The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”.  Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year.  The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca.  I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach.  Apparently not so.  Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call).  The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside.  Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

SXSWi has one of the more interesting content picking processes I’ve seen for a conference.  It has turned into a well-oiled machine, and it is, in my opinion, responsible for allowing SXSWi to reinvent and remain relevant (even more relevant) over time.

Recently, topics for SXSWi-2012 were released.  These are the panels and sessions that were voted on by attendees or prospective attendees (although a vote isn’t the only input into the panel picking system).

If this year is like most, some additional featured speakers or top-down content will be added, in addition to a few late-selection panels to reflect any late-breaking news or changes in the world around us.

Topic areas:

• Keynote Presentations at the Austin Convention Center
• Featured Sessions (Austin Convention Center)
• Better Tomorrow (Austin Convention Center) – a focus on economy and social issues
• Book Readings (Austin Convention Center)
• Branding and Marketing (Stephen F Austin hotel – which was also the site of the BP3 all-hands meeting!)
• Convergence (Austin Convention Center)
• Design and Development (Austin Convention Center)
• Emerging (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
• Future of Work (Courtyard Marriott)
• Government and Global Issues (AT&T Conference Center)
• Health and Education (AT&T Conference Center)
• Journalism and Online Content (Sheraton Austin)
• Latin America (Hilton Garden Inn)
• Lifestyles and Sports (Campus TBA)
• ScreenBurn and Gaming (Campus TBA)
• Social Networks (Omni – Downtown)
• Startup Village (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
• Workshops (Radisson – Town Lake)

The biggest change I notice : moving the startup events to the Hilton (which is like ground-zero, right across the street from the Austin Convention Center), rather than having them at the AT&T Conference Center, as they did last year.  Last year’s startup sessions were really high quality – and the AT&T Conference Center at UT is a fantastic facility for an event like that – but it is removed from the core action at SXSW.  My guess is that there was an effort to bring this core area back to the center of the activity at SXSWi.  The only downside is it will be much harder to park this year!

To anyone trying to organize a conference, I submit to you that you just haven’t seen crazy til you’ve been to SXSWi.  The number of people and the logistics involved in feeding them, moving them, parking them, seating them, and providing wifi and 3g cell connectivity for their 3 connected devices is an incredible challenge.  And it is impressive how well it all works.

The Startup Village has its own set of articles on SXSW’s website.  This promises to be a great conference.  The number of topics is overwhelming, but the organization into campuses and topic areas at least helps focus attention on the topics you care about.

As I was about to post this, I ran across Austin Startup’s coverage of the same subject.  GREAT tidbits they pulled out from the schedule:

Stephen Wolfram on Computation and Its Impact on the Future. Any chance to hear him speak, I will take it.

Definitely. I look at this session as being potentially as promising as the Craig Venter session from the 2011 conference.  They also pointed out panels from Dachis Group, RecycleMatch, WP Engine, and Foreca.st (local startups).  Josh Baer will reprise a topic he owns: 3 Secrets to a Killer Elevator Pitch.  Even this far in advance it looks like a very strong lineup.

SXSW-interactive fully exposes its process for selecting panels and sessions to attendees. I’m not sure what the genesis of this crowd-sourced way of planning content was, but the effect is remarkable. It starts with nominating ideas.  Then there’s a round of voting. An expert panel also has input to the final outcome.  Amazingly, it scales.  Why does it work?

For one, SXSWi (SWSX interactive) is constantly being reinvented.  What at one point was primarily a vehicle for bloggers to gather and share, has morphed into an event that covers a range of topics:

• Blogging
• Social media
• Mobile tech
• Startups of all stripes
• Design
• Freelancers
• Social issues
• Raising capital, venture capital, etc.
• Etc.

The balance of these topics has been shifting over time.  A few years ago there weren’t really any topics on geolocation – but there were a lot of those last year.  There was even a whole day focused on lean startups.

This process for selecting sessions and panels is not only a great way to engage with the community – it is a great way to let the conference evolve and adapt with the interests of attendees.  It is impossible to imagine the organizers of SXSWi coming up with several thousand sessions over 5 days. But crowdsourced – it is not only possible to do, the attendees will create the content, give the presentations, mediate the discussions… SXSWi actually has to prune the content, and yet there are still time slots with 150 concurrent sessions.

All of this benefit is managed through their panel picking process. SXSWi is being reborn again as we speak, with round 1 of panel picking under way.  You can get a sense for the variety in sessions just from that Austin Startup link – social media, semantic web, women in Tech, elevator pitches.  And that’s a small sampling of the options.

Don’t like the sessions from last year?  Nominate and vote for your own for 2012!  I’ve voted, and I’m looking forward to see what makes the cut for next year.

Steve Blank was the star speaker among an incredibly strong cast of speakers at the Lean Startup sessions at SXSW-interactive.  The room was packed, and SXSW volunteers were keeping more people out in the halls to obey fire codes.  There would have been people sitting on stairs and on the floor if allowed.  I guess there were a few of those, but mostly just near the power outlets (people who didn’t have iPads to take notes on).

Steve speaks as well (or better) than he writes.  His talk was engaging and energizing.  He started his talk (and a blog post I’ll quote here, based on the same topic) discussing a quick history of the four waves of startup investing:

• The Golden Age (1970 – 1995): Build a growing business with a consistently profitable track record (after at least 5 quarters,) and go public when it’s time.
• Dot.com Bubble (1995-2000): “Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability.
• Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity.
• The New Bubble: (2011 – 2014): Here we go again….

Not everyone agrees that there is a bubble.  Of course, in order to disarm the “is it a bubble or is it not” discussion, he simply says “if you believe it IS a bubble, then the question is, are the rules different in a bubble than they are otherwise?  Are the rules different now, than they were for the previous ten years?”

It is hard to argue that the rules aren’t different.  Or at least that some tactics that would have been counter-productive or futile before, are now quite effective and productive.

The basic argument is that from 2001 to 2010, the Lean Startup was the way to go – conserving capital, focusing on learning and iterating, and finding a business model that could scale.  As he put it:

Startups began to recognize that they weren’t merely a smaller version of a large company. Rather they understood that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. This meant that startups needed their own tools, techniques and methodologies distinct from those used in large companies. The concepts of Minimum Viable Product and the Pivot entered the lexicon along with Customer Discovery and Validation.

So far so good.  But what has changed in 2011, and going forward toward 2014?

1. Breathtaking scale.  The addressable market for startups is vastly bigger than it once was.  And so is the ability for startups to serve that scale (via Amazon web services, for example). Mark Suster commented on this in his SXSW recap.
2. New Exits.  There are simply better options for startups to exit now, than there have been over the last 10 years.  IPOs are back on the table.  Acquisitions are at higher valuations.  And the companies that are IPO’ing will have real profits and revenue, and massive customer #’s.
3. Better tools are available – AWS, S3, Google App Engine, Rackspace, etc.  These scaling tools weren’t there 10 years ago.  Moreover, developer productivity is up with new tools like Ruby, Rails, etc.

It seems that the key change Steve is advocating for startups is visibility.  That previously, press exposure might have hurt you by locking you into the wrong path, but going forward, press would help you by expanding your user base, and increasing your visibility for potential acquirers.

But of course, all this advice only applies if you believe there is a new Internet bubble.

There were some great quotes in the talk.  My favorite:  “There are no 10 year startups. There are only 2 year startups attached to 8 year failures.”

Steve pulls no punches, but he does deliver his critiques with a smile and sense of humor.

Slideshow, embedded below, also tells the story quite well:

 
There’s also a great Q&A with Steve Blank on GigaOm – in which he discusses how the total available market has exploded in size, and how he believes a great CEO with a great product could have come out of SXSW-interactive highly visible and talked about. In other words, he still sees SXSW as a place where you could launch.

I was pretty surprised at how impressed Mark Suster was with SXSW-interactive.  I mean, I understand why it was such a great experience for me and many others in my shoes, but I admit to feeling that, surely for VCs and folks like Mark, SXSW is a little annoyingly out of the way or annoying in that it is such a throng of people.  Or something like that.  But no:

SXSW was magic. I can’t imagine having been at a better event. I was listening to NPR on my drive in yesterday morning. They were talking about the music portion of the show. A band was saying, “I can’t believe that at one event you could get access to the band managers of Lady Gaga, FooFighters, etc. Every night you are just hanging out with big name bands and the teams around them that brought them to their peak.”

I couldn’t have said it any better replacing music with tech.

