SXSWi: Departing Dispatch

The most impressive thing about this year's "South By"? Connectivity. Incredibly good AT&T 3G coverage and the best public Wi-Fi I've ever experienced at a conference. Period. The AT&T coverage didn't surprise me given last year's disaster (I wonder if AT&T's additional infrastructure costs came out of their PR budget), but the Wi-Fi quality certainly did. Great connectivity, coupled with charging stations throughout the convention center made for some very happy (though exhausted and hungover) geeks.

We spent a good portion of our time camped out in the Blogger Lounge, where I had the chance to speak to several people about their experience and key takeaways from the conference. For many, the key theme was location based services, and in particular the perceived (real or media manufactured?) Gowalla / Foursquare rivalry. I agree that "LBS" is incredibly exciting, and it's one of several trends that signify a broader, more fundamental and pervasive industry shift towards all things social (and mobile). In speaking with people it occurred to me that the "interactive" or "digital" industry is now indistinguishable from "social media," the "social web" or whatever you want to call it. No longer is it about a digital strategy including social capabilities. The principals that were once the exclusive domain of social media practitioners (authenticity, transparency, community, engagement, etc.) have become core and essential to any digital initiative. 

One of the more interesting conversations I had was with Allen Weiner from Gartner. Allen is something of a media legend,  having covered the space for over 25 years. Allen talked about the opportunities happening at the crossroads of social, apps and new, Internet connected devices - topics of particular relevance to the work we're doing at Kyte in helping businesses to deliver multi-platform social video experiences. 

Here's Allen's interview below:

The Internet connected devices Allen mentions, such as Boxee, Internet connected TVs, Internet tablets, etc. represent an opportunity for video publishers as potentially revolutionary as blogging was to text-based publishing. While "TV Everywhere" is fundamentally concerned with getting super-premium cable content to the PC, far more interesting is the potential for video publishers of all types to get online video content to the living room. These are exciting times for media publishing and in particular for those of us involved in helping to build the enabling technologies. And by "media publishing" I don't just mean content produced by media companies. Make no mistake, brands are media publishers (see Homeaway or Armani Exchange), but I'll save that topic for another post.