He mentions FastCoin as a fast-clearing currency. Bitcoin's confirmations are slow for the sake of security. There's a new method that makes it possible to get fast confirmations with good security, but I don't see any indication that FastCoin is using it. For details and a link to the academic paper, see here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359582.0 Ethereum is the only new coin I know of that's planning to…
Bitcoin's confirmations are slow because it takes several new blocks to be generated before a transactions is considered really confirmed. A block takes about 10 minutes. If you speed up the block time, you speed up the confirmation time, no?
(or whatever word you want to swap in for wasted; it's the difficulty of matching the computation that is interesting, not the number of blocks)