His post has a lot of name-dropping – but you know, some of those names are friends of mine and local Austinites (more prominent in startup circles, for sure, than I am).  So there’s a certain “reality” to what he’s saying that I can relate to.  It was nice to see some Austinites make his list of people he enjoyed meeting with.  Of course, who wouldn’t enjoy the conversations he had?  Steve Blank? Dave McClure? Gary V? I was just happy to get to see some of these folks present and hold court at SXSW.

I need to write a post explaining why the Lean Startup has relevance to BPM, in a logical, specific way.  But before I do that, I want to get the raw impressions and data I’ve collected from watching sessions at SXSW and then I’ll post my analysis.  Because much of this content is available on the web, the key attraction to the event was to hear it live, rather than Memorex – much of the analysis is the same, but with fresh input.

Eric Ries kicked off the SXSW Lean Startup event with a good introduction to Lean startups.  My notes from the session (rough notes):

• Entrepreneurs are everywhere
• Lean Startup is about Validated Learning:
  • Build
  • Measure
  • Learn
• (scribbled something about innovation)

Next, Eric talked about Scientific Management, and Fred Taylor. On the one hand, a scientific approach to business is generally a good thing, and on the other, his approach falls on its face in startups.  The argument seems to be, that in startups, we would collectively benefit from a more scientific, rigorous approach (rather than the trial and error that often happens, and rather than the waterfall approach we often see).  But also, that scientific approach has to account for the fact that the both the problem and solution are not well-known. Taylor assumes the problem and solution are well understood.

The key idea is the Pivot.  His example:  Groupon was building “petition++” and made a huge pivot to daily deals.  Their first daily deal was for pizza at the pizza place in their building.  A very humble beginning, but also a very useful way to start testing their concept in the real world.

So the goal is to reduce time required to pivot (rephrasing: reduce the time required to learn what you need to know, so that you can pivot effectively sooner rather than later).

The Waterfall/Taylor approach just doesn’t work well in startup land (I had visions of Phil Gilbert’s old bucket brigade slides when I saw Eric’s slides).  Eric points out he was kind of annoyed to find out that even manufacturing doesn’t follow a Tayloristic approach anymore – they’re using Lean.  So why are people teaching software and engineering still teaching this approach that is proven to be wrong?

The problem with a waterfall approach: Achieving failure, on time, on budget, with high quality, good design.  Only one problem:  wrong product.

Deming and Ohno put the focus on the customer, and lean manufacturing as the way to get there.

Customer Develment + Agile Development

Agile Development was a big improvement to delivery models for software companies.  But even agile doesn’t work well, by itself, in startups.  It needed to be paired up with Customer Development (Steve Blank’s process for hypothesis testing your business model, at right).  Meanwhile, it becomes clearer when to employ the two key parts of a lean startup: the approach to unknown problems, and the approach to unknown solutions…

Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

Not that executing these two models is necessarily easy, but it sure is a whole lot easier to do right if you know which situation you’re in.  If your problem is known, and solution is unknown, Agile development is a good choice. But if your problem is unknown as well, then you need to employ the customer development process to dig into what problem you’re really solving.

Eric described the cycles at IMVU, by way of example. And explained that the “pivot” is one cycle through the “build-measure-learn” loop.  A great quote was that “learning is the fundamental measure of progress” in a lean startup – not revenue, or users, or any other metric that a typical board might latch on to.

Translating to BPM terms: The pivot in business process management would be when we take what we learned from our last process improvement, measure what is really happening, and identify the new opportunities and tackle those.  In BPM we’re not pivoting the company hypothesis, just the hypothesis for where the bang-for-the-buck is in the process.

I particularly like his coverage of Lean myths:

1. Lean means cheap. On the contrary, lean is about speed much more than about cost.
2. Lean Startup is only for Web2.0 style companies. Actually, Lean Startup applies to all companies that face uncertainty in what the customers will want.
3. Lean Startups are bootstrapped. In fact, many lean startups are ambitious and can deploy large amounts of capital (see, Groupon).
4. Lean Startups replace vision with data. Actually, lean startups test the vision with real data. They still require vision!

Eric’s talk was followed by case studies on pivots by Pascal Louis-Perez (Wealthfront), Ash Maurya (USERcycle), Parker Thompson (Pivotal Labs).

Perhaps the most interesting nugget from these three case studies, with respect to the customers BP3 works with – was Pascal’s presentation on Wealthfront.  His company processes manages over $180MM.  And yet they have a continuous deployment setup – meaning they deploy changes to production as much as 30 times a day.  Their company puts lie to the idea that a highly regulated industry with very important financial outcomes can’t adopt a continuous deployment development model.  I’m not advocating that every Fortune 500 company do the same with BPM – but clearly there is a happy middle-ground between 18-month roll-outs and 30 times a day…  And whatever your number of days between deployments is, we should be looking at ways to reduce that number.

Ash Maurya was up next (slides here), and I admit to being surprised when he presented the use of kan ban boards to visualize the workflow of feature ideas (this is, truly, treating development of product as something that can be measured and improved and understood). He advocated moving only so fast as you can learn or aid the process of learning – that moving faster than that, or slower than that, amounts to waste (a big no-no in Lean thinking).

Parker Thompson, of Pivotal, advocated having a vision, but being humble and pragmatic in the near term.  If testing with users or customers proves that your vision isn’t getting traction, don’t assume you have the wrong test subjects, be willing to revisit your hypothesis and test different ideas.

Following SXSW-interactive, I found I had a collection of interesting bookmarks to resources from the conference.  I thought I’d share with everyone else who might (or might not) be interested :

First, we have everything tagged with SXSW on Slideshare.  Some great content – but buyer beware!

Next up, the Lean Startup folks pulled together a great collection of the content covered during the Lean Startup sessions.  Note that this link links to their 2011 content – which is more than just what was covered in SXSW, but it is pretty easy so far to discern which is which.

Next, Austin’s own Omar Gallega gives his 5 ways to fix SXSW next year. Generally I agree with his advice.  Except for one:  he recommends trimming panels by a third.  Quantity of panels isn’t the problem I was experiencing.  Almost every session I went to was jam-packed.  Fewer sessions means that each session needs a bigger room (on average) to accommodate the same # of people.  I’m not sure that’s the answer.  The solution to quality isn’t to prevent people from getting their panel in, so much as it is to make sure there is always quality content to compete. I don’t think there’s a good way to determine quality without stifling what makes SXSW great (for example, some of the presenters at the lean sessions were first tiem SXSW presenters).

If you want to read my favorite set of Tweets for the conference (Gary Chou asked for a TiVo for Tweets), you can look at Snap Bird’s capture of @elliotloh’s tweets.  Just keep in mind it is in reverse order…

Clay Richardson of Forrester covers SXSW-interactive as well.  He recaps three of the more interesting sessions (which represented interesting trends of conversation).

And these were just a few.  If you have other interesting resources you’ve run across please feel free to add to the comment stream!

Is this Shark too big to Jump?

Every year, attendees of SXSW ask if it has “jumped the shark” – usually a reference to out-of-control attendance, but also often used in reference to its growing appeal to “mainstream” audiences, sponsors, and media.

Legitimately, people wondered if a conference of 12000+ last year could still be meaningful to attendees.  It was a big jump in attendance (30-40%), and the organization of the conference struggled to keep up.  Hallways were jam-packed with people between sessions, and logistics seemed problematic (transportation and food were scarce, and so were spare plugs for recharging phones and laptops).

Early reports that SXSW would be even bigger this year raised the usual concerns – is SXSW-interactive too big?  Too big to create value for attendees?  The final numbers came in somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 – an almost shocking increase, and by far the biggest tech conference I’ve attended (approximately 3x the size of IBM Impact 2010).  It is amazing that Austin, a moderately sized city, can host such a large conference (we’re not talking about a traditional conference destination like Las Vegas or Orlando).  But SXSW compensates for this shortage of convention center space by branching out – to 10 venues in 2011.  This year it did a better job of grouping similar content in the same venue (campus), cutting down on the mad dashes across Austin from one session to another.  In a sense, SXSW is evolving into a set of smaller conferences – each of which is growing independently under the overall umbrella and branding of SXSW.  The organizers of SXSW of course have some experience with this… it is how they approached growing the Film and Interactive portions of the festival without missing a beat with the music festival.

It’s Over

John Gruber of Daring Fireball weighs in on SXSW as well:

As Budd says, you can’t go from a conference of 2,500 attendees to one of 25,000 attendees without turning the event into something entirely different. … Once it outgrew the Austin Convention Center, though, it grew into something I no longer enjoyed. I don’t see how anyone could claim that the conference now is anything but broken.

