I'm at the Glue Conference in Denver again, my third year running. I got here the day before the actual two-day conference starts, although some pre-conference workshops were held this afternoon starting at 1:00. And a reception fires up later this afternoon.
So, what's the event all about? Here's how they describe it:
"As the 'cloud' becomes a common platform, web applications still live in a 'stovepipe' world. It's not a question of 'should we move to the cloud?' It's a question of once some, or most, or all of our web applications live in the cloud, how do we handle the problems of scalability, security, identity, storage, integration and interoperability? What was the problem of 'enterprise application integration' in the late 90s, is now the cambrian explosion of web-based applications that will demand similar levels of integration. The problem, put simply, is how to "glue" all of these apps, data, people, work-flows, and networks together."
Glue says it's the only conference "devoted solely to this new problem-set facing architects, developers, 
and integrators" and says it will "explore the new technologies that are forming around web applications in a post-cloud world." That includes:
• APIs & Protocols: Twitter, Facebook, Websockets, PubSubHubBub (PUSH), XMPP
• Languages/Frameworks: JQuery, Zend, Ruby/Rails, Git, Django, Dojo, Scala/Lift
• Formats/Standards: RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5
• Open Data: DBPedia, Geonames, Data.gov, AWS Public Data Sets, Open Street Map, Open Calais, Alchemy API
• Platforms/Providers: Amazon, Rackspace, Goog App Engine, Heroku, Eucalyptus
• Storage: SQL vs. NoSQL (Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Voldemort, Dynomite, Sherpa, Pig, Hadoop, Drizzle, etc)
Glue is being held at the very nice Omni Interlocken Resort in Broomfield, CO. I'm looking forward to a packed agenda starting tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, with keynotes over the two days from Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Programmable Web, Cloudscaling, Gnip, VC Mark Suster, Eucalyptus Systems, Twilio, and Pete Warden. And so many great breakout sessions, it's going to crazy-hard to choose between them!
A new wrinkle this year, thanks to Community Sponsor Alcatel-Lucent, is a Demo Pavilion, in which a select group of 15 early-stage startups were awarded free exhibits to pitch their stuff to the 400+ developers, investors, and others attending this year's Glue (which is the largest attendance to date). These startups are:
• axiomatics.com
• bigdoor.com
• eclipse.org
• flomio.com
• locvox.com
• proxomo.com
• reportgrid.com
• singly.com
• standingcloud.com
• streamstep.com
• wanderfly.com
• jexy.com
• statsmix.com
• tendrilinc.com
• rainmaker.cc
I'll be doing brief video interviews of as many of these companies as I can, as well as other sponsor companies and speakers at this year's Glue. I'll record these interviews on a brand-new Olympus LS-20M, a review unit I was lucky enough to get to try out. (Hat tip to my friend Robert Stephens, CTO of Best Buy, back home in Minneapolis.) This thing is awesome, capturing both HD video and audio in one handheld unit — it's literally like a studio in my hand! I'll post these videos here on my blog during the event as I'm able to get them uploaded, or shortly afterwards. Let me know what you think, or any requests you might have for me, such as questions to ask in my interviews. I'll of course be live-tweeting the event as well, along with scores of others! The hastag is #gluecon. You can watch that action right over here —>>>>> in the sidebar of my blog, in my FanChatter social-media aggregation box, which includes both Twitter and Facebook integration — and you can post right from there yourself! Talk back to me… 🙂 or anyone else either tweeting from Glue or posting on Facebook. Try it!
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