Geeks gather to talk up latest tech trends

Discussions around panels and keynotes are the main draw at the annual South By Southwest Interactive event, writes Jim Carroll

AT SOUTH By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), the talking never stops. For technology and telecom industry entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, marketeers and geeks who travel to Austin, Texas for this annual conference, the peer- to-peer conversations provoked by panels, keynotes and showcases are the big draw.

What comes out of SXSWi though, often has ramifications way beyond Austin.

For example, Twitter was the star turn at SXSWi 2007 and positive post-event word of mouth helped to set it up for a subsequent wider breakthrough.

Naturally, many at this year’s conference have their eyes peeled for what might be the next Twitter. Could it be FourSquare, a social network game where users track and follow their friends on a night out from the team who developed Dodgeball?

Or Whrrrl, another location-based find-and-recommend social network? Or even the iTunes management tool from Irish start-up Echodio?

Established in 1994, SXSWi is the perfect testing ground for new applications and gizmos, given the openness of those in attendance to ideas and innovations.

Because of its geek-friendly nature, established companies also come to Austin to debut new products and services. This year, for instance, Facebook used the conference to launch and talk up Facebook Connect for the iPhone.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the new or refreshed offerings on show this year seemed to be Twitter rethreads, as many companies rushed to keep up with the 140 characters or less surge.

There were plenty of snarky comments about such use of the “me too” playbook. Referring to Facebook’s new home page, Yammer’s David Sacks commented at one panel that “we used to call ourselves Twitter for enterprises, but now that Facebook have copied Twitter, we could be Facebook for enterprises”.

With a dozen or so panels and talks taking place every hour over the five-day conference, the range of topics and themes was deep and broad, from highly technical discussions for coders to guides for newly established freelancers.

Some panels even managed to avoid the issue of adding friends and followers altogether.

The chat between baseball statistician turned political number cruncher Nate Silver and The Numerati author Stephen Baker provided a fascinating, clear-headed guide to how Silver used data mining for forecasts and predictions.

While Silver was among the first to the punch with the prediction of a Barack Obama win in last year’s US presidential election (overcoming such bottlenecks as the “redneck proxy variable” in the process), he did point out that his Oscar predictions weren’t quite so hot.

The future of privacy panel participants mused on how a micro-economy could be created where users traded their private information with corporations. A discussion on mobile web access for developing countries reminded attendees that there were many economies where the important considerations are cost and information, rather than new apps and hardware upgrades.

Tom Bodkins and Khoi Vinh from the New York Times presented a workshop on how they have managed the reinvention of that paper online with “the maximum of elegance and the minimum of ornamentation”.

Not surprisingly though, social networking of every hue dominated many of the discussions. A panel on the death of the traditional PR agency never quite managed to get out of that loop, with some in the audience wondering why the panellists were not touching on other relevant issues besides Twitter.

Naturally, they passed their concerns to the panellists via instant tweets from the room.