sxsw

Most of the conferences we have attended tend to be along the 2-3 days long, SXSWi is an marathon conference with 5 full days of sessions, panels, keynotes and of course parties; lots of parties. This makes for a long, but exciting week/weekend.

• The first session of the day, we both attended “Cloud Computing: Defining the Undefinable” which had Kevin Gibbs (Tech Lead and Manager for Google App Engine), Yousef Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon).  They all started the presentation talking about how each company provides cloud services (Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services) and how each of these services are similar and different from each other.  They delved into security topics, different kinds of clouds such as public and private, and how cloud computing is changing how services are provided to customers. An interesting note is that Amazon is itself a client of its own services and hosts all its sites using AWS. By far, our favorite panelist was Yousef, who clearly was on point, listened to the questions and answered directly and honestly.  Werner was also an amazing member but you could see he had to sprinkle a bit of marketing speak in, being the CTO and all.  Kevin seemed to be just a PR rep who ignored the questions and just talked about how cool App Engine is and how it will be even cooler in the future.  Overall the panel was good and covered the services provided by the big three player.
• Next up was “Designers and Developers: Can’t We All Just Get Along”.  This was another excellent panel, where they had both developers and designers talk about how they work together and what works and does not work.  Interestingly, they had the panel made up of actual team pairs.  They had Chris Lea (developer/architect at Media Temple and Virb) and Virb’s lead designer Ryan Sims, they had Digg’s lead architect Joe Stump and Creative Director Daniel Burka, finally they had Andy Beaumont (UX Dir, Flutter + Wow) and Rob Corradi (Creative Dir, NeonState) who have worked together in the past.  This was a good idea because the pairs could use real world examples to discuss the challenges and successes of working as a creative/development team.  Our biggest issue with the panel was that they had way, way too experienced people who have spent a cararee excelling in their field.  This was especially true of the designers, since all three of them are expert HTML/CSS developers and UX designers.  This created a problem because when some questions about why designers or developers don’t work well with each other the panelist answered with blank stares or “you should get fire them.”  Ideally, we 100% agree, but the reality is that not all designers or developers are in same league as this panel.  None the less, it was a great and interesting conversation.
• Aaron jumped over and caught the second half of Tuesday’s keynote conversation between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson.  Chris has a new book “Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price.“.  The talk was basically about this topic.  Chris discussed his theory of free any why things will be eventually become free and that companies and people will have to offer free services or products to stay competitive.  Why pay when you can get it for free.  He sites the theory that if marginal costs become zero, the price will drop to zero.  This is the exact reason why his book will be free in PDF format. For him to produce the PDF doesn’t cost him anything, so it should be free. He’ll make his money from hard back and speaking engagements.  The book is a selling point, not his cash cow.
  
• During the Free session, James headed over to catch a Film panel with Richard Linklater (Detour Filmproduction) and Todd Haynes (Killer Films).
• For the last day, James took on a lighter load so that he could meet up with his friend Niki once he drove into town for the music part of the conference and due to the fact that he still had another four days of SXSW to attend to (recaps of SXSW music are poster at James’ Awesomecon blog).
• The Last session of SXSW 2009 for Aaron was “Using GPS & Location to Enhance Social Networking” which featured Tom Marchioro (Garmin), Daniel Gilmartin (ULocate), Thor Johnson (GyPSii), Martin May (Brightkite),  John Adams (Twitter), Bryan Jones (Mobile Blasts).  The panel discussed the how new this emerging market is for location based services.  The topics ranged from how would companies of this type make money. This topic concluded with Mr. Adamns listing a few revenue options for Twitter, such as enterprise types of accounts with more security, exclusiveness and possible certified accounts for celeberties.  The other intresting conversation was around a standard API so that all these great services could communicate with one another.  They announced a new working group revolving around Interoperability called OSLO which has the backing of currently 10+ companies.  One new service that is very interesting is Google’s new Location based service called Latitude, which allows other serivces to share the user’s location.  Another service that we were not aware of was Yahoo’s product FireEagle

Day four brought us beautiful weather for the first time at SXSW so far.  The sun was out and made our adventure to the BBQ Crash Course that much better.

