Here's my quick grab of the big video opener first thing this morning from row four, starting about 10-15 seconds into it…
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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!
The major Amazon Web Services outage that began this past Thursday morning was unlike anything before it. Countless AWS customers, big and small, went down, many for days. Surprisingly, other biggies like Netflix, SmugMug, and Twilio had little or no disruption. One hungers to know why…
Over the weekend, George Reese, a cloud expert and author (and CTO of cloud-management tools company enStratus), wrote a fascinating post on O’Reilly about what some would call a cloud disaster — entitling it, ironically enough, “The Cloud’s Shining Moment.” George has a unique perspective on the cloud, and a large following. 
His post got huge play, and that continues — so I decided to message him on Twitter and set up a coffee so I could interview him Monday morning. I was anxious for him to elaborate on his post and share more of his thoughts, now that the outage is (mostly) behind us.
Click on the link below to hear the whole chat. What follows here are some snippets from that 30-minute conversation (it was recorded in a busy coffee shop, so there’s background noise, but you can hear us fine):
• Thursday at 3:00 am: “We knew something significant was going down.”
• What happened, who was affected, and why.
• What about SLAs? “They’re not an insurance policy, they’re a refund policy… SLAs are a joke.”
• The “Design for Failure” approach vs. traditional application architecture gives you “control over your own destiny.”
• Why the AWS outage was a shining moment: it’s about learning what you can do in the face of an event like this. “So many survived.”
• The “cloud haters” came out after the O’Reilly post. Flame wars erupted in the comments. George pre-empted what they thought was, ahem, their shining moment… 🙂
• In large corporations, the “Department of No” is the real problem.
• George guarantees that CIOs who say their companies are not in the cloud actually are, and just don’t know it. Many others realize the cloud “genie is out of the bottle,” and are now coming to his firm, to be their window into what’s really going on in the cloud.
• George’s company now makes it possible to do “cross-cloud” backup and disaster recovery. Not only can customers do automated DR, but automated DR testing, too.
• He says his company is at “the most important point” in its life and the evolution of the cloud. In the last six months, “enterprise has gotten it.” He noted that he’s never spoken to so many Fortune 100 companies as he has in the past week.
Download or listen to my interview of George Reese, CTO of enStratus … (MP3)
Two other excellent blog posts we touched on that came out over the weekend:
• “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse,” by Don MacAskill, Cofounder & Chief Geek
• “Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage,” by Phil Wainewright, ZDnet
UPDATE: Here’s another good one:
• “An unofficial EC2 outage postmortem – the sky is not falling,” on the CloudHarmony Blog (caution: you have to really want to take a deep dive into cloud storage)
(Here’s more about my interview subject: George Reese has been delivering software as a service since 2003 when he founded Valtira, a suite of web-based marketing tools. Prior to Valtira, George held a variety of technology leadership roles with J. Walter Thompson, Carlson Marketing Group, and startups Ancept and Imaginet. George is the author of several O’Reilly books on Internet and enterprise technologies, including Java Database Best Practices and Managing and Using MySQL and the recently released Cloud Application Architectures. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Follow him on Twitter @georgereese.)
Full Disclosure: As mentioned during the recorded interview, the writer had a consulting relationship with enStratus in 2009.
Can the Glue Conference get any better? This will be the third annual, and I can honestly say this year's event will blow the roof off. Listen: if you're a developer or tech startup founder, get your ass to Denver, May 24-26. You will kick yourself over and over in said ass if you don't! The quality of the programming and attendees is the best of any cloud/developer/big data/mobile conference out there. Trust me — I go to a lot of conferences. I know these things. And the #Gluecon crew is making it even easier for a bunch of startups to get visibility there this year…
How? Thanks to the main event underwriter, Alcatel-Lucent (and its OpenAPIservice), the Glue Conference is awarding 15 startups with a free demo pod at the event. Here's the post on the great Gluecon Blog that will tell you all about this oportunity. You have till March 24th to apply, so go for it!
What will the conference program offer? Well, that's taking even more shape as we speak, but check out this post on the Gluecon blog for juicy details about just some of the Gluecon sessions.
A quote from event organizer Eric Norlin: "We're working our butts off to make sure that Gluecon is the single most impact-filled conference for cloud/API developers this year. I hope you'll choose to join us."
[UPDATE: In a previous post, I wrote this: 'Glue' is a Cloud Conference That's Different – It's for *Developers* (and some interesting new twists on the next one)]
For basic details on this year's event, hit this register page and read the summary. 
Then register while the price is the lowest! (Try this code and see if it still gets you an even lower discount: alu12.) And make your hotel reservation. The venue is a very cool place called the Omni Resort in Broomfield, and the rate is quite reasonable. Gonna be tons of great learning, killer networking, and it's always lots of fun, too! See you there.
A fitting end to my blog coverage of the great DEMO Spring 2011 event last week is one about a personal favorite of mine that pitched at the event: GutCheck. They're about "Real-time qualitative market research." I spoke to these guys several times at the conference but, unfortunately, in the rush of things, I never audio-recorded one of our chats. But, being a marketing guy through-and-through from early in my career, this one rang the bell for me as soon as I heard about it. Turns out it rang a few other bells, too. In fact, it rang the gong! GutCheck won the big-enchilada prize of them all: the "People's Choice Award," which gives them $1 million in media value from IDG. To say these guys were elated would be an understatement.
GutCheck is about providing "consumer insights in a matter of minutes." They didn’t think it was fair that qualitative insight was reserved just for those with big budgets, big resources, and extended timelines. So, in 2009, they "leveraged the Internet and other technologies to blow up the market’s conventional wisdom and create an on-demand tool for gathering insight." GutCheck’s goal is simple: to be the leader in DIY qualitative market research. "By making qualitative research accessible to the masses, we're giving marketers and others the unique opportunity to surround any of their ideas, concepts, strategies, etc, with feedback," the company says.
The attendees of DEMO themselves vote for the People's Choice Award — as opposed to the DEMOgod awards, which are awarded to one company per category (so five total). I immediately posted the list of DEMOgod winners to my event live-blog — they were announced on stage just prior to this award. No one quite seems to know who those darn DEMOgod voters are, but everyone knows that GutCheck got voted for their award by the folks in the audience. That's pretty darn convincing. GutCheck obviously impressed. And I loved what CEO and cofounder Matt Warta (left in the photo) said from stage: "We love startups!" What he's referring to is the special appeal of their service to early-stage firms, which by nature hunger for feedback from consumers or end-users.
How fitting: at an event for startups, a presenter that makes life easier for startups to find their mojo and go to market more effectively, wins the big award. Friends, it doesn't get any better that that! Congrats to Matt, and to Marshall England (head of marketing), holding the check at right in the photo — you guys rocked it!
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