SxSWi is off to a rollicking start
Say what you will about the annual South by Southwest techie get-together, it is not boring. The opening antics so far prove that the current edition of the show is no different.
Every geek (or geek wannabe) at this year’s edition of South by Southwest has to be tickled to be there. So far, an emergency fire alarm, putatively false, does a respectable job of clearing the room containing a hotly awaited roundtable. On one’s way in, and again on one’s alarmed way out, the majority of the line of sight is filled with advertising, the pervasive look of the whole place. Social network is duking it out with social network for supremacy in the geolocation sector of that marketplace. Services with names like RSVP While You Sleep and Stickybits are getting a lot of press. And an imaginary or real (one never knows) left-at-home wife is providing comedic relief via Twitter to all of the rest of this. What more could you ask of a con?
The room which was cleared was in the Austin Convention Center, and inside it billionaire Mark Cuban and Boxee founder Avner Ronen were just starting to square off again after a highly entertaining war of words via their blogs last year. The two, long battling over the future (and past) of digital video were just starting to go at it, and very quotably at that, when the emergency alarm went off. According to a CNET recap, the alarm turned out to be a false one, but no one admits to knowing how it was triggered.
All that advertising was not just inside the convention hall; it seemed to fill the entire city of Austin. A social media startup advertised on the cardboard rings around coffee cups from Starbucks. City sidewalks were spray-painted with ads. During registration, paid hawkers shouted out the names of Twitter hash-tags to popularize. Some of that advertising was relevant to the ongoing war between Foursquare and Gowalla, who are fighting for the location-based social media championship of the world, using SxSWi as a battleground.
And if you’re too busy watching the fireworks to respond to all of your party invitations at SxSWi, an automated service called RSVP While You Sleep is offering to do it for you, either as a prank or for real. And don’t forget Stickybit, a company that is combining barcodes, advertising, photographs via apps for iPhone and Android, geo-location ditto, with social networking thrown in. Honest, we’re not making this up. Remember, it’s South by Southwest…
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March 14th, 2010
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