Only in comparison to an event profile from 2005.  It just isn’t the same event.  Or really, set of events.  This same complaint is leveled by Austinites all the time… about Austin!  People lament that the town it used to be is lost.  It has grown beyond its sleepy beginnings.  But the alternative is what?  Not having the robust economic growth that has made Austin one of the most interesting cities to live in? I’ll take the growth, thank you – I’ve seen the alternatives.

In the context of SXSW – what is the alternative?  A conference to which the same people come every year for 25 years, every year just a bit older than last year?  The truth is, you can’t keep a conference like this the same – it has to evolve.  Admittedly, the organizers can limit attendance, or raise prices to artificially limit attendance (one could argue they tried that by raising prices for 2011…).  But would lack of growth be better than what SXSW has achieved?  I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think so.

John Gruber also laments the lack of attendance at a talk scheduled too far from the epicenter;

A prime example: Despite the fact that there were almost 25,000 attendees, almost no one saw Matt Haughey’s excellent talk in person, because the conference schedulers put Haughey in an obscure location across the river, a mile away from the Austin Convention Center. There were about 30 or 40 people in the room for his talk.

This sort of thing is truly unfortunate.  There was a similar attendance issue at Craig Venter’s amazing talk on synthetic life-  one of the best talks I’ve seen on any subject.  It was scheduled at 9:30am on Monday morning.  I’m sure a lot of people were still sleeping off a long night out from Sunday night.  But I’d hardly call a conference broken for scheduling quality content at 9:30am.  I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in scheduling and grouping content together. But I have some faith that SXSW organizers are working it out.  I don’t know anyone who attended the Lean Startup sessions who walked away from SXSW feeling that the content wasn’t top notch.  I also attended a packed BattleDecks session that was, to put it mildly, less than value-added.  Voting with feet sometimes produces surprising results in both directions.

In the echo chamber of folks who didn’t go to sessions, talking about how bad the session content was, skipping the conference or just skipping the sessions seems like a good idea.  But I think they missed the boat for the average conference-goer – as usual the content was there, and rich – but it takes more work to find what you want because there are, literally, as many as 120 sessions happening concurrently.  You read that right.  In my opinion, if you’re not in that “influencer elite” class of attendee, you’re probably going to enjoy the content if you give it a chance. That opinion is validated by a couple of experienced startup veterans that came to SXSW for the first time this year and really enjoyed it.  Anecdotal data, I’ll admit.

Reinventing SXSWi… again…

One of the things that sets SXSW-interactive apart is that it reinvents itself – from “multimedia” to a blogger convention, to a tech/startup convention, to a convention with a strong streak of mobile and geo-location content (and all the while a gaming track has been growing in size)… The organizers don’t come up with the ideas that shape and reshape the conference, for the most part – the attendees and speakers do – by submitting and then voting on topics.  The Lean Startup track that Eric Ries, et al, created was driven by people outside the SXSW organizational structure, but with the help of SXSW once that theme became apparent.  How many conferences have you been to where the messaging is controlled by 2-3 people who work at a single company and have a particular agenda (or product, or service) to push? SXSW avoids that trap- whether on purpose or by accident.

After attending this year’s conference, if anything has “jumped the shark”, it is saying that SXSW has jumped the shark:

Depending on what you read or who you talk to, this was definitely the year that SXSW jumped the shark. In fact, I think we even declared it over before it even began. What was once a conference that was hip, now attracts the guy in the buttoned-up shirt — therefore, it’s over.

Except, it isn’t.  And if there is anyplace where the button-up shirt can meet with the guy in tshirt and Birkenstocks, Austin is it.  MG Siegler goes on to say:

Everything just felt fragmented — including the apps that did try to launch there. There was simply too much going on for what was initially conceived as a smaller show. This year was like watching a mouse trying to give birth to an elephant.

The other side of the coin is that SXSW is just too big for a few insiders to control the message, or to even groupthink what the message should be.  The fragmentation may be precisely what SXSW needed to handle the influx of people, who can’t fit into a single building let alone a single room in Austin. As for fragmentation, I like how Hugh Forrest put it:

Forrest said that for next year, the festival crew will look at quality control for panels, although the abundance of content is not something that will likely go away. “Yes, there’s too much stuff, but it’s part of what we’re trying to do here. That’s a feature, not a flaw.”

In other words: your problem isn’t going to be lack of choice at SXSW.  The problem will be choosing where to invest your time.  The adjustment I made from 2010 to 2011 was to more carefully plan out my first two days before the conference started – having 2-3 sessions marked for each time-slot that I thought were interesting and in a location I was willing to walk to.   I also planned what session or time frame I was going to ditch, so that I could eat lunch.  There just isn’t time to decide where you want to go after the previous session – you need to have it narrowed down to a shorter “interest list” and then make a bee-line for that session in case it is crowded.  Good sessions are often standing room only.

You Can’t Launch Product at SXSWi- Not Anymore. Or Can You?

It appears that I’m not the only one that feels SXSW is becoming a must-attend event.  But Michael Lazerow comes to one bad conclusion: that the days of breaking products at SXSW are over:

As for the product wars we all know and love, let me just say that this year marks the end of launching products (at least successfully) at SXSW. With launches being the only thing more prevalent than parties at SXSW, two things will happen with your product if you debut at SXSW:

• No one cares. There is too much noise. 99.9999% of the companies fit into this category.
• Everyone cares and you crash. SXSW is so big now that if people do notice and decide to check out your product en masse, you will crash as you can’t handle the traffic.

So either you crash and burn because no one notices, or you crash and burn because you actually crash and burn. It’s crucial to begin growing an active user base a few months before SXSW so you can improve the product and scale the infrastructure.

He goes on to say that SXSW is the kindling, not the firestarter.  Not sure about the analogy but I think he has a point – it can accelerate adoption for a product that already has a loyal following.   But launching a product to all 20,000 attendees at SXSW-i no longer makes sense (except when it does).  But it doesn’t mean you can’t have a successful launch  – you just have to aim at a more targeted or niche segment of the attendees – the conference’s attendees are too fragmented in demographics, and too large in number, to target in one conference with one message – but it doesn’t mean you can’t launch.  But it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can tell if SXSW gave your launch the boost it needed to attain orbit.

The Myth, and The Legend

In fact, Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital does a great job of explaining the myth of the SXSW launch, and why we shouldn’t be quite so focused on the successful launch of new technology as an indicator of success.  Essentially, Twitter was the perfect app to launch at an event like SXSW, and now that we have it, it isn’t clear yet what the next “right app, right time, right conference” confluence will be.  As he put it:

What SXSW has always been about is people.  It is the single best place in the creative innovation world to build relationships and get to know people.  I have friends from all over the world that I’ve met over the last five years that I can’t wait to see in Austin every year.  It’s where I met Rob May from Backupify for the first time in person–and I got to back him through First Round four years later.

Going back to fragmentation and cognitive dissonance, I love this article from Inc. magazine on what you missed at SXSW:

• Five days is enough to start a company.  The startup bus movement is in effect, and while it hasn’t churned out a blockbuster hit, it has given its participants a short primer on “starting up”.
• Gamification will blanket the earth… but…
• Gamification doesn’t matter.  Yes. You read that right.  Different points of view, strongly expressed, in different panels or discussions.
• Influencers will inherit the earth.  Get used to it.
• Ignore the influencers, and focus on a subset of mainstream users.

Hm. Conflicting advice!

Random Observations

My experiences at SXSW interactive have been so positive that I’ll be back in 2012.  The opportunity to step outside the day-to-day and get exposed to this kind of cross-pollination just doesn’t happen every day – and for me, being in Austin, this is a no-brainer.  I’ll share a couple of other random observations…

I noticed a few apps in particular were getting a lot of traction this year:

• Foodspotting.  I started using it at last year’s SXSW, and saw an awful lot of foodspotting on twitter this year.
• A friend of mine introduced me to Hashable late last year, but I didn’t really start using it until SXSW this year.  When you’re meeting with other active twitter users it is a nice way to “say thanks” when you get a meet-up.
• Groupme – I don’t use it but people were talking about using it.  However, I didn’t see any viral effect – none of my friends at SXSW sent me an invite or were asking me to sign up so that we could “group chat”.  This one hasn’t filtered down to the “general audience” at SXSW.
• Other opinions here.

There are other reasons to keep coming to SXSW.  The Austin360 Food Trailer guide is just one reason (25 Austin food trailers, critic’s picks ) – if Austin isn’t Ground Zero for the food trailer movement, I don’t know where it is. Free food trailer food was abundant at SXSW, thanks to Hashable, Foodspotting, and other startups at SXSW.

