Defrag Blog

I just read this post about Facebook choosing their first possible companies to fund — and the good news is that the companies get to present at locations “around the US.” Quoting:

“We’re scheduling a series of events around the US at which we invite you to give a 10-minute presentation of your proposal.

We’re currently planning the following events:

Silicon Valley: Monday afternoon, 1/7/08, 11:30am - 1:30pm
San Francisco: Tuesday evening, 1/8/08, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
New York City: Thursday evening, 1/10/08, 6:30pm - 8:30pm”

Huh??

Since when does the valley, SanFran and NYC count as “around the US?” And even more to my point, why have *both* the valley and SanFran? Because you didn’t want to have to force those budding entrepreneurs to travel?! Pffft.

To be fair, they go on to say that they’re planning other events that people can present at, but c’mon. I’d have been impressed if the first 3 events were Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans (or Minneapolis, Denver, Dallas, or Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, or)….

Or maybe I’m just being curmudgeonly. Back to your usual new year’s programming…

Remember all of those VCs rushing off to invest in China and India. And everyone in the media telling us about how China’s economy is about to overtake the US, and how entrepreneurs (and tech entrepreneurs especially) need to be getting into those markets.

Well, it turns out that the essence of those messages may be right, but the numbers behind them might be just a *little* off — by about 40%.

This opinion pieces in the LA Times lays out an interesting case saying just that.

So maybe while US exports will be enough to keep us from hitting a recession (and for the 9th time, we’re not going to have a recession), those exports to China are not quite as gigantic a force as we thought — or were told.

Could it be that 2008 will be the best year ever? Yea, I’m an optimist. Happy New Year, everyone!

Brad and I (and Seth) have started to kick around some ideas that could end up being something we talk about as an extension to Defrag, or it could (maybe) end up being a conference unto itself. The group of ideas is something we’re referring to as “Glue” — ie, the stuff that is to web application integration what enterprise application integration was in the late 90s. It includes topics like:

Marketing Glue: the abstraction of the management of ad platforms into a common interface

Enterprise Glue: a “rest-ful” service oriented architecture via mashups and RSS

Social Network Glue: the movement toward cross-network interoperability and data sharing

Interface Glue: cross-platform, cross-browser technologies like Silverlight and Apollo

Messaging Glue: tools that are evolving for meta-messaging

Identity Glue: reputation, user-centric identity and web sso

Brad has more about it all here. If you’re a company in the “glue space” (which is obviously different from the Defrag space), I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this.

I awoke this morning to a nice little holiday treat: Read/Write Web has an article listing Defrag as a “top pick” for high impact conferences (the other two are ETech and SXSW — so, good company).

I love setting the bar high in year one, it gives us so much more to aim for in year two.

I’ve been “out of the office” for a few days, and am returning to find that NewsGator has closed on a new round of funding. Huge congratulations to the team there. I’ve known Jeff Nolan for several years, and have recently gotten to know Greg and JB. They’re a great bunch of folks working on some really exciting stuff.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the road unfolds for NewsGator.

I met Marc Orchant only once — at the most recent Defrag. In the few minutes that we spent interacting, I found Marc to be a highly engaging, open and giving individual. And everything I’ve heard from his peers supports my sentiment and so much more.

And so it is with great sadness that I’m reading about Marc’s passing. Our thoughts are with Marc’s family and friends as we mourn this loss.

We launched the Defrag 2008 site today. There are still a few kinks, but I’m running under the “release early and often” mantra.

If you weren’t at Defrag in November, you’ll probably want to check out the attendee quotes and photos.

And, as you’d expect, we’ll be updating the site with all of the exciting stuff we’re planning for Defrag 2008 as we go.

[update: David Duey sings music to my ears, saying: " I'm planning on attending Defrag 2008 along with Heather. Defrag is the best conference I've ever attended. It'll be like a five year old waiting for Christmas..." Thanks David! Can't wait to see you there again.]

Marc Orchant, who I just met face to face at Defrag, has suffered a massive heart attack, and he is now in critical condition. Our thoughts are with Marc and his family. We hope that Marc’s recovery is speedy, and that we see him back and blogging soon.

If you weren’t at Defrag, you may have heard about David’s wonderful conference-opening talk (it actually brought one audience member to tears). If you were there, you’ll probably want to absorb it one more time (I’m doing so with Sunday morning coffee). In either event, you can find it in the fifth “entry” on this page. Enjoy.

[sidenote: see the new defrag blog design? just one tiny piece of our about-to-launch new website for 2008. Look for that very shortly.]