• To start the day off, Aaron hit up Finance 2.0 to discover solutions that help the computer nerd save/conserve money in this turbulent economy.  The panel was guided by Stessa Cohen of Gartner whose analyizes the space of social finance.  The panel itself consisted of small business finance blogger Nichelle Stephens (Keeping Nickels), Murali Subbarao CEO of Billeo Inc, Aaron Patzer CEO/Founder of Mint.com, and Michael Ferrari Co-founder of SmartyPig.  The main theme out of the session was to find solutions that meet your individual needs while freeing up time in our busy lives.Mint.com offers a quick and easy solution to gain insight into your personal finance. Where does all that money go? Find out at Mint.com. A note from Mint, their service is read-only, so even if someone gains access to your Mint.com site, they can not drain your accounts.

  SmartyPig offers a saving account alternative solution that allows you to visualize your goals of your savings. If you really want that shiny red bike, open a savings account at SmartyPig and share your goal with your family and friends. They can see your progress and SmartyPig even allows them to contribute toward your goal. Forget that sweater for Christmas, grandma can now add that 10 dollars toward your new bike. SmartyPig offers one of the highest savings rate on the market.

  Billeo offers a smart wallet that helps pay your bills online at the company website, through a private wallet that is attached to your browser (plug-in).  Billeo also allows for faster shopping through many of it’s affiliates.  Auto form filling, including credit cards, speeds you through the checkout process.  Access reports and analysis your shopping habits and your monthly bills.  If you need to make a rush payment, Billeo provides bill pay directly at the company’s website, allowing for those late payments to be processed ASAP without the extra fee most banks charge.

  And lastly Nichelle offers a blog, Keeping Nickels, that provides tips on how to save, invest for personal finance. A great blog, for the money conscious  geek.

• James headed to “Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s best content”.  The panelist included Marshall Kirkpatrick (VP Content Dev, ReadWriteWeb), Louis Gray (Author/Publisher, louisgray.com), Gabe Rivera (Founder/CEO, Techmeme), Melanie Baker (Community Mgr, PostRank.com), Micah Baldwin (VP Business Dev, Lijit Networks Inc).  The panel focused on how they use tools, search engines, grease monkey scripts, Del.icio.us and other social media services to track down new and interesting content.  One of the most interesting ways of tracking down new content that Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about was a process they are using at ReadWriteWeb.  They are currently going back through their top news stories, they then use Del.ic.ious to find out what users linked to the source content before ReadWriteWeb posted it. They then build a list of users that continue to find interesting data before ReadWriteWeb does and then subscribe to the user’s Del.icio.us feed.  It is a very interesting and smart use of mixed data sources to find leaders in the news aggregation field.
• Next up Aaron joined the Browser Wars (part III), which is a reoccurring panel at SXSW where the web browser gods battled each other and defended or dodged a series of fireballs thrown at them by panel moderator Arun Raganathan (now of Mozilla).  The panel was interesting from the standpoint of seeing first hand how each of these individuals mix with one another. Remember these are the same folks that collaborate to define the web specification such as ECMA-Script, and HTML 5.  It’s fair to say there was animosity but they played nice and no one got hurt. The foe of the panel was Chris Wilson “the IE guy” who is the main player for Microsoft in the specification groups.  Arun fired many of the  fireballs his way (they were not nice).  I was impressed with Chris and how he came off. I almost walked out of the session with IE as my default browser.A question that stuck with me was one pointed at Darin Fisher of Google, which asked why Chrome picked Webkit as the rendering engine. Darin’s answer was intriguing, they first looked and intended to use Gecko, but soon saw the superior rendering capabilities that Webkit provided. He also said Gecko is an application platform, so it’s large, bloated and does way more things than Chrome was going to do. Panel Members:
  Arun Ranganathan - Mozilla
  Darin Fisher - Google
  Chris Wilson - Web Platform Architect
  Charles McCathieNevile - Chief Standards Office, Opera Software
  Brendan Eich (CTO Mozilla Foundation and Creator of JavaScript)