Another is the likely-to-be-annual Das IronGeek Competition (congrats Joshua Baer on winning it this year!) – if you haven’t tried one of their mechanical keyboards, you should. They’re amazingly responsive and fast.  It is hard to describe without actually trying one. The competition consisted of:

• Typing at Das Keyboard
• A Fear Factor dig in the sand for smart phone accessories from Seidio
• SXSW trivia from Triviatise
• Old school air hockey from MapQuest
• Build a server rack from SoftLayer

Who doesn’t want to win the Dwight Schroot trophy?  And where else can you compete for the Das IronGeek prize, attend a talk on synthetic life, attend a talk on the singularity, learn about lean startups, meet the CEO of your favorite iPhone app, and win tickets to a Big Boi concert?  Not to mention good BBQ and Tacos all week.

The parties and social gatherings are another reason to attend – but I had more fun taking friends to local restaurants that weren’t hosting those events- treating them to unique local food.

Ok Ok, So Who Won SXSW 2011?

And in case you missed it, the product that “won” SXSW was the 2D barcode:

I’m talking 2D barcodes (i.e., QR Codes, Microsoft Tag…) that link the physical world to mobile. My client John Puterbaugh, CEO of Nellymoser and a pioneer in the development of technology that seamlessly delivers rich content to mobile devices, summed it up when he said on his PSFK panel:

“2D barcodes codes are to mobile what the URL was to the Internet.”

If you don’t believe me (or John), here’s a collection of the images I captured at almost every turn during my time in Austin.

I have to admit that the pictures don’t lie.  QR codes were everywhere.  Including on all of our badges.  And yet, I used them more in 2010 than I did in 2011, and I didn’t see anyone else taking advantage of them either.  Not sure if I’d call it winning, but they sure were ubiquitous.

See you next year, folks.

Day 4 started off right, and got better from there.  Parking was quick, and coffee in hand I strolled into Ballroom D just as Craig Venter was starting to talk about synthetic life.  I whipped out my iPad2 and started taking notes.  Yes, I was feeling pretty good about my new charger-free existence (I really do love the long battery life).

Lest you think SXSW is all about frivolous social media and twittering away late into the night (literally and figuratively), Sunday’s sessions brought a random substantiveness to my SXSW experience, and had me thinking about things outside my usual domain.  And lest you buy into the hype by some (Vivek Wadhwa you know who you are), that Silicon Valley (and startups in general) are focused on ephemeral, superficial things, Craig Venter just completely shattered my notions of what can be done today in genomics.

As I entered, Craig was discussing their goal: to make a living, self-replicating bacteria cell, driven by artificially generated DNA.

Craig’s construct: to discuss this in terms of hardware (virus, bacteria, yeast) and software (DNA).  Several minutes were spent explaining how DNA strands were spliced together to form strands more than 100,000 “letters” long.  Fascinating process of experimentation, followed by investing in discovering an automatable process that a robot can perform.  Literally.  (Not just automated in the BPM sense of the word, by software).

Eventually they achieved a one-step, in vitro assembly that worked at 50′C, which could be automated.  More examples could be pursued, larger pieces, more automation, more robotics.

A study in 2007 showed that just by changing the DNA in a cell, they could convert one species into another.  And still have a fully functional organism.

Paraphrasing a quote: “We think that the software recognized the DNA of the original species as foreign and ‘ate it up.’  All the characteristics of the original species are gone.”  He reminded us how often DNA is replaced – 20% an hour, or something to that effect (I might have missed the exact timing/numbers…) and asked, imagine if you had to change 20% of your car parts every hour to keep your car running.  It is amazing stuff that goes on inside our bodies.

To be sure that they had the real, unique organism, they encoded messages within the genetic code – an “easter egg” in the genome – quotes from James Joyce and others.

So now they’re focused on the software for designing new cells and organisms – there aren’t enough scientists to understand all the possibilities, so software will do much of the combinatorics and analysis.  But why bother? what’s the point?

• World population of nearly 7 billion has demands our earth and tech cannot supply without continued technological change. 3 people alive today for every 1 alive when Venter was born.  Genomics can help address the food requirements of such a population.
• Additionally, flu vaccines, and eventually an HIV vaccine, may be formulated.  HIV presents a challenge due to its rapid genetic code changes, so we need new approaches.  A flu vaccine using their rig takes 24 hours to produce, rather than the 3-6 months required by today’s techniques.
• Energy demand is increasing even faster than population growth.  The Keeling curve shows increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  So bio-engineered micro-algae can do a great job synthesizing sunlight and CO2 into combustible fuels.  The questions is can we scale this to get billions of gallons of fuel in 10 years?

If we based our energy needs on corn sugar replacement, we’d need a cornfield the size of 3 United States’.  But if we can do it with micro-algae, we’d need a field the size of Maryland.  Not easy, but at least it is achievable.

Clearly, Craig Venter is focused on how to solve the big problems.  One might say that he is on the path of a “Smarter Planet” but with a completely different approach than our friends at IBM.  It is fascinating.

My second session seemed to just gel perfectly with the Venter talk.  From Biological  artificially created life to synthetic artificial life.  The second panel was a discussion of the “Singularity” – the point beyond which we can’t imagine what our life(lives) will be like, because the rate of change is so fast we can’t understand the implications.  Usually this is considered to be because an Artificial Intelligence achieves sentience (the Vernor Vinge hypthoesis), but this is not the only thought model.  Our three panelists, experts in the field of AI, discussed their views.

First, the difficulty of context for computers.  The following two statements:

1. Mary and Sue are sisters
2. Mary and Sue are mothers

To us, it is easy to see that in statement #1, the obvious implication is that they are related and sisters, not that they both happen to have sisters and are not related.  In statement #2, it is obvious they are both mothers, not the mother of each other, and not necessarily related in any way.  But this sort of context is hard for computers.  Hard for Watson. Doug Lenat theorizes that we are now close to modeling computer systems that will be able to leverage fact systems for context and inference engines for generating outcomes that make sense.

Vassar took the point of view that if the singularity is in 2030′s, the point is to live well now – to enjoy your life, not to worry about what happens after 2030.  He had an oddly humanistic angle to his arguments:

• We are not very good at deliberate thought, but we seem to get a lot of mileage from the little deliberate thought we engage in.
• Machines are good at deliberate thought, but not very good at the non-deliberate thoughts that humans do quite naturally.
• If you have a good understanding of intelligence, by definition you have super human intelligence, whether you have an AI or not.
• If we understood ourselves as well as we understood societies, we’d already be creating people.
• Society does things – it does not decide to do things. Society isn’t intentional.
• We tell good stories about caring about things – but looking at our actions you would not conclude that we DO care about these things.

Vita-Moore was focused on the artistic, and the idea of extending life through cybernetics, rather than Ray Kurzweils view of uploading intelligence into a computer.  She talked about aesthetics and how we would feel about some of these changes as they happen.

The third session was focused on Business Models -but it was such an introductory discussion that I couldn’t last through it.  I left and joined a friend (Amar Rama) for lunch at the Driskill Hotel’s 1886 Bakery and Cafe.  We thought it would be far enough from the convention center-  we were wrong. It was packed.  We got a table, and looked over only to find ourselves sitting right next to Jane Kim of Hashable again.

We missed the keynote of the day, Felicia Day’s talk.  From what our friends wrote about it, it was a great session.  But we did stop by Vast, saw some of the Startup Bus competitors, and a couple of small Austin startups in that same building.  Good conversation followed, before we headed back to the convention center for another session.

My next session was “Abolish the Hourly: How Value Pricing Wins Clients” – a great content-rich session by a couple of successful professional services (agency) firms.  Jon Lax and Lee Dale led an entertaining discussion and case walk-through – in a room packed literally beyond capacity – with people sitting in chairs, on the floor, and in the hallway outside.  But there two key questions left unanswered, and I’ll have to track down the panelists:

1. When we say “value based pricing” – is “value” defined as the value the customer accrues from a successful project?  Or is it the value the customer sets as the amount they’re willing to spend to get the project implemented.
2. If we take value as customer-accrued value , then we have two values – customer-accrued and customer-willing-to-pay.  The question is, what is a spread between those values that works?  ie, if the project has $10MM in value to a customer, what should that customer be willing to pay to get the the help they want?

After this session, I walked down to the Four Seasons bar for a Trilogy Alumni reunion.  It was great to see all the alumni that were back in town because of SXSW-interactive.  It is astonishing to see the level of success and influence our alumni have within their companies – startups in NYC, SF, Bay Area, and Austin.  Not to mention the influence they have in the investor community. I think this influence and network is only going to improve over the next 10 years.  Thanks to Joshua Baer and OtherInbox for sponsoring the happy hour!

