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Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Get Involved In The Denver Tech Scene

Denver has an amazing tech scene, but we’ve noticed that many of the startups and established tech companies here don’t know much about each other. We’d like to change that. Here are some of the awesome Denver tech companies and events we track:

Companies

Pivotal Labs

Their featured product, Pivotal Tracker, is an agile planning tool for projects. We use it pretty heavily in our development here at FullContact. They also provide consumer web, mobile, and enterprise products. When we first started using Pivotal Tracker, they sent one of their top guys down to train our entire team, tell us about key features, and answer all our questions. It was a great example of effective customer training. Follow them on Twitter at @PivotalLabs.

Brightnest

Brightnest (still in Beta) is a web app that provides users with customized tips, weekly reminders, and instructions on home care. After you sign up, you are asked to answer a few questions that allow Brightnest to create an electronic owner’s manual for your home and send you relevant weekly task suggestions. I’m using it because I need reminders to do simple maintenance like change my HVAC filter. Follow them on Twitter at @Brightnest.

NextGreatPlace

NextGreatPlace operates a private, members-only travel club, along with an exclusive, vetted network of villas and activities in awesome places. NextGreatPlace has some impressive vacation plans for those who want to travel the world in a more exclusive and less annoying way than using Orbitz or Travelocity, or even a traditional travel agent. When Facebook buys my old futon for $30k, I’m signing up for this. Follow them on Twitter at @NextGreatPlace.

Ping Identity

Ping Identity provides cloud identity security solutions to a host of large businesses, including 42 of the Fortune 100. For example, eliminating passwords to private and public apps in favor of a single point of access for employees. Ping has gotten a lot of press in the identity security world, particularly as companies move toward enterprise configurations where employees can log in from personal and mobile devices. Follow them on Twitter at @PingIdentity.

ReadyTalk

ReadyTalk provides easy-to-use audio and web conferencing services for meetings and webinars. Having used their audio services for meetings, I can attest that it is one of the simpler audio interfaces you’ll encounter, unlike your insurance company or bank. They also recently launched an iPad application, Quick Launcher and Outlook integration, and have received some press for being a great place to work. Follow them on Twitter at @ReadyTalk.

Events

Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup

Tonight, April 19th, 2012 7:00 PM at MapQuest, 1555 Blake St, 3rd Floor, Denver.

HTML 5 Denver User’s Group

April 23, 6:00 PM at Casselman’s, 2620 Walnut St., Denver.

Denver Drupal User’s Group Meetup

April 24, 6:30 PM at Open Media Foundation, 700 Kalamath, Denver.

Denver Founder’s Network

April 25, 5:30 PM at Next Great Place. Networking starts at 5:30; Q&A starts at 6. Located at Uncubed, 2762 Walnut Street, Denver, CO.

Denver Web Technologies Meetup

April 25, 7:00 PM at The Ginn Mill, 2041 Larimer St, Denver.

This is the first post in an ongoing series about local Denver tech companies and events. If there are any companies or events we should know about please email us with your suggestions, and check back soon for the next installment.

 

Defrag 2011 – Big Data and Big Ideas

What makes a great tech conference? I’ve been to more conferences in past few years than I can remember, but as time passes they all blur together, and few stand out as particularly impactful. I was lucky enough to attend Defrag 2011 this year, on the conference’s 5th anniversary. After two intense days of sessions, networking, and manning the FullContact booth, I can honestly say that Defrag is one of the best tech conferences I’ve attended.

At Defrag ideas and passion take center stage. 20 keynotes are given over 2 days with 1 hour of additional breakout sessions each day. Attendance is capped at 325 and conference sessions are never streamed. The conference started in 2007 as an event for exploring information overload and building tools for the web. Recently the focus has shifted to things like enterprise collaboration, social media and big data. This year, conference organizer Eric Norlin chose not to limit the topics to a set list, so that speakers could talk about the ideas they’re most passionate about. This opened up the discussion to new topics and ideas that won’t be found anywhere else.

