Conferences Archive

On April 26, ten startups that are part of the “1 Semester Startup” program at the University of Texas will show off their new concepts to the world. The event is free for all to attend and will be held at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium in Austin.

Here’s the event overview:

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.

Each startup will get 6 minutes on stage and then you can go and talk to them afterwards. There will be numerous other leaders from the Austin entrepreneurial community in attendance as well.

In addition to the startup presentations, Dr. James Truchard will provide the keynote discussion. Dr. Truchard is the president, CEO and co-founder of National Instruments.

Course instructor and founder/angel investor Joshua Baer has also requested help for next semester. He notes:

1. We need more mentors. Stop organizing your wine collection and get a better hobby — help young entrepreneurs!
2. We need 2 TA’s to help us run the class.
3. We need the best student entrepreneurs at UT Austin who want to get credit for working on their startup and mentored by Bob Metcalfe, myself, and many others.

I am not sure what the requirements to be a mentor are as I applied last semester but never heard back. If you are in Austin, this is a great opportunity to help students become the next great entrepreneurs!

Register here »

The interactive portion of SXSW 2012 is now signed, sealed and delivered. Based on foot and car traffic downtown, this was the largest attendance since I started coming to Austin 6 years ago. As always it was great to meet so many people I only speak with via email or social media. For the last two years, I’ve provided photos of the expo hall, and this year I bring you fresh photos in case you weren’t able to attend the conference. You can check out my 2011 and 2010 photos for comparison.

The expo hall continues to grow – my first year the expo hall was tiny and this year it was as large as most “trade show” conferences. The expo hall was heavy on the interactive side but is open for days that cross all three SXSW sections: film, music and interactive. I was disappointed not to see Izea with a booth – I think they have been here every year I’ve attended.

We begin our photo tour with a woman dressed up like an angry bird?

Continue reading “SXSW 2012 Expo Hall Photos” »

It’s just a couple weeks until the next version of SXSW hits the pavement in Austin, Texas. I still believe this will be a huge “badgeless” year and I keep betting that SXSW officials will eventually not allow access into the convention center at all without a badge.

If you are looking for parties, here are three great guides to help you find free beer, free bbq, free networking, etc. If you aren’t going to have a badge, make sure the parties you are interested in will allow badgeless access. And if you will have a badge, make sure it is with you when you head out to the parties so you can get into the clubs and bars.

Gary is the master of Gary’s Guide and he has an in-depth list of parties around Austin during SXSW. You will easily spot Gary around Austin as he wears a suit with a bright red tie.

Social event guide Lanyrd has an event guide as well. Their event guide includes parties and all other events during SXSW.

SXSHHH has a party guide for all of the free and unofficial events – they charge $5 for the list. RSVPster will register you for every party for $20 – so basically you will take a slot for every party even though you won’t go to most of them and you will block someone else from going – blah on that.

Republic of Austin has a party guide and all of the parties they have listed are badgeless events.

Lastly here’s a link to the official SXSW party directory. My guess is that all of these events will require an official event badge.

Last week I noted that there will be a hackathon during SXSW. Two more interesting events have popped up on my radar that are worth checking out.

Startup incubators DreamIt Ventures and Austin’s Capital Factory are holding a series of “find a cofounder” dating-style events during SXSW. You can find all of the details and registration form here. The sessions will be held on Saturday and Sunday and it does look like you will need a SXSW badge to participate.  The two accelerators will also be holding two co-founder panels on Saturday and Sunday.

On Sunday March 10, BarCampATX will be held at the Black Sheep Lodge. The event is free although they do ask for donations.  I think BarCamps are the original “unconference” – there will be 45 – 20 minute sessions throughout the day. It looks like this is a badgeless event – so anyone in town can attend. The organizers ask that you register here. Here’s the overview for this year’s BarCampATX, “BarCamp is a general developer / tech un-conference with an open source slant. Topics need not be technical, so long as they relate to technology and/or development. This year’s theme is “Discover Something New” so new techniques, new apps, new ways of doing things are all great starting points.”

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.