After several hours of catching up with some of the smartest and most engaging people I’ve ever met, we decamped to Blue Ribbon BBQ (reviews on Urban Spoon here, another Trilogy Alumni founded service, seems appropriate).  The BBQ was amazing, but they need some work on their BBQ sauce (I know I know, good BBQ doesn’t need sauce, but I still believe if you’re going to put it on the table it better be good!).

Having taken my two visitors (and friends) to fine Mexican dining and fine BBQ dining, I felt my mission of representing Austin’s eating establishments well had been met!

From there, we proceeded to the Hashable party.  And then, to the Mashable party.  At that point, we declared we were only going to parties that end in -ashable.   And yes, a good bit of the value of SXSW is reconnecting with your friends (old and new) at the end of the day to share stories about the day and your lives.  Something you can’t do with livestreamed, virtual conferences.

I have one more SXSW post in me (besides my writeups of the Lean sessions), which will focus on my conclusions from SXSW… look for that tomorrow.

I was struggling Sunday morning, Day 3 of SXSW 2011.  I wasn’t the only one.  The universe had played a cruel joke on all of us and put US Daylight savings leap forward in the middle of SXSW-interactive.    Which of course, meant one hour less sleep during a week in which we all could have used an extra hour of sleep. The 9:30 lineup of content looked a bit weaker than normal, or perhaps it was just that I was too tired to get excited about it.

As I parked at the Four Seasons downtown and walked toward the convention center, I had a choice:  get to the session on “The Death of Relational Databases”, or get a Korean-Mexican fusion Taco at the FoodSpotting parking lot.  I opted for the taco.  And while there, ran into a few interesting characters including an old colleague of mine who once accompanied me on a six month project in Ottawa in the winter.  From there I eschewed a set of fantastic panels (Hacking the News Desiging iPad interfaces, and others) in order to stop by the NY startup meetup.  Briefly reconnected with Hashable and Foursquare and Gary Chou of USV. (I ran into Jane Kim from Hashable so often I’m convinced that she has a twin).

As I rushed off to the convention center again to catch the next set of sessions, my previously well-picked schedule for some reason refused to synchronize with my iPhone (nor my iPad).  Picking from the list, quickly, I dropped into a session on co-working.  It was a little too dry for me and I stepped out of it and moved on out.

As a family revolving around two entrepreneurs and two kids, sometimes things just break down.  We had one of those days.  Our babysitter for the day couldn’t stay late.  I went home early, skipping some good 5pm sessions and leaving a 3:30 session early to make it in time for the cut-off.  I had a wonderful evening with our two kids that made the weekend seem a little less hectic and a little bit more grounded.  They asked me about every 2 seconds if they could play with my iPad2.  As my son would put it: “mmm iPad2? Daddy’s iPad?” which translated means “let me play with your new toy Daddy, pllleeeeeeeeaaasseee!” ).  But we played outside and got the kids to bed, and then I hit twitter and other media to catch up on some of the sessions my friends had attended ( great live-tweeting from the events).

Day 3 was the kind of day you have when you’re tired, and haven’t planned your schedule in advance in terms of which sessions have the content you really want to see.  You feel disjointed, late, frustrated by the crowds.  And it was almost a relief to just hang it up for the day and head home.

But Day 4 was a good rebound… more on that in the next post…

My advice to festival goers – when you have a day like I did, on Day 3 – just pack it in – head to the hotel or house, and take a nap.  Something interesting and energizing will await you when you wake up, and you’ll enjoy it even more.

One of the sessions I missed: Tired of F@#king Social Media Experts? You can’t make this stuff up.  Good reviews of that session too (who says panels are dull!)

The Lean Startup is a phenomenon.  Day 2 proved it.  Day 2 was not a typical SXSW experience. Instead of scrambling all over downtown Austin to get to sessions, I stayed in one place all day at the lovely AT&T Center.  Eric Ries (@ericries) acted as emcee for the all-day event, which was literally packed wall-to-wall with people and content all day long.

I took copious notes throughout the day.  This day’s sessions were the highlight for me.  The concepts in lean startups and minimum viable product are so relevant for BPM, and not as well understood by our BPM community as you might think. After all, the Lean Startup is focused on areas where the problem is unknown or uncertain, and the solution is also unknown.  In BPM, we face a similar problem – it might be more accurate to say that the problems are “estimated” and the solution is “estimated” – but the point is, we don’t know for sure that we’re solving the right problem before we start the BPM journey, and we don’t know for sure that each solution we iterate is the right solution.  It takes iterations of customer discovery and agile development to get us to a better hypothesis about the problem and solution.  If this sounds like crazy talk, bear with me and read blog posts I’ll put up over the next few days that dig into this further.

Overall the sessions violated one aspect of the spirit of SXSW – there were very few breaks (I counted 2, and one was 30 minutes for lunch), no time for hallway conversation, and no breaks to get out of your middle row seat so that you could have such a hallway conversation.  All of these fantastic entrepreneurs in one space, one room, and we could hardly talk, except via the backchannel of twitter and the like. I think it only worked at SXSW because the sessions were at the AT&T Conference Center, far removed from the center of gravity for SXSW, the Austin Convention Center.

The content was first rate, and there’s too much for one blog post to cover!  But they could have split some of the sessions into two rooms to really make the feel more like SXSW.  It would have forced choices – you can’t go to everything- but the choices would have been good choices, and twitter and blogs allow us to follow content in another session if we’re motivated to. And it would have allowed the schedule to BREATHE a little bit.  Trust me, it needed it.  Finally, it would have allowed for the people who couldn’t get into the sessions in the afternoon to actually participate or watch at least a relevant session, if not the one they were hoping for.  I felt that there was a lot of value pent up in the entrepreneurs in the room, that wasn’t unlocked because there just wasn’t any time at all for the sidebar conversations.

Eric “Pivot” Ries was the emcee, but we had significant appearances and contribution from Dave “Nice to #$@!ing meet you!” McClure , Steve “Epiphany” Blank, and many other entrepreneurs.  My favorite talk, and the one that I was most looking forward to, was Steve Blank’s discussion of new rules for the new bubble.  For this session, even more than the others, it was standing room only, with people sitting on the floors and standing in the hall to listen in.

I had the good fortune of meeting up with fellow Austin entrepreneurs while I was there-  Jeff Chambers, and Ed Roman.  I also spent most of the day sitting with Elliot Loh (@elliotloh) visiting from SF.

Later I got to introduce a couple of my friends from out of town to Garridos, a great modern Mexican restaurant downtown.  We also checked out the Frog Design SXSW Opening party, which, as usual, involved some crazy technical and interactive features, as well as massive lines to get in.

Day 2 was an incredibly long day, with so many notes I knew I couldn’t hope to get my blog up-to-date by the time I finished the day.

The main takeaways:

1. The Lean Startup movement is grounded in real empirical data, real case studies, and real results.  It is no longer an “interesting idea” and seems to be on its way to being accepted as the “best way” to approach starting up your company.
2. Entrpreneurs, investors, and academics from the Bay Area believe there is a sort of “bubble” in investing.  On the other hand, they also believe that the companies likely to go public now are companies that have real scale and make real money.
3. There’s an incredible interest among entrepreneurs to improve their game – especially the ones that are building their companies with minimal or no outside investment.
4. SXSW-interactive has the power to draw an amazing group of people to one spot, to even one room, in Austin, TX.

If they had added an after-party on-site, or a good strong networking break, this would have been the key place to be on Saturday.  As it was, it was the key place to be but no one else would know you were there, and you’d have to track down your like-minded entrepreneurs later in the conference (good luck finding them!).

Day 1 is over.  For me.  For many people at SXSW interactive, 11:30pm is just midway through the evening. But Day zero was interesting too.  We attended a tech happy hour on Thursday night.  Surprisingly, I ran into an ex-IBM consultant who is starting a BPM practice at an IBM partner.  Small world!  You don’t often run into people you don’t know, who are doing BPM, I’ve found.  Especially unusual at a non-BPM related event…

Day 1 started frenetically.  Wake up early, teacher’s conference for our daughter, coffee, get the office and get contracts, paperwork, bills, emails, and a dozen other things done as soon as possible … to make sure I could get down to the first SXSW session at 2pm.

