A mobile guide to 2011 SXSW Interactive

7 Mar 2011 - Tom Limongello

SXSW 2011 is upon us and in no particular order I have lumped together what I think are the apps that will fight for my thumbs from Thursday 3/10 to Tuesday 3/15.

 
I have left out the photosharing apps here like facebook, instagram, picplz, tumblr, and I have also left out the best reference, the Sched.org mobile website where I have picked out a panel and party agenda (official parties only) and plancast but these posterity pic-ers and schedule gatherers are not the focus of SXSWi for me. For me, the fun is in the hunt. The hunt that I'm talking about is the hunt for the best of everything in Austin, and these apps are most likely how I will find them. More accurately these apps will help me cheat off of those SXSW A-listers who have arrived before I have.
 
The 2011 SXSWi apps:
bump, hashable, yobongo, foodspotting, beluga, groupme, ditto!, LoKast, rdio, foursquare, twitter and HeyTell are going to be my signals. Will I be as excited about them on 3/15 as I am now? Definitely not, hence the precarious 'x's. Why have I chosen these above all others? If you are wondering why constrain myself at all, you're right Fred Wilson had a great post about mobile notifications on 3/1 which shows Android's superior notifications architecture for letting you have more and more engagement apps on without relying on them all to be on your home screen. But with 144 apps on my phone post cleanup this week (I had 6.6 gb of apps, was getting close to my limit on 16gb iPhone 4), I felt it was time to focus on what could fit in a folder (12), and since on top of that there's a tremendous amount of overlap in this group, here is my reasoning for why each of them gets a spot in the SXSWi folder. (for the record I hate iOS folders :) )
 
bump, intros, sharing contacts, sharing apps, sharing music, chat with contacts
hashable, intros
yobongo, meeting new people when chatting about panels / parties, deciding on things
foodspotting, figuring out the best bbq!
beluga, chatting with housemates, prepping with panel participants
groupme, finding friends, chatting, sharing links / photos to make people laugh
ditto!, deciding on things, crowdsourcing plans for the day / evening, pushing serrendipity
LoKast, sharing songs, photos with people nearby
rdio, searching for and downloading music, checking out what friends at SXSW are listening to
foursquare, finding out what's next, being findable, posting photos, finding addresses
twitter commenting on everything, seeing what's trending, sharing with people back home
HeyTell chatting with housemates like I'm on a Sprint Nextell / Boost phone or walkie talkie!
 

Those 12 Angry Apps are not the whole story. There are a class of apps that are invisible, they are API services that are plugging into one of those above apps, most likely Foursquare or Twitter.
These aftermarket, app-boosting services are going to be providing more than their share of the fun at SXSWi. These are clearly extra credit apps, but if you have time to set these up you might be surprised at how funny make your social experience:
 
Tweetgrabber, a friend, Matt Newberg who I met at SXSWi last year just launched this ingenious service which helps you follow specifically someone's Favorites on Twitter and lets you store them in your unread Instapaper. This is a wormhole into the psyche of those you'd like to follow on twitter, so much more revealing than reading what they choose to tell you on Twitter.
 
Assisted Serendipity, another brilliantly devised and simple service that hooks into Foursquare and emails you based on the 10 venues that you think will most likely have desirables of the opposite sex in attendance. The way to set up this service is you put the number of the Foursquare number (which comes after the 'venue/' in the 4sq URL) and set the female : male ratio (or vice versa) to your liking and wait for assisted serendity to send you an email with those profiles so you can decide whether or not to go.
 
Don't Eat.at This service as the picture shows can be hilarious if mixed with other food apps like foodspotting. Basically, if you are going to use this app, make sure that you check-in before you foodspot! However, I mentioned this only because it was funny, in truth, this is currently a NYC only app, so I guess donteat.at won't spoil your fun in Austin!
 
For those of you who have not been to SXSW interactive before, then here's my advice for gearing up.