  Other blogs with more content:
  http://www.appscout.com/2008/03/sxsw_browser_wars_become_brows.php

  Podcast

• While Aaron was at Browser Wars, James headed over to “Start-up Management: OMG I have to manage people?”.  It was hosted by two of the founders of Catster/Dogster: Steven Reading and John Vars.  They both have been part of multiple startups and they talked about the process of hiring new people (hire as slow as possible) and letting people go (fire as fast as you can).  They talked about how to handle layoffs, encouraging employees, and working as a small team that grows.  It was run in a town hall fashion, where most of the topics were based on the audience’s question.  It was a very good panel and James enjoyed hearing how other small companies are grown and managed.
• For both of us, the most anticipated event of the week was the BBQ Crash Course at Emo’s.  Emo’s brought together 7 of the best BBQ restaurants in Texas for an all you can eat BBQ ho-down  The name of the game was to unplug for a few minutes and eat as much as you can. We both we eager to participate and we quickly grabbed a couple beers and worked our way around the backyard, piling our plates with pork ribs from Artz Rib House, the most tender brisket either of us ever had from Snow’s (Aaron hopes his Father-in-law isn’t reading this), and amazing BBQ taco by Ranch 616.   While enjoying more than enough food, we got the chance to meet SXSW’s CTO Scott Wilcox.  Scott looked a little stressed and confirmed it when he told us he was on his second week of 14 hour days, dealing with the normal technical challenges anyone faces with trying to put on three conferences in one, with over 15,000 attendees (music, film, interactive), and over 1800 bands.  Scott, after chatting with us for a few minutes, quickly ran off to tackle another technical issue, no rest for the weary.  Big props to Scott for putting on such a great conference and for surviving 14 years of it! One of the nicest stories we heard was from Snow’s BBQ which was recently named the best Brisket in Texas. Before being crowned, Snow’s BBQ was a weekend hobby that produced a few 100 pounds of various BBQ for sale to locals on Saturday morning.  After the best brisket recognition, Snow’s still opens only on Saturdays, and yet consistently sells out of 3x (they dug 2 extra pits) of everything within two hours of opening. Most of the customer base is now tourists seeking out the best BBQ, with only a few locals. However, when a family member sees a local standing in the long lines, they quickly pull them out of line and take their order immediately. It’s good to see community is not sacrificed when success has been found. And for those that can’t travel down to Lexington, TX for a weekend, they ship all over the country, only on Tuesdays though. Below is a list of the rest of great BBQ joints and their website. Visit any of them and you will not be disappointed.  UPDATE: James is currently waiting for his first order from Snow’s.
  Snow’s - http://www.snowsbbq.com/
  Louie Mueller Barbecue - http://www.louiemuellerbarbecue.com/
  Ranch 616 - http://theranch616.com/
  The Country Line - http://www.countyline.com/
  Inman’s Ranch House BBQ - http://www.bbqtours.com/2000/2000inmans.htm
  Artz Rib House - http://www.artzribhouse.com/

• Wirefames  for the Wicked - was presented by some of the best information architects in the industry; Nick Finck (Blue Flavor), Donna Spencer (Maadmod), and Michael Angeles (Traction Software). The group walked through the various types of wireframes; reference zones, low/high fidelity, storyboards, standalone, specifications.   All the panelist had good things to say about each form and what the censunsus was is that the detail of the wireframe depends on the project, but a wireframe is very important step in the project lifecycle to help convey information architecture to a client (way before you spend all your time on design).  It’s also a contract that helps find and define the features of your project.  Choose the one that best serves you and your project.   A few programs recommend for wireframing were Visio (Donna’s tool), OmniGraffle (Michael has a great set of stencils that the panel recommended), and Axure (Aaron’s favorite) but it’s Windows only.  Here is a link to the slide on slide share. If you are a information architect or are engaged during this stage of the process we recommend you take a quick peek.
• While Aaron was checking out Wireframes, James headed over to catch Robert Rodriuez and Henry Selick talk about how they are using 3D in their movies.  They were not talking about 3D animation, but actual 3D projection in the theater.  Robert was the first director to bring 3D back into the theaters with his Spy Kids 3D movie.  Since then, we have seen a huge resurgence of 3D movies such as Henry Selick’s Coraline.  One of the coolest aspects of the panel was when Henry talked about how they shot Coraline in 3D.  The typical process is to have two cameras hooked to a single lens with a special mirror splitter to offset the images.  Yet, this was not possible because Coraline was all miniatures shot in stop-motion.  To achieve the 3D effect, take a single frame with the camera, move the camera to the 3D offset and take another frame.  These two frames where then overlaid digitally for the 3D projection.  Brilliant!

