Periodically I promote the conferences we helped create with Eric Norlin – Defrag , Glue , and most recently Blur. If you’ve been to any of these conferences, you know why I get so excited about them – it’s a chance for me and my partners to spend two days immersed in a theme we are investing in while surrounded with some of the smartest people working in that area. ...
Suddenly, browsers are interesting again. Well – in my little corner of the world they’ve been interesting for a while, but suddenly when I look at the dock on my Mac I notice Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Rockmelt. And yes – I use / play around with each of them regularly. Recently, Wired declared that the Web is dead. Nice cover bait, but whatever. It’s not dead – like everything on the Web, it’s continuing to evolve at a dramatic pace. My friends organizing Add-On-Con 2010 tossed up a nice call to action recently titled Embracing Change Add-On-Con 2010 . The short message – there is more opportunity than ever for browser add-ons, but the add-on community needs to rapidly evolve along with the Web especially given the appification of everything . ...
Eric Norlin is a conference master organizer. The original conference we helped Eric create – Defrag – is happening for the fourth time in ten days in Boulder (11/17-11/18). I know of several major announcements that are happening around the conference along with a long list of amazing people that are attending that I’ll get to hang out with for two days. In the run up to Defrag , something awesome happened last week as Eric continues to work on the two other conferences he runs – Glue and Blur. Alcatel-Lucent signed on to be the Community Underwriter and Partner Sponsor of Gluecon 2011. ...
The Defrag Conference is happening in Boulder on Wednesday November 17th and Thursday November 18th and is looking like it will be the best one yet. If you haven’t yet registered, use the code “foundry2” to take 15% off of your registration. The confirmed Keynote Speakers include: Alex Wright addressing the “deep history” of Oral Culture and Social Networks Stowe Boyd speaking about “social cognition” Esther Dyson on Exploration and innovation Dion Hinchcliffe on the future of social analytics Jeff Ma on Business Lessons from the Blackjack Table David Weinberger on the Philosophy of Knowing Paul Kedrosky talking about Monkeys, Typewriters and Data Jeff Jonas on Organizations Getting Dumber, and IT’s to Blame JP Rangaswami on Information as seen through the eyes of a Foodie And that’s just some of the keynotes. Toss in a bunch of networking, lots of stimulating discussion, and breakouts that cover everything from APIs to shifting to the Cloud to Social Media Analytics to the Social Customer and it’s shaping up to be dynamite. ...
While I’m not able to attend because I’ll be out of town, I was intrigued by the invite to the Wisdom 2.0 Boulder conference that I got last week. Alan Kaplan, a local Boulder entrepreneur, introduced me to the organizer (Soren Gordhamer). While I don’t know Soren, I like the idea and agenda for the conference and think a few of the folks he’s invited to speak, including Leah Pearlman (Facebook), Alex Bogusky (co-founder of Crispin Porter + Bogusky), and Gopi Kallayil (Google), look great. ...
After flying home on an extremely early flight from Tahoe, having lunch with Amy, and then taking a nap, I’ve been pondering why I thought the Tahoe Tech Talk Conference was so powerful. As you may know, I’m not generally a conference goer, usually focus on tech-oriented conferences like the ones we’ve helped create (Defrag , Glue, and Blur), and rarely can sit still for an entire day. Yesterday was an exception – other than a few short phone calls I managed to stay in the conference room at #TTT for the entire day. ...
The Kauffman Foundation just announced that they are providing 15 scholarships to Defrag. If you are an entrepreneur running a startup that is pre-Series A funding, you are eligible for a scholarship. Kauffman will cover the full cost of the conference pass – all you have to do is get to the conference and find a place to sleep. I’m hugely appreciative that Kauffman has stepped up to do this. Conferences are not cheap and it’s a big expense for a company that has no funding. On the other hand, it’s an incredible networking and learning opportunity for a startup that’s addressing issues in the ecosystem that Defrag covers. Paul Kedrosky had a big hand in this and has been super helpful to Eric Norlin at Defrag from the beginning – thanks Paul – you are a star. ...
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”).” ...
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.) ...
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.