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: