If you came to SXSW for this year’s Sarah Lacey moment, you were probably disappointed. Although there were some rather awkward moments, and a little venom sent her way from Guy Kawasaki at the Chris Anderson Keynote, there were no major (memorable) snafu’s this year. That didn’t stop me from meeting some very powerful people in the tech industry and having some great conversations.
South by South West started around twenty years or so ago as a music festival that targeted music industry insiders. It was THE place for a band to get booked into where they could perform one night an announce that they’d be signed the next. It was only natural that SXSW would extend it’s brand to the Film and Interactive (Web, Games, etc) industries. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the ‘weight’ of the festivals relationship with high profile industry leaders has been extended as well. During the festival it was quite easy to end up having fairly casual conversations with company CEOs like Digg/Revision3’s Jay Adelson, consultants like Ketchum Interactive’s James Andrews and borderline celebrity web personalities like Alex Albrecht and Gary Vaynerchuck. The week got a little bit Hollywood with super-exclusive parties sponsored by companies like Google, Tumblr, Media Temple and Laughing Squid. Most of those parties set a reasonable ‘bar’ for entry but Facebook’s party became well known for turning people away at the door. It was a weird mash-up of snobbery, over-eager fire marshalls looking to give out fines and the sheer demand of thousands of people trying to get in.
But as is the case with most things like this, the real value was in the networking. I made a number of invaluable contacts and finally got to put some faces to the online names I socialize with everyday.
Like Erik Hersman (Ushahidi, Afrigadget) and Mike Stopforth (Afrigator, Adgator)…
Or (l to r) Erik, myself, David Kobia (Ushahidi), Teddy Ruge (Project Diaspora) and Rose Shuman (QuestionBox)
The five of us pictured above held a panel called “Appfrica: How Web Applications are Helping Emerging Markets Grow” which you can watch in it’s entirety on Qik below. Quite surprisingly, the room was packed and garnered a number of responses from attendees like these posts by Takepart, AlexDC, and this one from the Fighting Liberals. In the room we used the hashtag #afridev to interact with the crowd. I’ll be going back through some of the questions asked via Twitter to respond later this week.
The post-panel party was also incredibly well attended, despite being way out in suburbia! We were at least twenty strong and pleased to meet @Forge_Vaugh who brought her whole family with her.
Rose and I had some really productive conversations with Doc Searls of Linux Journal and Dareo Obasanjo of Microsoft.
She also, ingeniously, used our panel as a platform to crowdsource a laptop. She only asked for one but we received three, all working and one brand new in the box!! Bobuva writes about that here.
All in all it was an incredible year and I’m looking forward to what things will come out of it. There’s already been some great partnership proposals, business meetings and brainstorming sessions. In fact, nearly twenty developers connected to Africa descend upon Orlando, Florida next week to talk Ushahidi version 3.0, something I’m very excited to see.
Photo by: LittleMeBigYou
