Periodically I promote the conferences we helped create with Eric Norlin – Defrag, Glue, and most recently Blur.  If you’ve been to any of these conferences, you know why I get so excited about them – it’s a chance for me and my partners to spend two days immersed in a theme we are investing in while surrounded with some of the smartest people working in that area.

Blur is all about human computer interaction (HCI).  We’ve done a bunch of HCI investments, including Orbotix, Fitbit, Sifteo, Oblong, and Organic Motion and we’ve spent a bunch of time exploring HCI as we believe the way we will use and interact with computers will be radically different in 20 years than it is today.  As a hedge, we believe that if the robots are really going to take over, we at least want a hand in creating some of their software to improve the odds that they’ll be nice to us.

When Eric and I started talking about Blur, he said he wanted it to be a deeply hands on experience.  The HCI stuff we invest and play around with is some of the funnest and most interesting tech.  The conference should line be equally fun while giving a bunch of smart thought leaders around HCI a chance to collaborate on what each of them is working on.

For example, Kinect Hacks?  Yup – a bunch will be there (the hackers and the hacks.)  The history and evolution of multi-touch - did you know it was invented in 1982 the USPTO rulings not-withstanding?  Want to play with personal robots?  Do you know what neuroergonomics means or why it matters?

As with Defrag, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has stepped up with a major sponsorship for up to 15 people who are either founders of pre-Series A startups or students doing research around HCI.

Blur is happening in Orlando, Florida on February 22nd and 23rd.  Early-bird registration runs through January 14th at which point registration is only available at the full price.  Come play!

Want to see a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone?  Take a look at the Orbotix Sphero Sneak Peek Video below.

Sphero Sneak Peek from Paul Berberian on Vimeo.

My friends at Orbortix will be at CES in Booth #5422 North Hall from January 6th to 9th showing off real working robotic balls.  So psyched.

Fred Wilson emailed me a link to Dennis Crowley’s post I’m running the NYC Marathon tomorrow! Fred knows my obsession with human instrumentation, marathons, and social media.  And if you recognize Dennis’ name, that’s because he’s the founder / CEO of Foursquare.

As I write this from my house in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, I can see that Dennis is at mile 4.64 of the NYC Marathon via RunKeeper.  He just checked in at mile 5 on Foursquare.  And yes, Twitter and Facebook are active also.

While some people may not like this future, I love it.  Yeah, it’s kind of a pain to carry a bulky iPhone around on a marathon, but there are armbands for that and – in a decade – it’ll just be a thing you inject into your arm under the skin.  But for now, guys like Dennis are helping us create the future.

Oh – and he’s running a marathon.  He’s now at mile 5.64.  Way to go Dennis!

This summer I made two new friends who completely blew my mind – Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson. I met them through TechStars – they were founders of Orbotix, one of the 11 teams to go through this TechStars Boulder this summer. Today, Foundry Group announced that it has led an investment in Orbotix.

I’m always on the lookout for what I consider to be genius level software engineering talent. As an MIT graduate, I’ve been around plenty of it, but I also know that it shows up in unexpected places. A few weeks into TechStars, I realized that not only was I hanging out with genius level software talent but that Ian and Adam thought about hardware and the combination of hardware and software in unique ways. For example, take a look at a robotic ball controlled by a smart phone.

As part of my involvement in TechStars, I choose one or two companies from each program to mentor. We believe the magic of TechStars is the mentorship and while I tried to work with all the companies in the first two Boulder programs, given that there are now over 40 companies a year going through TechStars (10 each in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York), I realized I needed to act like every other mentor and focus at most on two companies per program.

While Foundry Group has investment in two other TechStars companies (both from the TechStars Boulder 2009 program - Next Big Sound and SendGrid) this is the first company that I’ve mentored that we’ve invested in. One of my goals with my mentorship is to work with companies that are both within our themes and outside of our themes – this keeps my thinking fresh in other areas. So, I set the expectation early with the companies that I mentor that it’s unlikely we will invest. For example, the company in the TechStars Seattle program that I’m currently mentoring is absolutely killing it, but it’s far outside any of our themes. But, I’m learning a lot and they are also.

In the case of Orbotix, I knew they’d be within our human computer interaction theme, but when I started working with Adam and Ian, I didn’t realize how profound what they were doing was. Fortunately, by mid-summer I did, and began encouraging one of their other mentors, Paul Berberian, to engage more deeply with them. Paul, Adam, and Ian quickly started talking about teaming up and used the last four weeks of the program to “pretend” they were partners. By the end of the program they decided to join forces with Paul becoming CEO of Orbotix.

While this investment has resulted in endless teenage humor for my inner 14 year old, it is also another step in my personal strategy of making sure that if the robots actually do take over some time in the future, I’ve helped create some of their software.

I’ve written in the past about my obsession with measuring things.  While my manual measurements via Daytum include miles run, books read, flights taken, and cities slept in, I’ve become much more focused in the past year on what I’ve been calling “human instrumentation.” This resulted recently in Foundry Group leading a $9 million financing in a San Francisco company called Fitbit.

If you want to see the type of data I’m tracking, take a look at my Fitbit profile.  For now, I’m focused on the data that Fitbit tracks automatically for me, primarily derived from the step and sleep data.  But from my profile page you can see a variety of other data which I can currently enter manually (I’ve entered a few examples) even though I use other sources to track them (for example, my weight using my Withings scale.)

I now have a house full of personal measurement devices and an iPhone full of apps to track various things.  A few are still active; many have long been relegated to the “closet of dead, useless, obsolete, or uninteresting technology.”  During this journey over the past year, I feel like I tried everything and finally found a company – in Fitbit – that has a team and product vision that lines up with my own.

A year ago when I first encountered the company, they were just launching their product.  I was an early user and liked it a lot, but hadn’t clearly formed my perspective on what the right combination of software and hardware was.  As I played around with more and more products, I started to realize that the Fitbit product vision as I understood it was right where I thought things were going.  The combination of hardware, software, and web data integration are the key, and the Fitbit founders (James Park and Eric Freidman) totally have this nailed.  That made it easy when we explored investing again to pull the trigger quickly.

One of the things my partners and I love about products like the Fitbit are the combination of hardware, software, and a web service that lets the product continually improve without having to upgrade the hardware.  Fitbit is a great example of this which I expect you’ll see over the next quarter if you buy one today.

I firmly believe that in 20 years we’ll simply swallow something that will fully instrument us.  Until then, we still have to clip a small plastic thing to our belt or keep it in our pocket.  But that’s ok since it now knows how to talk to my computer, which is connected to the web, which is getting smarter every millisecond.