A few weeks ago, a bunch of us at Roundarch went down to Austin Texas for the yearly new media conference, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. Although SXSW started out as purely a music festival to fill in the void in business during the spring break, it is now the highest revenue producing special event for Austin. It’s music festival has over 1,400 performers at over 80 venues over four days. The event now has an interactive conference and film festival all bunched up in the span of a bit over a week.

SXSWi seemed really big this year. It seems to be getting bigger and bigger every year and quickly becoming the “it” event for anyone in new media whether it’s digital marketers, social media folks, tech entrepreneurs, web technologists, bloggers, venture capitalists, publishers, agencies, etc. SXSWi is the one place where one can run into successful tech entrepreneurs and CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, famous authors like Guy Kawasaki and Tim Ferriss, and twitter whales like Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Evan Williams of Twitter. It’s a really great conference for those interested in hearing what the thought leaders of the online interactive industry and the herd are doing. I recall last year I didn’t meet that many people from Chicago but this year it seemed like everywhere I turned I met someone from Chicago. Many of them were SXSW first timers. My overall impression was that companies are starting to have a social media budget and sending these people down here.

Panels at the SXSWi conference typically fall under business, web design and development, nonprofit, or emerging technology. I stuck mostly to the web design and development track. Some of the notable panels I went to include scaling web applications, iPad, designing seductive interactions, and game mechanics. One of the things I really enjoy about SXSW is seeing and learning how others are doing things and their willingness to share.

Two big themes of this conference were mobile and social media. Just the sheer number of people whether they be social media enthusiasts or professionals doing some sort of social media work for companies was astounding. The demographic is definitely skewed towards the people with iPhones and it almost always guaranteed to bring the AT&T network down. Last year AT&T had to have a mobile antenna nearby. Location based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla also made a big splash this year. Last year people were using solely twitter to find out where their friends were at SXSW. This year, one of the most useful tools was the trending feature of Foursquare that showed you which venues had the most checkins.

Some people come down to SXSW as much for the conference as for the parties. Companies ranging from big software corporations like Microsoft as well as startups like Gowalla make an effort to throw big parties in order to please the vocal and active online crowd. On any given night, there’s probably around 3 different parties going on and lines are usually ridiculously long. Personally I’m a bit too old for that and it’s not how I roll. I prefer a more intimate and quite setting so that I can really get to know and connect with the people I hang out with. One evening, a small group of us ended up in a Thai restaurant with one of the Backupify guys (another great midwest startup) Ben Thomas. One another night, a small group of Chicago folks met up with some Youtube engineers to have a great private barbecue. In this type of setting I am able to learn more about what they do, converse and connect. In short SXSW is a great way to develop connections you otherwise wouldn’t make. Your mileage may vary depending on your age and tolerance for alcohol. I personally like going to the sessions. I think the early morning sessions separate the men from the boys and you typically see some hardcore technical ones in the morning.

This year’s keynote with Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter was a bit of a let down. The one big Twitter announcement of the new @platform was covered only very briefly. First of all, the person doing the interviewing is probably a better writer than a speaker and should have probably stuck to his day job. Many people in the audience complained and even Guy Kawasaki made a jab. Personally I think Guy should do all the keynote interviews. He is entertaining and gets right to the point.

The SXSW experience is what you make out of it. You can go to tons of sessions and learn a lot. You can make friends and lifelong connections at various parties. You can spend time with vendors and learn what their product roadmaps are. Five days is definitely on the long side and by the third day, I feel pretty exhausted but I recommend it if you are in the industry.

This was a panel of people from different industries: gaming, print, and publishing and their take on the iPad. Unlike Apple’s existing products iPhone and Macbook, which entered existing markets, the iPad is creating a new market for a device that is neither mobile nor desktop. One speaker defined it as the recliner app or toilet seat app. There are currently 75MM+ iPhone OS (iPhone + iPod touch) devices in the market with a hockey stick growth curve.

The panelists include:

• Bill Jensen @billjensen, director New Media at Village Voice. 14MM pageviews/week across 14 newspaper sites. 90% of business is local advertising with a 70% growth over the past 3 years.
• Shervin Pishevar @shervin, CEO of Social Gaming Network, one of the leading social and mobile gaming companies, and over 11 million installs on the iPhone and tens of millions of users on Facebook.
• Jason Grigsby @grigs, co-founder of CloudFour, a web and mobile development firm.
• Katherine Tasheff @tasheffka from Hyperion Books

Shervin actually got to spend some time with the iPad and he was amazed at how fast he got used to the virtual keyboard. Pundits question whether or not people would get used to typing on the screen, but Shervin said he was able to get to 85 words per min in 10 minutes. He also noted that the chip is fast and that there is a significant performance improvement compared to the current iPhones. This will translate well into the gaming space.

• Of the top grossing apps in the iPhone app store – 76% of them are games
• Estimated to be $30 billion industry by 2013
• iPad preorders – estimated 51,000 in first 2 hours
  90,000 in the first 6 hours
• Estimated to be 20MM iPads in the market by 2013

Katherine noted that ebooks already outnumber games in the Appstore. However since most of the top grossing apps are games, one could hypothesize that the phone form factor is not as conducive to reading and that ebook content in general do not perform as well as games. Essentially books haven’t changed since the 1400s. The industry is very slow to change because their model has worked so well for so long. However book sales have declined 5% over the past year. The ebook represents an opportunity for those who can come up with compelling content and experiences that fit the ebook model.

iPad is a great web browser. It’s got a new super fast Javascript engine. It’s resolution is that of a standard browser. It will support the latest CSS and HTML standards. Basically web apps are going to look great on it. This opens up opportunities for developers to make great iPad apps that bypass the Appstore distribution and let them keep their 30%. Also it will lower the barrier to entry as far as having an app for the iPad. Also iPad makes for a great dashboard appliance for scenarios such as the manufacturing floor.

In summary, the three industries see great opportunity since it’s a new product entering a new market reaching potentially a whole set of new users.

One of the more remarkable talks I attended at SXSWi (pronounced South By South West eye – not es-ex-es-double-you), was a talk by Matthew Smith from Squared Eye, a boutique web development firm.

Here are some takeaways:

• Design around the content. Don’t let your design aesthetics dictate your web design. Content is why the audience is there.
• It is not YOUR site – it is the site owner’s site. Your design must serve the goals of the site owner. As designers we are often emotionally attached to our work and often think of our work as an extension of us.
• Great web design helps content get stuff done (with pleasure).
• Spank that niche. I thought that this was hilarious.
• Knowledge
  • Know the Client
  • Know the Audience
  • Know the Medium
  • Know the Content
• Design Techniques
  • Use size to help design hierarchy visually
  • Establish a visual language (green for action, blue for links, features is 15pt font, etc)
  • Use color to draw people’s eyes
  • Design for pleasure – ex. Gowalla’s custom icons, motion, etc

Here are his slides although they are really best viewed along with the talk.