On Friday’s broadcast of the Greenlight Project, our radio show, my co-host, Rochelle brought up the happenings of SXSW taking place March 12th – March 21st. Prior to that, she’d mentioned it a few months back and it was the first time I’d ever heard of such an event. SXSW is apparently one of the largest interactive music, film, computer and innovative technology conferences in the United States. Celebrating it’s 23rdyear, it first began in 1987 and is centered in downtown Austin every spring. This year, media entrepreneurs, techno-geeks and the worlds most innovative minds descend upon Austin, Texas for nearly 10 days of information, music and film previews, making deals, partying and discovering the next Google andTwitter empires. 23 years? Where the hell have I been? Am I the only one that has been clueless to the brilliance of SXSW?
In 1994, SXSW added film and interactive conferences making way for brands like Kodak and AT&T to use it as a branding platform while attracting a strong following among web creators and entrepreneurs like Twitter, WordPress, and Foursquare. Foursquare took to the conference this year by bringing to life its virtual city and offering the experience in 3-D, how cool is that? With its popularity growing by leaps and bounds (I recently asked my intern to get on the horn ASAP to inform us what in the devil is this thing called Foursquare), it’s becoming the new Twitter and I’d predict, with this showiness at SXSW, it’s bound to have the Twitter-world all a-buzz about its brand, thereby increasing its value 10xs over. With its focus on emerging technology, SXSW has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. For instance Twitter launched at SXSW in 2007 and has completely revolutionized the way we communicate online as well as has redefined the term “relationship building”. Twitter has since birthed ...continue reading
