Posts Tagged ‘SXSW’

All posts tagged SXSW.

Check This

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 5th, 2010 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Events, Startups

**Update: Check out Mashable’s screenshots of the upcoming Foursquare app update for next week. Could possibly alter your vote.

MG Siegler posited last week that location apps are going to be the big bang at SXSW this year, achieving Twitter-like buzz level. This seems a pretty safe bet; as I’ve mentioned before, location apps are without a doubt the sector to watch in 2010.

As I was checking in this morning at Galaxy Cafe [sidenote: love this place. Please patronize them, Austin folk.], it occurred to me that the buzz-worthy question next week won’t be if you’re checking in, but how. Are you going Foursquare all the way, using their rumored shiny new update? Or will you stick local, checking in on Austin-based Gowalla? Or will you quicken your – and your friends’ – path to insanity by checking in on both?

I conducted a head-to-head of the services a while back and seemed to settle on Foursquare as my app of choice. But here am I still using Gowalla. I just can’t decide. Gowalla has a better – much better – UI. Foursquare has more of my friends signed up. Gowalla has items to collect, a feature that’s grown on me. Foursquare has the game as more of a centerpiece, an appeal to my competitive side. I could go on. But I won’t.

Why does this even matter? Because checking in at SXSW is going to be more important than normal. Attendees’ schedules are much more organic and evolving than at standard tech conferences. In short, one wanders where the day takes you. So word about a panel that’s turned feisty or a party that’s packed bring more people to the scene. This was achieved with Twitter in the past, a method that seems a little antiquated in the face of location apps. This year, not only will you need to know which parties to attend but which app to use to find out about those parties. Could SXSW crown a location app winner through sheer popularity this year?

Let’s see what the early buzz is. If you’re going to SXSW next week, which app will you use to check in?

Which app will you use to check in at sites during SXSW?

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The Vortex: Busy little bees

Posted: by carlacthompson on February 18th, 2010 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Week in Review

When The Vortex is ignored, it grows unwieldy. I had to write this just to clean out my link file.

-Buzz buzz buzz. Is this Google’s tacit apology for Wave? A knockoff of FriendFeed? Something I just can’t get excited about, no matter how hard I try? Call me naive, shortsighted or just plain dumb – I don’t get it. I cannot possibly fit one more stream into my day. And I rarely access Gmail in my browser. Plug it into my Facebook feed and then I could understand it a bit better. But how is it supposed to fit into my existing stream? No really, I’m asking – someone tell me!

**Update – They’re now being sued for it.

-I should start a regular column on the location apps market, as news is emerging almost constantly these days. While Foursquare’s traffic tripled in two months (that’s a hell of a stat), BusinessWeek declared it dead in the water. (Note to BizWeek: see ‘personalization of mobile experience’ for a hint.) My favorite though is the robbery meme that popped up yesterday, thanks to the launch of pleaserobme.com. I get the point they’re trying to make and yes, of course, we need to be cognizant about posting vacation notices to the public. But the cynic in me awaits the inevitable security solution the site’s creators are sure to pitch us.

-Just to prove to you I’m not a total grump, check out this advice on staying present in our bizarre new century. There’s some interesting stuff in here, like committing to ’single-tasking’ and keeping fewer tabs open.

Apps on the Radar

-If you’ve been to SXSW before, you know what a corn maze it can become. There are 10,000 panels, sessions, and parties to navigate, not to mention all the unofficial parties. I’m already needing a nap, just typing that. But a super-slick iPhone app has come out that does everything short of passing out your business card. What would make it even better is actual times connected to each session. But hey, I’m a control freak.

-Appsaurus may be old news but I’ve just stumbled upon it. Seems just the cure for those of us with iPhoneAppItis. (Sorry).

-If you have young ‘uns, you’ll care about this app. If you don’t, keep movin’.

-I’m a bit perplexed that there’s an entire app genre devoted to pretend-you’re-cooking games. Then again, it may be fun. For, you know, the ladies.

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The Vortex: Less is More

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 20th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Week in Review

Were I to tag this week, it would look something like this: SXSW, Facebook redesign, Foursquare, Christopher Walken, not Christopher Walken, Rackspace, Rob Cordry. Allow me to explain…

News from the Social Media Vortex

–SXSW occurred and a good time was had by all, especially Foursquare which seemed to win the “Twitter of 2009″ buzz award during the week. What’s Foursquare? It’s the new version of Dodgeball. Not familiar with Dodgeball? It’s a handy mobile stalking tool.

