My SXSW’i 2010 Experience

So SXSW Interactive 2010 has come and gone; it was another great year for the conference and another worthwhile trip to Austin, TX. Sure, some of the panels and events were a hit-and-miss; and sure, there’s almost too many things overlapping at the same time that it’s inevitable to regret missing this-and-that or feeling like your experience could have been even more fulfilling. But all-in-all, it was a great learning experience and I enjoyed meeting some of the most interesting and influential folks in the industry – all only within 1 week.

As in previous years, Razorfish made another strong showing with 42 delegates, 12 of which spoke on 9 panels that drew large crowds. Our Opening Night Happy Hour — where our Emerging Experiences team showcased an Augmented Reality Photo app — was a great success (the line to get in was around the block!). Moreover, we used QR Codes on postcards, temporary tattoos, pins, and t-shirts to distribute the “Razorfish 5” Technology report and to help raise money for charity: water.

In addition to being a brand ambassador for Razorfish, I also served as an official SXSW Interactive Panel Liaison this year. In this position, I had the great opportunity in meeting and working with some of SXSW’s esteemed panelists to make sure the logistics of each presentation went smoothly. Some of these panel presentations included:

 

Here are some of my takeaways from this year’s SXSW:

Location, Location, Location

Foursquare launched during the 2009 SXSW with great success and location-based services (LBS) has grown even larger since then. With LBS game MyTown and Austin-based Gowalla in the mix, and with the continued growth of smart phones, location was certainly one of the major themes this year, and will continue to be significant in the near future. Brightkite even released a service – check.in – to remedy “check-in fatigue.” I’m already noticing how these services are becoming more-and-more mainstream, and are getting over the “why” hump. Once more businesses start adopting these services into their marketing strategies, we’ll see the true potential of these LBS.


HTML5

There was a lot of talk around HTML5, and more specifically HTML5 vs. Flash. Some interesting improvements that HTML5 brings include:

  • standardization: for example, HTML5 provides a standard way to embed video so users don’t need a proprietary plug-in to watch video. This is especially important as the iPhone/iPad become more popular.
  • canvas & canvas text: a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.
  • new elements: HTML5 introduces new tags, such as <article>, <nav>, <footer>, and new input types and attributes.

With Safari, Chrome, and to a certain extent, Firefox 3.6 and IE9 (announced Mar 16) supporting HTML5, I think it’s only a matter of time before Flash becomes obsolete. Of course, that may take more than just a few years considering that a considerable chunk of internet users will still be using non-HTML5 browsers.


QR Codes

This is probably the first time I’ve seen such a wide usage of QR codes at an event. Everyone’s badges came with one that would link to your my.sxsw profile. We used them for our Razorfish and charity:water campaigns. There was even a startup, stickybits, that distributed a pack of barcode stickers with every SXSW bag that let you “attach” information (media, URL, etc.) to them. There are a lot of neat applications and use cases for QR codes, and I can’t wait to see more innovations around this space.


Gaming

ScreenBurn, SXSW’s video game element, made up a decent chunk of SXSW’s schedule this year (at least more than last year it seemed) despite that most gaming-industry folk attended GDC instead. In addition to video games and social gaming specifically, game mechanics in general was a major theme across the board as a popular way to engage users. This was evident in sites now including a points, rank, badge, etc. component (e.g. Foursquare and Gowalla). For those apps that don’t consider gaming as their primary focus, however, I have yet to see this strategy being effective in retaining users beyond the initial hype period. In many cases, you simply end up with what I find analogous to airline miles – almost-meaningless points. But I feel we’re at the tip of the iceberg, and it’d be interesting to see brands to start considering using game mechanics to capture and retain their target market.


Keynotes and Speeches

There were a lot of great (and not-so-great) discussions during SXSW – many of which took place outside the officially scheduled programming – so I’ll just highlight a few:

Danah Boyd

  • Privacy is not dead. Privacy == Control
  • Is making public data more public an invasion of privacy?
  • What is the difference between publically accessible vs. publicized?
  • PII vs. PEI (personally embarrassing info)
  • Case studies of how Google Buzz and Facebook failed with privacy


Evan Williams

  • Announced Twitter’s @anywhere platform
  • Every entrepreneur should learn that: whatever you think is true now is wrong. It’s all about experimentation. Openness is a survival strategy.

Note: I, like many others, left the keynote early as I felt that the interview did not go well.


Gary Vaynerchuck

  • Gary’s talk was as inspirational (and hilarious) as usual.
  • Customer Service is King. “No matter what you think you are right now, no matter what you think you do right now, every person is going to be in a couple of industries, and it’s coming fast and coming soon. And it’s called customer service.”
  • You should always do what you are passionate about.
  • “Agencies are playing politics to keep the client. If they spent 1/5th of that time being creative, and trying to make sh*t happen, they would be way more successful. I think what creative agencies need to is to be creative.”


Other Notable Startups

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to thank you and ask: what were your key takeaways from SXSW’i this year? If you didn’t attend this year, I definitely recommend you to attend next year.

And with that, I’ll end with a few notable startups (in addition to those I already mentioned) that made a strong showing during SXSW and that I feel are doing some interesting things. Check them out and let me know what you think:

  • Hot Potato: helps friends and fans socialize and share experiences around live events
  • Plancast: a service for sharing your upcoming plans with friends
  • Venmo: a way to safely pay, charge, and trust individuals and businesses, primarily through a mobile device.
  • Quora: a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it
  • PeopleBrowsr: a Social search engine and a Conversation Mine for monitoring and analysis
  • OneRiot: a real-time search engine

 

And finally, a special thanks to all SXSW staff (esp. Hugh Forrest) and Razorfish for their contribution and support!