Tuesday, March 16, 2010

How to Ask Questions at Panels

Ever get tired of the long, rambling, self-important question-askers at the Q&A section of a panel? Don’t be one of them!

Yes, I’m talking to you.

Anyway, there are some great tips on keeping it short, sweet, and to the point at howtoaskquestions.com.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Have a Great Idea for SXSW Interactive 2011?

Want to join the conversation on making SXSW even better? Come join the SXSW Town Hall! Tuesday, March 15th at 12:30pm in Ballroom D, on the 4th floor of the Austin Convention Center. 

Friday, March 12, 2010

SXSW Tips: Don’t Forget To Smile, Be Patient, and Have a Backup Plan

Three more things I try always to bring to Austin.

Humor, patience, and a smile. Please don’t forget these at home.

Be friendly! Relax! Oh, and one more thing? It’s not a race. We’re here to learn and have fun!

Expect long lines. SXSW has grown up and become an enormous conference that takes over downtown Austin for nearly two weeks. That’s a lot of people who all want to get into the same bars, clubs, restaurants, and more. Expected attendance for Film is about 7,000 people, with 11,000 expected attendees for Music, and about 12,000 attendees for Interactive!

Show up early to parties and panels. If you’re nervous about an event, it doesn’t hurt to show up earlier rather than later. RSVPs for parties often don’t guarantee entry, so the early birds will be inside, while you’re waiting in line outside. Same for the popular panels and talks. Get to the room 10-15 minutes early to ensure you get a seat, or, for some popular speakers, that you get in at all. This can be especially true for keynote speeches.

And know that even if you didn’t get into that one panel, party, screening, show, or club, there’s plenty of fun elsewhere during SXSW. Have a backup plan.

Or just ask around for whatever else might be going on, text message a friend, ping Twitter, or talk to the people who also didn’t get in. Plenty of new friendships have been forged in line for an event or in the hallways of the Convention Center.

SXSW Podcast: Ed Hunsinger’s How Not To Be Douchebag at SXSW

Time to start the 2010 podcast coverage of South by Southwest, rather than talk to the Festival organisers, there’s a more pressing matter to be dealt with first. How can you go to SXSW, interact with everyone, and not be a douchebag?

Luckily, I caught up with Ed Hunsinger in San Francisco before we both flew to Austin to talk about his panel, funnily enough called How Not To Be A Douchebag at SXSW (which runs today, Friday, at 5pm)

Today’s Guest
Ed Hunsinger: www.geeked.info, @EdRabbit

Download the MP3 file - RSS Feed - Show notes at The Podcast Network.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Check In to Win Prizes, Support Charities, and Find Friends

As you might have heard, both Gowalla and Foursquare have updated their mobile phone applications just in time for SXSW Interactive.

Foursquare has also added 16 new badges specific to the Interactive conference and festival and are giving away free Foursquare tattoos. In addition, they’ve also added four new badges specific to the Music conference and festival as well as a contest to win free tickets to SPIN’s showcase at Stubb’s. But more importantly, you can check in for charity with Foursquare. Starting at 9am CT tomorrow, Friday, March 12, every time you check-in on Foursquare in Austin or use the hashtag #sxswHaiti on Twitter, Microsoft and PayPal will donate 25 cents toward Save the Children up, to $15,000! Find out more on the Foursquare SXSW page.

Not to be out-done, Gowalla has also added Gowalla items that lucky folks can find scattered about town when they check in using Gowalla, some redeemable for prizes like Lomography analog cameras, Palm Pixi and Pre smartphones, Adobe CS4, and Eye-Fi cards! Gowalla is also supporting the Livestrong Foundation during SXSW. If you find a yellow Livestrong bracelet and add it to your collection, Gowalla will donate $1. Find out more on the Gowalla SXSW page.

And even if you’re not into checking in on services like Foursquare and Gowalla, you can use the handy sitby.us service to locate your friends in crowded panel rooms during the Interactive conference. It’s a mobile-friendly web site that allows you to check in to a room, mark your approximate location, and add a note that your friends can see. It uses Twitter to figure out who your contacts are and allows for easy posting of location to Twitter. 

SXSW Tips: PSA on iPhone Sounds: Please turn them off!

Imagine a conference room full of people trying to listen to a panel with a quiet speaker. A touching story about life at Fray Cafe. A quiet acoustic performance in the back room of the Red Eyed Fly. And the person next to you is thumbing out an email and you can hear them typing every single character.

Click. Click. Click, click, click. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, whoosh.

Please turn off any extraneous notification sounds and keyboard clicks, or you’ll drive everyone around you insane from hearing those little iPhone typing sounds or an SMS notification wind chime.

In short: don’t be that guy.

Pick Up Your Badge on Thursday, Pick Up Now on 1st Floor

Straight from South By Headquarters, badge pickup begins Thursday, March 11 at 3pm and runs until 10:00pm for those of you arriving in the evening. Badge pickup re-opens Friday, March 12, at 9am.