(Update: Photo Gallery by Austin360)

Things started off right.  I found parking in the convention center garage, no crazy antics required.  $9 for all-day parking.  Cost of business.  As I exited, I realized I was only one block away from Hashable‘s sponsored free taco stand.  Coincidentally, my wife‘s company, Red Velvet Events, is helping them out with a few planning/logistics items during SXSW, and we had the good fortune of having met a few folks at Hashable at a happy hour earlier in the week.  Trusting that they wouldn’t have a crummy taco truck, I walked over.  GREAAAT taco.  And Jane Kim (VP Business Development, Hashable), and Elliot Loh were there. Elliot and I went to school together at Stanford and both worked at the same company out of school.  It was a nice reunion to run into him.  The three of us wandered over to the convention hall and then split up to three different sessions.  That worked pretty well because Elliot tweets the goings-on in his sessions like a mad man so I could follow his session, and at the same time follow my own.

First session:  Conference Startups.  The format was a “core conversation” where the room and chair arrangement is concentric and intimate to foster spontaneous, but still centralized, conversation.  The moderators were great, and the conversation moved smoothly from one topic to another, almost as if the audience was in on the script. I was interested in this session, despite other strong sessions in this slot, because we have previously hosted the bpmCamp unconference and have intentions to do it again in the near future.  With that in mind, I hoped to get some new ideas from the conversations.

A shotgun sampling of advice I heard:

• Get a clear yes or no from sponsors.  If you don’t get one, you haven’t asked clearly enough for what you want.  “You haven’t really asked if you don’t get a no”
• Find the experts, and then find out who you could bring to your conference that would blow their minds.
• Market the conference.  Presumption is that it takes 7 times before someone acts on hearing about a conference.
• (At this point, I noticed this session was standing room only … unreal )
• Mizzou School of Journalism was represented – looking for ways to foster more participation in the community in Columbia, Missouri.
• Discussion of Ignite and TedX – you can lend your brand to other regions, cities, and venues… you don’t have to own every one of them.
• People like great speakers, and conversations – but they don’t often like panels.  People want to be engaged in the conference, not just talked to.
• Food and coffee are more important than you think.  No really. They’re more important than you think.
• Some discussion of tools – lanyrd, eventBrite, etc.

Ultimately, people still want a live connection, face-to-face.

Session 2:  Time for comic relief.  I headed back to a VERY crowded Austin Convention Center (they set up a book signing right across from an info center booth, right in front of the entrance to one of the main Ballrooms.  Suffice to say, TRAFFIC JAM and poor positioning of obstacles go hand-in-hand.  Made it to Battle Decks.  Got a coveted seat at the end of the row (making it easy to bail on the session if it sucked).  It was a huge room, big projection screen of slides.  The presenters don’t know the slides in advance.  They just have to adlib their presentation based on what comes up.  This comedy is not for the politically correct or faint of heart.  The very first word out of the emcee’s mouth might have been an F-bomb.  The presenters were judged on coherence, comedy, and sexual innuendo.  Enough said.  Sadly, the slides were funnier than the presenters.  I gave up after 2.5 presenters weren’t making me laugh enough.

Decided to check out the pop-up Apple store – and get coffee at one of the dozens of coffee stands on the way out of the convention center (pro tip: no line, because everyone was still in session).  Checked in on foursquare, and won tickets to the Big Boi concert on Monday night.  If you don’t know who that is, then you’re probably in my demographic and so now I have to figure out if we’re going to go or not!

Ok.  Stopped at 4th and Trinity to meet Elliot for the walk to the Apple store.  Ran into fellow entrepreneur Aruni.  Also, ran into two guys dressed as super heros to promote their website.  Yes, we’re at SXSW.  Elliot pings me: he’s at 6th and Trinity. All right. We meet at the Apple store. Pretty amazing mini-story. They lease the place on Monday.  An empty store front at 6th and Congress – a very important intersection in Austin.  Wednesday morning the black drapes go up and the construction begins.  Friday at 5pm, the drapes come down and an apple store nearly as nice as any I have seen opens up – wood floors, wood tables, ipad2′s EVERYWHERE.  But also a healthy supply of demo machines and phones.

Ok.  The line was around the block, around two corners.  We walked back to the Convention Center to listen to Clay Shirky talk about the various online events surrounding the events in Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East.  He really went in depth about the history of the movement to oust Mubarak.  There was more to it than a spontaneous rally a few weeks ago.  Years of groundswell support led up to that moment.  It hit especially close to home because one of our very good business partners is based in Cairo, Egypt, as well as one of my close friends from school (who lives there with his family).  Incredibly informative talk, and the Q&A session brought China and other countries into the conversation in really interesting ways.

During the session, I realized that none other than Clay Richardson of Forrester is here, tweeting about the talk.  Or rather, he realized I was sitting in the room making snarky comments on twitter.  We met up in person for the first time.  A second BPM connection at SXSW.  Two more than I made when I came last year.  We had a great mini-meetup and then split up to find our various dinner commitments.  Met a fellow entrepreneur, Tony Chen, for dinner at a good sushi restaurant downtown.

After dinner, we thought, “hey, surely the line at the Apple Store has died down by now!” and walked back over there (quite a few blocks).  Sure enough. The line looked reasonable.  Ten minutes later, chatting amiably with Apple store staffers, we were buying iPads.  The staff were brought in from all over Texas – Texas all-stars.  It showed too – all the good things about Apple retail employees were even more apparent with these folks. Happy Happy Happy.  Helpful. Interested in what business I was in and how we use iPads (um, figuring that one out!)  Painless process.  Unlike phone activation.

Hint: Apple, stop activating phones on opening day. The lines would move SO much faster and you could actually blow out your opening day sales numbers.

We then walked down the street back to the parking garage like rock stars, constantly being asked if we had just bought an iPad2 at the pop-up Apple store.  (One wonders what else we would be carrying in Apple bags and Apple boxes of that size.  Still, it was a nice conversation starter).  On the way back to the garage, we passed a cross-dressing band (playing good music…), and a group of people changing costume (not sure from what or into what – they were in a slight state of undress) – ooops!  And then passed a fleet of pedi-cabs offering to give us rides to wherever.  Tony headed out to some of the night time party activities, I headed home to rest up, and write this blog post!

(Well, I might have had an interest in setting up my new iPad2 as well… )

It starts tomorrow.  But the unofficial pre-parties and meetups have already started.  The map of the 10 “campuses” for SXSW-interactive 2011 is included in this post (linking to the original).  All but the AT&T Conference Center are walking distance from the Austin Convention Center (which is ground zero for SXSW-interactive).  Preparatory discussions on mailing lists have included extensive lists of downtown restaurants, BBQ restaurants, and where to get the best migas (thanks Gary Chou!).  If you haven’t had migas before, or haven’t had them in Austin – try them.  Its breakfast, it is good, and it is quintessential Austin.

If you needed another sign that SXSW was cool, besides the fact that Foursquare is designing oodles of custom badges for it, Apple is actually opening a temporary store just for SXSW, as noted by an article in the Austin-American Statesman, and in GigaOm.  If they’re selling iPad 2′s… expect to see long lines!  Apparently they found the site on Monday, started work on Wednesday, and open for a 2 week limited engagement on Friday!

There are a lot of Canadians coming down – there’s a Maple Leaf Lounge for meeting up with fellow Canadians.  And at least one of our visitors from the far north is blogging about his experiences.  Great first post!  There’s also a big NYC contingent, and several meetups down here (I think sponsored or instigated by Hashable in some cases).

Of course many people swear that the conference is too big and each year they say it will be their last.  But often they do come back.  And blog about it.

I’m excited to see how this year’s event unfolds.  More to come over the next week.

Additional Resources:

• Unofficial event calendar for SXSW on Plancast
• Ten new Mobile Apps GigaOm recommends for SXSW
• The StartupCrawl starts today… wow. Lots of startups.
• Interesting list of distinguished speakers at SXSW…
• So many more that I haven’t even touched on!

SXSWi 2011 Map, courtesy of Cox News

That’s right.  SXSW-interactive is coming to Austin.  Soon.  This week, even.

It all started innocently enough – a few “multimedia nerds” years ago.  And then the focus shifted to blogging, before blogging was cool.  And then… something happened last year.

Maybe SXSW-interactive jumped the shark.  Or maybe it just tapped into the zeitgeist.  But there was a feeling last year that it was its own living thing – not something easily contained.

Attendance was up, way up.  More than 14,000 people had access to SXSW-interactive last year (although, that includes premium badge holders who might have focused more on the film and music portions of SXSW).  An article I read, just days ago, estimated that actual attendance could be up 30-40% again this year – and that SXSWi briefly entertained capping attendance for the first time.  Its hard to imagine SXSWi being bigger this year than it was last year.  To put it somewhat in perspective, I attended IBM Impact last year – a huge conference with over 6000 attendees… And SXSW-interactive was twice that size.  (And the wifi and 3g coverage mostly worked… unlike my experience at Impact last year)

SXSWi has split the event into 10 campuses – at least one of which is so far away you can’t walk to the other parts of SXSW (though the AT&T Center at UT is a fabulous facility to hold meetings and conferences in!).

