We’re back!

March 15, 2007 by karen

From five long days in Austin for SXSW interactive. I can’t remember the last time I needed a nap so badly. I am exhausted, but luckily I took off to today to recover from the week’s non-stop activities. Poor Alex had to go to work.

The week ended up being pretty fun and was definitely interesting in many ways. Rather than doing a whole recap of the week, here are some of the highlights and thoughts:

Highlights:

- Free drinks and parties all week long.

- Seeing Jon Levine’s movie, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, at the best movie theater, the Alamo Downtown (they serve dinner!). The movie was awesome and I hate horror films. I hid behind my hands for a good portion of the screening, which I suppose is the sign of a good slasher flick, right? Here he is doing some press.

- The design inspiration panel reminded me that I want to take a letterpress class.

- Will Wright knows how to give a presentation. It was fast paced, interesting and Spore looks pretty fun and I don’t even like video games.

- It was fun to get out to Austin and see what other people are up to in the interactive industry.

- Running into a wasted Matt Saracen at the Rappolo pizza buggy. I think I would have passed out had it been Coach Taylor.

- Great Mexican food can be found in Austin.

Thoughts (or Rants if we are being honest):

- Twitter reminds me that you need to package things the right way. I don’t think there is anything innovative happening with twitter, but by calling it light blogging, they have somehow managed to rebrand group text messaging. Or maybe I’m just being a hater. I hear twitterific is worth checking out though (which is a third party app) and could possibly change my feelings on twitter as a communication tool.

- At a conference where a third of the participants are titled “User Experience Something” I think the registration/badge pickup could be better implemented. We waited on line for like 45 minutes or something just to pick up our badges. Can’t they get some airport style kiosks and let participants swipe their credit cards to check-in? Some non-digital ideas could probably improve the process too.

- Is it too much to ask for a geek conference to have consistent wifi in the convention center? It flared on and off all week. Alex is psyched he’s back online for a few minutes.

- While I walked away from SXSW with a bunch of links to check out, I was overall underwhelmed by the content of the panels. Someone mentioned they think the panelists do panels for the free badges, and I can’t say I fully disagree. There were definitely some good panels in the mix, and luckily the ones I missed will be podcasted, and maybe I will change my feelings about the content of the conference, but I tend to agree with CrowdCtrl’s review of the panels.

Disclaimer: However, Dennis did a great job on his game panel.

- More napping needs to be built into the week, but that is more of a personal schedule complaint. Going from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. each day was absurd. I realized on Monday that the people who stayed out all night, didn’t go to panels.

- SXSW seems like a really good place to go if you are a) looking to pimp your product or b) yourself (for work or personal reasons). I would definitely consider going back, but I wouldn’t stay as long, and I would prefer if the organizers of the event would post the content of the panels before we booked our flights. Some of the panel titles turned out to be pretty misleading.

Overall it was a good week. Be sure to check out more photos here (me) and here (Alex’s).

Tags: alex, dennis c., karen, kevin k., technology

Posted in Travel