Sunday was supposed to be the first nice day, but we woke to grey skies and rain.  We decided to punt on the 10am panels and hit Moonshine again, for their brunch.  It was well worth the break to get a good meal in to start the day:

• James started the sessions off with "OpenID, OAuth, Data Portability and the Enterprise".  The panel talked about how Software as a Service (aka SAS) is chaning how Enterprise is dealing with 3rd party / cloud computing.  The main issues that are troubling Enterprise at the moment with 3rd party SAS applications are user account management across internal/external services, provisioning software (automatic new hire and termination account management) integration, and data security issues.  The panel was a little future vision based and the crowd was a little more current vision which lead to some heated arguments about the current realities of IP law, security and the pace that Enterprise moves (i.e. slow).  The panel had the lead architect of Plaxo and he was very much consumer centric and this caused some frustration with the IT crowd because his vision of how it all works does not comply with a lot of Enterprise.  When we got back to the hotel we had a long discussion about how the old brick-and-mortar mentality of large firms need to change but until experiments like Zappos.com continue to define success it will be hard for large firms to openly adopt new and potentially risky ideas.
• Aaron's first session was "Violating the Warranty on Your Touch Computing Device", which turned out to be a session 100% dedicated to Microsoft's Surface product.  The session included 4 panelists; Chris Bernard (User Experience Evangelist, Silverlight/Microsoft), Joe Engalan (Dir of Dev, Vectorform), Erik Klimczak (Creative Dir, Clarity Consulting), Joe Olsen (CEO, Phenomblue), Dan Thompson (Developer, Silverlight (PP)/Manifest).  A good session none the less, they talked about the challenges facing current development on the table, which included: programming behaviors, the lack of a common toolkit, and the difficulty finding 3D programmers.  The coolest example Aaron heard of was Vectorfarm's vehicle configuration for BMW.  Inside of dealers, customers can configure their vehicle on a Microsoft Surface.  First, the customer can play with real materials such as a leather seat swatch or a paint chips that are next to the table. When custom likes a paticular accessory, they can simple lay the swatch/chip on the Surface, it reads a bar code on the item and updates the virtual configuration.  We have both built vehicle configurators in the past and this sounds like the most engaging experience on the market.  For anyone looking to enter the Microsoft Surface development market it will only take $15,000 for the device which will include 5 seat licenses.
• After catching up between sessions, James headed off to "CSS3: What's Now, What's New and What's Not."  The panel had a Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera rep and was lead by one of the Opera evangelist.  The panel showed what each browser was doing for CSS3, such as Firefox's support of background borders (scale 9 support), embedding web fonts, type size management, etc.  Interestingly enough, a lot of the things they demo'd are already in Flex.  We are not saying the Flex is CSS3 compliant, because its not by a long shot (maybe Flex 4 is closer), but the things that got the crowd to ooh and ahh was all Flex enabled features.  Microsoft showed how IE8 is 100% CSS 2.1 compliant which is important because this means that the spec can be signed off and CSS3 can begin for real.  Opera then showed off what its doing and where they want to take CSS beyond web layout, such as print (think PDF features such as table of contents leaders, page numbering, etc).
• We met up and headed out to sit in on "So You Want To Write A Tech Book".  James liked the panel because we are more familar with the process and the panel got deep into industry jargon, but we felt sorry for the people that had never seen/heard about the process.  The presenter tackled the process backwards, and should have first explained how you go about getting a book deal, instead of trying to explain the industry first.  These kinds of panel are frustrating because you can clearly see it is structured wrong but yet you get good information out of it.  We were one of the lucky few I think that gleamed something from it.
• After this James called it a day and met up with peeps for drinks, since he has to pace himself for the rest of SXSWi and then the music portion.
• Aaron caught the break of the conference when his "Twitter for Marketers: Is It Still Social Media" session was at full capacity.  Heading back to the hotel he stumbled upon the keynote session by Gary Vanynerchuk the creator of Wine Library TV and other sites like Corkd.  For those who have not seen his show, the guy is straight up crazy. Crazy in a good way. Gary is so passionate about his life, career, family he can make the most unmotivated person stand up and do 100 jumping jacks.  Only Gary will critique wines with phrases like "Big League Chew" or a "Rubber Tire".  Gary talked about how in order to be successful in this online craze, you have to get out there and hustle.  Do whatever it takes to make your dreams happen. For Gary, that's staying up until 2-4am every night reading blogs, and replying to every email sent to him.  He is so passionate, that if you comment on his site and tell him you don't like something or that he is wrong he will hunt you down and make you see his point, or at least make you see that he's a cool guy.  (Aaron Speaking) When I left the session all I wanted to do was go back to the room and start searching 100,000 ideas in my head, but of course I went out drinking and was asleep by 1am. Gary posted a video of the talk....Listen in