Gist at Defrag - seems like we are on to something here…

Last week I was fortunate enough to go to the Defrag conference in Denver.  Eric Norlin and his crew put on a great event.  I was overly impressed with the quality of the attendees and their interest in new communications technologies.  The Twitter streams were flying all day long and well into the night, and hearing guys like Stowe Boyd talk about “flow” and Charlene Li (formally of Gartner) give her thoughts “harnessing the implicit social graph“, I knew I was hanging out with the right crowd.

Chris Wand of Foundry Group set up a great pre-event dinner with the “email dudes” which gave us a chance to meet each other and compare notes on what we are seeing out there. Chris has done some great thinking and investing in and around email and the evolving “communications” space.  Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team ( Dave Drach) sponsored the dinner, and it was nice to catch up on the latest from EBT since I used to do so much work with them during my time at Microsoft.

I participated on a panel discussion with Tom Keller, IntenseDebate, Daniel Ha, Disqus and Avinoam Rubenstain, my6sense, which was moderated by Deborah Schultz.   We talked about the “dis-aggregation and re-aggregation of the web”, which was very appropriate given what we are doing at Gist. Deborah asked some very good questions about “focus” and “priority” as well as putting these “filters” on a mobile device.  It is fair to say that most people agreed about the need for better systems to provide this focus by leveraging either past history or related end-user actions, leading to better “context”.  Lots of good ideas and discussions after the panel discussion as well.

There was also a very good panel discussion about the future of email and the inbox, including  Deva Hazarika from Clear Context and Pete Warden from Mailana.  Both are working on products that help unlock the value trapped in the “Outlook/Exchange inbox”.  I really respect their thoughts and ideas, so it was great to hear both of them describe Gist as “one of the coolest and most interesting companies they have seen at Defrag”.

I also got in a few good hours of running with Brad Feld (also from Foundry).  He was instrumental in setting up Defrag with Eric and his thoughts on the “next inbox” also really resonated with what we are thinking here at Gist.

I am already looking forward to attending next year.  Great work Defrag team!