–The Facebook redesign occurred and is not receiving the warmest of receptions. In a polling application created on the site, 954,000 users so far give it a thumbs down, with 58,000 approving. Will the masses cry loud enough to be heard? I’m working on a longer blog post about this, so check The Guidewire later.

–Robert Scoble disappointed me by neglecting to mobilize his army, at least for the moment. Instead, he’s launching a new content community with partner Rackspace, called Building 43. I’m a little fuzzy about what the new site is exactly, as his explanation involved Creative Commons, cloud computing, interactive videos, and something about boats in a tide.

–My initial excitement over Christopher Walken on Twitter was quickly dashed. It’s apparently an “experiment” – and an old one at that – by Clusterflock.org. Dear Clusterflock: 1) Don’t toy with my complex Walken-related emotions and 2) Change your name. Immediately.

Apps on the Radar

–My good buddy Josh pointed me to Contxts.com, a why-didn’t-they-think-of-this-sooner technology. SMS business cards. Brilliant. Think of the trees, people, and sign up for this hugely simple service.

Tweet of the Week

–My new favorite Tweeter is Rob Corddry, who curses heavily and never fails to amuse.But his rant to his two-year old couldn’t match the sheer terror inspired by Jason Calacanis: “Just had lunch with the former head of the CIA. fascinating discussion about religion, nukes, the middle east, oil and electric cars.”

Where to start: How did faux-celebrity Calacanis wangle lunch with the former head of the CIA? Did he bring a hit list with him?  Can we get more details on the “nukes” part of this discussion? Will any of us ever sleep peacefully again? I need answers.

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Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Startups, Web 2.0

Five years from now, we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or at least some of us will. Others are decidedly more cranky these days. But the great FriendFeed-Socialthing war will seem trivial compared to… whatever meme we’re obsessing over in five years. The funniest part of all this hubbub is that the CEOs of both companies don’t even view each other as competitors. After talking with both Matt Galligan at Socialthing and Bret Taylor from FriendFeed, it’s clear that the two companies are approaching a very real problem – information overload – in very different ways. In fact, it’s entirely possible for someone to use both services at the same time, with virtually no rips in the space-time continuum.

As Taylor noted, the end goals of the two companies are their key difference. FriendFeed is about content discovery and applying social solutions to the problem of information overload. Socialthing focuses more broadly on a user’s entire digital life, in an attempt to make sense of the myriad networks out there. FriendFeed is bringing the conversation in, while Socialthing is broadcasting it out. FriendFeed has morphed into a separate social network while Socialthing wants to help consolidate all the networks you’ve already built. FriendFeed, tomato; Socialthing, tomahto. Read the rest of this entry »

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A Smarter Way To Go Green

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 13th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Startups

One more post tied to SXSW and then I’ll shutup about it until next year (maybe.) One of the buzzed-about companies, and Webby award nominees, was MakeMeSustainable, a site focused on educating people about reducing their environmental impact. There are all manner of sites and companies looking to capitalize on the green movement but, as CEO Ben Brown puts it, many of them have the philosophy, “Here’s your carbon footprint. Now go buy an offset.” If you watch this space at all, you know there isn’t currently a site that views consumers’ environmental impact dynamically, tracking their daily actions over time. In fact, as Ben and COO Dave Delcourt point out, the majority of innovation in this space is largely focused on industrial and corporate technologies. All good to be sure, but I’m surprised there hasn’t been more effort put toward employing social tools to enable mass consumers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Music for the Masses

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 12th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Europe, Outside the Valley, Startups

I met with Songkick at SXSW, a Y Combinator startup that aims to bring live music to the masses. The London-based company is announcing some exciting new features next week (I call it “music semantics”) but for now, I’ll share what interests me about its current offerings.

CEO Ian Hogarth wants to “change the way people think about their Friday nights.” His reasoning is simple: when consumers want to see a movie, they do a quick check on Fandango or Moviefone and head out. Going to a concert just isn’t as easy. Even following the tour dates of mainstream artists is a headache, with listings and ticket sales scattered far and wide online. Songkick scrapes all those sites for you, grabbing venue and ticket info from major ticket hubs, as well as MySpace pages and music blogs. Users have a one-stop-shop for band listings, in addition to an instant price comparison list of competing vendors.

