The SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin TX this March 2010 was an almost overwhelming event. Here are a few of the concepts and takeaways that still have me thinking a couple weeks later
Andrew Bates (@AndrewBates)
Client Services Manager
This was my first year going to SXSW, and I have to say the event is almost too big. No complaints here, but attending the event was fascinating and jam-packed with learning. Thinking back two weeks later, I am still amazed by the people I met, the things I learned, and especially the tech I saw on display.
With events running from 9am to 2am daily and with at least 6+ main track events occurring simultaneously every few hours, it was impossible to see and do everything. Like many SXSW Interactive noobs, I tried to do too much and see more then my brain could digest. Now that it’s been a couple weeks, I find myself thinking about the SXSW concepts that have stuck with me.
First off, my most important takeaway has to do with the events size plus the expense that sponsors and vendors incurred to hock their wares. We know that this year’s Interactive registration was up 40% from 2009 even surpassing the registration for this year’s Music portion of the festival. The corporate presence from the big guys was more than noticeable. This is obviously not an event that is on its way up – it is here and likely here to stay. Google, Microsoft, and the rest of the major industry players are obviously taking this event very seriously.  Most had 4-6 times the booth size of your average vendor, and many of the event sponsors had points of presence throughout the event with freebees everywhere you looked. The non-geek industry sponsor presence was also obvious. Chevy was everywhere with their new Volt allowing the elite special test drives, and SOBE and Pepsi flowed freely wherever you walked.
The next takeaway that amazed me the most was the impromptu tweetups occurring night and day all over Austin. Attendees used this event to not only see scheduled panel discussions, but they also took advantage of the festival to get face to face with their colleagues.
@jjgardner3 tweets about a DC tweet up at SXSW Interactive 2010
Many attendees were excited ahead of time for the unofficial but very cool meet ups that were often just as valuable as the scheduled sessions. Many ran to David Armano’s growing event Allhat 2 in its second year with a lot of follow up tweets and posts. SXSW Interactive is a place where industry experts get time with each other to learn, validate, grow, and have a great time communicating offline. I even say DC’s own Geoff Livingston get a tattoo in the name of charity for reaching his goal of $5k+ in donations to the Livestrong Foundation.  Thanks to foursquare and twitter, people were constantly and quickly syncing up with others.
So that brings me to my next thought. The amount of content put out through twitter, blogs, and the rest around the event was impressive. According to a quick search in Radian6, there were over 800,000 mentions and posts across the web including “sxsw” over the last 30 days. So much so that the SXSW event trended in twitter throughout the week. I was especially thankful for those that tweeted important points that came out of sessions that I could not attend.
Probably one of my favorite pieces of technology at this year’s SXSWi is QMCodes. Attendees could not miss these “interactive print” displays on nearly every handout, product, demo… These small inch and a half squares of seemingly random black and white blocks were stuck on everything including our official event badges! With interactive print codes, a small amount of digital information can be tagged to this printed image, and then those with mobile devices can use the camera on their smartphone to access that data. Links, pictures, video content – nearly anything can be tagged to one of these images to be viewed by others later. This smart code technology was all over SXSW, but QMCodes clearly has the lion’s share of attention from this year’s event. I got to spend a few minutes with QMCodes CEO Antony McGregor Dey talking about his firm. They will be one to watch this year.
I’m still trying to digest all of the lessons learned from the scheduled sessions I attended. There is also a very large stack of cards on my desk of all the key people I met that I want to connect with again. One thing is for sure, SXSW Interactive 2010 was the best mix of learning and fun I’ve had in my professional career and I will go back next year (boss willing)!