• The most amusing and mind boggling session of the week was Bruce Sterling’s talk. We sprinted as fast as we could to get prime seats and it was well worth it.  Joining us front and center was our good friend Larry Gonzales (Eye-Fi).  Bruce is renowned for putting on a great presentation.  His insights into the tech world are deep, rich, spot-on and very very amusing.  He referred to us as the group formally known as the audience and delved into how technology such as the iPhone and Twitter have the potential to destroy the previous definition of interaction.  He teased (rightly so) that most of the audience was Twittering away as he presented.  He questioned if people where truly paying attention when they twittered.  To point this out he joking said some very rude/crude statements to jest with us about who would hear the comment correctly and who would just twitter “omg did you hear what Bruce said!” without full context.  Bruce then proceeded to open up bags of chips and eat them while he talked.  We have lost formality, if the audience doesn’t pay attention why should he, as the speaker, be civil?  It would be incorrect to state that Bruce is opposed to Social Media and the changes being wrought on society, but he is concerned that we may be losing things of value for the sake of progress.  Is all progress good?  Should we just open our arms and accept all that changes?  This is an issue that we in technology should keep in the back of our minds as we blindly adopt the newest and greatest thing.  Just because something is old or “outdated” does not mean it has lost its value.  It was truly a great presentation about the state of social media.
  

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

Day Two (Saturday March 14th 2009)  of SXSW Interactive kicked off at 10am for us.  Head over here for a recap of Day One.

