South by South… What?
Music has Coachella, film has Sundance, and technology has the Consumer Electronics Show. So how do you explain South by Southwest? First, this isn’t a conference, it’s a festival. Sure, among the 72,000 attendees there are big business interests, but the scene is more experimental, the products launched often impractical, and the crowd a lot younger.
The show is supposed to be about connected life and connected entertainment, but just what does that mean?
Music Hyper-Accelerates Everything
SXSW is actually three big festivals that overlap somewhat: Film, Interactive, and Music.
In Music, emerging artists can get a big career jump with a buzzy SXSW performance: The White Stripes, John Mayer, Alabama Shakes, Janelle Monae… the list of performers who had breakout SXSW shows could go on for pages.
And because the discovery of these acts is so central to those who attend the festival, communicating about who you’re seeing, where they’re playing, and how you’re getting there is a huge part of the deal.
Hence Twitter launched here, Foursquare checked in, and Uber launched a pop-up pedicab service along the Austin streets. And that’s the first thing to take away from SXSW: It’s a hyper-accelerator of culture, interacting with technology. The crowd is connected, diverse, and interested in anything hot. Services and products that meet their needs gather momentum at South by Southwest, and that groundswell can carry over into the real world as the diaspora of attendees shares what they learned when they go back to their regular lives.
And About Twitter
It’s a common tale told here: Twitter had a big screen monitor in the halls of the Interactive festival that showed all the tweets related to SXSW. A huge crowd of early adopters and influencers joined the fledgling service. But some say Twitter’s breakout at SXSW, hailed as its great success, has actually hurt the show. The media (yeah, that’s me) roam the show looking to crown the “King of South by Southwest.” We feel compelled to discover the next big thing, but the participants know it’s totally unrealistic to hope for that Twitteresque home run, and it hasn’t happened before or after Twitter. Remember Glancee? Highlight? These were two social discovery apps that were huge at SXSW and then fell off the map.
But there are a few interactive technologies we want to try out this year, like FireChat, a phone-to-phone communication app that works without cell or WiFi service. It’s a cool idea — amazing at festivals, and it could be a very powerful tool in emergencies. As one analyst put it, hitting even a single or a double at SXSW can still really help a company.
Interactive Panels
So why are so many people here? Many come to learn; panel discussions are a big draw. At SXSW, they range from the deep and insightful to what appear to be totally off the wall, like How Potato Salad Killed/Saved Crowdfunding and Online Success Without Cat Videos or Crotch Hits.
Many panels are chosen by SXSW attendees in an online shootout months before the show, so grabby panel titles on top of serious topics are the norm.
The show also sees speakers like Neil Degrasse Tyson and practical topics like An Intro to Ruby on Rails Programming.
Film and TV
The HBO hit series “Silicon Valley” came out to rave reviews here in Austin last year. Other successful films that have come out at SXSW: “The Hurt Locker” debuted at SXSW, Lena Dunham’s breakout film “Tiny Furniture,” and this year the new Steve Jobs documentary from CNN films is launching. (We’ll be profiling that after its debut on Saturday.) Some mainstream movies are launching here: Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell’s comedy “Get Hard” debuts. And I’m psyched to see “Sneakerheadz,” a documentary about high-end athletic shoe collectors.
South by Southwest is still a switched-on gathering of new ideas, and it’s ultimately a cultural crucible that keeps refreshing itself and its attendees.
