South by Southwest (SXSW) is widely recognized as THE seminal interactive media event. So if you need to be in the know on what’s up with Internet technologies, you better get your butt down to Austin in March.
Band of Skulls at KLRU
3 front row knuckleheads
Between beer bashes, amazing music and super hot tacos that would take the paint off your car, we attended a crazy number of panels and gleaned the current big picture on interactive. So from 30,000 feet (literally – I’m on the last leg of my flight back to Honolulu), here’s what our gang thought the lay of the land to be:
3 Big Themes of SX 2010
1. The Cloud, More Mashups & Social Media. This is largely a recap of 2009, but the trend toward applications built on shared information resources continue at an exponential rate. Just about everyone has had a taste of this already through google map and YouTube integrations. Then there’s the myriad of social media applications like facebook and twitter that are connecting the world like never before. We’re unbelievably lucky to be witnessing this new age of mind-melding and global interaction. It’s without doubt one of the most amazing evolutionary steps in our species’ history so stay tuned… hey, if you don’t believe me, checkout grandma printing maps and commenting on facebook… Pandora’s box is open and we’re all looking.
2. Mobile (iPhone & Android) Apps. One panel on mobile apps started with a hand-count on mobile devices. Out of a couple hundred people, only a few were not on iPhones. Of course the audience was largely comprised of techies (not corporate blackberryites), but the hand-count mirrored the reality that 95% of mobile apps are Apple-based. Further, as of this writing, the iPhone app market is estimated to already exceed $1B a year and the number of Apple app downloads recently topped 3B so for at least for the near term it looks like mobile apps will still be all about Apple.
3. Geo-Location Apps. This is a particularly juicy subset of the mobile app space in that it’s largely about finding individuals via mobile devices through global positioning technology. English translation: technology that can place you and your mobile phone on a map. Which makes for a whole new level of tools to create “addictive behaviors” – nice buzz-term, huh? A crazy number of cool geo-plays are on the way so stay tuned for some headline-grabbing launches this year. Indeed, every year at “South By,” one or two new plays really stand out with this year’s darlings being Gowalla and FourSquare who use geo-location technology to make discovery games that reward participants with social interactions, status kudos and prizes.
The plays we saw working were by and large not “toys” nor fads. They were apps that featured real-world benefits so many stand an excellent chance of finding some legs.
Now it’s time to detox and recover so we can be ready for next year. Thanks to our friends in Austin for showing us a good time as always… Keep it weird Austin… Looking forward to SXSW 2011!
