Mike Maney

Tag: conference

  • MapMy(Beer)Run

    So here’s the deal: Last year, Matt Helmke and I undertook an epic multi-state beer run from Philadelphia to Portland to attend Monktoberfest. Along the way, we made like Zane Lamprey and Pleepleus by stopping at a number of craft breweries. At each stop, we interviewed the head brewer and put a case or two of their tasty beer into the back of my Tahoe. We arrived in Portland with close to 13 cases of Dogfish Head, River Horse, Old Burnside and Harpoon to share with attendees (on top of all of the ridiculously crazy good beer provided by Steve and the Redmonk crew).

    This year, we’re making the same Philadelphia-to-Portland run…with a twist.

    Come to find out, there’s a site that let’s you plug in your origin and destination and it spits out a map showing the breweries along your route. Which got me thinking: Why not let the Monktoberfest participants decide which breweries to visit on our annual pilgrimage?

    So, take a look at the map. Study it. Then tweet out your top five choices (copying me @the_spinmd). Voting closes at the end of happy hour (ET) on Friday, 9/13. I’ll then tally the responses, gas up the truck and make like The Bandit.

  • Gluecon 2013: It’s Not the Things

    It’s not the things. It’s the things that make the things work.

    That’s the core of Gluecon, one of a very select few conferences that are on my must-attend-at-all-costs list. Held every May in Broomfield, Co., Gluecon brings together a who’s who of the tech industry’s smartest people. You won’t find a Zuckerberg, Mayer or Brin, but you will find a Hoff, Merling and Cockroft — the sort of people who are building and running the core infrastructure that enables the world we all live. Household names? Maybe not. But high Q scores among those who follow cloud computing and APIs (and, I suspect, equally strong Little Bird influence rankings).

     

    As I looked through this year’s attendee list (using an awesome app developed by Full Contact), there was noticeable shift from year’s past in the type of developer and company attending Glue. Where past conferences had a healthy smattering of long tail developers, this year seems to have a robust profile of enterprise folks (something I also saw reflected in the agenda). The reason, in my opinion, is that we are finally seeing the enterprise wake up to power of things like the cloud and APIs. But instead of seeing power in apps, like we saw in the last wave, they are finding opportunity in new business models.