Defrag Conference – Day 1 Recap

Defrag Conference 2010 is taking place this week in Denver, CO and Capital Entrepreneurs is attending.  The Kaufmann Foundation sponsored 25 young entrepreneurs to come to the conference and four Capital Entrepreneurs members were lucky recipients: Steve Faulkner of Real Time Txts, Dan Gordon and Mike Fenchel of Momenta Technologies, and Heidi Allstop of Student SPILL.

Here are some highlights of day 1:

• Alex Wright, Director of UX for the New York Times, gave a fantastic opening talk about the history of social networks.  Take away message: Social networks have been around forever, the medium has just changed, not the behavior or the motivation.
• Blekko is here demoing their new search engine.  All of us were skeptical, but after the CEO gave us a personal demo we were singing a different tune.  If the use of slashtags really takes off, Blekko could be a much better way to search the web.  Google is getting gamed by content farms and spammers and there has to be a solution.  Blekko may be it.
• Vivek Wadhwa literally ranted and raved for 45 minutes on the sad state of innovation in the US and most other countries.  The talk was very polarizing and there were mixed reactions from the crowd.  He did applaud the Startup Chile program which Capital Entrepreneurs members Nate Lustig and Jesse Davis of Entrustet just started this week!
• Jeff Ma, the inspiration for the movie “21”, gave the final keynote.  Great talk, great story.  Black jack is completely data driven so the information was very appropriate.  Also, he did not get beat up like in the movie… or so he claims.

Overall, the conference has been awesome so far.  We have all met some amazing people and are thrilled that Kaufmann allowed us to attend.  We will be posting tomorrow to recap Day 2.