Defrag and Blur, sister conferences held over three days at the Omni Interlocken Resort in Broomfield this month, offered a glimpse at trends that may drive technology developments and cutting-edge products on the verge of release.

About a dozen mostly early-stage tech companies, including a couple of local firms, exhibited at Blur.

Among them was Toronto-based InteraXon, developers of a brainwave-sensing headband called Muse. The product, scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2013, will pair with a smartphone app to help users “build healthy brain habits.”

“The first kind of applications are things that let you track your own brain activity and then give you exercises to improve the way that you interact,” said InteraXon chief executive Ariel Garten. “It can improve your focus, your working memory, your emotional regulation.”

Although the company has taken to crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise $150,000, Garten said it has already proven the technology.

“Your brainwaves are the sum total of the electrical activity that happens in your head,” she said. “When you think or engage in anything mentally, your brainwaves change, and then we can track your brainwaves and their changes and use that information in meaningful ways.”

Garten said InteraXon has created a thought-controlled beer tap, which the company is offering to share with anyone who pledges $8,500 on the Indiegogo campaign. Beer starts to flow from the tap if someone stares at it long enough thinking only about the adult beverage.

“We use it at our Christmas parties all the time,” she said.

A Blur exhibitor with products that don’t seem so far off was Boulder-based Modular Robotics. The company’s Cubelets, next-gen building blocks, are already available. An update that will add hinges to the Cubelets and allow kids to build more advanced creations will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Modular Robotics CEO Eric Schweikardt said the robotic kits can help children learn about complexity science.

“When you build a robot with Cubelets, you’re putting together a model of a complex system,” Schweikardt said. “We should think about giving kids tools to build their own complex systems. Little simulations, little worlds where they can build complex systems, play within complex systems, see patterns emerge.”

Other exhibitors included MakerBot, creator of a 3-D desktop printer that creates models, and Flomio, developer of a plug-in that gives iPhones the ability to use near field communication technology.

Defrag, initiated in part by venture capitalist Brad Feld in 2007, is an intimate conference that launched with a focus on Web tools but shifted in recent years to include social media and data collection. Attendance was capped this year at 325.

Donnie Berkholz, an analyst with with industry research firm RedMonk, provided an overview on the various phases of tech development. Decades ago, when IBM was dominant, money was made in the hardware. Amid the rise of Microsoft, the money shifted to software. Stage 2.5, Berkholz said, involved an integration of both, and Stage 3 was driven by companies that provided services, such as Google.

Now the value is not in the software but in data collected by companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Companies such as Boulder-based Gnip have created a niche in selling services on top of that data.

Blur, now in its second year, will be held again in 2013. Eric Norlin, who organizes the conferences, said he is working on tweaking Blur because many of the exhibiting companies are early-stage and can’t afford airfare and hotel, much less conference sponsorships.

“We’re trying really hard to figure out how to get the community to play the right way, how you can kind of capture the enthusiasm,” he said. “We don’t want to just turn into your gun and boat show, where it’s free and everybody comes and looks at cool stuff. We’d really like to have the thinkers and the thought leaders interacting around the cutting edge of what’s going on and trying to figure out where we go from here.”

Andy Vuong : 303-954-1209, avuong@denverpost.com or fb.com/byandyvuong