The 5th Annual Defrag Conference was held November 8-10. 2011, in Denver, and I was there once again reporting on all the action during this much heralded meeting of the Internet’s big minds. 
One of the highlights this time for me was the keynote on the final day by Robert Stephens, CTO of Best Buy and founder of Geek Squad. Robert was a huge hit, as I’d been telling all my Defrag friends for years that he would be. (A selection of the scores of tweets during his talk is shown below — screenshots I grabbed from my Defrag 2011 Live-Blog archive. The hashtag #defragcon was lighting up the web over the three days of the event, and still is with the afterglow. One of my favorite tweets, not shown below, was someone quoting Robert saying, “Everything at Best Buy is an accessory to your mobile phone – including your car.” Hmmm, and maybe even your electric motorcyle, a product category that’s been expected to show up in Best Buy stores, and may finally be coming soon — the first hint: there are actually reviews for one already posted on BestBuy.com — but Robert didn’t touch on this topic.)
In a 10-minute video interview I did with Robert while we were having coffee and rolls before the general session started Thursday morning, we covered a range of topics — including the recent announcement that Best Buy is acquiring managed services provider MindShift for $167 million. I also got a sneak preview of other topics Robert was going to talk about in his opening keynote:
It is 11/11/11 so 
A continued acceleration in all things mobile takes an interesting twist this week with a Best Buy VC investment in electric scooters. We then have on a special guest, Lisa Foote, CEO and Co-Founder of 
The passing of Apple’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, overshadowed all other stories of the past week…even Apple’s own introduction of the iPhone 4S. Still, there were numerous things to talk about since the acceleration in technology innovation continues unabated.
Lots of announcements this week with Facebook f8, Google+ opening up to everyone, and Forbes thinking our hometown technology retail success story, Best Buy, is in trouble.
Mobile is changing dramatically and the strategic-level changes are a challenge to stay on top of, which is why we have Lisa Foote on as our guest for this podcast. No one in the Twin Cities is on top of the mobile space like Lisa is, and the Gang did a lot more than our usual homework to prepare for our time with her. As such, there are several fabulous links below that you’ll undoubtedly find enlightening if you’re at all interested in the mobile market (and where the “OMG!” about the death of feature phones comes from).
We talk Google+ and Google’s design changes, bring on our guest, 
The 2011 summer acceleration in all-things-tech continues unabated. The Gang discusses the continued explosion in cloud services and how many are driving toward “cloud money” by monetizing their offerings, or offering cloud strategies with the intent of being in-the-game and making money on cloud uses (e.g., Twitter, Best Buy’s Music Cloud, respectively).
Due to the overwhelming success of the