SXSW Interactive: A March Madness of a Different Kind

Since 2006, my husband Dave and I have been loyal attendees of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, the younger, geeky stepchild of the acclaimed SXSW Music and Media Conference held each March in Austin, Texas. For digital pioneers, there is nothing quite like SXSW Interactive: a sea of Mac-toting, smartphone-obsessed, buzzword-counting, new media snobs on a mission to know “what’s next” before you do.

Over the years, we have witnessed the launch and initial efforts of digital darlings like Firefox, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla. Now, keeping with the theme of this issue, I’ll come clean on a couple of things:

1) Hubby is a much more accurate predictor of the future of these sorts of products. For instance, when we played around with Twitter at its 2007 unveiling, the light bulb went off for Dave—I foresaw no relevant business use for it whatsoever.

2) We skipped SXSW in 2010 because the thought of attending one more Twitter- or Facebook-focused conference was too much for us (that’s where the aforementioned “snob” part comes in). Blessedly, the 2011 lineup features plenty of great panels, keynotes and sessions that do not revolve around Facebook or Twitter, so back to Austin we go! This year, I’m hoping to learn more about these new media newbies:


Quora:
The early adopter geek community is positively beside itself over this “continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” Once you sign up for a free account at Quora.com, you can “follow” and start conversations about topics and questions (and relevant answers) of your choosing.

Quora was co-created by Charlie Cheever, a former engineer/manager at Facebook, and the goal of the site is to create a sort of collective, ever-expanding database of all knowledge. It sounds good to me, but I’m not yet sold on how non-spammy and useful it will actually be. Stay tuned; I’m sure Quora’s marketing and development folks will be out in full-force at SXSW this year.

Blekko:
According to TechCrunch and my husband, I should keep an eye on Blekko. An up-and-coming search engine created by a few former Google and Yahoo! engineers, Blekko promises to “slash” the clutter from your search experience. Household name Google is clearly a search engine dominator, but many share the concern that true search results via Google are increasingly buried in spam and paid ads.

On Blekko, you can add a slashtag like “/college” to your “MBA programs” query. Blekko uses the slashtag as a cue to only search a few thousand of the most relevant college and university sites, as opposed to the entire Internet. You may add “/date” to receive chronological results. Blekko has already sounded the SXSW siren with the launch of its aggressive SXSW marketing campaign and the promise of the ultimate geek attention-magnet: free t-shirts. I’m fairly certainly I’ll be well versed in Blekko by the end of the month. In the meantime, you may give it a try at blekko.com.

JumpScan:
I’m not sure how practical or mainstream this technology will ever be, but I’m intrigued by new applications like JumpScan, which turns Quick Response (QR) Codes into virtual business cards. JumpScan is in Beta, so it is still working out the kinks, but the gist of it is this: sign up, create a profile, receive your personal bar code-type thing and post it on the Internet somewhere. When folks scan your code using a smartphone scan-reader like ScanLife, their phone’s browser will open up your profile, giving that person easy access to the information you chose to share (it is a much more streamlined process than I’m making it sound). I’m newly fascinated with QR code technology and hoping I’ll discover more creative marketing and reputation management uses for it this year.

New and new-to-me products aside, I’m curious to hear if the digital community really believes the honeymoon—and growth spurt—is over for location-based games and applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places.

You can learn more, register and view the impressive line-up at sxsw.com/interactive. If you aren’t able to make it in person this year, join us virtually! Podcasts of nearly all of the keynotes and sessions are available online following each scheduled presentation. And, if you are going, let’s connect! Shoot me a message at twitter.com/margienewman.