SXSWi 2010 Redux

I’m flying back to San Francisco from Austin in just a few hours. I began my journey last Tue on The Startup Bus, a three-day road trip to South By Southwest. I thought I’d give a brief rundown of the conference.

There’s no doubt that mobile apps were a major source of buzz. I was particularly intrigued with Sticky Bits, a mobile app / bar code reader / social app. Who knew?

I heard a lot of talk about crowd sourcing and decentralizing just about everything. These concepts really seem to embody what open source is all about -distributed brainshare and collaboration. I attended a session given by Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com about sparking a movement. I feel like his grass roots approach to activism is like taking the open source ethos and applying it to more than just code.

Of particular interest to me were the Design and UX sessions. I attended a few and found them to be informative, but nothing said was particularly new. I heard practically the same lectures that I got at Web 2.0 in 2008, and an Event Apart in 2007.

I definitely enjoyed the BBQ and the Austin Street Food scene, and admittedly, I did not make very many of the parties. I was pretty drained after three days on a bus.

The awesome networking was without a doubt the highlight of my week. I participated in so many interesting discussion with my peers, including some a heated debate about user interface design theory and whether progressive enhancement is important. (I absolutely think it is.)

I’ll be back at GWOS tomorrow, ready to share plenty of great new ideas with the team. It’s been a incredibly stimulating adventure and I look forward to taking what I’ve learned back to San Francisco.