Glue

The Glue Conference is happening again this year on May 23rd and May 24th in Boulder, CO. This is the awesome conference that Eric Norlin puts on around our Glue theme . 500+ people obsessed about mobile app development, cloud computing, and big data are going to be there this year. As part of the conference, Eric provides 15 early-stage startups with FREE exhibit space. Did I say FREE? Yes FREE! Alcatel-Lucent acts as the Community Underwriter for Gluecon and funds this activity. ...

Last week we announced our investment in Awe.sm . It’s squarely in our Glue and Protocol themes and is similar to investments we’ve made in SendGrid (for transactional email infrastructure) and Urban Airship (for push notification infrastructure). Oh – and the founders – Jonathan Strauss and Laurie Voss are – well – awesome. We love things that wire the web together and believe Awe.sm is the company to do that for the construct of “sharing.” Specifically, Awe.sm’s goal is to become the key infrastructure provider powering quantitative performance marketing across the social sharing channel. ...

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. ...

In March I wrote about Standing Cloud ‘s public launch of a free service to test drive open source applications. As reported today in TechCrunch, Standing Cloud has now launched it’s Business Edition , a service that enables users to also host applications on any of four cloud providers. As with the free edition, they have made it remarkably easy to get started: you register (including providing payment information), select your cloud provider and application, and go. Currently, the easiest setup is with Rackspace, where Standing Cloud can automatically assign a billing account to you; this easy setup is coming soon for GoGrid and Amazon EC2. ...

We recently invested in a Seattle company called BigDoor Media . The founder/CEO Keith Smith wrote a wonderful love story about the deal which was picked up by the WSJ VC Dispatch in a post titled A Summer Romance Between Founder And Venture Capitalist . Yes, I’ve fallen in love (in a very non-sexual way) with Keith, his co-founder Jeff Malek, and BigDoor. Over the past year I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the idea that the computers are going to take over. I’ve even begun to think that we are already working for them. So – why not have fun while we are at it? By using a light weight API approach, BigDoor enables any non-game publisher to quickly integrate game mechanics such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency, and virtual goods into their web and mobile applications. They’ve already rolled out integrations with Cheezburger Networks and BuddyTV and have a pile of additional publishers launching in the next 90 days. ...

I’m at the Glue Conference all day. So far, it’s far exceeded my already high expectations. I’m now sitting in the API track and the first two presentations have been dynamite. Clay Loveless from Mashery just did a presentation titled “5 Things I Hate About Your API-TOS“. He nailed it. Here are his top five (most important last), along with some commentary from me. For simplicity, I’ll call the company providing the API’s the “platform company” and the companies using the API as the “ecosystem partners.” Also – I’m not picking sides here as I’m an investor in both “platform companies” and “ecosystem partners”. Rather, I’m just trying to summarize Clay’s points, bring out a few ideas, and give you a sense of the kind of stuff we are talking about at Glue. ...

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. ...

I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue . Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up. If you are familiar with Defrag and Glue, you know they are built around two of Foundry Group’s themes (Protocol and Glue respectively). Blur is being built around our Human Computer Interaction theme, but with a twist. Instead of simply being able to “see cool stuff up close”, our goal with Blur will be to create an environment where you can actually use and work with this stuff. We’ll have user-oriented demos, hackathons, and tons of crazy shit no one has ever seen before. ...

I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag ). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment. He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference. ...