Let’s bow our heads, together, and groove! I’ve imagined those words, more than once, emanating from an invisible pulpit on Monday nights at the Continental Gallery in Austin, Texas. What happens there every Monday between 8:30-10pm, and has for the last two years, would not meet any traditional definition of church. No one in attendance expects […]
Weird metrics Eye of the Beholder: The story of SXSWi 2014 presented some fun metrics and results in a game show format. According to an aggregation of the social buzz at SXSWi 2014 — Most popular speaker: Edward Snowden, who says he was willing to do it because he thought those in the room would […]
I’ve involved in some exciting music during SXSW, starting tonight. Here’s an update. Elias Haslanger and Church on Monday is a soul jazz quintet playing classic jazz A and B sides along with originals. Saxophonist/composer Elias Haslanger envisioned and launched the band two years around the soulful core of Dr. James Polk, a Texas music legend […]
I spoke with the founders of EvoSure, competitors in the SXSW Accelerator, about their solution for connecting commercial insurance providers and those searching for the right underwriter. Just one more startup example of how cloud, mobile, and analytics are a three-legged stool on which new ideas are climbing above the competition.
The excitement at the 2014 SXSWi Accelerator is building with the winners being announced this evening. Social Media startups presented this afternoon, and here’s a taste. Connect, from San Francisco, aggregates and maps all your friends from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Instagram, and more and allows you to keep in touch with them without “the creepiness […]
SXSW Accelerator recommenced after a short break. Fieldwire, from San Francisco, kicked off the second half of the pitches from enterprise and big data finalists. They offer a mobile productivity platform for construction and maintenance workers. Users can record, track and share tasks, in the field, in real-time, with geotagging directly from their blueprints. In […]
I sat down at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas a few weeks ago for a social business roundtable with five colleagues deeply involved with social media strategy at IBM. Here are a few highlights: Scott: Let’s go around the group and hear what you all are excited about this year […]
TurboTodd and I got together for our annual post SXSW Interactive ramble. South by Southwest Interactive, now clearly the premier emerging web technologies conference, happens right here in our hometown of Austin, Texas. Todd and I go on for 25 minutes or so, reflecting on author Douglas Rushkoff’s keynote on his newest book, Present Shock; Al […]
Scott Belsky is Co-Founder of Behance, an innovative web platform for showcasing and discovering creative work. He spoke at SXSWi 2013 about how meritocracy, innovation, and access to opportunity are not natural to the web. Some notes/thoughts from his talk — The web is verticalizing and isolating itself because it can. But innovation happens in […]
Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, is “Present Shock.” He waxed philosophical on Saturday about resisting the digital age’s obsession with fractured, everything is important and it’s all right now! living. Some snippets from Doug’s talk at SXSWi … Digifrenia – multiple instances of ourselves operating simultaneously and out of control. The […]
SXSWi is, as Guy Kawasaki puts it, probably the most youthful, unpretentious web and tech conference of its kind with very few, if any, suit entourages walking around. I love it, spend half my time sitting in the lobby of the Austin Convention Center chatting with people, and ALWAYS wear jeans. It all kicks off today and runs […]