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SXSW 2012 was my second venture through one of the largest interactive conference in the US. I broke the conference down by the themes that occurred during the week below.

The Weather

The big story for the first 2 1/2 days was the crappy weather. Schedules were based on how intense the rain was between sessions or whenever you had to venture outside. The rain was coming down in buckets and many, including me, did not have the proper attire to swim from venue to venue. The rain was good for Austin and the state of Texas however. The region has had record droughts and a lake north of Austin is 40-feet below average.

Sessions

The interactive sessions were hit and miss as usual. You pick sessions based on the assumed content and the presenters. I skipped a few sessions with known presenters to view some based on content… swing and a miss. The big one I missed was Sean Parker (napster, facebook) interviewing Al Gore. Gore was a surprise to the session but I had a chance to go and skipped it. A surprise was Billy Corgan (smashing pumpkins) being interviewed about the state of the music industry from a business view. Corgan was rather raw and wanted to be challenged. Great interview and I walked in on it by accident.

Most sessions, good or bad, are always better once the Q & A segment starts. There are no subjects off the table and the answers from known web personalities can offer memorable quotes.

Twitter hashtags for the sessions were almost nonexistent after SXSW pushed it hard before the conference.

The Apps

Every year a new set of apps launch at SXSW. Twitter, Foursquare and GroupMe all had their big break there. The theme this year were apps that let you know when friends or potential friends are close by. The most notable of these apps was highlight (logo hurts my head). These apps were a combination of a bit freaky and lame. I am sure highlight and the like were downloaded countless times but I knew few who used it.

After continuously hearing about the new Tweetbot and how great it is I finally coughed up the $2.99 and never looked back. Tweetbot is WAY better than the native Twitter app and well worth the cost. The Twitter app was promptly deleted.

The app that changed my experience was the “winner” of yesteryear, GroupMe. I used it with my colleagues from GSW to organize the 10 of us that were down there. At times the app was a bit overwhelming when you have 70+ unread texts but it was a great app.

The Food

The food was great. It varied from bar food, steakhouses, tex-mex, vietnamese and of course barbecue.

The Trade Show 

The SXSW trade show is often just a race to see how many free T-shirts I can grab before they run out. I acquired 16 shirts this year but loss to a GSW friend who got 27. I felt bad for the booths that either had only one person working it or nothing to give away. Little traffic saw those booths and the floor space is not cheap.

Final Thoughts

This being my second year at SXSW the event was a bit underwhelming, or better put, last year was overwhelming. I learned a ton again but got the gist on how it works and where to go last year. Overall it was a great experience and I hope to go again next year.

Instead of solving the real issue with movie distribution in the 21st century, Hollywood has been trying to censor the entire internet, and failing. Rob Sheridan (creative director of Nine Inch Nails) posted a quick solution on his tumblr blog.

Hollywood, what is so hard about this? Apple did it with music last decade. What the movie industry doesn’t understand is, individuals are willing to pay for movies if it is delivered in a simple format for a reasonable price. Perhaps they have stumbled on Netflix.

The best solution would be one application where you could get movies from all of the studios. Think of the money you could make on the “long tail” of movies. Old movies that have amassed over the years that you still cant find on Netflix.

There will always be online piracy with movies, music and software. Stop wasting your efforts on an issue larger than you and solve the root issue. Simple distribution of a product that consumers will pay for.

It was recently brought to my attention that if you visit the Merrill Lynch corporate site using the Google Chrome browser, you would get a “Incompatible Browser Detected” error. That can’t be right. One of the biggest financial companies in the world probably gets hundreds of thousands of pageviews from the Chrome browser every month. Here is a screen shot of the error.

Notice the browser versions they do support; IE 5, Netscape (what is that?), and Firefox 0.8. Talk about being out of touch with current web trends. Netscape doesn’t even register on browser market share reports anymore and Chrome is closing in on FireFox as the second most used browser behind the free falling Internet Explorer.

The only question that comes to mind after experiencing this would be, is this a corporate policy that the internal tech team is fighting? Or is this choice coming from the internal tech team because they are too lazy to get the site to work with modern browsers? Either way, this is lame.

Which country do you think Mac OS X has the largest market share? My first guess would have been the United States with Canada second. I was wrong on both accounts as the US is ranked third and Canada fifth. Pingdom.com created a few graphs based on StatCounter data.

Switzerland has the highest Mac OS X market share with 17.61% followed by Luxembourg with 15.79% and then the United States with 15.36%. Europe actually has 5 of the top 10 spots for OS X market share. Which shouldn’t be a huge surprise as Europeans are not big Microsoft fans as is shown with the Firefox market share numbers on the old continent.

When OS X market share is broken down by continent you see a different story.

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