Tech author Ben Mezrich to speak Thursday at the 2013 IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference

By Jamie Mendez

With just over two weeks to go until the kick-off for the 2013 IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, I’m pleased to announce the identity of a Thursday guest speaker who is bound to keep you on the edge of your seat. Hailed as the freshest thing to hit Hollywood in years, tech author Ben Mezrich will share his insights into the astounding possibilities of visionary thinking and today’s ever-evolving technology.

Mezrich has been so successful, in fact, that two of his novels have already been made into box-office gold. You’ll no doubt remember the 2010 film The Social Network. This Academy Award-winning movie was based on Mezrich’s novel The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, which debuted at #4 on The New York Times bestseller list and instantly became a worldwide phenomenon.

You may also be familiar with another runaway success from Ben Mezrich called Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which spent 63 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 2 million copies in 15 languages. This tale of clever young people who beat the major casinos at blackjack using a sophisticated card-counting system was the basis of the Kevin Spacey vehicle 21, which was the number-one movie in the US for two weeks in 2008, as well as a huge international hit.

What is Mezrich’s secret?

According to the official press handout, Ben Mezrich has “created his own highly addictive genre of nonfiction, chronicling the amazing stories of young geniuses making tons of money on the edge of impossibility, ethics and morality.” This is indeed what makes his work so compelling, as the ability to use technology to execute anything you can imagine can have some highly interesting and dramatic repercussions.

Not content to observe from the sidelines, Mezrich is known for immersing himself in the worlds he writes about. At one point while writing Bringing Down the House, he smuggled $250,000 through airport security with some of the most notorious card counters in the world.

So visit the 2013 PartnerWorld Leadership Conference website now to view the full agenda, plan to stay until at least 1 p.m. on Thursday, February 28^th, and spend some quality time with one of the most fascinating technology authors on the planet!