So how do you make sense of the Nerdpocalypse?  First, if you live in Austin, and aren’t attending SXSW – just pretend downtown Austin doesn’t exist for the next two weeks.  You’ll be happier that way, because festival-goers are going to take over every eating establishment and parking spot Austin has to offer.

If you’re going to SXSW-interactive, check out some of the following resources:

The SXSW side-parties database, by Austin360.

Joshua Baer’s Austinpreneur’s Guide to SXSW 2011

The Unofficial Apps Showcase (you know, for SXSW)

SXSW official “social” site

Julie Germany’s How to Survive SXSW Interactive post

And, I feel sure, there will be many other resources worth reading on the subject – but these are just a few to get you started.

Some of our regular readers, if they’ve gotten this far, may be wondering, what does SXSW have to do with BPM?  Well, nothing explicitly.  But there are several topic areas that are tangential to what we do at BP3 and impact our work and lives.  I intend to get some of that famous “cross-pollination” experience, and reconnect with colleagues near and far at the same time.

I’m planning on attending the SXSWi/LeanStartup sessions – some of my favorite bloggers and startup experts are on panels or speaking that day, at the AT&T Conference Center.  But I also intend to catch Craig Venter’s talk, and several other topics that will probably get my brain going.  And I’ll be looking for tidbits to take back to BP3, or to BPM, or just to keep in my head.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – don’t underestimate the value of meeting real people who are excited about what they’re doing – it’s incredibly energizing.

This hit the news this morning, that Apple acquired Siri.  We had the opportunity to see Siri compete in the startup accelerator competition at SXSW-interactive this year. Even at that time I was thinking how much better something like Siri would be if it was able to take advantage of a “service registry” or API registry within the iPhone App community – much like apps in Mac OSX can take advantage of the service registry there.  So an application could register to provide “table reservations” and Siri could farm out reservation requests to such applications (currently, it does this only with OpenTable). And integration to core applications within the iPhone would greatly improve the service (emails, calendar, etc).

So its a logical fit, and a good outcome for the Siri team.  But more than that, the Business Insider believes it is a shot across the bow at Google- because it may be what Search looks like on mobile devices.  Where it is less about “search” and more about “search as a preface to action”. I think this is a great point, and a fantastic move by Apple.  I can definitely imagine them taking advantage of Siri functionality to make the Apps we already buy more useful on our phones.  And hopefully the Siri application itself will improve (more stable, better voice recognition, etc.).

Business Insider’s original article here.

I wanted to refer interested readers to what I thought was a very thoughtful recap of SXSW-interactive. Doug Freeman recaps the event. He’s covered the SXSW music festival for years, and nicely discounts much of the criticism of SXSW by some others – as he says, sometimes the good ole days are just the good ole days, but the now is actually pretty interesting in and of itself, and may just require a little change in the routine to take advantage of the new reality.

It isn’t that the criticism isn’t accurate in many respects- but the real issue is a mismatch between one’s expectations and reality (ie, if you expected Google i/o, that is not SXSWi… ), rather than an absolute standard that the conference is falling short of.

Initial Thoughts…

I previously posted about my first two days at SXSW-interactive. I had a good experience at the conference, overall, but it does present some challenges (not least of which is the lack of eating options at lunch).  And there was a flurry of criticism post-conference which might be a bit predictable: that the conference had gotten too big for its britches and perhaps too focused on celebrity and parties, and not enough on technology.

I don’t think size necessarily is a problem of its own – SXSWi is like several mini-conferences all under one umbrella.  There were enough sessions on blogging to be a pure blogging conference, for example.  Another set of sessions on using social media in your marketing and demand generation.  Another set of sessions on Javascript.  Another set of sessions unveiling relatively new startups.  I think the criticism that SXSWi wasn’t technical enough misses the mark – as I recall it is “interactive” not “technical”… and the definition of what falls under that “interactive” umbrella has shifted over the years from blogging to social media to location-based apps to mobile apps in general.  Part of what makes SXSWi interesting is that it can adapt over time to the changing technology landscape – and then put sessions together that are as much about how to use the technologies as they are about how to build software leveraging those technologies, or how the software works under the hood. If you’re coming to SXSWi expecting Google i/o, you’ll be disappointed.  But if you’re expecting CES you would also be disappointed.  SXSWi is somewhere inbetween, although that comparison doesn’t really do it justice.

If you want to figure out how to leverage blogs, twitter, facebook, and mobile apps to improve your business, SXSW was a good conference for you.  If you wanted to get exposure to a set of people that will affect perception of your product or firm among an elite set of users, SXSW was a good conference for you.  But of course, SXSW isn’t without its challenges.  As someone else pointed out, choosing between 28 sessions at one time slot is a daunting task at best.  But fewer sessions may not be the answer – because fewer sessions would mean a larger average size and therefore less discussion-oriented sessions (which were my favorites).

Of course, the interesting thing about SXSW-interactive is that each year, attendees VOTE on the topics ahead of time.  And the topics are put forth by people who want to present or moderate at the conference.  This is part of the flexibility of the conference, and the reason its appeal has widened over the years.  Surely no conference committee could come up with 20+ simultaneous sessions 4-5 times a day for 5 days in a row.  But the democratic polling process absolutely can fill the conference.

If you didn’t like the conference this time, propose a panel, and VOTE!  You can at least create a channel through the event of panels that you find highly valuable.

Improving on a Good Thing?

Having said that, what can the conference do to improve?

1. Provide better food options during lunch time.  Lots of food options.  Austin is practically the capital of airstream-trailer-food, as well as live music, so why not bring a fleet of these vehicles to both the front- and back-side of the convention center (Trinity and Red River) to handle the mad rush of business between the end of the 11am sessions and the beginning of the 12:30pm sessions. Also, wouldn’t be a bad idea to convince Fogo de Chao and some other local restaurants to open for lunch for a change.
2. Better descriptions of the panels.  As we get closer to the event and you have to choose, it would really help to have a better understanding of the panels being offered, but some of them had woefully inadequate descriptions.
3. Group panels not just by location (which helps!) but also by topic-grouping, so that it is easier to find the kinds of things you want to know more about.
4. Provide a couple time slots that have fewer sessions to drive some traffic to the exhibit floor, or give more people time for lunch (whichever).
5. Pick the keynote speakers (or interviewers) carefully.  Its a tough job, and a tough crowd.  Give the folks who do this a chance to succeed!
6. If there are shuttles, etc., make that information more obvious.

Well, those are my thoughts.  I attended SXSW-interactive not so much because I thought it would directly impact our business at BP3; I wanted to see how it had evolved over the years, make some new connections outside of our usual trails in the BPM ecosystem, and to get exposed to some ideas outside of the BPM echo chamber.  And I also wanted to learn how to attend SXSWi in a more efficient way in the future (in other words, how to optimize my work-conference-personal life balance during the conference).

Highlights for me:

I really enjoyed hearing from speakers across a number of topics:

• How some bloggers make money from doing this, and what drives them
• How people feel about yelp, and how it affects the way restaurants run their business.  Note to businesses who don’t think yelp applies to them: there is a site called “Get Satisfaction” that has an even more aggressive version of a very similar business model.
• How good speakers can weave entertaining presentations from *ANY* set of slides put in front of them (battle decks presentation showdown)
• Interesting startups like AnyClip (although, this one will diminish the value of my encyclopedic quoting knowledge of certain movies), I-nigma (2D barcode scanning, so fast its hard to believe it works), ShopSavvy (price comparison using barcode scanning), and Siri, which is a voice-activated application that integrates well with a bunch of other services on your phone – it literally feels like magic.  Definitely one to keep an eye on.
• Despite all the advice to the contrary, whenever a panel of judges asks a startup presenter to tell them about their competition, they answer “well, no one does exactly what we do, but here are a few that some people might consider competitors”… I guess if you’re mostly giving these answers instead of saying them, you don’t realize how much this undermines your credibility.  For example, for Siri, I would have responded that “Google Voice Search and voice-activated dialing and voice-activated reminders are all competing for our users’ attention and overlap with our application.  We need to create a more compelling experience to draw them away and part of how we do that is by allowing the user to do MORE with voice activation, and part of how we do that is by providing better voice analysis, which is actually quite hard.”
• Some people in Austin are doing great things with their businesses.  Entrepreneurship is alive and well in our town.

