The fundamental mistake companies make when marketing at SXSW is giving away things I can easily buy on my own. Open bars and taco giveaways only attract freeloaders. If brands want influencers to take notice, they have to provide unique experiences.
From my last three SXSWs, I couldn’t tell you who provided the ice cream sandwiches or Lone Star beers. But Zynga’s warehouse concert with TV On The Radio, Tagged’s limo rides, and Diggnation’s fire-eating magician — those I remember. → Read More
StartupBus, the hackathon-on-wheels in which busloads of entrepreneurs make the journey down to the South By Southwest conference with the goal of teaming up to create viable web apps by the time they arrive in Austin, rolled into its third day yesterday. in this video you can see how the buspreneurs’ apps have gone from concept to code with demos from customizable breakfast cereal app Cerealize and motion detection video technology startup Kinect.ly. → Read More
With a new class of passive location apps on the rise, failed geo-mobile apps of the past need to cut their losses, so Loopt today announced plans to sell to banking and payment solutions company Green Dot for $43.4 million. Green Dot hopes checkin functionality can help it attain and hold on to customers by expanding from prepaid cards into a mobile wallet. And it needs Loopt’s talent to stick around to make that happen, so $9.8 million of the cash is reserved for a retention pool.
SXSW starts today and no one has been talking about Loopt. Had it waited until after the event and watched younger competitors revel in the spotlight, its valuation could have sunk, so this was wise timing to sell.
→ Read More
The journey to SXSW continues. Yesterday, we watched as a busload of entrepreneurs began a multi-city roadtrip to the South by Southwest Interactive conference where they will debut the startups they form on this four-day excursion. The Startup Bus left its San Francisco/Silicon Valley base at 6 am on Tuesday, heading south as the entrepreneurs got to know each other.
On Day 2 of the trip, the teams are hard at work on their products. Ideas brewing as the bus rolls along include: Cerealize, a service that lets you create and customize your own healthy cereals and boxes, Expensiev, a receipt-management system that brings paper receipts into the cloud, and Jeli.co, a location-based plotting tool for storytelling within communities. → Read More
There are a few use cases for using hot background location app Highlight, cofounder Paul Davison explains to me. You just met someone and you want them to find out more about you. You want to note that someone is particularly interesting for future reference. And, you want to see which friends are nearby, or have recently left.
The app is getting a set of updates today that should make it more useful in all of these situations. → Read More
Out of the slew of new location apps vying for users at SXSW this weekend, Highlight and Glancee are looking like the standouts. They both have subtle ways of connecting you to friends and new people via your phone, without invading your privacy too much. But there’s a royal rumble of competitors.
And another one of them, Kismet, has just entered the ring with a particularly forward approach to privacy that could help it win the attention melee.
It includes the background location stuff like the others, but lets you check in if you really want to declare the place you’re at. ”Walking around San Francisco, I’m unlikely to check in,” chief executive Kevin Stephens explains. “But at SXSW where so many events are right on top of each other, it’s more valuable to show which event or location I actually am in order to meet new people. It’s impractical to leave a bar to go to one next door if the line is 30 minutes long.” → Read More
StartupBus, a multi-city Wi-Fi-enabled roadtrip to the South by Southwest Interactive conference with the goal of developing and launching a startup by the time the travelers arrive in Austin, fired up the engines on its biggest year ever this week.TechCrunch TV’s John Murillo is along for the ride all the way from San Francisco to Austin, and he put together an awesome video wrap-up of Day One. → Read More
We’re republishing this timeless classic, because it still stands pretty much as is exactly as is year later.
Believe it or not, I had this very same conversation about Groupme versus Beluga as a preferred messaging app WITH THE SAME EXACT COLLEAGUE today, though yeah, in retrospect, the dude was right, Facebook did “do something” to them.
Also, I’m not hosting a “pussies in tech” panel with Sklar this year. Instead, this. Come, if you actually have a badge. → Read More
Getaround, a car rental community that only launched in May 2011 and subsequently won TC Disrupt NY, is ready to get you where you need to be in time for SXSW.
The app that lets you rent a car by the hour, day or week, and comes fully loaded with insurance, 24-hour roadside assistance, and a Getaround car-kit has broken ground in some new territories, including (yep, you guessed it) Austin, Texas. → Read More
Here’s one of the great things about South by Southwest: Everyone wants to launch a cool new product there. Here’s one of the worst things about South by Southwest: Everyone wants to launch a cool new product there.
