Join us at Glue

At Foundry we organize our thinking about investing into what we call “themes”. The themes we pursue are horizontal in nature and are driven by underlying technology protocols and standards or emerging market trends and customer needs. Examples of the investment themes we are currently pursuing include Human Computer Interaction, Implicit Web, Email, Glue, and Digital Life.

As part of this approach we look to meaningfully participate in the ongoing conversation taking place within these thematic areas. To that end we’ve teamed up with Eric Norlin to work on a few conferences that bring together thought leaders from across the technology industry.  Our first attempt at this is Defrag – a conference now in its third year that is focused on how technology has evolved to help people and organizations better organize, interpret and consume disparate information (thus the name "Defrag").  While the conference wasn’t theme specific, the conversation has tended to tie closely to our Implicit Web and Email themes.

In 2009 we’re introducing another conference to the mix that we’re calling "Glue".  If Defrag is a high level discussion about meta-information, Glue is a more nuts and bolts discussion around the actual technologies that we use to pull this information together.  As you can imagine, it also fits nicely with our Glue theme. Presuppose the notion of cloud computing/platform as a service; assume the web as a platform.  Now what?  Glue is going to bring together technologists to start to answer these questions. The discussion is generally going to be "below the browser" and if you check out the agenda you’ll see plenty of topic areas that relate to the details of the changing technology and architecture landscape. And while we’re still putting the final touches on the agenda, we can confirm that keynote speakers will include Mitch Kapor (long time software luminary and private investor) and David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) along with many sessions that are designed to encourage meaningful interaction between conference attendees.

We hope you’ll join us at the Glue – May 12^th and 13^th at the Hyatt in Denver. Use the code "early1" to get $50 off the regular conference price of $395 (but there are a limited number of discounts available, so best to register right away).