Monday, March 24, 2008

DC @ SXSW Interactive

Keeping up with "cool" in interactive trends can be a tough job, especially when one has to attend a barrage of parties, drinking, geeks dancing, sandwiched between technical seminars. Over the four days of the "Nerd Spring Break," thousands of dot com pioneers, their entourages, web designers, developers and investors invaded Austin in the search of "geekasm" as it is put so eloquently in the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) How-To Seminar.

Every where you looked, the glow of Mac books, iPhones and Blackberries bathed over a sea of people texting, Twittering, Gawking, Meeboing, facebooking and blogging (Wordpress, Blogger.com, etc.). In the evenings, start up ideas flowed as freely as the liquor, and new friends exchanged business cards, Moo cards , linked-in, and facebook id's. Miss something? Check it out later on youtube, qik.com or browse through thousands of pictures (read evidence) on flickr or natuba.

Seminars ranged from designing beautiful web sites, javascript development, user-experience design, gaming, finding respect as a designer, finding creativity, happiness and team building. The inaugural Screenburn seminar video gaming trade-show found Master Chief playing Guitar Hero...speaking of Microsoft, they were there pushing Silverlight, their answer to Adobe Flash - who were there promoting CS3. The most obviously absent was Apple. And of course, Linux was there represented proudly by the folks of Linux Journal. ;)

Below are just a few more pictures captured via Blackberry to add to the web collective.







Jeffrey Zeldman's panel on Respect (If you don't know him, you have no business working on the web.)




Elisa Adams from MMI and Richard Yoo of Natuba, sorry about the pic dude. ;)





Fire-dancing at the Frog Design party




Keynote speaker Matt Zuckerberg of Facebook




With Brian Tong of CNET.com covering the trade-show




Serverbeach party at the Iron Cactus




And lastly, Michael Eisner interviewed by no other than Mark Cuban discussed the future of web content and delivery.




Finally, a shout out to Vancouver! See you all there next year!

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