Hello Campers...today is day 1 from the SXSW (South By Southwest) Interactive. Although I got off to a rocky start this morning - cabbie dropped me off at the wrong terminal - it has been smooth sailing since. For the record, I am not sure if the cab thing was my fault or his. I guess we will both take some blame. At least I got on the right plane.
So far the festival has been interesting. For those of you unaware, SXSW is a conference that combines Musicians, Interactive Professionals (geeks really), and the film industry in Austin, TX. The conference is an overwhelming series of panels, screenings, concerts, networking events, exhibit halls, etc. Essentially the idea is to get a bunch of people together to share ideas, creative outputs, and of course alcohol. The result, 2 weeks of self promotion, big ideas, and hangovers. I am mainly focusing on the latter two, but will plug myself when needed.
Here is what I have seen so far from the technology exhibits:
Microsoft is Everywhere: They are plugging Microsoft Tag a lot in addition to everything else they do.
Couple of Newer Vendors of Note:
Element Fusion: Promoting a platform that competes with Wordpress called LightCMS. It demos nicely and incorporates hosting along with a pretty simple backend. More expensive than WordPress, but potentially a great application for freelance designers to build and host sites for smaller clients.
Cooliris: Said as two words...Cool Iris. This is a browser plugin that lets you take information from a page and display it on an interactive wall. It is actually pretty cool and you have to try it to see what it can do. They are promoting some new capabilities where anybody can make an Cooliris wall and drop it as Flash object onto any page (to the editor of this blog...get on it).
There is a lot more to check out, but I am off to the first panel talk I am attending: User Experience Deliverables: Experts Choice. It is more exciting than it sounds.
No comments:
Post a Comment