And, if you’ve been to SXSW before, note that badge pickup has now moved to the first floor of the Austin Convention Center. It is no longer up the escalators on the second floor. For easiest access, enter the ACC on Trinity St between 2nd St and 3rd St. rather than on 4th Street.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

First-Timers Guide to SXSW

If it’s your first time at SXSW, here’s a handy video from the festival/conference organizers. And you may also find it useful to listen to the podcast of last year’s How to Rawk SXSW panel.

South By Southwest is For Foodies

There are a number of great parties happening during SXSW and one of the aspects where party-organizers try to out-do one another is through not just an open bar, live music, and contests and prizes, but by offering food. And with each year, the party snacks get more and more interesting (although not always for free). Combine that with Austin’s thriving food truck scene, and you have some great combinations going on. From Pastries and Pasties to a Street Food Fest right outside the Convention Center doors, SXSW is for food lovers!

Here’s a great list of all of the events happening that focus on food. And the ones that caught my eye:

• The SXSW Street Food Scavenger Hunt
• The Austin360 Food Blogger Bash
• Milwaukee Beer and Brat Bash
• East Meets Fest at Uchi
• IFC Crossroads House (various events)

And don’t forget to check out our Where to Eat During SXSW 2010 guide.

SXSW Tips: Keep in Comfort

Prepare a travel kit with some comfort items and you’ll find your SXSW experience much more enjoyable.

I usually bring:

• Chapstick (sometimes I find hotel rooms dry due to the air-conditioning)
• Band-aids (just in case)
• Travel size lotion
• Extra hair ties (if you have long hair), as Texas can get pretty warm
• Sanitizing hand-gel (Purell travel size with Aloe are my favorite)
• Tissues/napkins (especially helpful for wiping off BBQ sauce)
• Dental floss (for post-BBQ cleanup)
• Breath mints/gum (to get rid of BBQ or Tex-Mex breath)
• Eye drops
• Vitamins and/or Emergen-C (to keep up your immune system)
• Tums, Pepto Bismol, and other gastrointestinal problem remedies
• Stain stick (for accidental drips during lunch or dinner)
• Wetnaps/Handi-wipes (for sticky BBQ messes)
• Sunblock and sunglasses (especially if you plan to be outside during the day at a music party)
• Woolite single wash packets, in case you need to hand wash something in the hotel sink.

The hand sanitizer is especially handy if you find yourself at an outdoor party with BBQ and only porta-potties during the Music Fest.

Where to Eat Downtown During SXSW 2010

A guide for the car-less, created by the authors of sxswbaby.com. You’re hungry, you don’t have a car, and you have a short time to find some food in between commitments in downtown Austin. (Unlike some other interactive and web conferences, meals are not provided by conference organizers.)

So where to eat? I’ve pulled together a list of spots for your perusal. The focus here is listing mostly restaurants that:

1. are close to 6th Street, Red River, and the Convention Center
2. don’t require a car (cabs are unreliable and in extremely short supply during SXSW; if you even have a rental car, finding parking downtown can be a hassle; and even if you have a bike, your friends may not)
3. inexpensive and casual, or are of good value
4. fast-ish (to a relative degree)
5. not national chains like IHOP or PF Chang’s

Sidebar: I highly recommend eating at off hours. Eating during SXSW can make you crazy. By the time you figure out where your friends are, what they want to do, how sober they are, and gather up the troops to get lunch or dinner, you end up walking into a restaurant with a huge party and get quoted a wait time of 1-2 hours. Go as soon as the last panel ends, especially during SXSW Interactive. It doesn’t matter if you can’t gather everybody up. Just go!

Additionally, I’ve made a Google Map of all of these spots. I’ve also created a short URL for my map on bit.ly. Just enter in http://bit.ly/sxsweats. To access on your iPhone, simply add my map to your My Maps listing in Google, and then sign in from your iPhone on mymapsmobile.com. Or use the iPhone application My Maps to view. I’ve also added operating hours, when I could find them, but some eateries may extend operating hours during SXSW. When in doubt, call ahead. (Yelp/Citysearch/etc. lie. They can’t keep up with restauranteur’s complicated lives, so operating hours are often out of date).

Continue reading "Where to Eat Downtown During SXSW 2010"...

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

SXSW Tips: SXSW On Your Mobile Device

Before I arrive in Austin, I find it helpful to bookmark all of the relevent SXSW Mobile sites and install any SXSW mobile applications. Do this at home, before you find yourself somewhere where they charge for the wifi (airport, hotel) or there’s a potentially flaky connection (hotel, convention center, AT&T)! My recommendations:

• The official schedule on my.sxsw.com, which now also has a mobile version. You’ll be able to add and remove events from your computer, and access them on the go using the mobile version. You should be automatically redirected when you visit on your mobile phone. There is also a free my.SXSW iPhone application that includes syncing of events as well as offline access of most features, except for Maps and Search. Having trouble? You may need to delete and reinstall the application.