That’s all well and good for music lovers but what I really like about Songkick is its intent to appeal to the mass consumer. Through several innovative tools, the company wants to create more music lovers out of its audience. The Songkicker plug-in for iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player scans users’ music catalogs and lets them know of artists in their library playing nearby. Bandsense is a distributed ad platform that recommends area bands based on your IP address (check it out at www.missingtoof.com). And Battle of the Bands is a fun little app that combines MySpace data, blog mentions and Amazon sales to produce an Alexa-like ranking chart for bands.

Throughout our conversation, I kept attempting to bring Ian back to the technology; how recommendation and discovery are a hot market sector and that his algorithms could possibly be applied to other areas. But he would have none of it. Songkick isn’t interested in boasting about the brilliance of its technology. They’re singularly focused on using that technology to make live music more approachable to the general public. It’s a refreshing attitude to encounter in a startup and bodes well for the company’s future success. With most companies in tech today, considerable force is usually necessary to make them keep end-users top-of-mind. Songkick has been there from the start.

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Becoming the Story: A Cautionary Tale

Posted: by chrisshipley on March 11th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Categorized: Chris Shipley, Observations

Earlier today, my business partner Mike Sigal and I had a robust discussion about Carla’s post on the Sarah Lacy kerfuffle at SXSW on Sunday. Neither defending nor attacking Lacy, Mike asked whether The Guidewire did a service to the community by entering the debate. “How,” he asked, “are we additive to the debate?”

It’s a fair question and I do think Carla made a key point:

It seems that the audience was misread at several junctures. In the end though, the only question that needs to be answered is whether Lacy did her job as a reporter and interviewer.

Whether you like or dislike Lacy’s style, whether you appreciate her body of work, whether you were in the room or not, one thing has become clear: Lacy became the story.

In fact, I’ve been hard pressed to find much coverage at all of comments made by Mark Zuckerberg during the hour-long keynote Q&A, so I went to YouTube to find video of the interview. Lacy talked about her visit to facebook, her previous discussions with Zuckerberg, her forthcoming book, her interview techniques, her indignation. . . herself.

In short, Lacy made the interview as much about her as it was about Zuckerberg. That, my friends, is an amateur mistake that a journalist of her position should not make.

But, oddly, it’s almost understandable. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mob Rule

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 11th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Events, Observations

I know, I know: you likely can’t take one more analysis of the Mark Zuckerberg/Sarah Lacy debacle. But as tempers have calmed and more thoughtful analysis beyond “she sucked” emerges, I must add my two cents. As someone who was sitting smack in the middle of the audience and experienced the vibe, I disagree with those who are now calling it a witch hunt and an overreaction by an unsympathetic audience. The packed-to-the-gills ballroom sat on their hands and kept their mouth shut for the majority of the Q&A. But as time ticked by and Lacy continued to cut off his answers, plug her upcoming book, and relate personal stories that weren’t of interest to the crowd (his profuse sweating in their first interview, for example), the murmuring and discomfort became palpable. Frankly, I was embarrassed for her. It was like watching a tanking Saturday Night Live sketch that has gone on far too long.

From what I know of Lacy, she’s a sharp reporter – BusinessWeek isn’t in the habit of hiring dimbullbs. But she was off her game in this interview and didn’t ask the questions this developer audience wanted to hear. The attendees unhappy with the interview weren’t in “the back of the room,” as TechCrunch surmises. They were everywhere and were of all shapes and sizes. Three people on all sides of me – none of which were developers – got up and left before the kerfuffle kicked in, uncomfortable and fed up with a highly anticipated keynote that went south.

We can all agree that Zuckerberg is a tough interview. But the audience wasn’t displeased with the answers he was giving; they were displeased with Lacy’s unprofessional and weirdly personal interview style. Jeff Jarvis hit the nail on the head; she should’ve researched her audience more. And Brian Solis (linked above) makes a good point that SXSW organizers should take part of the blame. It seems that the audience was misread at several junctures. In the end though, the only question that needs to be answered is whether Lacy did her job as a reporter and interviewer. Turning an entire ballroom of excited attendees into a torch-wielding mob is an answer in itself.

