Conferences Archive

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.

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.

Here are some groovy web tech events coming up in Austin that are worth checking out:

1 Semester Startup Demo Day Fall 2011 – December 1

From the event registration, “1 Semester Startup invites you to Demo Day where we will showcase the 20 undergraduate startups from our inaugural Fall 2011 class. Undergraduate students experienced entrepreneurship first-hand, learning from some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Austin. University of Texas students from many different departments including Computer Science, Engineering and Management started companies and were assisted with a semester-long program of startup acceleration: speakers, mentors, and supervised project work. Mentors are exceptional people who have successfully started one or more companies.” register here

Austin Web Bash – December 13

Over 15 monthly web groups are coming together for the mega huge Austin Web Bash. The party is free but you need to bring at least one can of food for the Austin Area Food Bank. register here

Full-day Running Lean Workshop by Ash Maurya

If you are into the lean startup movement, the Austin Lean Startup Circle has put together a full day training session hosted by Ash Maurya. The event will be held at Tech Ranch Austin and costs $250 – looks like there are 7 tickets left.  register here

Remember to signup for Joshua Baer’s weekly Austin events mailing list on StartupDigest.

Here are some upcoming Austin tech events worth checking out. For a regular listing of Austin tech events, Joshua Baer from OtherInbox has a weekly events newsletter that you can subscribe to here. Sadly it seems again most events are on Tuesday – so you are forced to select only one – a real shame considering that there are 4 other days in the week and the events would see more traffic if they spread out.

• Austin PHP – Tuesday – scaling PHP applications using Redis
• Your Internet Marketing Party – Tuesday – How to Use Human Psychology to Get Web Visitors and Cash (with Derek Halpern)
• Co-Founders Austin – Tuesday – held at the Microsoft office, this event is a matching event where new startups pitch to those looking to join a startup. Here’s an overview of how the meetup works. The event costs $10 to attend and free for the presenting startups. If you are interested in presenting, get in touch with the organizer (Ricardo Sanchez) asap.
• Austin Lean Startup Circle – Tuesday -October Meetup – Continuous Deployment Mechanics at IMVU – currently full
• Friday Night Hacks – Friday – “…is an opportunity to connect, share ideas, build cool stuff and launch projects into the community. We typically do this into the wee hours of the morning while indulging in delicious snacks, brewskies and copious amounts of caffeine.”
• Social Media Strategy Saturday Night @ American Bingo w/ Rachel Greenfield – Saturday – looks cool, you play bingo for an hour, meetup for an hour and then beer and bingo for another hour.

If you are in the Austin area, there are two networking events coming up that are worth checking out.

First up is the Austin Tech Fair which will be held next Monday, September 26 from 9am-4pm at the AT&T Conference Center near downtown. Last year over 1,100 people attended the tech fair which combines an expo hall with a number of talks on a variety of tech topics including Ruby on Rails, community building strategies and project management. The tech fair is free to attend.

I will be at the tech fair in the expo hall demoing CloudContacts – if you attend, please stop by and say hi. I have some goodies to give away and we can chat.

On October 5, the ProductCamp group will hold a networking event they call ProductParty. This event will also be held at the AT&T Conference Center in the evening and is a great way to meet other locals in the tech, product and marketing space. They are going to have a karaoke competition – I will enter – the only thing I have to decide is whether I go with Kris Kross – Jump, House of Pain – Jump Around or Snow – Informer.

You should bring a big stack of business cards and a smile to both events.

The big news in the startup world is that Israeli startup Shaker won the big prize at the Techcrunch conference this week. Many, including AOL employees, wonder what it is that Shaker is “disrupting” while others are talking about the conflicts regarding the finalists and AOL/CrunchFund’s funding of 2 of the top 3 and an upcoming investment in the winner. Of course questions are nothing new with Techcrunch (now aol) conferences – heck, I wrote about MC Hammer investment questions with regards to DanceJam at the first TC40.

When I saw Shaker, the first thing that popped into my head was, “oh it’s the new version of that game!” But I couldn’t remember the name of the game until Dean Collins replied to my message on the NYTM messageboard noting that Shaker is Leisure Suit Larry! And yep that’s exactly what it looks like.

TC writer Leena Rao describes Shaker as, “…a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks.”

Shaker looks like a fun game but what frustrated me in the Shaker demos is that the founders kept suggesting that this virtual world was, ” just like real life”. It is absolutely nothing like real life.

Rackspace startup blogger Robert Scoble seems to love Shaker – I just don’t see it here. I mean seriously – maybe I am missing something – but it’s a virtual world where you walk around and chat – AOL 1996 called. Sure you can click on a person and get their info but otherwise what, you dance on a bar? And just wait – the minute a woman “walks in” to the virtual chatroom, you will watch all the males run over. Something tells me these “bars” will be all male. Maybe it will work for the concert concept but even that will be a stretch.

As I watched the two demos of Shaker, I could only think of one thing (which applies to more than just Shaker)…

HOW ABOUT CALLING UP A COUPLE OF YOUR REAL FUCKING FRIENDS AND GOING OUT TO A REAL FUCKING BAR AND HAVING A DRINK OR DINNER AND SOME FUCKING CONVERSATION INSTEAD OF SITTING IN SOME FUCKING VIRTUAL WORLD.

And if you don’t have local friends or are new to your town, go to Meetup.com or Plancast, find a freaking meetup and get the gosh damn fuck out of your house. Walk up to a person, shake a hand, exchange a business card (heh), and smile. Learn something in your conversation.

I know it’s not easy to go outside and it’s way easier to stay home/office and chat on a social network or, now, play some 2.0 version of Leisure Suit Larry. But trust me, the more we sit at home and live online, the less we will be able to live offline.

Ok I am done. Now get out there and do something.

Today at the Capital Factory Demo Day, ethernet creator Bob Metcalfe provided the morning keynote. If you get a chance to hear him speak, you should go – he was a great speaker.

Bob shared 5 tips for startup success…

Tip #1 – Health

You don’t need to kill yourself to run a startup. Instead you have to take care of yourself and make sure your health is in order. You should sleep 8 hours every night.

Tip #2 – Writing

Bob suggests that you write as much as possible – what’s great is that today this is very easy to do with the available tools.

Tip #3 – Speaking

Bob talked about how great Steve Jobs is as a speaker. He suggests (which I agree with) that you speak as much as you can about your product or service.

Tip #4 – Selling

You should spend time selling – he notes people consider salespeople lower than pond scum but they are critical to a company. Even if you are a developer/engineer, you should still learn how to and sell. At a minimum you need to sell your team on why they should follow your direction.

Tip #5 – Planning

Bob explained how important it is that you have a plan. His company (3com) used the acronym MOST – mission, objectives, strategies, tactics. He noted that each year at 3com they would adjust MOST as needed.

I like Bob’s suggestions and I can confirm that health is the most important thing when it comes to the early days of a company.