That’s why Dalton Caldwell, CEO of App.net, is holding a special App Showcase at Beauty Bar on the afternoon of March 10. → Read More
Bar/None recording artists The Slip (as well as their many side projects) frequently travel nationally and internationally. Therefore Marc Friedman, the band’s multi-instrumentalist with whom I shared an airplane row for the flight out of SXSW, was the perfect musician-on-the-go to investigate for possible “gadget addictions”. An admitted “late bloomer” to the world of mobile devices, Marc seems to have his habit under control, with the exception of a fondness for playing the Blackberry version of Katamari Damacy. Check out our conversation in the video below. → Read More
To save all 15 of you the effort of writing a response to MG’s “Saying ‘SXSW Is Over’ Is Over” post right now, the “Has SXSW Interactive jumped the shark” discussion has hit Godwin’s Law. That’s right someone has made a Hitler’s Downfall video where the Fuhrer shares his views on how much the conference has sold out as its scaled, thereby symbolically decreeing the “SXSW is Over” meme officially, yes, over. → Read More
So what comes after the future? I asked Bruce Sterling at SXSW.
But, for Bruce, the future is really the past. “I like narratives,” he told me, while explaining why the most “effective” futurists are good historians. So perhaps, using this logic, what comes after the future is history.
And Bruce is certainly an effective futurist as well as a good historian. Which is why when I asked him about today’s Internet obsession with “the social,” he riffed with dark euphoria about the history of socialism as well as what it’s like to be a 15-year-old kid with no knowledge of the past.
Video ahead. → Read More
I am currently in Austin at SXSW 2011, but mentally absent: I was at Tokyo airport on Friday to fly off to Texas, on my way to the gate, when the earthquake hit Japan (where I am based). As everybody knows by now, the quake marked the biggest disaster in Japan’s history after WWII, leaving thousands of people dead, wounded or homeless. After 6 years of living in Japan and being there when it happened, I, too, am devastated.
The Japan delegation for SXSW Interactive consists of about 10 people, and in the light of what was and still is happening in their home country, everybody toughed it out, took part in their panels and did a great job. (I know because I got a ticket at a later date and luckily was able to moderate two panels related to Japanese tech and speak at another one. I was too late to attend the first Japan panel.) → Read More
Appropriately, Bruce Sterling closed SXSW this year. It’s appropriate because after Bruce, there really isn’t much to say. He’s just about the smartest and funniest historical science fictional writer in the business. And the edgiest too – even though he’s built a professorial façade to disguise the punk in him.
So it was a huge honor to catch the darkly euphoric Bruce in Austin where he talked to me about his upcoming new book Gothic High Tech and Favella Chic, on why “hactivism” isn’t democracy and why he finds Sarah Palin “super interesting.”
Video ahead. → Read More
SXSW Interactive is no longer about the panels or keynotes, having become a five day experiment in the ability of technology to withstand the load of over 20,000 influencers congregated in the same location, trying to network using various digital tools. It’s some sort of sped up playground for app and device Darwinism, where the rest of the world functioning as a control group.
SimplyMeasured has analyzed the #SXSW tweet streams and come up with some preliminary results to the booze-fueled undertaking. According to SimplyMeasured’s data, GroupMe dominated people’s #SXSW Twitter streams in the group messaging class with 65% of the mentions, iOS devices won the platform battles with 74% of the tweets (split into 60% for the iPhone and 14% for the iPad respectively) and Foursquare won the location based check-in war at 65%. → Read More
Group messaging was absolutely not as useful as we thought it would be this year at SXSW. Whether you were using Beluga, GroupMe, Kik, Yobongo or Fast Society or others, everyone had high hopes for a breakout group messaging app, simply because we spoiled tech brats are already bored with the ones we already have.
I know it’s old school, but towards the tail end of the conference simple SMS won out (for me at least), because SXSW isn’t about hanging out with the same groups of people all the time, but rather about having variety of exclusive options. In practice group messaging is kind of weak on the exclusivity thing, because you’re almost always roped into groups with at least one person you don’t like. → Read More
The search engine wars have been heightened since January, when TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa wrote about why we need a better system of search, because his college students could no longer find the information they were looking for due to spammy results.
Since then, both JC Penney and DecorMyEyes have been called out for questionable search-related business practices, as have content farms like Demand Media and content aggregators like the Huffington Post. Google has accused Bing of scraping its results, and both Google and newcomer Blekko have taken very public steps to block sites that attempt to game the system. → Read More
Now that the interactive portion of the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas is over, the key question is already rolling in: who won?
What this really means, of course, is: what service was the breakout hit of the conference? After all, in past years, the conference has helped launch both Twitter and Foursquare into widespread usage. So the question really is: who was this year’s Twitter? Or what was this year’s Foursquare?
The answer this year is a bit different, a little disappointing, and perhaps not all that surprising. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
