SXSW Recap

Last week I attended the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin for the first time. Here's a summary of what I observed as well as some takeaways.

I was expecting a big crowd but 18,000+? That was the attendance figure I heard although I have not seen any official number. Regardless, it was a big crowd. Much bigger than recent years according to those who have attended in previous years. I guess it is a good indicator that at least in the Interactive world, the recession is over.

Another big trend for this year is that SXSWi attracted big business. Sponsors included Chevrolet, AT&T, Pepsi, and Miller. For example, Chevy had 30 cars on the streets of Austin providing free rides to conference participants. I took advantage of a free ride in a Chevy Cruz on my first day.

Social media was obviously on a lot of folks minds and was a dominant theme of many sessions. Interesting factoid, AARP, which is not an organization and demographic most would associate with social media, has a 6-person social media team.

As opposed to past years when there was a key new startup/technology launch (e.g., Twitter and FourSquare) that captivated the SXSW crowd, this year's big launch was the Apple iPad 2. Not exactly an unknown making a splash. Sure, there were a number of group messaging companies (GroupMe, Beluga, and Kik among others) trying to make themselves known. But the iPad2 was the new gadget that most SXSWi attendees coveted.

The Lean Startup movement had a big presence on Saturday with an all-day set of sessions. My big takeaway on this day was the size and passion of the crowd. The Lean Startup methodology has definitely caught on in the entrepreneurial community and it is definitely not confined to Silicon Valley. Here are some of the key slides from the day:
- Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup"
- Dave McClure, "Startup Metrics for Pirates 2.0"
- Steve Blank, "New Rules for the New Bubble"

Primary message from Christopher Poole's, founder of 4Chan, keynote on identity and authenticity: ""Zuckerberg's totally wrong on anonymity being total cowardice. Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way," Poole said, adding that the internet allows people to "reinvent themselves" as if they were moving home or starting a new job.

I attended a sparsely attended session on "Machines Trading Stocks on News" . It was an interesting session on text mining and semantic technology being utilized to scan news and social media streams to drive automated stock trading. Not sure if the technology is truly ready for prime time but it is getting closer. The technology can at least be used to greatly assist human traders in sifting through mountains of information. One of the key examples was commodities traders in Chicago following and trading on tweets from farmers in the fields exchanging info regarding weather and crop conditions.

"Apps vs. Mobile Web: Which to Reach Consumers?". Top brands (e.g., Google, FB, Yahoo, Fandango) are cross platform (i.e., offer apps and web content and services). If limited resources for development, platform choice becomes one determine by breadth and diversity of audience, desired user experience, and ability to monetize. For those going after the mass market, a multi-platform strategy is required (market still very fragmented). For a multi-platform strategy, providing a similar user experience on the various platforms seems to be the best approach (see FB and Fandango). Also, using the mobile and desktop sites to promote and drive user downloads of apps is a best practice.

"Your Data in the Cloud: Privacy, Ownership, Convenience". PogoPlug CEO Dan Putterman describes the value and challenges of personal cloud storage. While a lot of cloud data storage has been given away for the last few years, wholesale data storage (AWS) is approximately $2/GB/year. Average content/data in the home is approximately 2TB, quickly approaching 4TB. Cloud storage costs and syncing (upload/download) times are current challenges for private cloud. Average consumer is willing to pay only $5/mo for cloud storage whereas actual costs closer to $3000/year. Tiered storage options are likely required.

"Thunder in the Clouds", panel discussion on state of cloud computing for enterprises and individuals.

"David v. Goliath: Internet startups vs. Money Giants", panel discussion on whether financial startups can disrupt existing giants on Wall Street. Good discussion however it mostly focused on retail and small business banking. Panel is summarized by the moderator here.

Reid Hoffman on "Data as Web 3.0". Summarized here. Reid finished his talk with his 10 rules of entrepreneurship.