Brad Feld

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Defrag 2013 – Year 7

Sep 06, 2013

Defrag is entering its seventh year of existence. That’s kind of amazing to me. What started as a simple email exchange between myself and Eric Norlin almost eight years ago resulted in a conference that has grown in importance, had meaningful impact on my thinking (and that of many others), and spawned other shows, most notably Gluecon. Most tech conferences don’t last seven years, and they certainly don’t get better with time. Defrag has and is.

Eric has been outlining his thinking for this year’s agenda here, but let me point out a couple of things of note:

  1. Defrag is 3 days long this year, as we’ve rolled the Blur content into the overall Defrag agenda. This means that if you register for Defrag, you’re registered for 3 days (not 2, as in previous years). By the way, we did not increase the price as we did this.
  2. We limit Defrag to 325 people (25 press/analysts; 300 attendees) on purpose, as the primary goal of the Defrag conversation is intimacy. All of which is to say, don’t delay in grabbing a spot – it will sell out.

This year’s Defrag is covering everything from drones to robots to the cloud to APIs to big data. The full Defrag 2013 agenda is here (and it will continue to evolve) but topics will include the following:

  •  The History and Future of Calm Technology (Amber Case)
  • The Identity Manifesto: Seven Points On The Future of Identity (R Ray Wang)
  • Great, Software Ate My World. Now what? (Oren Teich)
  • Industrial Entropy and the Future of Work (Chris Devore)
  • The Coming Digital Dark Ages (Maggie Fox)
  • The Girl Geek Imperative (Lorinda Brandon)
  • How to make Skynet User Friendly (Bret Tobey)
  • Security in the Cloud for the API Economy (Andy Thurai)
  • Healthcare After The Deluge (John Wilbanks)
  • Existence as a platform: Quantified Self meets the internet of Things (Chris Dancy)
  • The Future of Flying Robots (Chris Sanz)

Jerry Colonna and I are also going to have a special fireside chat about surviving the startup life.

Use “brad12” to take an additional 10% off of the early bird pricing (which ends September 20th).

See you there!