One of my favorite conferences, Defrag, is really heating up. As always, Eric Norlin is doing a magnificent job of curating the agenda and already has some great headliners such as Esther Dyson, Paul Kedrosky, Vinnie Mirchandani, David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd, and Vivek Wadhwa.
Today, Jeff Ma agreed to keynote Defrag. From Eric’s blog post:
“Jeff Ma, who was the inspiration for the movie “21″ and the book “Bringing Down the House,” and is the author of the *awesome* new book, “The House Advantage” is coming to keynote Defrag. Besides being a world-famous card counter in the game of blackjack (which he, literally, can no longer play in casinos), Jeff has started several businesses (PROTRADE and Citizen Sports – which sold to Yahoo! in May of this year). Jeff’s current focus is on applying the laws of statistics to business in order to give managers, entrepreneurs and leaders an edge (hence, “The House Advantage”).”
I was re-introduced to Jeff recently through our mutual friend Niel Robertson, the CEO of Trada. I wrote about this, and Jeff’s great book, in my post The House Advantage. We’e talked about getting together – it might be that the first time our paths cross physically will be at Defrag on November 17th and 18th in Boulder.
Come join us – register now for the Early Bird Price which is good through September 30th.
When my partners and I started Foundry Group, one of our key principles was to be “theme-based investors.” At the time the phrase “theme” wasn’t being used in VC-land so we got to make up what it meant, at least for us. We decided that a theme was a “broadly horizontal technology area that would have dramatic impact and opportunity over the next 10+ years.” (see Jason Mendelson’s post titled What Is Thematic Investing for a deeper explanation.)
At Foundry Group, our themes have become our intellectual filter to the world of what we invest in. As a result, they are always evolving, expanding, and changing as we learn more and as technological innovation continues its tireless march. We try to spend as much time as we can rolling around in our themes, playing with stuff, spending time with smart people in each theme, and just thinking and talking about stuff.
Several years ago a guy named Eric Norlin reached out to me after I wrote a blog post in 2006 titled Intelligence Amplification and suggested we start a conference around the idea, but with a better name. The Defrag Conference resulted from that discussion, as did our now four year old collaboration with Eric and his conferences. Not surprisingly, since we referred to one of our popular themes as “Glue” it made sense to start a Glue Conference several years ago.
Last year Eric and I started talking about doing a conference around our human computer interaction theme. We’ve now made a number of investments in this theme, including Oblong, Organic Motion, EmSense, and Sifteo. It took Eric about a year to get comfortable that the timing was right, but he’s now ready to do it. As a result, he’s launched his latest conference – Blur.
The Blur Conference, like our human computer interaction theme, is based on the premise that the current models of human computer interaction are undergoing a rapid change. Technologies that were until recently science fiction or university lab projects are now showing up all over the place. From the promise of the tablet computer to touch computing to motion capture to augmented reality to the “minority report” interface, the ways in which we interact with computers are moving far beyond the keyboard and mouse.
Eric’s goal with Blur is to have it be massively participatory. Everyone will get to use all tech at Blur, hack on it, explore it with their colleagues, and figure out new and inventive ways to work with it. Because the goal of Blur is so participatory, Eric is going to limit the number of attendees in year one to only 250 to make sure he nails the experience.
Blur is taking place on February 22nd and 23rd at the Omni Orlando at Championsgate. The facility looks awesome and Eric assures me Florida is a lot warmer than Colorado in February. Early bird signup is up for $995 (the full price is going to be $1495) so get a jump on things if this floats your boat. I’ll be there!
Mobile Monday Colorado is hosting a member of the TechStars mentor family, Dion Almaer, for their July 19th event. Dion is Managing Director of Developer Relations at Palm (now part of HP). Besides his involvement with TechStars as a mentor, he is a celebrity in the AJAX community as the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, and previously held senior positions within Mozilla and Google. Dion will be able to shed some light on how the largest consumer device company in the world will be integrating WebOS into various product lineups including tablets and intelligent printers. He will talk about the direction of the WebOS operating environment specifically and the future of mobile and the web. It is sure to be a solid event worth checking out.
Early tomorrow morning, I’m heading out to San Francisco to spend two days at Google I/O 2010. I love technical conferences – the Google I/O 2010 agenda looks killer. I’m also on two panels – they’ve invited some VCs who code to participate in Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: VC panel moderated by standup comedian Twitter COO Dick Costolo and Making Freemium work – converting free users to paying customers moderated by Microsoft evangelist Google Developer Advocate Don Dodge.
Then, next week I’m spending two days in Boulder (well – Broomfield, but close enough) at the second annual Glue Conference. The agenda is also killer, is built around the Foundry Group’s Glue theme (e.g. it’s super relevant to us), and has a superb list of sponsors who will be attending and participating. Did I say the agenda was killer? The amazing thing about Glue is that the speakers are part of the conference – part of the reason we have it in Boulder is to drive deep multi-day engagement amount all attendees (speakers, attendees, and sponsors). Eric Norlin, who created Glue (and Defrag, and Blur) is a master at creating these types of specialty conferences.
I know many of my friends will be at both and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of folks that I have mostly an email relationship with. While you can’t get into Google I/O anymore, Glue is still open for registration. And Eric has set up a discount code of “googleio” for 10% off the conference price. Finally, to all my local Boulder and Denver friends that have been thinking about coming, your cost is about a round trip plane flight to the bay area and a night at a hotel, except this time everyone is coming to you. So come out and play!