In case you haven’t heard, this has been a huge week for interactive media. From last Friday to this Tuesday, from luminaries in the field and representatives of giants like Facebook and Apple, to the greenest of start-ups and job-seekers, everyone’s gathered in Austin, TX for South by Southwest interactive, attending panels, trying demos of new products, and partying harder than any of them will probably admit when they come home. “Southby” is business, but it’s also fun — in an industry where people know each other by screen names and posting styles, the convention is a way to attach names to faces and get an idea of who you might be working with in the future, as well as who your customers, backers, and competitors might be. It’s also not just a tech event — the simultaneous music and film festivals going on mean that creativity, artistic expression, and the rock-star lifestyle are never far away, even when someone’s trying to sell their startup to Google or learning how to develop a tablet app.
The Creative Media People’s Kelly Utt-Grubb is currently at Southby, representing both the firm itself and the startup social networking site Letterberry. She’s been sending missives along the various social networks, updating us on the exciting things that happen when the interactive media industry actually gets together face to face. So what are we all going to be talking about this year? Here are some of the possibilities.
* Foursquare, the location-based network that took the web by storm in 2010, isn’t done taking over the world just yet. The site, which allows users to “check in” at locations like a coffee shop or nightclub and invite friends to come join them, plans to expand in 2011 by creating something called a Venue Harmonization Map, which sounds complicated but is really just a way to link places on Foursquare with the corresponding place in the database of other networks like Twitter and Facebook, to make it easier to share locations across social networks.
*Blogger, the Google-owned blogging platform that’s been around since “blog” was a weird-sounding new word that people didn’t think would really catch on, is completely redesigning its user interface, presumably to compete with faster-growing and more buzzed-about platforms like Wordpress. The redesign is still in beta, but visitors to the Blogger booth at SXSW were invited to try it out.
*Google hosted an event called the League of Extraordinary Hackers, inviting attendees to take part in fun activities like building robots out of Lego toys, with the goal of promoting awareness of the importance of technology education. The proceeds of the event — and the Legos — went to schools that support the goals of women in technology. Look for the LEH to appear in the future as this campaign goes viral.
*Video game company Insomniac Games announced that they’re creating a division called Insomniac Click, designed to fuse console gaming with casual social gaming — like FarmVille and Angry Birds. Insomniac refused to see social gaming as a threat to console gaming, and instead sees it as an opportunity to move the industry in a new direction. Game industry superpowers Bioware and Electronic Arts also took part in the panel discussing the social future of gaming.
*“Gameification” continues to be a hot topic in the industry. Author and developer Jane McGonigal and game developer Seth Priebatsch discussed this phenomenon — the strategy of using “game mechanics” like earning points, beating missions, and as Charlie Sheen would say, “winning,” in real-world applications from marketing to motivating employees — at a hot panel at SXSW, and speculated on its applications to social media. One example they used was a new social app called LevelUp!, which encourages shoppers to earn discounts through loyalty to certain stores.
Southby Interactive finishes up tomorrow, but attendees will have the option to stick around for the continuing music and film festivals, catch some unforgettable live performances, and further bond with their new friends in the industry.
Are you, or is anyone you know, attending SXSW? What news from the festival are you most excited about? Tell us in the comments! And check back for more updates on what these new developments and what they could mean for your business.
