Want a first hand perspective (or maybe you did go and partied too hard) then this post is for you. There’s a lot to learn from SXSW: A Petri dish of social and interactive behaviors. A bellwether of what could be a trend for the year. It also has a downside from overhype. Fanboyism, and an over inflated view of behaviors that may not persist as people return to work. This year the conference was bigger than ever. Word on the street is the entire 2012 festival has. Grown to include 50k (Tuesday evening, the festival said its official paid attendance count for 2012 was 24,569, up from 19,364 in 2011.
A change of about 27 percent
Via Omar of Austin 360, hat tip to Bryan Person) Secondly, interactive is getting larger each year, including dozens of sessions not in the convention center. After visiting SXSW five years consecutively, there’s a few observations (not strong enough to be called trends) I wanted to point out from Cayman Islands Phone Number List my perspective: Observation Set 1: In a sea of noise, new technologies emerged to foster intimacy With this many people this year, the need for smaller more intimate social networks to find ones friends was more important. Tools like Groupme (a darling last year) become very important among the SF tech.
Contingent stemming around Chris Saad
Interestingly the rain caused some interesting changes to the social dynamics resulting in people staying longer at events for longer periods of time. And less venturing about the city and allowing for Happenstance meetups France Phone Number List in the street. Heavy usage of proximity based social networks like Highlight. Glance, EchoEcho, Banjo and Sonar resulted in rapid battery drain forcing social circles around those who had power and those who did not. Although these tools were hyped to be the darlings of this event. A clearly winner didn’t emerge as the dominant player. Surprisingly, the conference really struggled.