Over the past few years, I've been getting involved once again with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This is one of the most important groups in the software industry and is where all the big tech companies come together.

Here's a few questions to see if you've ever used software from the ASF:

• Own a droid - your apps are running on a platform built on Apache Harmony.
• Searched Yahoo - Yahoo runs its search engine on thousands of servers using Apache Hadoop.
• Read a twitter status or a Facebook profile - those are stored using Apache Cassandra.
• Surfed the web - 70% of the websites are served using the Apache web server (HTTPD).

ApacheCon is our annual conference and is a great opportunity to hang out with all the brilliant people who build the software that everyone uses.

I'm Vice President for Fundraising for the ASF, which means I oversee relationships with our large corporate sponsors including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, HP, AMD, and many more.  Last week I was on the phone with Yahoo and Microsoft as we're looking to renew their $100,000 platinum sponsorships.

Aside from hanging out with friends, I'm looking forward to hearing some talks on the latest technology that people are working on.  If you've heard of buzz words like cloud computing, HTML 5, and NoSQL, this is the group of people who are building those technologies, long before someone in marketing comes up with the buzz word.

I'm looking forward to coming back with a ton of ideas for PrestoSports.