The blog has been a little quite due to our trip 3 hours south to the great town of Austin for SXSW Interactive. We had a booth back in the corner where all the noise was. What does that mean? Guess you had to be there to understand, but our schwag was noisy and everyone wanted it. At one point during the last day, we walked the floor and all you could hear were these singing magnets from all corners of the room.

The conference itself was an absolute blast and we made a lot of new contacts and friends. A few of our friends in booths around us have exciting services I thought was worth mentioning.

  • SocialThing – had a booth directly in front of us with Rock Band setup. I think we spoke with most of them and they were all a very cool group of people. They even invited us to their private party at The PureVolume Ranch. When you get a chance, go check their site out as they have a really neat new social platform that centralizes all of your social accounts into one.
  • BarOptic – These guys were right next to us and were streaming the booth live with all of their fancy equipment. We had to be careful what we did out in front of the booth because no telling who was watching. BarOptic installs camera equipment in bars so they can stream live shows in their venue through the net. I think this is great because how many times do you wish you could make it to a show and not be able to? These guys make it an option to just watch it online.
  • ServerBeach – It felt like the entire company was there because of the number of employees we met, but they were all a lot of fun. While they are not our main hosting company (Alpha Omega), we do use them and they were very generous for inviting us to their private party at the Iron Cactus.

Along with our friends exhibiting, a few other mentions would be the B5 Media crew who stopped by to say hi. I was able to spend some time chatting with Darren Rowse of problogger.net and also Darcie Vany. Their whole crew rented a ranch and some were camping in tents! Also a shout to our good friend Natalie (never got the last name). She was the keeper of the bar within leaping distance. This was our first conference where they actually served beer during the conference and had happy hours that featured free beer. Natalie was a lot of fun and we seemed to run into her everywhere we went.

The whole vibe in Austin was great. Most conferences we attend, the city has no idea anything is going on. Between the Interactive, ScreenBurn, Film and Music, the city was buzzing with things to do. It was the most eclectic group of people we’ve encountered, which I really liked. It is just a shame we had to leave before the Music Festival started.

Best food we had: Iron Works Barbecue. WOW!

We plan on being there next year and we hope you will too. See our Flickr photos from the conference.