.

In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.

At first, the beta–current users can register to try it here–will take place in the United States, Brazil, India, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–that will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.

It is also Yahoo’s first attempt at leveraging and integrating technology from its $350 million acquisition of open-source email and calendaring company Zimbra just over a year ago.

And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.

That lack of innovation has resulted in major inroads in recent years by newer entrants like Google, whose calendar launched with more modern features, like color-coding, easy sharing and drag-and-drop functionality.

With its renovation, which is based on open standards, the updated calendar from Yahoo (YHOO) now has these kinds of features and also works more seamlessly with Yahoo’s powerful email product, Yahoo! Mail, which has 278 million users.

The new Yahoo calendar is built on the Zimbra platform, which uses Ajax functionality in its online calendars and iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV3 standards.

That makes it interoperable with other online calendar services, including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Time Warner’s AOL and Google.

One of the cooler features is the ability to zoom-in and zoom-out from a monthly wall calendar view to a single event.

In addition, Yahoo’s new calendar can integrate pictures from its Flickr photo community and also has a “to-do” list.

As the beta is rolled out further in the coming months, Yahoo will add additional synching and event discovery features.

I talked about all this today with Yahoo SVP Scott Dietzen, who came to the company with the Zimbra acquisition and now is in charge of all communications products at Yahoo.

Here is the video interview I did with him:

And here are the screenshots of the new calendar, along with one of the old calendar, for comparison (click on images to make them larger):

The old main Yahoo calendar

The new main Yahoo calendar

The “zoom” feature

The integration with Flickr

The Upcoming.org integration

Yesterday, Yahoo trotted out a range of top execs who were unusually loquacious at its “open house,” where the company made a valiant effort to explain an aggressive strategy to open up its platform and products.

In an attempt to redefine and refocus itself, Yahoo has correctly wed itself to the trend toward more-open platforms, rather than locking consumers into its once tightly closed portal gates.

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to search and ad infrastructure. Now it is trying to show that it can be open all over the company.

BoomTown liveblogged the event, here and here, but nothing is as good as hearing all about it from the horse’s mouth. Or, in this case, the Yahoos’ mouths.

So here are video interviews I did with a range of Yahoo’s top execs, including Audience Product Division EVP Ash Patel, Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore (who cleverly used a Barbara Mandrell line to explain Yahoo’s open strategy), social media guru Marc Davis, Yahoo! Mail kingpin Scott Dietzen, Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries and PR minion Brad Williams:

BoomTown is thinking of starting a drinking game wherein the group gathered at Yahoo’s “Open House” media event this morning takes a shot of Cuervo every time an exec says “open.”

Except, everyone would be drunker than drunk by now if that was the case, as Yahoo lays out strategies to open its platform and all its products to the whole wide world.

That would be developers, publishers, advertisers, content creators and my mother.

OK, not her, since she cannot turn on a computer. But definitely everyone else.

As Yahoo U.S. VP Hilary Schneider noted, the main benefit for Yahoo (YHOO) ad clients of Yahoo becoming more open and allowing them to buy and target ads more easily: “It’s more access, better [return on investment], and it gives the advertiser a better experience.”

It’s also easier. “What an advertiser wants to do is reach target consumers, and they want to do it without working with a lot of different silos,” she said.

While Schneider (pictured here) was not specific in any substantive way–more to come next month, apparently–about what that ad system eventually looks like, streamlining and automating Yahoo’s often confusing ad process is critical to improved financial results.

She also skittered rather quickly through any specifics about the company’s controversial Google (GOOG) deal, in which Yahoo is outsourcing some of its search-ad business, making it sound peachy-keen for advertisers and not scary in any way.

Next up was Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries, who had not been expected to present, to talk about Yahoo’s mobile strategy.

“Open for us in mobile is not only a strategy, but a necessity,” said Boerries (pictured here), who also showed off a more open mobile home page that users could customize in any way.

He also talked about more openness for Yahoo’s Blueprint mobile development platform, which lets third-party developers create standalone applications, as well as its oneConnect, which debuted yesterday.

Yahoo has described the service as an “evolutionary new social address book that brings together a user’s circle of friends, their lives and all the ways they communicate into one seamless, easy-to-use application.”

Essentially, it is a social-networking aggregation play, which is a good thing to do given that Yahoo does not have a true social-networking play.

Next up: Video of demos!

Okay, BoomTown arrived late to Yahoo’s media event this morning to show off its “open” strategies across its properties (I had a most excellent excuse in that it was my youngest son’s very first day of school).

So, walking in, it was kind of jarring to hear Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore talking about an email demo that had preceded his presentation–and which he had missed himself–about adding social elements.

“I always think of the media properties as the sexy [part of Yahoo],” said Moore. “But that kind of made mail sexy.”

Sexy email! Yahoo is saved!

Well, the jury is still out on that.

But it was nice to see Yahoo execs actually talking about the various products they’re working on at the troubled company rather than seeing them hide away in fear of questions about proxy fights and hostile takeovers.

That has, of course, been the only story of Yahoo (YHOO) for far too long–about corporate and management turmoil, as well as worrisome stock declines.

Because of that, it is obviously in Yahoo’s best interests to change the narrative and talk about the product innovations it is making to reinvigorate itself.

Thus, Moore (pictured here) showed off a new look for Yahoo’s news properties, including substantially more third-party content integration and interchangeable modules.

It’s not a new idea, by any stretch, but it looks like a good change.

“Our users are in control,” said Moore. “We’re not doing this open thing because it is the flavor of the month.”

Added Moore, co-opting the famous line from country singer Barbara Mandrell: “We were open before open was cool.”

Sexy! Well, not really, but nice try!

Next up, Yahoo U.S. EVP Hilary Schneider on open in advertising and the Google (GOOG) deal.

Yahoo–because it has decided its living-inside-a-cave press strategy has been, shall we say, a bust–has invited a passel of media tomorrow to its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ and will trot out a range of top execs to talk specifically about the various facets of its “open” strategy.

In an attempt to redefine and refocus itself, Yahoo has correctly wed itself to the trend toward more-open platforms, rather than locking consumers into its once tightly closed portal gates.

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to its search and ad infrastructure. Now it is trying to show that it can be open all over the company.

Neither CEO Jerry Yang nor President Sue Decker will be at tomorrow’s event (he is at a Cisco board meeting, while she is in London–and BoomTown now sounds like the official Yahoo exec stalker). But the company will feature many key players.

The gathering will be kicked off by Yahoo’s CTO, Ari Balogh, for example, who has been a prime mover in the company’s open-platform strategy.

Also on deck: Yahoo Audience Product Division EVP Ash Patel, who will be talking about the opening up of platforms and products like email; Hilary Scheider, Yahoo U.S. EVP, who will discuss opening up Yahoo’s ad business; Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore, who will cover how Yahoo’s content properties integrate third-party partners and also become more distributed; and Marc Davis, Yahoo’s “social media guru” in its Connected Life division, who will do the open dance related to mobile.

As I have previously written, this kind of conceptual shift toward open platforms is something many have felt Yahoo has needed to do in a bolder manner, as consumer interest in massive centralized portals like Yahoo has waned.

Following in the path of start-ups like Facebook, the vision is of a more widgetized and social Yahoo and a Yahoo available everywhere.

Yang has also made open a core Yahoo strategy, saying at one point:

“These key strategies will be enhanced by our adoption of new, more open technology platforms that will encourage the development of new applications and the involvement of third-party developers–and help enrich the user experience.”

Now if Yahoo could just open up a can of excitement to jack up its moribund stock price-now in the $17 range again–things would really be looking up.