What I’m Looking For at Austin’s Tech Fest
South by Southwest Interactive, the annual festival that lures the tech-savvy set away from the warm glow of their computers to Austin, Tex., kicks off Friday. I’ll be joining the masses who turn out to see the newest and coolest Web innovations and the latest clickable sensations, reporting on what I see along the way.
Last year, as a newbie to the rituals of the digerati, I thought that the event resembled spring break for bloggers — at one party, guests playfully blew into Breathalyzers. And a calamitous keynote interview between Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and journalist Sarah Lacy gave everyone something to Twitter home about.
But this year, organizers are hoping to make the conference — part of the bigger South by Southwest festival that includes film and music — more than just a string of wild, barbecue-fueled parties.
For starters, organizers have taken note of the makeshift, digital tent city erected around the infrastructure of the conference and made some of those third-party innovations official parts of the gathering. In short, “we formalized what had been happening in the hallways all along,” said Shawn O’Keefe, one of the event producers.
For example, during 2008’s event, graphic designer Mike Rohde drew visual guides to several of the panels and events that he nicknamed Sketchnotes. After the conference he uploaded his hand-drawn infographics to Flickr, where they were widely circulated and linked to.
South by Southwest organizers commissioned Mr. Rohde to create another set for 2009, and they’ll be made available for free after the event.
Organizers also borrowed a page from one of 2008’s most prized applications — a free, unofficial scheduling tool called Sched.org, built by a pair of developers in a single day. This year, SXSW rolled out its own version of a custom networking and schedule-building tool called MySXSW. It lets attendees keep track of the week’s presentations and happy hours via the Web and mobile browsers, as well as send messages to one another.
Many of the 200-plus panels scheduled for the five-day event have how-to or do-it-yourself format, emphasizing practical skills in an economy where they are suddenly more valuable. For example, there are in-depth lessons on Adobe software, video journalism tutorials and tips for building online communities. The fun stuff is still there, of course, and several panels look promising: Sex lives of the microfamous, drilling down into the anatomy of online scandals and sustainable food 2.0.
The recession doesn’t seem to have dampened the spirit of the event or its attendance. South by Southwest is on track to exceed last year’s 9,000 people by at least 30 percent, said Mr. O’Keefe.
Ever since Twitter caught the attention of the crowd at South by Southwest in 2007, start-ups have flocked to the conference hoping to dazzle its influential mixture of bloggers, social media mavens and early adopters.
This year, organizers teamed up with Microsoft BizSpark to create the Accelerator, an event hosted by the venture capitalist and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, where more than 20 start-ups will demonstrate their products before a panel of judges.
As part of our coverage, I’ll be blogging on Bits, Twittering dispatches from the scene, ducking my head into keynotes by the statistical whiz Nate Silver, playing a round or two of SXSW Bingo and following start-ups like Foursquare that are hoping to break through the noise.
Feel free to share your tips and impressions through blog comments, e-mail and tweets @jennydeluxe.