Defrag

One of my favorite conferences of the year is Defrag happening in Boulder on November 9th and 10th. Eric Norlin is gearing up for it and just announced several scholarships for Defrag, underwritten by the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman scholarships are for students and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to attend Defrag, but would receive significant benefit from doing so. Eric is making a concerted effort to get more women to Defrag so he’s allocating 50% of the scholarships to women. For information on applying, take a look at the Defrag scholarship post. ...

The Defrag Conference is happening in Boulder on Wednesday November 17th and Thursday November 18th and is looking like it will be the best one yet. If you haven’t yet registered, use the code “foundry2” to take 15% off of your registration. The confirmed Keynote Speakers include: Alex Wright addressing the “deep history” of Oral Culture and Social Networks Stowe Boyd speaking about “social cognition” Esther Dyson on Exploration and innovation Dion Hinchcliffe on the future of social analytics Jeff Ma on Business Lessons from the Blackjack Table David Weinberger on the Philosophy of Knowing Paul Kedrosky talking about Monkeys, Typewriters and Data Jeff Jonas on Organizations Getting Dumber, and IT’s to Blame JP Rangaswami on Information as seen through the eyes of a Foodie And that’s just some of the keynotes. Toss in a bunch of networking, lots of stimulating discussion, and breakouts that cover everything from APIs to shifting to the Cloud to Social Media Analytics to the Social Customer and it’s shaping up to be dynamite. ...

The Kauffman Foundation just announced that they are providing 15 scholarships to Defrag. If you are an entrepreneur running a startup that is pre-Series A funding, you are eligible for a scholarship. Kauffman will cover the full cost of the conference pass – all you have to do is get to the conference and find a place to sleep. I’m hugely appreciative that Kauffman has stepped up to do this. Conferences are not cheap and it’s a big expense for a company that has no funding. On the other hand, it’s an incredible networking and learning opportunity for a startup that’s addressing issues in the ecosystem that Defrag covers. Paul Kedrosky had a big hand in this and has been super helpful to Eric Norlin at Defrag from the beginning – thanks Paul – you are a star. ...

One of my favorite conferences, Defrag , is really heating up. As always, Eric Norlin is doing a magnificent job of curating the agenda and already has some great headliners such as Esther Dyson, Paul Kedrosky, Vinnie Mirchandani, David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd, and Vivek Wadhwa. Today, Jeff Ma agreed to keynote Defrag. From Eric’s blog post: “Jeff Ma , who was the inspiration for the movie “21″ and the book “Bringing Down the House,” and is the author of the *awesome* new book, “The House Advantage” is coming to keynote Defrag. Besides being a world-famous card counter in the game of blackjack (which he, literally, can no longer play in casinos), Jeff has started several businesses (PROTRADE and Citizen Sports – which sold to Yahoo! in May of this year). Jeff’s current focus is on applying the laws of statistics to business in order to give managers, entrepreneurs and leaders an edge (hence, “The House Advantage”).” ...

I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue . Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up. If you are familiar with Defrag and Glue, you know they are built around two of Foundry Group’s themes (Protocol and Glue respectively). Blur is being built around our Human Computer Interaction theme, but with a twist. Instead of simply being able to “see cool stuff up close”, our goal with Blur will be to create an environment where you can actually use and work with this stuff. We’ll have user-oriented demos, hackathons, and tons of crazy shit no one has ever seen before. ...

I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag ). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment. He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference. ...