Other highlights included having lunch at Moonshine (a great Austin restaurant) with my wife (owner of Red Velvet Events) and two other entrepreneurs.  Colleagues raising a quick $500 for a wheel chair for someone who had fallen ill (thanks Thom!).   Successful exhibits by local Austin startups Spiceworks (some good friends work here) and Das Keyboard (I met the co-founders at the exhibit and they’re great!).  The CEO of SlideRocket started a conversation as we were waiting to get our caffeine fix at the Hilton coffee shop (and convinced me to check it out as we compared notes on what sessions to catch).  I met a few old friends who were back in Austin for the conference (a couple of co-founder/CTOs, and a director of Business Development), as well as friends from Austin that I hadn’t seen in several moons.  And maybe that is some of the magic of SXSW-interactive – to mix it up and see what comes of it.

UPDATE: great recap from Doug Freeman, who has covered the SXSW music festival for years, and nicely discounts much of the criticism of SXSW by some others – as he says, sometimes the good ole days are just the good ole days, but the now is actually pretty interesting in and of itself, even if it isn’t “the good ole days…”

I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts from two days at SXSW-interactive…

1. Austinites don’t really know escalator protocol.  We stand on both sides of the escalator, annoying the folks from both coasts who know that you stand to the right to let the impatient blow by you on the left.  The Austin Convention Center has some very long escalators, and the traffic jams have been beauteous.
2. People will not take the time to go to another floor to find shorter food and beverage lines.  Try the 4th floor first thing in the morning – its a morgue because everyone stops at the first “Starbucks served here” sign they see – which happens to be on the first floor.
3. Unlike my experiences at every other conference I’ve ever been to, SXSW (at the Austin Convention Center at least) had power supplies everywhere.  I swear I saw one above the urinal in the Men’s bathroom.  No, not really.  But they were almost everywhere else.
4. Do not screw up a bay-area coffee snob’s coffee order.  They will not be amused.  (I love coffee, but I don’t qualify as a snob because I actually like Starbucks just fine.  If you think people who like Starbucks coffee are coffee snobs, trust me, this is a finely layered cake and Starbucks is now where near the top of the coffee snob cake).
5. People who blog about comic strips can expect to see 1000 comments in a couple of days.  There aren’t 1000 comments in the whole BP3 blog yet.  Apparently BPM is only mainstream in the eyes of Gartner and Forrester – it is not mainstream in the eyes of comic-strip readers, or anyone else you could call “mainstream”.
6. Nearly every blogging-related panelist seemed to have started blogging when computers were built with vacuum tubes.  I jest, it was only 1997 or 1998… which amounts to the same thing as far as blogging goes.  Would have been good to hear from a successful blogger who started more recently…
7. A classic quote (missed the name for attribution): “In 2002, I thought [cynically], ‘hasn’t everyone who wanted to start a blog already started one? I mean, there are literally thousands of them.” Needless to say, as he pointed out, he vastly under-estimated the number of people who wanted to start their own blogs.
8. Fun quotes: “If you think Twitter is a good substitute for a blog you weren’t a good blogger to begin with”… “Huffpo could just be tweets”… “New generation of blogging sees it as furthering your existing self.  Whereas before, it was unearthing the self you were afraid to expose” (paraphrased)…
9. Do design and platform matter? The panel says, largely: no.  “Design is 5% important. Craigslist is popular and its the worst designed site on the web.”
10. There need to be about 10 more food trailers outside to satisfy the hunger of 15,000 attendees.  Seriously.  It turns out that Austin is not just ground-zero for Migas and Breakfast Tacos, but also for the food-in-an-airstream-trailer – even good food.
11. Going to Moonshine for a 1:30pm lunch was a good call. But it was a 45-minute wait.  Food trailer was also nearly a 45 minute wait. Guess which one was better?
12. There was a running joke about how to get a million page views on a blog post, but I won’t repeat it here.
13. Top ten lists were also cited as a key driver of traffic.  Why? No one knows for sure, but it works.  Check Digg, Reddit… etc… it always seems to work.   (I wonder if a top-29 list will work?? hmmmmmmmm let’s find out).
14. Apparently it is hard to make $50k/year blogging.  I’m not sure what “hard” means in the context of blogging, but everyone nodded their head (we know hard isn’t hard like mining coal, but does “hard” mean you need to be lucky or does “hard” mean it takes many many hours of investment without much assurance of return on that investment? or something else?)
15. A Google product manager talked about link quality like it was a moral good and not just something you worry about because you want your page rank to be good and you want Google search to drive traffic.  Kind of losing sight of the fact that getting paid for linking isn’t really amoral, it just inconveniences Google’s search quality – and then Google will punish you for having paid links that aren’t marked as such with no-follow (they literally used the term payola).  The example given was that you should turn down that $1000/month someone is offering you to link to their site.  The guy next to me said (sarcastically) “yeah, that’s a problem I have.”  Right.
16. Saw a panel about “unsexy” but profitable businesses.  Great representation from local firm, uShip, among others.  If Business Process Management (BPM) consulting doesn’t qualify for unsexy, someone explain to me the looks of desperate un-interest I can generate by telling people at SXSWi what I do for a living (BPM Consulting).  Hopefully this means we’re destined for profits as well.
17. There are too many stock photo sites in the world. But that’s good, because next time I need one they won’t be too expensive (I saw 4, at least, on the exhibit floor).  There are a LOT of tools for building websites (I saw 4, at least, on the exhibit floor). Couldn’t help but wonder if they were all partnered up with stock photo sites…
18. There are too many sessions! I can’t possibly see everything I’m interested in.  But I’m glad there are so many sessions because the small sessions are the real gems.
19. The Chevy Volt actually looked kinda cool.   Kinda.
20. There’s an under-served interest in well-designed physical products at the exhibit.  DAS keyboards and blue lounge where the two that I saw, and they looked great and had good attendance the two times I looked.  Everything else was a bit too virtual.
21. The AT&T U-verse store was, unsurprisingly, unable to tell me if they serve our neighborhood yet. On the other hand, AT&T the wireless carrier seemed to hold up pretty well the first two days of SXSW.
22. @paulcarr with British accent:  “The internet is a major distraction.  I recommend you all stop using it.” In the context of this audience, that was high humor.
23. It turns out, hashtags have to be shorter than 140 characters to be useful on Twitter.  Please take note of this, SXSW organizers…
24. Apparently: “if you’re goal isn’t to make money, you’re not actually in business”.  I like the way that panelist thinks.  If I remember right, that was also @paulcarr, of Techcrunch.
25. Sushi goes quite well with Tres Leches, thankyouverymuchialwaysthoughtso.  And this is why I love Austin.
26. Pedi-cabs in Austin cost more during SXSW than any other time of the year.  Why does Austin have so many pedi-cabs?  I don’t remember them being here when I first moved to Austin, but they’re everywhere downtown now.
27. Bijoy is everywhere.
28. SXSWi men’s fashion can be summed up as converse sneakers with tshirt and jeans and a sport coat.  Fedora optional.
29. No matter how many people are here, you can still bump into your friends, and make new friends. Good seeing everyone yesterday.  If you see me looking lost today, say hi and distract me from finding the next panel room.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference, its quite an experience.  Really impressed with the Austin representation.

AustinStartup has had a couple of posts attempting to help those new to SXSW find some of the gems hidden in the long schedule of events at SXSW.

Here’s another take on panels you shouldn’t miss, by Carla Thompson.

Stacy Higginbotham from GigaOm gets things rolling with 10 Austin Startups you should meet at SXSW.  Notably, she avoided the obvious in Gowalla and listed out a few that folks outside of Austin might not have heard of or made contact with.  There are certainly other interesting startups in Austin, but she managed to call out a couple of my favorites (Whurleyvision, Appozite, and OtherInbox).

There are a mind-numbing number of panels, just for the interactive portion of SXSW. I’m going to attend some of the sessions this year and I’m still trying to figure out how to narrow it down. Its definitely a time to feel fortunate to live in Austin to have this kind of opportunity to see what’s going on in the world of music, movies, and “interactive” (this year, by the way, the focus seems to have turned toward mobile platforms… whereas interactive used to be more focused on blogging).

UPDATE: of course, as I soon as I posted this I found an article I’d been saving to read that should have been included:

Austin Startup’s “Tech Tips for N00bs to Survive SXSW“.  It gives some classic advice about double checking the locations of your events before assuming they are all co-located.  SXSW uses *all* of Austin for its events – especially for the music festival.  I recall one year that they reported using 300 music venues in Austin for one festival.  The article also includes great links to sites with more information on SXSW, and who to follow on twitter to keep up with the latest and greatest.

The best advice: bring earplugs.