Larry Augustin's Weblog:

My Events

You can find me at these upcoming events
2007-11-05 to 2007-11-08 DotNetNuke OpenForce '07.
I'm speaking at the DotNetNuke OpenForce '07 Conference in at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas November 5 - 8. The conference is co-located with DevConnections.
2007-12-05 to 2007-12-07 HP Financial Services Industry Open Source Council.
I will be speaking in Philadelphia at the Ritz Carlton December 5 - 7, 2007 at Hewlett-Packard's Financial Services Industry Open Source Council along with Raven Zachery.
2008-01-22 to 2008-01-24 Open Source Meets Business.
I will be speaking January 22 - 24, 2008 in Nuremberg, Germany for the Open Source Meets Business conference. This is my first time at this event and I am looking forward to it.
2008-02-07 to 2008-02-09 Open Source ThinkTank.
The Olliance Group will hold their Open Source ThinkTank Feb 7 - 9, 2008 at the Silverado Resort in Napa.
2008-02-25 to 2008-02-28 HIMSS08 Annual Conference and Exposition.
February 25 to 28, 2008 I will be at Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2008 Conference at the Orange County Convention Center (West Concourse) in Orlando. I will be speaking there.
2008-03-03 to 2008-03-06 O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference (ETech).
March 3 - 6, 2008 I will be at ETech at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina in San Diego.
2008-03-25 to 2008-03-26 Open Source Business Conference (OSBC).
If you're in the business of building companies around Open Source, the one show you can't miss is Matt Asay's Open Source Business Conference. I'll be there March 25 - 26, 2008 at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.
2008-07-21 to 2008-07-25 O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON).
As always, I'll be in Portland, Oregon July 21 - 25, 2008 for OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center. This is another of Tim O'Reilly's "must attend" events.
2008-08-04 to 2008-08-07 LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.
LinuxWorld San Francisco will be August 4 - 7, 2008 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. We are working on the program now so contact me if you have ideas or are interested in speaking.

(Some of) My Favorite People

Chris DiBona
Chris is a just plain great person and stand-up guy. He's also the Open Source program manager at Google.
Doc Searls
Doc is the senior editor at Linux Journal and one of the four authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the iconoclastic web site that became the best-selling book.
Matt Asay
Matt is the founder of OSBC, and currently runs business development at Alfresco.
r0ml Lefkowitz
The r0ml is one of the most entertaining and insightful commentators on the state of the IT industry that I know.
Stephen Walli
I first met Stephen when he worked at Microsoft, and I organized a dinner at OSCON between Eric Raymond and a number of the Microsoft Shared Source team. I liked him even then so that should tell you a lot.

I had a great conversation with Tom Berquist, CFO of Ingres, and MR Rangaswami, co-founder of the Sand Hill Group, a few weeks ago on the subject of Open Source software. The podcast is available at sandhill.com. Tom and MR have been around the world of Enterprise software seemingly forever, and it was great to get their perspectives on the industry changes. Before taking the CFO job at Ingres, Tom was previously a research analyst at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs covering software and has an incredible depth of expertise in the industry.

My Companies

I am involved with these companies as an investor and board member.
Compiere
Open Source Enteprise Resource Planning (ERP). News
Fonality
Open Source VoIP PBX based on Asterisk. News
Hyperic
Open Sources systems/application management. News
Medsphere
Open Source Electronic Health Record (EHR). News
Pentaho
Open Source Business Intelligence (BI). News
SugarCRM
Open Source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. News

My Other Investments

I am an investor in and/or advisor to these companies.
DeviceVM
Embedded virtualization for consumer devices. News
Eloqua
On-line lead generation and marketing automation. News
Interface21 (Spring)
Interface21 is the company behind Spring, the Java/J2EE application framework. News
ITerating
Wiki-based directory with reviews of Open Source and commercial software. News
MuleSource
Mule is then world's most widely-used Open Source ESB and integration platform. News
Novara Clinical Research
Novara Clinical Research operates dedicated facilities for conducting Phase II to Phase IV patient studies for the pharmaceutical industry. News
Ohloh
Mapping the open source world by collecting objective information on open source projects. News
VirtualLogix
Real-time virtualization for mobile devices. News
Vyatta
Open Source router and firewall. News
WSO2
Next generation Open Source Web services platform. News
Zend
The PHP company. News

My Exits

These are companies that I was previously involved with as a Board member or investor. (Successful "exits" in venture investing parlance.)
JBoss
JBoss was acquired by Red Hat Software (NYSE: RHT) for $420 million. News
SourceForge/VA Software/VA Linux
The parent company of Slashdot and SourceForge. VA Linux (now SourceForge)(NASDAQ: LNUX) went public in December 1999 with the largest first day gain ever in an IPO. News
XenSource
XenSource was acquired by Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) for $500M. News

My Current Reading List

Robert Jordan: Knife of Dreams (The Wheel of Time, Book 11)
I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I'm still reading Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. When he passed L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth decology I could have cried. Maybe WoT will be made into the worst movie of all time? Still, I've been following the saga of Rand al'Thor for more than a decade now, and I want to see how it ends. Rumor is that the next book, Memory of Light, will in fact conclude the saga. To borrow a phrase, "There should have been only one." (**)
Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
My family got me Quicksilver for Christmas. I'm not far into it, but it's clearly a Stephenson book: lots of historical connections, multiple timeline unfolding simultaneously, meticulous historical detail, 100 pages in the plot is still a total mystery, big "thud"factor... Should be a great read.
Chris DiBona: Open Sources 2.0
Anything edited by Chris DiBona is worth spending the time to read.
David Kahn: The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet
I'm just getting started with this one, but so far it's a fascinating account of the history of cryptology. It's a massive 1200 pages, so it may be a while before I move on to something else.