My Defrag story began a day before the conference, at API Hackday in Boulder, Colorado. After Hackday, Bart and I walked down Pearl Street to Brasserie Ten Ten, an excellent French restaurant, for one of the the pre-conference dinners. I got to sit at the “Developer Evangelist” table with John Sheehan from Twilio, Brandon West from SendGrid, and Jessica Goulding, a senior social media analyst at Collective Intellect.

The next morning, I arrived at the Omni Resort, in Broomfield, Colorado to setup the FullContact booth. The conference kicked off at 8:30. As with any Eric Norlin event, you can expect an impressive intro video, and this year he did not disappoint. The almost IMAX-sized screen in the main conference room faded to a panning shot of outer space, with the words “A long time ago in a tech world far, far away…”, and the conference began.

Tim Bray gave a talk titled “The Mysteries of the Web”, where he touched on the concept of the internet as a tool for human communication, and the responsibility that experts have to preserve their niche expertise in Wikipedia for the greater good. Roger Ehrenerg of IA Ventures gave a talk titled “Creating Competitive Advantage Through Data” and the author James Altucher spoke about how “Success is a Sexually Transmitted Disease”. Other speakers included Robert Stephens, the CTO of BestBuy, Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix, and Brad Feld, managing director of the Foundry Group. Bart Lorang, CEO of FullContact, gave a break out talk titled “Social Caller ID”, where he discussed the history of communication and it’s relation to identity resolution.

During my two days at the conference, I had the pleasure of meeting many of the top people in the tech world. Interesting conversations were easy to come by. Mark Kelley, our head of business development, told me at one point that “Defrag feels like more of a think tank than a conference.” I couldn’t agree more.

If you’ve never been to an Eric Norlin event, make sure you attend Defrag, and it’s sister conference Gluecon, in 2012.

Boulder API HackDay Recap

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at FullContact. We started last week with API Hackday at the Microsoft Bing offices in Boulder. A crowd of about 30 developers showed up to spend the entire day building software using various APIs. Tim Falls kicked off the day with a brainstorming session to generate project ideas. Once a few good ideas were on the whiteboard, everyone split off into groups and began developing their apps.

I ended up working on an idea pitched by Bart, our CEO, called Topikly. Topikly lets users create subscription email lists about any topic by simply sending an email to the “topic”@topikly.com, no web interface necessary. The app uses the SendGrid parse API to receive incoming emails, provision a topic in the database, and establish the original sender as the administrator of the topic. An email is then sent out to the person confirming that a new list has been created. After a topic is registered, all subsequent people who email the “topic”@topikly.com are subscribed to the list, and an introduction email is generated and sent to all subscribers, notifying them that a new user has joined the discussion. We used the FullContact API to augment the initial introduction email with the user’s full contact information. To unsubscribe, a user simply sends an email with the subject “unsubscribe” to the list.

We were joined  by Alex, a python programmer and fellow API hacker. We ended up using 2 SendGrid API endpoints, and the FullContact email endpoint to implement the entire app. The app is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance running the LAMP stack. We then used PHP and the CodeIgniter framework to build a a REST endpoint for the SendGrid parse API to communicate with when a new email is received. This simple app really showcases the power of APIs. Without the use of SendGrid and FullContact, the features we implemented in a mere 8 hours would have taken weeks to build.

There were a lot of other cool apps built during they day, and each used a different combination of APIs. After the presentations the judges awarded prizes to the participants, including a $750 Apple gift card, a Quadrocopter equiped with video camera, numerous Arduino kits, and of course free API credits for the various APIs represented at the event.

We had a blast at API HackDay and look forward to attending more events in the future. We also took part in Defrag 2011 and Startup Weekend Denver. Look for blog posts about these events shortly.

API Hackday Coming to Boulder November 8th

API HackdayAttention hackers, developers, and data junkies, API Hackday is coming to Boulder on November 8th. The all-day event will be held from 8am – 7pm at the Microsoft Bing offices, located just a block off of Pearl street in downtown Boulder.

API Hackday brings developers together for a full day of coding, focused on building apps with APIs. Developers of all experience levels can share ideas, collaborate on projects, start new ventures, and discover great tools and new APIs.

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