I’m headed to LT Pact for the next couple days, Layered Tech’s customer gathering in Vegas. Layered has been a close partners and puts on a great event, with folks from all over the world interested in delivering web applications. Most, of course, host with Layered, but not all. It’s an open event, registration is free, and you don’t have to be a customer to attend.

The only downside is this means I’m in an airport AGAIN, for the third time in as many days, enduring that infinitely un-American intrusion into my life that is TSA. This morning’s line extended more than 100 yards outside the terminal itself. If either presidential candidate would commit to ending this assualt on our civil liberties they’d have my instant support. Any takers???

A few of us from 3tera will be at the  O’Reily’s Velocity Conference in San Francisco for the next couple days. In fact, this will be a pretty busy week. In addition to  Velocity, we’ll be presenting at Cloud Camp and LTpact, and will be attending the Structure 08 conference as well.

When I was in college the irreverant comic strip Doonsebury was in it’s prime. Because it featured college kids it was a favorite on campus. One frequent story line involved the young college kids workig as polsters during election years and in a particularly memorable line the polster responds to a woman who’d never heard of his candidate with “he’s never heard of you either.”

So, here I am going through that same dance with other startups at AjaxWorld. Sure, Oracle and IBM are here along with a few other industry stalwarts, but a large chunk of conversations between exhibitors is “so what do you guys do?” Ah, the life of a startup.

For startups, how you answer this question is an important decision, it’s your elevator pitch to use the venacular. What three sentences can you string together to convey what you do. If you’re building a faster, smaller, cheaper widget then your answer is pretty simple. On the other hand, if you’re building something new, as we believe 3tera has, then the job gets a little tougher.

Imagine showing a spreadsheet for the first time, a GUI, or maybe a mouse. I’m sure showing the first web browser stretched a few imaginations. Each of these is well understood today, but when first created the developers had to find a way to communicate. You search for a meme you can associate with.

I just did my video interview with sys.con.tv here at AjaxWorld and have a panel session this evening - all preparing for the day when no one will have to ask what we do.

Peter Nickolov, our President and CTO, was scheduled to speak at AjaxWorld on the 24th and 25th, but he’s been called out of town. So the audiences will have to put up with my blathering style of speech instead of his deliberate delivery.

The topics of Monday’s panel is still up in the air, so it should be interesting, but on Tuesday morning I’ll be talking about the development of our AJAX interface along with Stephen Quintero, one of our developers.