Defrag is one of the premier conferences that focuses on tools and technologies that are leveraging the social aspect of software. Located in Denver from November 11-12, Defrag caters to those involved in contributing to the next wave of software innovation.

MindTouch is honored that Aaron Fulkerson, our CEO, has been selected to speak at this prestigious conference.

This year’s conference focuses on the topics of:

• Business Intelligence
• Business Process Management
• Social Computing and Analytics
• Next level Discovery
• Social Media Monitoring and Engagement
• The Semantic Web
• Next-Gen Email
• Enterprise 2.0

To get more information about Defrag, to see who else is attending, and to learn more about other topics of interest, check out the Defrag Conference site.

MindTouch, as always, is ecstatically participating at OSCON. It is one of the best conferences all year. I’ll be at the MindTouch booth in the expo hall where we will be demoing our latest product release, codename: ‘Minneopa’. This release has many exciting new features and is being announced this Wednesday at OSCON. I’m especially excited about demoing this product release at OSCON because some of the many new capabilities are uniquely suited for developers. Stop by to see the great new capabilities and tools.

Also, This year MindTouch is co-sponsoring the LinuxFund’s 10 year birthday party with Kaltura. The event is being held Wednesday July 22nd from 8PM to Midnight at Motif in San Jose, which is just blocks away from the event. Event details can be found at the OSCON event page.

MindTouch founder and CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, is speaking at the event. He is leading a session on “How to Become a RESTafarian WOArrior” in Meeting Room C3 at 2:35pm Thursday, 07/23/2009. This talk covers the following objectives:

• High level: What is WOA? How is it different from SOA and Object Oriented Programming?
• How does WOA benefit business?
• WOA implementation strategies and methodologies.
• WOA enterprise case studies.
• How to be a RESTafarian WOArrior and why achieving this matters.

Aaron is also speaking on the Microsoft open source panel on Thursday July 23 @ 1pm in Meeting Room C2. The topic is “Roundtable Discussion: Microsoft and PHP ” with Garret Serack (Open Source Technology Center), Al Hilwa (IDC), Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch ), John Keagy (GoGrid)

Brian Hill, of MindTouch product support, will be facilitating a BoF session titled “Bash and Beyond” in Meeting Room B2 at 7 pm Wednesday, 7/22/2009.

We hope to see you all at the sessions, the booth and most of all at the party.

Earlier this week MindTouch took part in the first ever GlueCon in Denver, CO. MindTouch was a participant in the exhibit hall and panel session. It was great seeing MindTouch users, partners and customers like Intuit, Gigya, Avaya, and NASA. It was exciting and an honor for us to be a part of such a forward thinking, talented group. And props to the Norlin team for being the glue that holds us all together!

Below are photos taken at the MindTouch booth & Aaron Fulkerson’s WOA session. View More GlueCon Photos.

The MindTouch booth.

Aaron Fulkerson presenting.

Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch CEO, lead a Post-It Note Keynote session on Tuesday: “What is Web Oriented Architecture?” From the chatter coming from Twitter I knew it had been a great (and most likely controversial) presentation.

One attendee @kevinmatheny Tweeted:

What is this Jamaican reference anyway, Aaron? After the presentation was done, Aaron announced that the presentation would be available on SlideShare so I immediately took a look to see what I missed. Even though I’m not a technical person I still got a kick out of his presentation and enjoyed reading it through its entirety. I can only imagine what the live version was like!

To learn more about WOA and see what you missed from Aaron’s presentation at GlueCon check out the presentation below.

Due to popular demand and an overbooked webinar last week, we will be showing an encore presentation of MindTouch 2009 with an introduction given by CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, this Wednesday, April 22 at 11am (PDT).

This Wednesday’s webinar is really unique in that we’ll be demo-ing MindTouch 2009 and MindTouch CEO and Co-Founder, Aaron Fulkerson, will be making a 15 minute introduction to the webinar. This is a webinar you simply cannot miss. Make sure to SIGN UP and mark your calendars for the webinar and witness firsthand the powerful new feature set of MindTouch 2009 and what it can do for you and your organization.

Along with a host of powerful features for building new apps, MindTouch 2009 provides users with a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities. With the new bi-directional messaging bus users are now able to setup and receive change notifications when changes are made within MindTouch 2009 or to the many applications that users plug into MindTouch 2009, such as enterprise systems, databases, office productivity applications, Web services and more.

RSVP for the Webinar today!

Tomorrow’s webinar is really unique in that we’ll be demo-ing for the first time publicly MindTouch 2009 and MindTouch CEO and Co-Founder, Aaron Fulkerson, will be making a 15 minute introduction to the webinar. This is a webinar you simply cannot miss. Make sure to SIGN UP and mark your calendars for the webinar and witness firsthand the powerful new feature set of MindTouch 2009 and what it can do for you and your organization.

