New directions in technology

The South By Southwest Interactive festival puts the latest tech trends centre stage, writes Jim Carroll

A YEAR ago at the South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, there was a bit of a buzz among delegates about Foursquare. Back then, the service was one of several new location-based applications jostling for attention at the annual Austin, Texas, gathering of geeks and tech entrepreneurs. While it featured in some media dispatches, it didn’t quite hit the SXSWi jackpot like Twitter did back in 2007.

This year, though, the only way to avoid Foursquare was to leave town. Location-based applications were all the rage at SXSWi 2010 and, despite keen competition from similar services such as Gowalla and Loopt, Foursquare was the one gaining all the attention.

It is a safe bet that a huge share of the 1.6 million check-ins on the service last week were generated by the 10,000 delegates who hit Austin for SXSWi.

Aside from broadcasting their whereabouts at various bars, restaurants and clubs to the world, the delegates were attending hundreds of panels, keynotes and workshops. With titles including Why Australians are Virtual World Innovators, From Trolls to Stars: the Commenter Ecosystem and Users Who Take Their Time Tweeting, all aspects of the state of the tech nation were up for discussion.

The amount of ideas generated at and around SXSWi has helped the festival build, develop and maintain an audience. The presence of so many bright sparks also means it has become a platform for companies seeking to interest early adopters in new products and innovations.

SXSWi began in 1994 as an offshoot of the SXSW music and film festivals to appeal to Austin’s Silicon Hills tech community. Since then, SXSWi has developed to become an exuberant, invigorating spring break for anyone keen to get a measure of possible future trends. As the organisers boast, tomorrow happens here.

Naturally, given the common interests and concerns of this audience, certain themes came up again and again over the course of the event. Tackling the issue of privacy and publicity in her keynote address, Microsoft Research social media expert Danah Boyd noted that, “no matter how many times a privileged, straight, white, male technology executive tells you privacy is dead, privacy is not dead”.

Aside from blasting recent innovations by Google and Facebook for what she saw as privacy failures, Boyd examined differences in how teens and adults approach the issue of putting private data in the public domain. Teens consider what they have to gain from what is in the public domain about them, she noted, while adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.

Another issue that dominated many panels was how to get funding for new or existing businesses. A panel examining how the wisdom and enthusiasm of crowds can be tapped for cash focused on Kickstarter, an innovative funding platform for emerging projects which raises micro-budgets on an all-or-nothing basis. The platform is not just for artists or musicians: Britta Riley of Window Farms explained how Kickstarter helped her company raise $25,000 (€18,000) for an urban gardening project.

Reduced budgets and adapting to less splashing of the cash were also on the agenda. A panel on Big Campaigns on Digital Dollarsexamined how Ikea and the television networks behind such shows as Gossip Girland Heroeswere seeking to get more bang from less bucks by way of viral videos and online campaigns.

Sometimes, it came down to drawing in fans of the brand to get involved. “Ikea is like Apple, but with tables,” commented panellist Wilson Cleveland of CJP Digital Media about this approach.

The Accelerator scheme provided an opportunity for those seeking funding or attention for new projects. This is the festival's American Idolmeets Dragons' Denshowcase for tech start-ups, held in conjunction with Microsoft BizSpark. Some 32 firms made the cut from hundreds of entrants and each had two minutes to impress the judges with their spiel. One of the finalists was Irish-US start-up Amulet Devices, which pitched a voice-automated remote control for Windows Media.

Some people did not come to talk about cash. There was much pre-game chatter about how Twitter chief executive Evan Williams might use his keynote interview to unveil a much-mooted new advertising model for the service.

Twitter is SXSWi’s favourite poster-child, having come spectacularly to the boil at the 2007 conference, and there was a lot of hullabaloo about Williams’ appearance.

Unfortunately, he did not live up to expectations. A capacity room sat through a meandering, uninteresting and cliche-ridden interview as Williams did his level best to avoid saying anything of note for an hour. The queues to leave the room before the set-piece concluded seemed slightly longer than the ones earlier to get in.

The only innovation that Williams brought with him was @Anywhere, Twitter's answer to Facebook Connect. This will allow Twitter's 75 million users to access and use Twitter services from third-party sites, with the likes of the New York Times, Huffington Post, YouTube, Amazon and eBay already on board.

Despite Williams’ underwhelming performance, Twitter still caused waves. Delegates and panellists discussed if you could copyright a tweet, assessed the service’s suitability as a news-gathering tool and examined corporate America’s response to social media tools like Twitter.

Luckily, those seeking more electrifying panellists than the Twitter boss did not have far to look. Serial entrepreneur, wine blogger and alternative business guru Gary Vaynerchuk had them rolling in the aisles with his take on customer interaction.

Meanwhile, a discussion about what a post- New York Timesmedia landscape might look like featured an entertaining, spirited exchange on crowd-sourcing the news between the newspaper's media correspondent, David Carr, and the Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas.

Like many others at SXSWi 2010, the pair may not have produced definitive answers, but they provided plenty of sparks.

For more information, see sxsw.com/interactive