My partner Seth Levine just put up a post about our "Glue" theme on the Foundry Group blog.
In our continuing series discussing some of our investment themes, we’d like to introduce a topic that we’re calling “glue”. Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies. As this ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, this “glue” layer of the Internet is becoming more and more core to overall web infrastructure.
This is a theme that we’ve stuck with for a while. Seth draws the analogy to EAI and the emergence of enterprise glue in the 1998 – 2001 time frame. We think there are lots of different types of glue, so we’ve once again started a conference with Eric Norlin – this time called the Glue Conference. Gluecon will be modeled after Defrag – it’ll be a place for smart people to hang out and talk about glue, and hopefully stick together (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) as they work on creating some interesting things.
Take a look at Seth’s longer post on Glue and tell us what you think.