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Glue Keynoter: Mitch Kapor

Jan 27, 2009
Category Education

One of the really fun things about working with Eric Norlin, the creator of Defrag and Glue, is watching how he evolves the agenda from a conference from idea to reality.  It’s a very fluid process that Eric handles masterfully.

Eric’s post The Glue agenda starts to get sticky summarizes some of the latest highlights on the ever evolving agenda.   The headliner: Mitch Kapor is going to be giving the keynote on Wednesday, May 13th. 

While I’ve never worked with Mitch, he’s one of my heroes as the creator of several of the most amazing pieces of software products ever.  If you guessed Lotus 1-2-3, you are only partially correct, as the real mind-bender was Lotus Agenda.  I was an undergraduate at MIT between 1983 and 1987 in Lotus’ heyday as emerging company (IPO in 1984, 1000+ employees in 1985) and watched as Lotus buildings were erected along the Charles River.  I had a number of interesting meetings at Lotus for a variety of things between 1985 and 1993, including several visits with my Uncle Charlie during the Lotus OS/2 – pre-IBM days.  I also had a really groovy fight with the GC at Lotus at an MIT event during the Borland / Lotus look-and-feel lawsuit (which Borland thankfully won.)  I still refer to 55 Cambridge Parkway as “the Lotus building” even though I only go there to visit VCs these days when I’m in Cambridge.

Mitch joins other great speakers recently announced, including David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails) and Kevin Matheny (the head of Best Buy’s Remix API initiative.)

Registration for Glue – which is happening in Denver on 5/12 and 5/13 – is open now.  It’s only $395.  Come to Denver and stretch your brain.