 
This is a picture of my pre-SXSW stockup. I'm going to be staying up by UT Austin at a house that we've named HxSW II, casa chalupa, so I have rented a bike, and am bringing the New York Lock by Kryptonite with a deterrent that goes to '11'. I'm also bringing a Mophie Juice Pack: Boost which is the largest charger available that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone. It gives ~1 full charge but is still pretty discreet even when attached to the phone in your front pocket and has a carabiner for carrying on a belt loop / back pocket when you're not using it.
 
Also, on my trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress I bought a Monster Power Outlets to Go 3 with USB. For times when you have plugs near you (like near the stage at Stubbs!) this small outlet strip will come in handy to power up more than 1 device at a time. Actually, I had even grander power plans but waited too long to get one of these solar panels from Voltaic for my backpack.
 
I agree with Fashism's post that bringing regular running sneakers are not necessary at SXSW, but, I would disagree about bringing sneakers in general. There's a ton of walking going on at SXSWi and the daily fashion show that I've seen for the past 3 years has been about cool t-shirts and kicks, so remember to bring yours! Also, although it's pretty dry in Texas, many of the best events day or night have an outdoor component to them, like an outdoor courtyard (remember the rainy 4sq party last year?) or roofdeck so there's a very good chance you'll get caught in the rain at some point. Try to stash a rain jacket somewhere on you when rain threatens.
 
Remember to come and see Check-in 2 Check-out: Mobile Audience Engagement in 2011 on Tuesday 3/15 at 9:30 at the Hyatt! Let us... @jakemintz, @foolazy, @ladylexy, @BB_iojbegun and @toms ...know when you've checked in on Sitby.us
 
and now for the uberlink with all the links from this post and beyond that might be useful to you in Austin.

The SXSW Interactive Mobile Thriving Guide (iPhone)

26 Feb 2010 - Tom Limongello

The snow today is making me really look forward to SXSW Interactive in Austin. 2010 will be my 3rd time attending so I wanted to write up all of the mobile services that I will be leaning on to schedule, network and keep my battery going all week…and I do mean *all* week.

Rules

SXSW is a game. It’s about doing everything you want but not wasting your time planning and confirming, getting everything done, meeting up with everyone you wanted to see. Potentially you won’t remember any of it, but you’ll have lots of new connections and warm feelings for people who are showing up in your stream all year as a result.

Austin is your playground. It’s where all the new mobile services that help us accomplish our SXSW plans.

There are 3 areas which you must master if you are to fully free yourself of your laptop @ SXSWi:

Advance Scheduling: It is imperative to look at the schedules and try to comprehend everything that is going on so you don’t feel the dread of missing out on anything. This plan will fail miserably, but these tools will make the experience better for you and better for those who follow your example.

1) Tungle Tungle lets you schedule with people without a lot of back and forth. It looks at your outlook or ical powered calendar and lets you paint your availability, or even shake to schedule from it’s iPhone app. This is for real meetings with people that you cannot miss.

Here is the tungle demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQ9O4Rycc

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Some], Requires Download [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Fast]

2) Plancast http://plancast.com/toms I’ve been told I use this too much already, but I’ve been very excited about it’s potential for spreading the word about your particular panel or workshop at SXSW. They have useful profiles on there already like Badgeless SXSW which tells you all the events you can attend without a SXSW Badge. BTW @Leahculver please skip the Owen van Natta party and finish up the iPhone app b4 SXSWi, kthxbai.

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Yes], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Slow]

3) My.SXSW iPhone Application This official app loads all of the event schedules at once (which takes a good amt of time the 1st time) and is integrated with the my.sxsw.com schedules and your official SXSW profile, which on the iPhone app is easier to set up than on the desktop. You can upload your photo and add social networks. However, this app is not connected for sharing panel links on social networks or even via email.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Fast]

4) Sched.org http://sxsw2010.sched.org This was the best mobile web calendar last year with full description of panels and great use of JavaScript overlays to minimize page loads, still a bit heavy for AT&T

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Medium]

