By Paul on 31 March 2010
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Sonali Shetty
Paul Spicer- Compleo on
SXSW 2010 -- Compleo Was There!
The uber-techies over here at Compleo are always up for stumbling upon new geeks and gadgetry. So with that in mind my headed down to good ol’ Austin, Texas for yet another impressive display of interactive media at the legendary South by Southwest (SXSW) festival.
In case you’ve been hiding under a PC somewhere, it doesn’t get much better than SXSW when it comes to the latest and greatest in new media and emerging trends. As app developers, we felt right at home with the thousands on hand to share their dandy new creations.
Of particular note to Compleo this year was the pre-event hoopla around location rock stars Foursquare and Gowalla. And in typical SXSW fashion, both delivered – big time. That’s right, location is now king…there’s just no getting around it. In other words, forget about your “social graph,” we’re now talking about your “life graph,” with your actual physical location adding context to your online personality.
While the five day marathon session of techie workshops were brimming with all-stars, the real lesson in “location” was actually found outside the Austin Convention Center on a foursquare court chalked off by the developers of the Foursquare app. Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, co-founders of the Foursquare, were on hand to issue challenges to bystanders, an opportunity we just couldn’t pass up. What was unique to their guerilla marketing antics was the fact that the temporary court itself was quickly added as a venue on Foursquare with users of the app battling it out daily to become its “Mayor.” With the app adding over 100,000 users during the SXSW festivities alone, it should come as no surprise that many event-goers used Foursquare to locate where the action was occurring (often on the court) at any given moment and then on the fly schedule their SXSW activities accordingly.
Best of all, adding a real life twist to unlocking Foursquare “badges,” the business development team at Foursquare handed out secret business cards to fans that were then given a link to a special web page for SXSW. Those lucky enough to collect all of the cards were awarded a “Groupie” badge. Also of note was a jam-packed Foursquare party, in conjunction with Sticky Bits, at the Cedar Door Courtyard where Ashton Kutcher and other celebs jumped on the location-aware bandwagon.
Though Foursquare had the crowd buzzing on the court, the official event ballrooms inside were filled with A-listers such as Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter; Guy Kawasaki, Silicon Valley venture capitalist/blogger; Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable.com; and Gary Vaynerchuk, gonzo host of Wine Library TV, a daily internet webcast; and Peter Shankman (better known as @skydiver), who injected a bit of location-specific antics into the social media equation by challenging participants to win a prize by using Twitter to locate him at one of the many SXSW parties and whisper a secret code.
More than just fun and games, SXSW offered big ideas to the whiz kids here at Compleo who enjoyed interfacing with the other hungry digital creatives and early adaptors in attendance. While location aware applications managed to work their way into many a discussion, there was plenty of chatter around other ways to link the physical and online realms. Take for instance the strong showing by the growing fans of QR (Quick Response) Codes. If you haven’t heard, QR Codes are a two-dimensional bar code that can be read by your mobile phones. That’s right, just point your phone at the bar code (which can be attached to a name tag, advertisement, product, etc) and magic happens. For example, by scanning a QR Code a user can access a “tell me more” button that can include any digital content left to your imagination – such as contact info, video files, and links to social platforms.
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