After an incredibly successful SXSW last year, where the Plaxo Product Team came up with the idea of a social aggregator: Plaxo Pulse, I couldn’t pass up another opportunity to go to the Interactive festival this year once again.
It’s amazing how much can change over the span of a year (different job, different place, different coast) yet how some things can still stay the same. The same passions, still the same good friends and no shortage of good ideas that are probably going to be as popular next year as social aggregators are becoming in 2008.
Last year’s SXSW
The best panels from last year were held by industry mavens who had gone up on stage to show the battle scars they had just incurred from their recently successful startups and businesses. They talked about how they fixed scalability, how they increased clickthroughs, how to improve design and even talked about perfectly executing on your idea as if it were a heist. It was great… and I think that is one of the key things that’s so great about the conference (as opposed to random boring MSFT conferences)… it’s run by humble people that have real concrete experiences from the real world to reflect upon.
This year
This year, certainly felt different. There were definitely a good number of panels held by people who thought they had real battle scars, but really all they had to show was giant pictures of hearts in different shades and blabbing on about how websites should have tactile feedback. And then, there was the Facebook fiaso. I thought Zuck would be the one to screw up trying to quote exactly what his PR team had prepped him. Instead, it turned out the interviewer herself upped him in screwing up and stealing the limelight. Either way, I was smart enough to skip the Zuckerberg interview, but only after being subjected to a million different shades of powerpoint slides showing just Hearts (what? That’s how you get your users to love your products… didn’t you know?).
Next year?
All was not lost. It was still a worthwhile conference in my book, and probably the only conference I’ll go to this year. In fact, I’m pretty much ready to book my tickets for it as soon as they announce SXSW 2009. Here’s why:
Jason Fried’s “10 Things We’ve Learned at 37Signals” was quoted and referenced again and again through the many lunch, dinners and happy hours that I attended. That’s no surprise either right? He perfectly fit the ideal SXSW presenter’s profile: someone with actual battle scars with experience to reflect upon. But what about the humble part? I’d say that was one of the best things about his talk: people accuse Fried and DHH of being arrogant, thinking their principles apply to everything and people are stupid for not following it. On the contrary, Fried, with the utmost humbleness completed each and every one of the ten things by pretty much saying: “this worked for us… it may not apply to you, but we think this is a pretty damn good way to go.” Humbleness. Love it.
Another awesome panel was one held by Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin: “Bootstrapping 101.” I went into the panel thinking “I know everything about Bootstrapping, hell I’ve helped in doing it atleast twice and succeeded.” Well, I was wrong. Once again, not only was he a guy with real battle scars, he brought along a couple of people from his network that also had scars. Even better was the fact that he brought on bootstrappers that were creating businesses that had nothing to do with technology! I think the most impressive thing was the fact that Goswami was able to break down the seemingly straight forward concept of Bootstrapping into individual stages each with it’s own set of guiding principles.
Finally, a real surprise was the keynote delivered by Frank Warren of PostSecret. Not only was his presentation incredibly touching, he even hooked up a guy by helping him propose to his girlfriend on stage.
In conclusion
Sure there was a lot more crap to sift through, but the few goldmines were certainly worth it. I’m very glad, and for those of you that have yet to discover SXSW Interactive, I really urge you to check it out.