5) Sitby.us http://sitby.us This may replace Sched.org for me this year. A quick loading mobile website with really easy navigation for the full SXSWi calendar and ability to check-in and share on twitter WHERE YOU ARE SITTING in a particular panel! How’s that for real-time? Really well done.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes], Requires Download [No]

Contingency Planning: Planning The panels, movies, drinkups and music in Austin start out like spores and grow based on community distribution of event details and checkins from attendees. The battlefield of SXSW will look nothing like your pretty calendar. So SXSW has already tested Twitter and Foursquare in this capacity, but there is a new entrant to the fray and it is specifically designed to facilitate conversation at an event without junking up the feeds of people who are not attending, and it’s called HotPotato. All panels at SXSWi 2010 should start by pointing their audiences to the associated HotPotato event.

1) Twitter and Twitter Connect Sites/Apps Status updates and hashtags still rule the day, it will be interesting to see if that changes in 2010. Tweetie 2 is my choice of app, and its seamless ability to manage more than one account is quite helpful when on the go. Sitby.us like many other apps lets you Tweet

Reach [High], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Hashtags], Noise [High]

2) Facebook and Facebook Connect Sites/Apps Facebook events are underlying a lot of the Plancast links and is currently the glue behind HotPotato

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [Low], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Full Service], Noise [High]

3) Foursquare Foursquare has picked up where Twitter left off, as now people find out which party to go to based on the stream of Foursquare check-ins. Badges specifically designed for SXSW were a hit last year, e.g. the Porky badge for checking in at Stubbs. Too crazy for you?... Check-in off the grid like tiger w. be

Reach [Low], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [People Tab], Noise [Medium]

4) HotPotato HotPotato lets you attend, watch or follow events based on your proximity and makes the chatter in each event relevant by 1) defining the event 2) offering more than just commenting e.g. posting photos and links for making references and analogies to the event 3) giving you a view to whom within your network (currently powered by Facebook Connect) is commenting on what events 4) tuning your feed based on location

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [Full Service], Noise [Low]

Battery Life!

What I will bring to stay connected 24/7 from Thurs-Wed.




1) Just Mobile | Gum Pro: this little power grenade from Just Mobile is supposed to carry 2-5x iPhone charges and power up fast, 90% in an hour, and it uses both a 5-pin camera cord power up and and the iPhone cord to charge the iPhone, with a switch to turn off the juice if it is not being used.

How people will make fun of you: “Why do you have an iPhone cord coming out of your pocket? Are you plugged in right now?”

2) Griffin Tune Juice: the un-green little AAA battery pack that takes 4 batteries and charges without requiring a wall socket. Which means you don’t have to stand under the stage at Stubbs or hit on hostesses to have them charge your phone if you forgot to charge your extra battery pack.

How people will make fun of you: “batteries? srsly?”

3) Kensington Mini: This bottom feeder is good for a small charge at the end of the day, light, small, no extra cords while carrying. Charges with a 5-pin camera cord into USB. The fact that it plugs into the bottom could be a problem if you put it in your front pocket and sit down. L

How people will make fun of you: “gee you have a really long phone.”

4) The Mophie Pack: Mophie gets a colbertian wag of the finger. Once my battery pack of choice, until the weird jack that plugs in a weird non 5-pin cord broken into the device and has rendered the Mophie pack useless.

How people will make fun of you: “is that really an iPhone, it looks so big and bulky.”

It will be a showdown for sure, but at least I’ll be prepared.

What I’ll be doing:

http://plancast.com/a/if1 Moderating UX of Mobile Panel, Friday March 12th @ 11am with Kyle Outlaw (Razorfish), Scott Jenson (Google) and Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design)

http://plancast.com/a/if3 Organizing the Mobile Advertising Workshop, Tuesday March 16th @ 3:30pm with Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Justin Siegel (MocoSpace)

http://plancast.com/a/11r0 Organizing HTML5 vs. Flash Discussion, Monday March 15th @ 11:00am with Richard Ting (R/GA)

http://plancast.com/a/if4 Organizing the Mobile Social Workshop, Tuesday March 16th @ 2:00pm with Michael Sharon (Facebook) and Justin Shaffer (HotPotato)

http://plancast.com/a/if5 Organizing the Mobile Commerce Workshop, Tuesday March 16th @ 5:00pm with Francesco Rovetta (PayPal)

Is anyone writing up a guide for Android?

