Glue Conference 2012

Glue Conference 2012 took place at the Omni Interlocken Hotel Bloomfield, CO on May 23 and 24th. Gluecon is an information packed developer conference that focuses on cloud, mobile, APIs, big data, and most importantly, developers. Some of the topics included NoSQL, node.js, HTML5, backend-as-a-service, cloud management and security, cloud storage, Hadoop, DevOps, mobile app development, and cloud platforms.

I attended the conference with sponsorship (full ride) from FullContact.  These guys were unbelievably gracious and showed me a great time while I was out there.  I came in contact with them when Bart Lorang, CEO of FullContact contacted me over e-mail and wanted to setup a time to talk with him and his engineering team about a paper I had published at a KDD'11 workshop.  After meeting with the guys and talking shop, I found out that they are solving the same real world problems (at world scale) that I was working on in my graduate research (at individual scale).

Some of the more interesting presentations/demo's of the conference included:

FullContact's Dan Lynn gave a presentation on Storm
The title of the presentation is Storm - The Real-Time Layer Your Big Data Has Been Missing.  The problem with big data that is constantly changing is that your processing jobs are typically done in batch processing, and while this works and is usually perfectly acceptable, batch processing operates over a snapshot in time of your data.  If you want to get the most accurate, and most up-to-date picture of your data, real-time processing is what you want.  Storm is a new framework for real-time computation on big data that operates using new concepts of streams, spouts, tuples and bolts.

EmergentOne

EmergentOne makes it ridiculously easy to launch an API. Generate a complete and customized REST API for an existing application in minutes using a GUI interface.  I saw a demo of this hooked up to a world country MySQL database.  Within minutes the guy had created an API that I could hit over the internet.

Tempo

Tempo is purpose-built database used to store and analyze massive streams of time-series data.  Think the internet of things here where each thing is generating data where the most important attribute is the time-stamp.  From their site "TempoDB is the first purpose-built data layer that enables the scalable storage and instant analysis of your time-series streams, so that you can learn from the past, understand the present, and predict the future."

Distil.it

Distil.is used to guard your website against unauthorized web scraping, competitor data mining, and more, without impeding your end user.  Distil.it was the winner of the Demo Pod which contained 12 new startups that were competing against each other for this title.  (FullContact was the winner of the Demo Pod for GlueCon last year).  While Distil.it will be welcomed by many a content generator over the internet, it flies in the face of the web-scrapers out there like myself and FullContact who harness the massive amounts of information on the internet in order to aggregate the data into a meaningful product.  I'm still skeptical that they could prevent the scraping used in ArchiveFacebook.

Shout out to Robbie Jack and Kyle for showing me a great time in Boulder, CO the Friday after the conference.  We had fun bar hopping and playing Werewolf at the TechStars Boulder HQ.  I'm definitely going to have to try and come back for next years GlueCon.