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Fast companies

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 10th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Entrepreneurship, Observations, Startups

One of the best panels I attended at SXSW was The Art of Speed, a discussion about how to create cult followings and hugely popular companies. Moderated by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, and including Evan Williams of Twitter, it was an interesting discussion about living and working in current fast-as-you-can environment. The room was packed, discussion was lively and audience members formed a long queue at the mike during Q&A. Some interesting points were made regarding entrepreneurship and I hope at least part of the packed room was innovators looking to make their mark, as the advice was strong. Some highlights:

–Twitter’s Williams advised startups to follow the market that is responding to their product: “see where your technology is working and follow it there.” It’s straightforward but not practiced enough among companies today. Too often, execs get roadblocked by markets that aren’t listening, trying multiple angles and approaches to no avail. This isn’t to say that startups shouldn’t identify target markets in business planning; just that a certain amount of agility will serve tech companies well, especially in the realm of Internet technologies.

–Ferriss addressed the importance of, and differences between, traffic leaders and thought leaders when it comes to company/technology evangelizing. Though the traffic leader is an easy lure, their mailbox is crammed and therefore harder to attract. Ferriss advises approaching thought leaders first, as the traffic leaders read their blogs and will usually follow. This is especially intriguing to me, as it goes against innate PR behavior. To small startups short on cash, reaching out personally to thought leaders rather than paying agency costs to attract the big press… definitely worth considering.

–Mike Cassidy, founder and CEO of Xfire: put your product in front of someone who’s never used it before and ask them to talk out loud as they use it. Another simple but great idea. And another concept that can get lost in the noise of building a company. Too often, valuable user input lies fallow as companies get caught up in other planning/building aspects. Don’t forget the user and, as I’ve said many times, don’t forget the mass-market user. If they say a certain feature doesn’t sit with them, don’t write them off as ignorant about tech. Listen, absorb, and use it.

With all the panel options to choose from, it was good to get so much interesting fodder in one session. I have much more to share from SXSW, including my thoughts on the Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg kerfuffle (I can’t resist.) Stay tuned all this week for more…

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Password Schmassword

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 8th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Observations, Startups

Conversations with fascinating people are, in my opinion, the best part of tech conferences. I haven’t even been at SXSWi 24 hours and have already hashed over: whether human-assisted tagging and metadata can be classified as semantic technology; the increasingly casual attitude we’ve all adopted toward our passwords; what it will take to interest the VC community in green technology (ahem); and, perhaps most importantly, how many breakfast tacos one has to ingest before complete diet integration is achieved. As a Texas native, I’m not a good judge of the last issue, as we begin eating breakfast tacos at birth. But a piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick today, along with an unpleasant experience with Spokeo two days ago, prompted me to tackle the password issue.

Frankly, I’ve become so used to giving my Gmail password to any social service that requests it, I don’t give it a second thought anymore. So when I decided to try out Spokeo in comparison to FriendFeed, I freely gave up my password thinking it would respond as expected: find some friends already using the site and prompt me to invite in others. Instead, it began trolling the Internet for all 500+ contacts I have in Gmail – including people I contacted once or twice on Craigslist – - and telling me of their detailed activity online. It felt invasive and downright creepy. Even worse, it contacted some of those people (not sure how it determines which people) and told them that someone was digging for info on them online, so they should 1) change their privacy settings on those sites and 2) sign up for Spokeo. (Not sure I grasp their messaging there. If everyone changes their privacy settings, Spokeo’s user base disappears.)

My friend Kelly, a super-smart developer in semantics, was one of those who received this email. We were discussing it last night and he made an excellent point that should be foremost these days and which I applaud Marshall for bringing up: a dangerously lax attitude towards our passwords is beginning to take hold in the industry and important initiatives like Data Portability and OpenID should be receiving much more support and attention. With lifestreaming taking hold – I’ll write soon about a hot company launching here, Socialthing – users and innovators alike need to keep the password issue top-of-mind. In the manic development atmosphere that has arisen around communities and social networks, the issues of privacy and security have taken a bit of a backseat. As a new era of all-updates, all-the-time is ushered in, we need to bring it back to the fore.

**Note: I haven’t talked with Spokeo yet for their side of the story and will post their side once that conversation occurs.

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