Sitting in the hallway outside the press room at the Web 2.0 conference here in Boston I noticed this fresh-faced looking kid wearing blok-square glasses and a blue shirt with Apatar embroidered across the back, pacing up and down in front of me. Haltingly he took a stab at conversation when I opened my banana. "Healthy lunch," he said. "Fast lunch," I said, looking down at my laptop to indicate my busy state of being.

A good 10 minutes went by and I noticed the kid again, pacing, trying to catch my eye. I even felt a minute of panic, like maybe he was someone I should be concerned about, some sort of stalker. Turns out he just wanted to pitch me about his company, Apatar. The company develops software to help business users, database administrators and mash-up developers to move data in and out of a variety of data sources and formats using software that requires no programming, according to literature the kid handed me. Essentially the company provides an open-source repository of meta data, listed on SourceForge, that lets users map data from one source to another and send it out through RSS feeds, or to other Web 2.0 collaboration venues, without utilizing costly middleware.

The CEO of Apatar, Renat Khasanshyn (our names are almost the same, he pointed out) explained how Apatar works, a process that I am summarizing through the company's data sheet: Visual job designer and mapping enables non-developers to design and perform ETL (extract, transform, load) transformations. Connectors include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL, FTP, XML, flat files, SugarCRM, Salesforce.com and Amazon S3.

In business for about a year-and-a-half and on SourceForge for four months, Apatar has three pretty big name beta customers that escape me at the moment. While the repository is available for free download, like any open-source company, Khasanshyn plans to make his money through services first and then through an exchange, much like Salesforce.com's AppExchange, where Apatar's partners build data maps and sell them. After he makes enough money with Apatar, Khasanshyn plans to get an MBA from Harvard, return to his alma mater in Russia to get his "paper"--the BA he never finished, I am assuming--and then become a venture capitalist investing in Eastern European companies. It's a heady vision.

"Can I ask you a personal question? I said. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-six," said Khasanshyn. "This is my third company."

During his college years back in Minsk, Khasanshyn started a travel company, buying up blocks of unused college dorms in Moscow during the summer months and offering a weekend trip for $30 to students looking for a little fun in the big city. After coming to the United States he worked in a restaurant in Florida serving steaks and seafood, riding his bike home at night after work. Then some friends told him he should head to Massachusetts, live in a cheap little town outside of Boston where there was a lot happening in technology, Khasanshyn's area of study in college. Once settled near Boston he started an IT outsourcing company, Altoros Systems, building software that was helpful but of no real consequence for bigger companies.

When he realized the limitations inherent in providing software products and life cycle management services to other software vendors--he couldn't build Altoros into a company with 1,000 or 5,000 employees--Khasanshyn figured he had enough know-how to develop his own software company, the genesis of Apatar.