Villalpando’s the name, Edgar Villalpando. Double-oh-one, licensed to sell.

As Hollywood plays a game of Brett Favre with James Bond (will they or won’t they make another picture?) I figure I’m as eligible as the next guy to step in and flex my quads as a super sleuth. After all, I’m conversant in the cloud and if you haven’t heard, the cloud is the new playground for spies.

Forget video and games and data, the cloud is where spies are storing all the stuff they used to put on microfilm (how 1960s) or tape (how 1970s) or even on database servers (how 20th Century). Now a spook who’s gathered something important that he wants to share with his handlers need only upload it into a secure file on the cloud where it can safely sit out of sight—ready to be accessed by the next spy to come along with the password: “Paul sent me.”

Seriously, it seems that spies, always seemingly one step ahead of the rest of us when it comes to technology—or at least that’s what the movies would like us to think—are actually keeping right up with ActiveVideo with cloud-based information.

It makes as much sense as it does for a service provider. The cloud holds a lot; is easy to access; and delivers excellent quality. If it’s good enough for a movie or a television show—even some of the dreary summer fare the broadcast networks have been raining down on us—it’s certainly good enough for national secrets.

So, with a license to sell, I deliver these bullet points …

• The cloud is a super repository for all kinds of content that subscribers want.
• It’s easy to store material in the cloud.
• The cloud can be any size, as we demonstrated at CableLabs this week.

After all, I never joke about my work.

What if all of our brains were linked in the cloud? Think of how we can improve efficiency and help our coworkers. Rochelle walks us through a morning in which her brain is a part of the cloud and shows us how CloudTV™ powered applications, like Blockbuster, can harness the intelligence of the cloud.

The first time we laid eyes on the iPad, we immediately thought, “This would make a great CloudTV controller.” (Well, that wasn’t our immediate thought, which was more along the lines of “Holy crap, this thing is AWESOME.” But I digress.)

Adoption of interactive TV has long been held back, we believe, because of the most important part of the user experience: the control device. Traditional remote controls just don’t suit interactive TV as well as we’d like. And who wants to buy yet another keyboard and mouse, this time just to use with the TV? We associate those devices with work, and TV shouldn’t be work (unless you work at ActiveVideo, of course).

Why not instead use some cool, user-friendly devices that we already enjoy in our daily lives to also control an interactive TV experience? When we saw the iPhone and then the iPad, it was love at first sight (twice). We made it our mission to come up with an easy, powerful way for the iPad (or a smart phone like the iPhone) to control a CloudTV experience, and we think we have. In this video, I’ll show you an example: our iMozaic app, which makes TV more personal and interactive than you’ve ever imagined.

As you’ll also see in the video, my pals Remy the Remote and Palmer (guess what he is) aren’t too psyched about all of this, but I’ve given them a new home where they can complain and reminisce to their hearts’ content: a desk drawer.

Shopping at home is fun; we all do it on our PCs from time to time. Some of us even order products off of TV channels like HSN. Until now, though, if you saw something you liked on HSN, you had to get the product code and either call via telephone or order on your laptop. But what if you could order products from HSN as you watch, right on your TV? Our HSN Shop by Remote app for CloudTV does exactly that.

My old pal Remy the Remote and I were chillin’ at my crib one day, and while Remy was in more of a passive mood, I convinced him (or her?) to use HSN Shop by Remote to help me buy a nice leaf pendant. A few button presses later, my purchase was done! Later, while I was out, Remy got hold of the video camera and… well, you’ll see. Remy’s a handful in more ways than one.

Last week, sports news was more active—and interactive—than usual. Consider these events: The World Cup semifinals and finals, the LeBron James “Decision,” and, um, the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

I suspect there were a few old-timers who were watching these events without taking frequent glances at their laptop or mobile devices to chat with friends, read stories related to the events, view live blogs, or look for related video content. For the rest of us, though, it was one eye on the screen, one eye on… well, some other screen. Horror of horrors, for some it might even have meant walking back and forth to a whole-‘nother room to do so!

All of this got me to thinking about a cloud-based platform (I’m a marketer so repeat after me: “like CloudTV from ActiveVideo”) could enrich the viewing experience by giving us all the sports content and applications we’re looking for on a single screen. Some examples:

• If you’re a serious Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest viewer, then you were watching it in full HD on ESPN and you knew that six-time champ Takeru Kobayashi was embroiled in a contract dispute with the organizers. (Over hot dogs. Go figure.) ESPN couldn’t cut the mustard when it came to showing video of Kobi trying to crash the stage and getting hauled away by the NYPD, but you could have relished every moment if you’d been connected to the cloud. Your RSS feed would have delivered Deadspin’s video of the arrest as soon as it was available. You wouldn’t even need to look for it; it would be right on your TV, just waiting for you to press “play”.

• As a marketing bigshot, I was fascinated by all three rings of the LeBron James circus. But wouldn’t it have been great if the blogging and commentary and tweets around “The Decision” had been delivered to your TV screen, as the event happened? With a cloud-enabled TV, you wouldn’t even need to have toggled between apps. Your personalized apps—your social networks, your favorite blogs and news sites, your chat network, and of course, the ESPN show itself—would be right there on your TV screen.

• Same with the World Cup. There’d have been a red card or two if your kids had been toggling between TV apps just as Iniesta connected on Sunday. With the cloud, there would be access to a whole world of video, conversation, opinion, shopping and more—without interrupting the game itself.

The common thread: This isn’t “the Internet on your TV.” This isn’t a PC-like or browser-like experience on your TV. Rather, this is the Internet delivering content to your TV and becoming the coolest TV network ever.