Another year, another SXSW festival coming up in just a few weeks. What will this year’s event hold? Last year seemed like a big shift for both the event and for attendees. The event was split up into many locations (I think this was a huge mistake), more commercialization than ever and it seemed like lots of people came to Austin but didn’t buy a badge – they just surfed the hallways of the convention center and also attended lots of Sixth Street non-official events. Each year the event grows larger and hotel rooms display sold out signs earlier and earlier.

I wonder if this will be the year that the registration/check-in process will be updated similar to how Google handled the IO event registration.

The SXSW group has released demographics for all of the SXSW events: music, film and interactive. You can find all of the demographics data here (would have been great as an infographic). Remember that the numbers don’t include people who just came to town without an official badge.

Some of the interesting stats include:

• Total conference attendees across all three festivals – 50,000
• Interactive participants – 20,000
• Sessions – 935
• International attendees – 10%
• 75% of attendees have an income over $55k
• 30% of attendees are over 40

Drop me a line if you are coming to town for the annual gathering – I will be covering the event for CN.

Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for January 30, 2012 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.

Featured Jobs:

• Vice President/Director, Digital Services at LipmanHearne
• Web/Interface Designer at Garmin International
• Application Developer (Programmer/Analyst III) at University of California, Irvine

More Jobs:

• Front end web developer at Artisan talent
• Interactive Developer at Garmin International
• Lead Ruby Engineer at Howcast

Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today – only $10!

It seems these days hackdays, hackathons, hack this, hack that events are popular across the world. Some of these developer events have created very successful startups and some of the companies have been acquired.

Austin will be holding an API Hackday on Saturday, February 18 at the HubAustin coworking location. The event is free for everyone – just make sure to register for the right category so the organizers can make sure there is enough of each type of attendee (developer, designer, investor, etc.). The event will run from 8am-8pm with free lunch, dinner and post-event beer celebration.

Here’s the event overview, “API Hackday Austin brings developers together for an all-day coding fest focused on building apps and mashups with APIs. Developers of all experience levels can share ideas, collaborate on existing projects, start new ventures, and find out about great tools and new APIs to play with. Hackers will also hear from some of the country’s top API-focused companies on tips, tricks, and tools for building the next big app. At the end of the day, teams and/or individuals get a chance to present their work to a panel of judges and win kickass prizes.”

The event is sponsored by Twilio, Mashery, Paypal and Sendgrid – all four companies are heavy on the API.

This Saturday, January 28, 2012, the LoneStar PhoneGap group will hold their first meetup. PhoneGap is a mobile platform that helps you easily create mobile applications and more importantly helps you distribute one set of code to all of the major phone OS systems (Apple iOS, Google Android, Blackberry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and Bada). Nitobi, the parent company of PhoneGap, was acquired by Adobe last October.

I think it is awesome that a group is meeting on a Saturday afternoon! The meetup will be held at a public library just west of the university area. Free pizza and drinks will be served.

Here’s the event description, “Lets kickstart the first PhoneGap meetup in Austin. Come to learn about PhoneGap, network with other PhoneGappers in Austin, and discuss best coding practices. On the program is a 15 minute coding session where we will develop a simple PhoneGap application demonstrating some of the key features and coding style. You are wlecome to bring your laptop and code along with us.”

Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for January 21, 2012 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.

Featured Jobs:

• Front end web developer at Artisan talent
• Interactive Developer at Garmin International
• Lead Ruby Engineer at Howcast

More Jobs:

• Senior Theme Developer / Front-End Developer at Sony Music Entertainment
• Project Manager, BI Applications at Beachbody
• Senior Web Developer at Saatchi Online
• Web Development Specialist at Columbia College Chicago

Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today – only $10!

Last weekend our hosting company moved the physical location of their servers — from San Antonio to Chicago. There were a number of very serious issues that appeared post-migration caused by the hosting company. I will address the issues and the responsiveness from the hosting company in another post once all of the post-mortem details have been provided to me. But what the downtime and issues made me quickly realize is I need to have a current, well-documented disaster plan for both the blogs and for my startup.

With a WordPress blog, there is the website (css, html, images, video, etc.) and then there’s the database. I have backups of both. Luckily there was no downtime passed the migration period for the blogs. As long as we keep current backups of both content and database, it would be relatively easy to create a new server installation, either at the same host or a different host and copy everything to the new location. Then it should be as simple as switching the DNS and waiting for the internet pipes to switch the tracks to the new location.

Obviously every startup and every company will have a different disaster plan. We backup our database several times a day so we can always revert back to a backup should the need arise. And we test the backups on a regular basis using a mirrored database. When my startup was down due to the hosting issues, I knew I needed to quickly be able to communicate to both current customers who would want to login to the system and to potential customers looking to place an order. I updated the affected web pages with a message explaining the situation and offering a way for customers to contact us, both by phone and by email. I also prepared an email blast but since the server was up and down, I decided not to send the email. I did monitor the social networks and responded to any queries or questions from customers.

I’ve covered the worldwide Startup Weekend events over the past couple of years. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to bring the community together in a different city each weekend to create a startup (or multiple startups) during the weekend.

The event is coming back to Austin during the weekend of March 30th, just after SXSW. The weekend of events will be held at Hub Coworking which is a few minutes south of the city center. Pricing runs from $75-$99 and if it is like the last event, meals will be provided. You can register here and there is an early bird registration that runs through February 17.

For those of you that are new to the Startup Weekend concept, here’s the overview, “Startup Weekends are 54-hour events designed to provide superior experiential education for technical and non-technical entrepreneurs.  Beginning with Friday night pitches and continuing through brainstorming, business plan development, and basic prototype creation, Startup Weekends culminate in Sunday night demos and presentations.

Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurials. The weekend is centered around action, innovation, and education.  Whether you are looking for feedback on a idea, a co-founder, specific skill sets, or a team to help you execute, Startup Weekends are the perfect environment in which to test your idea and take the first steps towards launching your own startup.”