Mike Maney

Tag: gluecon

  • In Pictures: Defrag X

    It’s taken me longer than I expected to write this post. It’s been a decade since Eric and Kim Norlin sent out the first registration link for a small Denver-based conference called Defrag. 10 years for a tech conference is a helluva run.

    Defrag had a long run because Eric and Kim made it something special. Attendees never knew what to expect from the agenda other than it would be mind-expanding and changing until about two weeks out. Unlike many conferences, the talks weren’t chosen by committee. They were chosen by whatever Eric saw coming down the pipe that the community might need to get in front of. From connections between housing starts and ladders falling off of trucks at one exit in Los Angeles to tales of dinner table conversations with computing greats and cosmonauts in training…Defrag never disappointed.

    Luckily, much of what made Defrag great will carry on at Eric and Kim’s other long-running conference: Gluecon. Different time of the year (May instead of November), but same Bat channel. If you’ve never attended, I encourage you to register and come prepared to learn from some of the smartest people in the business.

    And, if you’re like me and have been to more Defrag’s and Glue’s than you can count, I’ll see you, my friends, in May at the Omni.

     

     

  • 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.

  • The Blur(con)ing of Human Computer Interaction

    blurcon

    I’ve never made any excuses for being a big fan and supporter of the conferences organized by Eric and Kim Norlin (and their dedicated group of pool hustlers family and friends who make the events run smoothly). I still have a brainache from my first Defrag. And Alcatel-Lucent (my employer) is putting serious weight behind Gluecon this year, a conference that has become *the* must-attend gathering for developers working with the APIs and the cloud.

    This year Eric and Kim also introduced a new conference. It’s called Blurcon. And I am highly bummed I’m not going to make it (crazy travel schedule). What is Blurcon? Let’s let Eric describe it in his own words:

    …we stand on the verge of a major revolution in the models of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A revolution that will fly right past academic and into a world of retail, medical, gaming, military, public event, sporting, personal and marketing applications. From multi-touch to motion capture to spatial operating environments, over the next 10 years, everything we know about HCI will change.

    Take a look at the agenda for day one. If you can get to the Orlando area in February and you’d like to stretch the gray matter in your head to the point of breaking, get yourself registered for Blurcon.

  • Futuregeek

    This is what the lid of a beat up, old ThinkPad x570 should look like. It’s like the mullet of laptops: business on the lid, Webkinz on the inside

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