Along with a host of powerful features for building new apps, MindTouch 2009 provides users with a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities. With the new bi-directional messaging bus users are now able to setup and receive change notifications when changes are made within MindTouch 2009 or to the many applications that users plug into MindTouch 2009, such as enterprise systems, databases, office productivity applications, Web services and more.

RSVP for the Webinar today!

This past Friday, I had the opportunity to participate in the Government 2.0 conference together with our CEO, Aaron Fulkerson.   This was the second government related unconference that I have participated in, and believe me when I tell you, these are exciting times;  over 500 people from both government and the private sector came together to discuss transparency.  The mandates for transparency passed down from the executive branch are opening up access to an amazing amount of data, and users are quickly accessing and building upon this massive amount of data.

One of the most amazing realizations that we had at the conference was how many of the attendees are already MindTouch customers, and on top of that, how many more are using the open source core of MindTouch to build upon for their own applications.

Last month, I hosted a session at Transperancy Camp to demonstrate how users can utilize MindTouch to query this data and mash it up together to create new intelligence and visualize the results.  At the time, I demonstrated some very simple API interaction and how a person could easily query data into our environment, and once there, analyze that data in powerful ways.   Two things became apparent during that first session; first, there is a huge demand for a unified platform upon which to analyze this data and second, MindTouch is uniquely positioned to allow users to rapidly develop applications that utilize this data.

Following my return from Transparency Camp, and with the Government 2.0 conference only 3 weeks away, we set about creating “extensions” to some of the more popular APIs, including the Sunlight Labs API and the Capital Words API.  Over the course of just a few days, one of our engineers, Robert Mason, built these APIs into full MindTouch extensions.  Now users can query this data with just a few clicks from within the page editor.  Robert has also written tutorials on both the use and the creation of these extensions.

At the Government 2.0 conference, Aaron presented a several use cases for these new extensions, including a template that calls several of these extensions and displays the results using Google charts.

For those of you that have never attended an “unconference”, they are based on the premise that no one is a spectator; rather, everyone is a participant.  Anyone is free to host a session, and many of these sessions tend to be very interactive and engaging; Aaron’s demonstration of these extensions spurned some fantastic interaction from the audience, including discussions with government officials regarding the best ways to package this data for release.

In the past, users were expected to digest data like this from within agency websites, through forms for queries and tables or text files for results, but now, with the rise of external data access methods, this data can become much more powerful.  True intelligence comes not from looking at a single data set, but rather pulling data from many sources.

Here at MindTouch we believe that free knowledge is the cornerstone of a free society, and we’re excited to be a part of this data revolution.  In this same spirit, all of these tools are built on the MindTouch Open Source core, and are released to the public free of charge, so visit our community, download MindTouch and start a Revolution!

Aaron caught up with Scoble and they discussed improving enterprise productivity, staving off email overload. During this conversation Aaron gave Scoble a brief demo of MindTouch Deki. Scoble discusses this at his blog and below you’ll find the conversation and a demo.

I’ve always had a fascination with Paris (even though I’ve never been) - the love stories Hollywood centers around it, the Eiffel Tower, the food. It just seems like a very magical place. So when I heard that MindTouch was sending Aaron and Steve to Paris I got super excited (and jealous because I totally wanted to go on a Euro-Trip!). What an amazing opportunity to promote MindTouch in Europe! The European market has always been very welcoming to MindTouch; that’s also where we had our first user conference awhile back. Euro-style all the way, baby!

Aaron and Steve are heading to Paris (mustaches and all!) September 24 - 25 for Paris Capitale du Libre. This is a really great conference for MindTouch because of it’s dedication to economic industrial and political issues related to Open Source software.

Our Belgium friends, Ask.be, the guys who wrote the Lotus Notes converter for MindTouch, will be providing 3 of their rock stars to manage the MindTouch booth at the conference. ROCK! We’re really excited to have Alain Loyens (Managing Director), Vincent Daron (Software Architect) and Dominique Dantinne (Consultant) from Ask.be attend Paris Capitale du Libre with us. So which one of you is wearing the bunny suit, anyway?

Thanks again to everybody who helped put this thing together and many thanks to our good friends at Linagora for putting on a conference MindTouch is super excited about. Have fun Aaron and Steve and enjoy the fabulous city of Paris! Oh and please bring me back some Chanel boots - they’re only worth buying when they’re from France, ya know?

Disclaimer: We cannot guarantee actual Europeans will not be harmed.