There are some very smart people at SXSW. There are also the interactive rock stars, the non profits and the downright weird. All of these personas have thrown themselves into one giant interactive/tech sausage machine to see what they come out like at the other end. Some will be shabby and some will shine. However no matter what persona you are, those that resonate the most are those that can articulate their message , which is often a very simple message, to all of the other personas and have them get it quickly, agree with it and act upon it. For me, so far from all that I have seen and heard, there has only been one person that did that.
That person was Valerie Casey. Valerie ( I’ll call her by her first name even though I don’t know her), gave the keynote yesterday which delivered the takeaway that the Interactive commuunity as a whole was conspicuous by its absence in contributing to sustainability. She made succinct points and gave great examples of how Designers Accord, a global organisation she co-founded is helping corporates and SMEs around the world with sustainability. One such example was Naked Pizza which demonstrates that sustainability is not just about recyclable packaging. Its about the big picture, the overall system and sometimes you have to make tactical sacrifices to get the big wins with sustainability.
Here is some artwork of the points she made
Graphic of Valerie Casey's keynote at SXSW
By contrast today’s keynote was an Interview of Ev Williams @Ev, co-founder of Twitter by Umair Haque. The hall was full to bursting, close on 2000 people. After 20 minutes the first people started to leave. I lasted 45. To be fair to Ev the guy who was interviewing him was rubbish. He did however, annouce @Anywhere which is Twitter’s own @store, pronounced “at store” and wizzed through that in 5 mins. It allows websites to embed twitter into their UI. So that for example if I am reading content about Audi which has an @anywhere link I can hover or click and follow Audi from there without having to go to Twitter.com. I can also see how many followers Audi have etc. Ok thats handy but it’s not the silver bullet revenue ad model that everybody was expecting. Ev did have a couple of interesting points of view on how they (Twitter) think of Twitter. He talks about “Twitter as an Information Network” and he also made the point that “ Twitter reaches those with the weakest signals” and cited Chileans using twitter during the recent earthquake. One final quote from Ev “We (Twitter) are helping to bring down the walls between the world’s influencers and those that they influence.”
Social search is going to be big. I am Jon Keefe and Social Media was my idea. There I said it. No seriously the social search panel today included Brynn Evans (@brynn), social anthropologist and Max Ventilla (@ventilla) both smart and engaging people. Ventilla started Aardvark on the premise that web search is great for objective (when is Einstein’s birthday?) questions but subjective questions (what’s a great bar in Austin?) generate the most volume. Check out their technology.
I also learnt that location-based services are still not quite sure about who they are or how anybody is going to make any decent money from them. Gowalla beat Foursquare in the awards here last night incidently. Hmmm aren’t Gowalla based in Austin? With Lifegraphing, as using Gowalla, Foursquare and Latittude etc, is called, there is still two camps 1/. the check in model and 2/. the passive opt in background model. When asked what the future was the panel agreed that it was a hybrid of the two. Genius !?
Scobelizer and Pete Cashmore at SXSW
Last night I mixed with the gliteratti of the interactive world at the Mashable party and found out that actually Scoble is bigger than than I thought and a nice guy. Brian Solis is shorter than I thought and also a realy nice guy to talk to. Pete Cashmore, Mashable founder, is a god and quite popular with the ladies so I overheard. Women were actually screaming after him. Mashable was started in Scotland and I never knew that.
Finally ending up talking with real people who worked for Facebook. That sounds like an interesting company to work for. And by the way they told me that Facebook are opening an office in Austin but not to tell anyone. Oops.
More tomorrow if I survive the video sessions and the Rackspace Mixer tonight.
Laters
