My email dings on Tuesday and GLUE organizer Eric Norlen tells me to pick who I want to be introduced to at the conference. In front of me is this massive agenda, filled with loads of terms that I don’t understand, but inside my stomach is that unmistakable feeling of excitement. GLUE is only a couple of weeks away, on May 23rd and 24th in Broomfield Colorado, and I can’t freaking wait.
Why you ask? Because I don’t understand everything that’s going on. I have a high-level, working knowledge of almost all of the topics being discussed, because it’s my job to at least know what someone’s talking about if they mention Hadoop or Azure. But what I want is a deeper understanding, presented by the people who make the Internet work. That’s exactly what GLUE will provide.
Let’s face it, conferences are a dime a dozen these days. The good ones? They’re hard to find. We have standout events like LeWeb, Disrupt and of course our own TNW Conference, but we focus heavily on consumer-oriented technology and entrepreneurship. When you want to take things to that next level, you need a conference like GLUE.
So what will I be doing there?
First off, I’m going to spend a load of time in the Demo Pavilion, because I want to see what’s next. I personally helped to select the startups that got free space in the Pavilion courtesy of Aclatel-Lucent, so I’m pretty stoked to get face-to-face with them. You can expect to see stories about the best ones, plus plenty of coverage about the ones that will be huge in the future.
But I’m also going to be attending loads of sessions while I’m there, by people such as Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix, Mike Ihbe of Yammer and Evan Cooke of Twilio. These are the people who are making huge moves in the world of big data, turning that overload of information into something useful. These are the crafters of tomorrow’s Internet.
So yes, I’m going to a conference that’s way above my level of understanding and yes, I’m absolutely excited beyond belief to be attending it. If you consider yourself to be on the forefront of what forms our technology, then you should be excited too, and you should join me.
But you had better move fast, because tickets are almost gone. If you are going, drop me an email because I want to meet you. If you’re thinking about going, use the code “tnw12” to nab a steep discount. Just click on “Enter promotional code” on the registration page.
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