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.

Plus, we’ll give away a lot of cool toys, have a ton of smart people who are working on the next generation of HCI in one place, and have some fun surprises.  And we are doing it in an environment that is especially tuned for a conference like Blur.

I’m incredibly excited about what Eric has put together for this year’s Glue Conference (as I wrote about the other day).  He’s setting a high bar for Blur, where the goal will now be to have a few brains explode!  Get ready – it’s never dull around here.

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.

The 2010 Glue Conference is a few months away (5/26/10 and 5/27/10).  Instead of happening in Denver, Eric is doing Glue at the Omni Interlocken Resort on the outskirts of Boulder.  For a taste, here are some of the speakers:

• Michael Barrett, CISO, PayPal
• Professor Eric Brewer, creator of the CAP Theorem
• Chris Hoff, Dir. of Cloud Solutions, Cisco
• Ryan Sarver, Dir. of Platform, Twitter
• Jonathan Ellis, Lead on the Cassandra project

Some of the sessions that are finalized include:

• The Cassandra Database: Inside Twitter’s Choice
• What’s up with OAuth/WRAP?
• 5 Things I Hate about your API Terms of Service
• The Apache Cloud Stack (Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper, etc)
• App PaaS vs. Enhanced Cloud System Infrastructure
• Inside MongoDB: the internals of a NoSQL database
• Understanding User-managed Access

Take a look at the fuller speaker list and agenda if you want, but beware that it moves around a lot.  If you register for Glue now you can get an additional 10% off the early bird price of $525 if you register by 4/2/10 and use the discount code “twit1” (full price at the door is $695).  As a special bonus, CloudCamp at Denver is happening the day before Glue (5/25/10).  CloudCamp is free, but only 98 tickets are left. 

Sign up for both of them now.  I’ll be there for the whole shebang, along with my partners at Foundry Group.  Plus, May in Boulder is just awesome.  And be on the lookout for an announcement soon about a third conference that you’ll have to really focus on (yeah – inside joke – but you’ll appreciate it.)