• James headed over to see Danah Boyd, Judith Donath, Alice Marwick, and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss privacy on their panel “Is Privacy Dead Or Just Really Confused.”  This had to be one of the best panels James saw here at SXSWi, not just because he knew two of the panelist, but because the discussion was amazingly mind expanding.  The core idea that was discussed is how privacy is a contextual construct that is defined by social and cultural norms.  One of the clearest examples of how privacy is contextual was the idea that when eating at a resutrant, we construct invisible boundries around the table.  It is considered rude to just walk up to a table and start talking to random strangers.  Yet, there is no physical walls… we create this boundry due to our social constructs and therefore in the context of a resturant our privacy at a table is respected.  These contexts are being removed and/or re-defined online and we, as a society, need to define new privacy definitions, create better understanding of privacy and hopefully create policy that best suites all our needs.
• Aaron’s day started with a session entitled “Tips For Making Ideas Happen“. This session was presented by the CEO of Behance Scott Belsky who’s team has been interviewing individuals from many types of organizations trying to understand how some of the most productive people in the world make ideas come to life.  Out of this research Behance has produced many products and services including the Behance Network a network portal for creative individuals to share their work and the Action Method. The Action Method is made up of three basic elements that Behance recommends to help organize in order to make ideas happen. The first element is Action Steps, which are concrete tasks that need to be completed.  References are notes that provide context for Action Steps.  And lastly there are BackBurners, which are ideas that are great, but have no place in the current scope of things.   Scott suggests using this method when taking notes in meetings, to help scope the meeting’s results and come up with a better action plan for each key member of the team.  Behance offers notebooks that help breakdown each of the elements and offers a website 100% dedicated to the method.  There’s even an IPhone app.
• Next up for James attended the “Microformats: A Quiet Revolution” panel.  Microformatting is a set of standardized tags and properties that are applied to HTML to help define the content the HTML describes.  An example is setting the “rel” attribute, of an anchor tag, to “me” for site links that belong to you (or your company).  This attribute enables a parser to look at a single site, such as a blog and then back reference other links that are tagged as “me” to find the individuals Flickr page, MySpace page, Twitter page, etc.  As more sites use Microformatting new tools can leverage this data to create linkages, data profiles and other import context from the HTML that is not clear unless a human reads the data.
• “Bootstrap Your Startup” was Aaron’s second session. Presented by Bijoy Goswami (this slides are here), we walked through the three types of business startups. Cookie-cutter (Franchise), Funding Generated (Venture Capital), and Bootstrapping. The first two have their benefits but lack the control most entrepreneurs seek. Bootstrapping provides an open landscape to allow for a dynamic business model that is constantly changing as the business grows. Bijoy pointed out this was the model of Southwest Airlines which grew it’s no assigned seat business model out of necessity of having to sell one of it’s first four airlines to generate extra capital but still be focused on covering the same routes as before. In a startup environment you are always looking forward at the upcoming landscape making adjustments when necessary, however you are not racing at a pace that would be set in a Funding given model.   The key point taken from this session was that a Bootstrap model takes the largest commitment by the entrepreneur: personal investment. You must give up something in order to take the step toward your goal. That could be giving up your BMW, or asking your spouse to take a higher paying job, or to live in a cardboard box. But if what you are doing is your passion, the sacrifices will be worth it.  Who knows maybe your idea will make you the next Larry Page.
• James met up with his old friend and co-worker, Larry Gonzales, to catch up and talk about how things are going over at his company, Eye-Fi.  Larry was in town to both attend the conference, but to also shoot a lot of shows using Eye-Fi to post the images in real time.  Thanks for the card Larry, we’ll let you know how we use it!
• We both headed over to the keynote to see Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (follow him on tweeter @zappos), talk about how Zappos is run fundamentally different then any other large billion dollar firm.  The core concept of Zappos is to make customer service and company culture the number one goal.  All new employees, from Accountants to Customer Service must spend 5 weeks in training.  during this time they will spend a week answering customer phone calls and another week in the warehouse filling out customer orders.  The whole time they have a $2000 offer to quit at any time during the training.  By focusing on making sure that people both understand the entire company and verifying that people WANT to work their has created an amazingly loyal workforce and customer base.  They consider this kind of monetary investment marketing, since it makes people want to use Zappos.com.  The best line from the session was “If I had to do it again, I would hire faster and fire quicker”. The idea that culture is key and compromise will only lead you down the dark side. Podcast of session…Listen in
• James took a break to have lunch with Larry and then got ready for the evening launch party for StandardAnswers
• We headed over to Stubb’s backyard to take a peek at the Digg.com show.  It was amazing (and not neccesarily in a good way) how fanatical the crowd was for Kevin Rose.  We also saw Felicity Day from Dr. Horribles Sing-along-blog there.
• Next up we walked over to Red Eyed Fly for the Standard Answer Launch Party where we caught two amazing bands, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears and White Deniem. As Aaron said, it was one of the best shows we had both seen in a long, long time.

As promised, here is a more detailed breakdown of the “oooh That’s Clever” panel. This panel was presented by Paul Annett the creator of a very popular site that shows some cool CSS called  Silverback App. In this panel Mr. Annett explored a wide range of company trickery that gave customers a joyful surprise when discovered. The examples ranged from company logos, to secret message on the bottom of juice bottles (”stop looking at my bottom”), to website easter eggs. The idea behind the session was two folds. First to show designers (and developers, that’s me!) some creative “easter eggs” that inspire creativity. Second was to show how these little gems could help channel potential customers to your product or service through a viral “did you see this” pattern. Here is a list of as many examples as I could write down and/or research.

continue

In the past, James has written SXSW posts on his personal blog, Vivisecting Media, which were in-depth long hour by hour editorials of the experience.  This year, our goal is to do more condensed notes, just because writing long recaps at four in the morning is kind of exhausting and we know you want the real content.  So we will try to link audio and video of the presentations as they become available by SXSW.