Ping me @ SXSWi on your service of choice.

foursquare

tungle

plancast

twitter
 

A Review of Mobile @ SXSW 2009

23 Mar 2009 - Tom Limongello

Everyone heard that AT&T was slow during SXSW, but what was working with mobile? Well there is no consensus, but I can tell you what I used. Sched.org's mobile website for calendar, shortn.me for sharing news, and Foursquare for managing the parties. Using Sched

Sched.org's site redirects to an optimized iPhone experience which leverages Javascript popups of event descriptions and lets you save events to you calendar. With three types of panels at SXSW, no time staggering (most panels were at 10, 11:30, 3:30 or 5pm), screenings all over Austin, and 1600 bands--Sched.org's interface is a calendar lover's miracle. You can share your calendar with friends with a static URL based on your username and you can use advanced settings to search and browse by popularity. The fight against paper schedules continues, of course with battery troubles (I'm now keenly aware of each outlet available in Austin, and even found the secret outlet near the stage at Stubbs!) When you start offering sorting features and bookmarking, sched.org starts to beat the pocket guides. It's much more fun to share your shedule with @philton, whose favorite band name is 'Natalie Portman's Shaved Head,' and show him that you're going to their show instead of his party. To indulge, my favorite SXSW artist names were McFrontalot, Beans on Toast, Biscuit Brothers, Doctor Krapula, Flosstradamus, Japanther, Abe Vigoda, Scissors for Lefty, Dear and the Headlights, Venice is Sinking, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Whole Wheat Bread, and of course, Yak Ballz. Foursquare

There's no paper offering that can prepare you for the official and unofficial parties each night at SXSW. So, if for some reason you forget what your plans are while you're listening to the 5pm Suxorz panel that chronicled the worst social media ads that featured Sara Smith from Wonkette talking about Truck Nutz, you were not alone. It used to be that Twitter was the crib sheet for where to go at events, but this year there's a new interactive mayor in town and SXSW saw the introduction of Foursquare. If Twitter tells you what people are doing, Foursquare tells you where people are partying. Just like its SMS predecessor Dodgeball, the Foursquare's iPhone app tells you where everyone is. Let me clarify...not where they think they might like to go, but where they are at a point in time. Foursquare adds a new dimension to Dodgeball by awarding badges for behavior related to your own personal navigation of the city.  As Dennis Crowley put it at the New York Tech Meetup--going out using Foursquare is like playing The Legend of Zelda in that you get points and unlock secrets based on your check-ins. This is simple design for irrational behavior in NYC, but of course, using it in Austin added a dimension of weirdness - have a look at the Smule Fool at the Belmont during SXSWi playing his Ocarina:

There were more panels dedicated to talking mobile at SXSW than ever before and even this year's t-shirt symbol was a hand holding a mobile phone, but there was too much to cover in these panels and I think people went home more confused than when they left. Marc Curtis of Flirtomatic found it necessary to make a distinction that not everything in mobile is a downloadable application.  There are channels for mobile data such as mobile sites, widgets and apps; and that mobile sites like BBC have scale at 100MM page views per month.  Marc also made a poignant comparison between the EU and US in terms of interactive behavior. Austin was different from Barcelona in that in Barcelona attendees had ditched their laptops for mobile browsing, but at SXSW we were all tied to our laptops. I had my own laptop failure, which made me use my iPhone a lot more than I would have, I got so attached I started to make my own games. And I have to note that laptops are not the only devices that need to be charged. Why Mophie didn't have a 'mobile' salesman or even a mobile RV like those that sell pizza, kebabs, tacos and BBQ is the biggest mystery of all this SXSW. The mobile service that I'd like to see next after SXSW? GPS enabled electrical outlet locator for the city of Austin and suggested tip amount!