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The saddest press room ever
For the most part SXSW is pretty cool, certainly more fun than CES. (CES is a long, hard slog compared to SXSW.) Lots of like-minded people converging on a fairly small city with the goal of networking their way into the next Web 2.0 success story. Good luck with that is all I have to say.
That’s not to say the show doesn’t have its share of glitches or things that simply annoy me. Take the press room, pictured here. First, it’s pretty damn small; CES’ was significantly better. Most crippling to the bloggers and journalists here is the poor Wi-Fi connectivity. There’s two networks set up here and both are atrocious. Speed isn’t even the primary problem, but simply getting connected at all. There’s speculation that the show’s organizers didn’t anticipate the number of Wi-Fi users, but that seems impossible. It is a tech show, after all (at least the part I’m attending). And if you do get a conection be prepred for worse-than-dial-up speeds. Uploading photos at certain times of the day is literally impossible. (The early morning seems to be the worst time to try to connect.)
Another gripe of mine is all this talk about Twitter. You can’t walk down the hall or about the show floor without someone saying, “Oh, did you see what so-and-so said on Twitter?” Who cares? That’s just my own mania talking, but it had to be said. Twitter is silly.
The Wi-Fi issue is one that actually impacts people’s ability to do their job. It’s bad,