• Our cab ride to the hotel involved a classic cabbie persona who decided to update us on his current life plans.  Aaron missed part of the conversation and thought that the cabbie was taking us by his house to pick something up.  Due to this misunderstanding, Aaron was worried that we would end up at some meth-house/trailer park (we did not).
• Got our hotel room, it had two beds.  If you have read or read James previous SXSW series, this will make a lot more sense.
• Grabbed a bite to eat, drank a few pints, made a few client calls (darn you AT&T losing the connection in the middle of a call)
• Picked up our passes, met Mark from eGuiders, and had a wonderful in-depth conversation about technology, film, TV and video production. We got deep into aggregation, writer strike benefits for web based exclusive content, and of course BBQ.  A quick summary about eGuiders, Mark explained his site as a TV guide for online video content, with industry leaders reviewing and suggesting content they find appealing.  Guiders range from Jerry Stiller & Anne Meara to the Executive producer of Lost Damon Lindelof.  If you want expert suggestions in this ever growing blackhole of content, check out eGuiders.
• Dinner was the at Moonshine.  Fantastic trout… like, seriously best we have ever had. www.moonshinegrill.com, make sure you turn down your volume, the play some annoying music.
• Slept.
• Headed out to our first sessions (stupid cold rain, it was warmer in SF). James went to “Minority Report is Real” which delved into the concept of tactile and immersive UI experiences.  The focus was how Film represents futuristic experiences in movies, how this inspires technologists, how technologist are applying these visions, and where are we at today by comparing the film to reality.  Examples of this is the Microsoft Surface, CNN “holograph vision”, Oblong {http://flowingdata.com/2008/11/17/minority-report-physical-interface-in-real-life-oblong-g-speak/}, etc.
• After the first session James headed over to catch the “Open Source Flash” presentation but ran into Danah Boyd and decided catching up with her was WAY more important.
• Aaron caught  “Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong” presented by Dan Willis.  Dan argued that web design is stuck in the same dilemma film faced during it’s creation in the early 19th century, when the first camera was invented, and technologists created films that were stuck obeying the same framework and rules conceived and followed in the world of theater. “Everything we know about web design, is what we know about print design” As D. W. Griffith did for film , the web needs to create a grammar (1+1=3) that combines elements to create an enriched experience.  For the web the idea is to break out of the norm, create new elements and as artists combine those elements to provider users with an experience they can control.
• James’ second session was The “Ecosystem of News” which covered how news and media are changing due to the Internet. Very exciting and deep examination of how news media has changed over time, including both bad changes (newspapers closing) and good changes (in-depth focused coverage, such as Ars Technica or the 2008 Presidential Race).  The presentation was led by Steven Johnson who used the term “old growth media” to describe technology news reporting.  Currently, technology news, is the oldest form of new media based news and how other news topics such as local, war, politics, etc. can learn and adopt methods used by technology reporting.  He also defined his vision of the new structure of news media.  Hopefully, it will be posted online so that we can share it with you.
• Aaron attended an inspirational session entitled “ooh That’s Clever”.  The presenter Paul Annett explored a wide range of web trickery that showed how designing and implementing a little extra feature can not only inspire the community at large, but also provide a viral channel to drive traffic to your product or service.  This presentation shows some amazing links which Aaron is currently compiling. Expect a secondary post that highlights each link example.
• James and Danah met up with Judith Donath (MIT Media Lab) who is amazing.  Great conversations about privacy, technology, social networks, cultural structures and how most of this is dependent upon context.
• Dinner for Friday was at Stubb’s BBQ, we just had to have it.  Aaron commented on how he has never seen a restaurant move in and out customers so damn fast.  They must turned each table 7 times in a night.  So our suggestion is, go there for the good quick food, not a long well served dinning experience with friends you are trying to catch up with.
• Slept again.

DevelopmentArc will be attending the 2009 Interactive South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas.  This will be the first year that Aaron and I have attended the Interactive conference.  I have been to the Music portion of the conference for the last three years and I have throughly enjoyed it.  We are looking forward to seeing what the Interactive conference has to offer and to meet fellow industry members.  If you are attending SXSW and would like to meet up with us, let us know!