As the world sits watching financial markets, the real ramp toward Defrag has begun — which means that over the coming days, you’ll see a ton of announcements here around keynoters, sponsors and special events. In that vein, let’s start today with two announcements:
1. The Kauffman Foundation Scholarship: I’m pleased to welcome back the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to Defrag. As with last year, we’ll be offering a limited number of Kauffman scholarships to students and entrepreneurs that can’t afford to attend Defrag, but would receive significant benefit from doing so. If you believe that’s you, then please send me an email (enorlin AT mac.com) and include: name, school and/or startup, and a couple of hundred words on how you’ll benefit from the scholarship.
An important note on this: one of the things that I’m trying to do this year is start a concerted push to encourage more women to get into technology (and specifically tech entrepreneurship). We need more women CEOs with engineering degrees that have decided to start a company. As such, 50% of the Kauffman Scholarships will be held for women. Please do spread the word. (And we’ll have more announcements in this area in the coming days.)
As a corollary to that (call this a pre-announcement), we’re working on a program whereby we would award money for college to a deserving young woman in high school that has an interest in computer science. I’m still hammering out the details, but we’re talking to our sponsors, the NCWIT, etc — where the idea would be that Defrag and Defrag’s sponsors throw some money in a pot, and we find the right mechanism for award selection. Like I said, I’m still working on details, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could build this up to the point where there was a Defrag award that could PAY for the college tuition of a woman choosing to enter the field of computer science?
2. The API Hackday: Tim Falls over at SendGrid has been working on an API Hackday that will happen the day *before* Defrag starts. It’s going to happen at the Bing offices (not far from the Defrag hotel), and is brought to you by the good folks at SendGrid, SimpleGeo, Twilio and Mashery. If you’re coming to Defrag and want to do some API hacking to dig in a bit more, plan to come in a day early. More on this in the coming weeks…
Stay tuned for more announcements. Defrag’s a-coming…..get your butt registered.
