SXSWi Day 1
posted Mar 11, 2011 at 11:00:42 PM by Doug Gibson.
Having wanted to attend South by Southwest (SXSW) for more than two years, this year, I finally made it happen. I’ll be reporting on each day of the interactive, film, and music conference. I’m actually only attending the interactive and music portions, so I’ll blog the interactive experiences here on my personal blog, and the music experiences over on Metal Underground.com.
I arrived in Austin Thursday evening and the interactive and film portions of the conference officially kicked off on Friday, March 11th. With no talks scheduled before 2pm, I figured I’d go pick up my badge and check out the expo/tradeshow area until lunch time.
I got my badge and “swag bag” and headed off to explore the massive Austin Convention center. The swag bag contained only the basics this year: a SXSW pocket schedule and map (essential), the SXSW Interactive book, and the SXSW edition of the Austin Chronicle. It was commented by a few conference goers that it was lighter on swag than in previous years.
The Austin Convention Center is large and a little confusing, but not as massive and I thought. But I also wasn’t expecting the convention to actually span multiple hotels, some several blocks away.
Unfortunately, the expo doesn’t open until Monday, the 14th, however, but this left plenty of time to roam the convention center and nearby areas, and even relax in the sunny, warm weather on a small strip of grass in front of the Hilton long enough to get some sun on my face.
The crowd was very noticeably a geek crowd, seemingly very much made up of geeks in their mid twenties to thirties and older. Everyone had some sort of smart phone to play with, and with all the down time we had before the session began, the walls were lined with people consumed with using their mobile devices. Luckily I had my ipod touch and a Wifi connection to search the schedule and interactive map via the excellent SXSW Go app, so I wasn’t entirely out of place among the mobile using geek crowd.
Two o’clock finally rolled around and I went to the “Big Brother on the Big Screen” panel, featuring Chris Conley (ACLU), Cindy Cohn (EFF), and Tim Edgar (Office of the Director of National Intelligence). It was an interesting discussion about what the government can and can’t do (physically and legally), using fictional movie clips as springboards for discussion. It was an interesting talk, and there were certainly some eye-opening points - such as the description of the fiber optic splitter in the AT&T building in California making a copy of all cell traffic going through there - but far fewer than one might expect, mostly due to Tim’s cagyness about some topics, however reasonable it might be given his position.
The next presentation I attended was “Location, Location, Location” from Google’s Marissa Mayer. There was nothing else compelling in this time slot, and I figured Google would have some cool stuff to show. And they did. To top it off Marissa was a great speaker. She unveiled some recently released products such as traffic routing, turn-by-turn navigation, Google Maps update to vector-based maps, and even Google Hotpot (local recommendations). Interestingly, Google Maps currently has about 150 million mobile users, comprising about 40% of its traffic. The ways that local and maps have grown is heavily due to mobile usage, and mobile and social themes ran deep throughout most of the sessions offered at SXSWi.
Interestingly, despite the lack of very web developer-centric topics, I met quite a few web developers (in the traditional sense) in my downtime.
Exhaisted and fighting a headache all day, after a quick bite to eat, I headed back to my hotel. Capping the first day, was an extremely long wait during the shuttle service’s shift change, which happened to be around 6pm, which was terrible timing. Not only was it during one of the busiest times when people were heading back to the hotels, but it was during rush hour. So while vans waited for drivers, others were stuck in traffic, slowing service further. I heard from many people that it’s always crazy and uncoordinated on the first day. I hope this is the case.
Overall, Friday seemed like a very optional day. Had I been here before and known my way around the city and the convention center a little, I would have flown in on Friday morning rather than Thursday night. But it is a lot to take in, and having some extra time to do so on your first visit is nice.