• Additionally, the unofficial scheduling site sched.org has launched a free SXSW 2010 version at sxsw2010.sched.org. It will format itself automatically when you visit on a mobile device. Additionally, they are offering an iPhone application very soon which includes syncing of events as well as full offline access. 

• Don’t forget your favorite location-based social networking application. Foursquare or Gowalla (these links are for iPhone apps) seem to be the weapons of choice this time around. And there are definitely special SXSW-only treats for users of both. Users of Gowalla can win VIP passes to the Gowalla Tiki Room during SXSWi, while users of Foursquare during SXSWm can win entry into SPIN’s invite-only party at Stubb’s BBQ.

• And if you’re attending SXSW Music, you may also want to install the Levi’s Fader Fort application for iPhone/Android, built to support their unofficial SXSW parties. They also have an SMS updates service going on:  text FORT to FADER (32337) to receive their updates.

• And I’m sure you already have your favorite Twitter client installed, or m.twitter.com or mobile.twitter.com bookmarked.

• Having trouble updating due to poor signal? Use your cell phone to send text messages to Twitter, instead. For US-based customers, send a text message to 40404.

• sitby.us is a handy tool for Interactive attendees. Build or import a schedule, see what your Twitter friends are interested in attending, and during the actual conference, check in to panels and broadcast to your friends exactly where in the room you’re sitting. Rather than scanning the room looking for a familiar face, sitby.us hopes to connect you with other attendees in the same room. Save me a seat!

• If you happen to drive somewhere during SXSW and need a designated driver to accompany you home, try out TipsyTaxiATX. They’ll send someone to drive you home, apparently!

• The GetHuman iPhone application isn’t specifically about SXSW but it’s helpful to find airline customer service numbers if you happen to be traveling by air to Austin.

SXSW Tips: Twitter and South By

Don’t get overwhelmed by Twitter at SXSW! Twitter is basically the easiest way to keep in touch with your fellow SXSWers, but people at SXSW are a chatty bunch. I don’t know about you, but I’m hesitant about allowing Twitter to send my friends’ updates to my phone, given how many people I follow.

But if you do have SMS updates on, I recommend setting Twitter off during sleeping hours, say between 1 AM and 8 AM.

If you don’t have SMS updates on, you might also want to turn on direct message forwarding to SMS. Tell people to DM you if they want to arrange a meetup and you’ll receive their message as a text message. Simply reply back “D username” with your reply, to direct message them back.

I hope you all increased your SMS plans with your cellular provider already! Now would be a good time to call to either add a text messaging plan or increase your allotment.

You may also want to warn your Twitter friends that you’re going to SXSW, and that it’s OK to unsubscribe from you or snooze you for a little while.

Hint: if you’re on AT&T, dial *DATA# to see your remaining text messages for this billing cycle. You’ll get a text message back with your billing cycle date, data usage so far in this cycle, and text messages used so far.

I also recommend using some of the more advanced features of Twitter to stay on top of things.

You can change your notification preferences for specific people by clicking on the Device Settings icon next to their username. This way you can choose to only receive some people’s tweets via SMS.

Search for information in real time on search.twitter.com. Try plugging in event names, venue names, or panel names, if you’re curious what people are thinking at any given time.

I’ve also collated some interesting people on Twitter on my SXSW list.

And of course don’t forget to give out your username when you meet someone new, and get theirs in return!

SXSW Tips: Documenting Your Experience With Photos

Pics, or it didn’t happen, right? I always bring my digital camera to SXSW with extra memory cards and charged batteries and the battery charger. And a camera cable or card reader to transfer images to my computer. It might help to clear off some hard drive space (and do a backup) before you arrive.

By the way, if you plan on putting your extra camera batteries into checked luggage and it’s lithium, put it in a separate plastic baggie.

Oh, and do turn off the fake shutter sound on your camera. Nothing says “I’m a newbie taking a picture of the panel! Look at me!” like hearing those little beeps. Same for your smart phone: turn off any annoying “fake shutter” sounds if you can.

Before you leave, set your smartphone up to send photographs to your preferred mobile uploading service: Twitpic, Yfrog, Flickr, etc. and your favorite uploading application. I like to set it up so that Flickr automatically adds a “sxsw” or “sxsw 2010” tag, too.

You may also want to post your photos to Twitter using the #sxsw or #sxswi hashtag.

SXSW Tips: Unofficial Party Lists

Given that plans can change at any given moment, I always find it useful to bookmark and/or print out some of the unofficial SXSW party lists. I’ll fold up the printout and slip it into my bag, in addition to having a schedule of my own picks. This can be useful if the daytime party you want to attend is already full.

My favorites are:
Austin360.com’s SXSW on the Side list (all parties and events for SXSW Interactive, Film, and Music)
Showlistaustin (only unofficial events for SXSW Music, with a comprehensive listing of free daytime events)

Don’t forget to follow @SXSWPartyList, too, on Twitter.