After a great time at this SXSW2008, I must say it is the place to be if you’re in any field of technology. I have been to many conferences, Symposiums and such, but SXSW is by far the best one in recent years. I enjoyed the Music, Film and Interactive festivals. You get to meet interesting people: musicians, filmmakers, actors, producers, geeks, creatives and human-like characters.
This year’s panels that I thought were a must and then spawn a lot of sentiment, rage, or made it to the news were:
Mark Zuckerberg interview by Sarah Lacy, twitterers from everywhere exploded badly, but don’t take my work for it, there is a great place where everything is well detailed.
http://scobleizer.com/2008/03/11/audience-of-twittering-assholes/
and here is video from the interview, judge yourself:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/mark-zuckerberg-sarah-lacy-interview-from-sxsw/
I actually think the interview was to generic, it would be great for a business conference, but here you have technology people all gather together, we all know who Mark is, and we had actual technical questions and wanted to hear technical or technology related information. What I was actually glad to see is how open Mark was to talk to people, I had the opportunity to talk with him at the Facebook party. He is a very approachable person.
Also a great panel was the ‘Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again’ which had Brendan Eich, who invented JavaScript and is CTO of Mozilla; Chris Wilson worked on every version of IE that you’ve used; Charles McCathieNevile is the public face of standards at Opera, hosted by Arun Ranganathan, System Architect.
What it was unfortunate is that Apple didn’t send, at Aruns request, anyone from the Safari team. This actually was a let down, but if Apple does not care to send anyone, then they cannot defend themselves, which is their own fault. Apple missed a great opportunity, and probably they thought all of these developers would had been tough on them, as it should be.
http://www.appscout.com/2008/03/sxsw_browser_wars_become_brows.php
I was actually impressed by the amount of people with iPhones, and Apple Laptops, definitely the majority, I would like to set a poll or if anyone could bring some statistics back from SXSW, please do.
The Google party and the Facebook party were great, I will be posting a few photos of the events and of some sessions. Anyway, if I saw you, talked to you or anything alike at SXSW, please drop me a line.
Great events, great nightclubs, great place, Austin.
