Last year at SXSW, I interviewed Jason Aiken from crowdsourced design service 99designs. The service is described as, “We connect 62,177 passionate designers from around the globe with small businesses who need design projects completed. And, we do it in a timely fashion without the usual risk or cost associated with professional design.” Basically 99designs allows companies to create “contests” and then designers submit their designs for the contest. The company selects a winner and pays for the selected design. Some call this type of relationship, “spec work” – the concept was a hot topic last year at SXSW. There’s a group called No!Spec which discusses the spec work topic indepth.

While waiting to get into the Mashable party, I caught up with Jason to find out how 99designs is doing a year later. Check out our brief discussion in the video below. The big news out of 99designs is the launch of their logo store. Designers who have won at least one competition on 99designs can then create stock logos and place them in the logo store. Companies and small businesses can quickly select a logo for $99 with non-exclusive rights (or they can pay $300 for exclusive rights) and then the designer will customize the logo with the company name, etc. in 24 hours.

Jason also shared some current stats related to 99designs. He noted that 500-600 projects are uploaded each week, a new design for a contest is uploaded every 7 seconds and they hand out $600,000 a month to the contest winners.
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If you’ve been working online as long as I have, you probably remember the WYSIWYG craze of the late ’90s. Everyone and their mother had a program that attempted to make building a webpage easier. The most popular (and also the worst) was Microsoft Frontpage.

Today I am seeing more “cloud” services that aim to make building websites easier. Most of these tools are web-based and are very easy-to-use. About 18 months ago we covered the launch of SnapPages (which at SXSW launched a new developer service).

Launching at SXSW, Lifeyo is a new website builder that co-founder Betsy calls the, “people’s website builder”. They have lots of themes, easy to use blog tool, ability to add multiple pages, etc. I like how you edit the pages in place and the drag-and-drop elements which requires no code knowledge. You can edit the code directly if you prefer as well. Betsy uses Lifeyo to manage her RazorBlonde blog.

The service is free (including hosting) and they will be offering paid upgrades in the future including the ability to create a custom domain.

With all of these new website builder tools on the market, it’s amazing how many small businesses still have websites that look like they were built in 1995.

Here’s Betsy explaining how Lifeyo works and how they are different than the other website builders on the market. This is my first video uploaded as HD so be sure to select the HD option when viewing. Make sure to watch the part from the two-minute mark as she shows how the editor works – it’s pretty slick.
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Day 2 of the SXSW interactive festival is complete. Here are some of the best reads from the second day of the conference:

• Lifestreams, Neuroscience Marketing, Privacy and Content Strategy – Weber Shandwick
• Mojito Internet device video demo – Information Week (my post)
• I Don’t Do SXSWi – Jeremy Pepper (I agree with him)
• Lost in Translation: Nuances of European Social Media – Peter Bihr
• Boyd Calls Out Google and Facebook for Abusing Users’ Privacy – GigaOm
• New Version of Digg Revealed – Mashable

If you aren’t interested in SXSW posts and/or event coverage, Darren has put together a website, Not In Austin, that lists posts from the top tech blogs with no SXSW posts listed.

DO NOT FORGET TO MOVE YOUR CLOCK FORWARD ONE HOUR!

Leave any links you’ve found related to SXSW in the comments and I will add them to the post.

This afternoon marked the opening of the SXSW 2010 expo hall. Like most things at SXSW, the expo hall seems larger than in previous years with more large companies anchoring the space. Paypal, Google, Rackspace, AOL and Microsoft all have huge sections of the space showing off their latest technologies. Panasonic has a huge truck that houses a 3D experience. Former PayPerPost, now Izea, seems to have a booth at every conference.

There are multiple companies that provide simple webpage creators (SnapPages and Lifeyo). And lots of musician and music management apps are showing off their wares.

Here are some photos from the expo hall – you can also check out my full SXSW photoset on Flickr.

Microsoft showing off their table touchscreen thingy

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Last year at SXSW we filmed a video demo of Atlanta-based Regator. The service provides curated blog aggregation on hundreds of topics. It looks like the Regator team is in Austin again this year and I’ve noticed their ads on all of the “Plastic-wrapped columns” around the convention center.

You can see their ad below – pretty interesting. They use a Twitter bubble along with names of two popular bloggers: Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb and Robert Scoble from Rackspace. I first noticed the ad because the @marshallk caught my eye.

Instead of pushing the service on the ad, they push two of their popular users. The names may draw people to the ad and then to the site which could mean longer levels of engagement.

Day 1 of the SXSW interactive festival is complete. Here are some of the best reads from the first full day of the conference:

• SXSW: Social media marketing for business – Lost Remote
• 12 Tips on Live Blogging & Content Marketing at SXSWi (works for any conference) – Lee Odden
• Tech companies try to stand out at SXSW – Houston Chronicle
• What Google will do in China – RWW
• SXSW photos by Jeffrey Zeldman
• Staying Immune to the Hype Virus at SXSW – Harvard Busines Review

If you aren’t interested in SXSW posts and/or event coverage, Darren has put together a website, Not In Austin, that lists posts from the top tech blogs with no SXSW posts listed.

Leave any links you’ve found related to SXSW in the comments and I will add them to the post.

I’ve heard from multiple people along with SXSW event staff that this year’s event will be the busiest ever. I’ve been coming to SXSW for 5 years and from what I can tell, it sure is more crowded than it was 5 years ago. More sessions rooms are being pushed out to the nearby hotels and there are more people on the street than before.

I decided to select one of two sessions in the Hilton in the first round of sessions, Friday at 2pm. I arrived 30 minutes early and, as you can see from the photos below, the rooms were both packed. A couple of people were wondering if the entire event will be like this. The last couple of years the keynotes were crowded, but the session rooms were sometimes full.

Since SXSW is still allowing people to register, is there even a capacity limit? If there isn’t, there certainly should be.

As I noted in an earlier post, it’s also interesting to watch SXSW become the NASCAR of tech conferences. It seems like they moved the registration to allow for more sponsor areas. So far I’ve seen huge displays for Pepsi and AOL – tradeshow-like displays.

If you are at the event, leave a comment on your take on capacity limits and if you feel like you are riding the 6 train at rush hour trying to move around the convention center and into the sessions.
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