End of Silence

I spent the Monday of SXSW Interactive attending panels. I went pretty geeky this year.

First, I hit Mobile Application Design Challenges and Tips. The panel was moderated by Kevin Cheng of Yahoo!. It included Simon King, who works on ZoneTag for Yahoo! Research, John Poisson of Radar, Matt Jones from Nokia and Anita Wilhelm from Caterpillar
Mobile. I personally haven’t done a lot of development for cell phones. I’ve watched the mess that is J2ME and the consensus on this panel was that things are still a bit of a mess. It’s difficult to deal with the carriers. There are still a lot of problems with compatibility. I learned that there’s a version of Apache for Symbian 60 phones called Raccoon. The consensus also seemed to be that Flash Lite is no good for applications on the phone. Matt Jones seemed to be a bit of a comedian. I did like his mention
of the carriers as a “proud pipe”. I remember Russell Beattie mentioning Anita a couple of years ago as someone to pay attention to for mobile application design. The panel assembled a group of smart people with a lot of experience in mobile application design. I think it could’ve been moderated a little better though and kept a bit more focused. Small Surfaces was mentioned
as a good mobile design site and more than one person mentioned that Brian Fling’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask. I’ve been hoping a podcast of that one would appear, but it hasn’t yet. You can watch for it here as well.

Continue reading »

I didn’t get to do nearly all that I would’ve liked at SXSW 2007. I suppose it’s that way for everyone. I missed both Turbonegro shows. I missed all of Thurston Moore’s shows. I missed all of Tom Morello’s shows. I missed Bruce Sterling’s annual rant, although I can re-live that through the SXSW
podcasts. SXSW is also posting video from the conference. I didn’t see any films. I heard King of Kong was awesome.

Here’s a small sampling of some of the things that I’ve seen posted over the past week or so that I think are worth checking out.

• Neil Gaiman plugs Hera’s SXSW performance
• The Smoking Gun on SXSW buzz chick Amy Winehouse
• David Byrne recaps his panel and his travel woes on the way home
• SuicideGirls SXSW Surveillance Parts One, Two and Three
• Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser gets arrested at the Holiday Inn
• Bob Mould recaps his SXSW experience
• SaintMurse recaps the Donnie Davies performance at Emo’s
• MTV News take on the Stooges performance at Stubb’s
• I missed Dorkbot. I hear that they had a line around the block. Make has some video and a recap and BBC’s Digital Planet was there as well.
• Wired’s Listening Post has the best videos of SXSW 2007
• Dylan from the Seattle Metblog posts from SXSW.
• The Register did a roundup of SXSWi, complete with the one other thing besides Twitter that I couldn’t seem to escape this year…those two dudes dressed like Superman and Hulk.
• Matt Dentler, a SXSW Film organizer has roundups of SXSW in the news, part one and part two.

The big controversy this week is the shutdown of several of the parties held outside the normal SXSW schedule. It’s been happening for years and has become its own little cottage industry. John Kelso wrote a column in today’s Statesman. Austinist has an open letter from the owners of Factory People about their encounter with
the fire marshals with a long comment thread and a post speculating about the death of the afterparty, but I can’t link it at the moment because they’re inaccessible for some reason (it appears Austinist had some issues over the weekend).

Louis Black does his own recap in an editorial in this week’s Austin Chronicle.

SXSW Baby has the dates for next year.

I missed this last week in the SXSW frenzy, but apparently Ted Nugent taped an episode of Texas Monthly Talks this morning down at the KLRU studios on the UT campus. Did anybody see him?

That’ll be interesting. Evan Smith, the show’s host and editor of Texas Monthly, is sure to ask him about his governor’s ball performance earlier this year.

I did a quick check of the schedule for that show on KLRU and it doesn’t look like it’ll air until at least early May. I’ll definitely have to make a note to watch for that one.

My SXSW Friday kicked off with a continuation of the parking karma from Thursday night. I hit the Dog and Duck around noon for the Pop Culture Press party and scored an unmetered spot right around the corner. They were running a little late, so I found a few friends and settled in for The Figgs. I’d never seen or heard them before, but our bass player is a big fan, so I thought I’d check them out.
They were good stuff, catchy songs, great start to the day. I caught a few songs of Graham Parker before heading back to South Austin to pick up some sticks at Tommy’s Drum Shop on South Eighth.

Continue reading »

I just got the text message that the last round of wristbands are going on sale tonight at 7:30pm. It’s $175 cash only and they’ll insist on putting the wristband on you at the time of the sale.

You can get them at Bourbon Rocks, Buffalo Billiards, Elysium, Habana Calle 6 Annex, Maggie Maes, The Parish II, Lamberts, Momos, Opal Divine’s and Jovitas.

For the out of towners, the first six are on or near 6th street and east of Congress. Lamberts is west of Congress at 2nd and Guadalupe. Momos and Opal Divines are farther west on Sixth, almost to Lamar. Jovitas is the only location south of the river and they’re on South First.

Good luck with that.