North Of South By Southwest

By Wayne Raicik on 03/23 (0) Comments •
tagged: Advertising, Interactive, South By Southwest, Web Design

Phew! What a whirlwind. Estimates for this year's interactive portion of South By Southwest hover around 30000. That's a large helping of geekness. It's a bit large for my liking but worth every minute of waiting in line, getting shut out of presentations and waiting for the hotel shuttle six miles north of the city. In between Austin 512 IPAs (very tasty if you care to imbibe) and barbecue (my favorite was Rudy's, in a gas station and a short cab ride outside the city) there was an endless stream of really smart, insightful and inspirational speakers and panels. Here's a few highlights.

Marissa Mayer, VP Consumer Products, Google – She's the Brooklyn Decker of geekville. A tall, blond, Stanford educated woman with a brain so large she carries it around in a bucket, her canned talk was mostly Google-sell, although Google Places with Hotpot is a pretty nifty product. Her Q&A was more insightful, with talk of where Google is headed with the growing mobile market.

Seth Priebatsch, SCVNGR, Princeton dropout – He was a keynote speaker and probably this fan's favorite. An over-caffeinated, red Oakley wearing man-boy, he has more energy in one finger than I have in my entire body. He looked at the world's problems through a gamer's POV and I think has a viable solution to this country's education problem.

Barry Diller, Chairman, IAC – There was a chill in the air and I swear I heard the Darth Vader theme song when he strutted in. The funny thing was he was actually quite informed and charming. He was pretty adamant that you can't design for one channel (the iPad) , that the TV industry will be unrecognizable in a few years and that net neutrality is a good thing.

The Old Spice Guy Panel, Weiden + Kennedy – As if we haven't dissected every nuance of this memorable ad campaign, there was more. Mediated by Justine Bateman (yes, that Justine Batemen) and headed by the W+K creative team who looked like that just finished junior high, it was more proof that with a really good idea and talented people across the board, anything is possible.

Felicia Day, actress, creator of the webisode series, The Guild –  By creating, writing, shooting and acting in her own web series, Felicia became the poster girl for the DIY attitude of the internet. The funniest part of her talk may have been her male fans falling over each other to get in line for the Q&A portion. Although I originally questioned whether she would have had the success without her God-given good looks, her ending monologue about the internet giving anyone the chance to create what they believe in was goosebump worthy.

Robert Brunner, Product Designer, Ammunition – He has been lead designer on such ubiquitous products as the original MacBook, Dr. Dre Beats headphones and the Nook from Barnes & Noble. His thoughts on how people interact with products and why they respond to some and not others is something that can be applied to almost anything. The fact that one person could be responsible for so much beautiful design was both inspiring and envy evoking.

Hashable and GroupMe, hottest apps of SXSW – Twitter was launched here five years ago. This year the talk was about two others. Hashable is a networking app where you can exchange virtual business cards and make intros. GroupMe is a group texting tool. Both seemed tailor made for this event where the major forms of communication are texting, Twitter and Four Square.

This is just a small sampling of what I experienced over four days. I can't lie, by the last day I was pretty burned out. I played hooky for a few hours and made a pilgrimage to Mellow Johnny's, Lance Armstrong's bike shop in downtown Austin. Austin is a great town, full of friendly people and good food. Even now I dream of breakfast at Jo's Coffee where they make a mean huevos rancheros. Would I go back? Only the hardcore fan could justify going back every year, but every 2 or 3? Maybe. This much is for sure, everyone should experience it at least once. They have a saying in Austin, "Keep Austin weird." For nine days every spring, thousands of people do just that.