South by Southwest Day 1

The first day of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas was a really great one. Despite some early morning setbacks, which included a nosebleed in the shower that left the washroom looking like the opening bathtub scene from Psycho and another nosebleed in the badge pickup line (I have this weird nose thing that in any extreme change in air pressure or climate, my nose starts bleeding for short periods of time).

Today was a day of meetups and tweetups. And evacuations.

First, I caught up with Joyce Peralta, Western’s past Senior Web Designer at the badge registration zone. Over lunch at Iron Cactus (and a huge amount of food), we talked about the web design work and ideas we have for Western (me) and UVic (her). We left with 15 minutes to spare for our first panel of the day.

By the time we got to the venue, the panel was absolutely packed up and people were lined up out the door. We met a similar scenario at two other panels and decided to use the downtime to do some exploring and then duck into the room where Josh Williams from Gowalla would be talking about Chasing Virtual Goods in the Real World.

The talk was about what Gowalla is, what they do, their origins, and their directions. It was interesting to hear him say that they built a Facebook game called PackRat that people were playing 2-10 hours a day. They made Gowalla in an effort to get people to go outside and explore instead of being behind a screen all day. It was a great talk and I took three pages of notes.

Then Joyce and I split up and I met some pals across the street at the Hilton and caught a session on dealing with difficult clients - not that I have any to deal with. It was a great session that gave lots of great advice on how to remain positive.

Then my pals and I went for dinner (at Iron Cactus again), but not before Joyce sent me one last Facebook message to say that they evacuated the convention centre for some reason, and I ran out of power on my phone and couldn’t tell Joyce where I was going to be (despite having said that I would).

Got back to my hotel room at 11:15pm and was able to do some blogging.

Comments

[brian adams]

nice post my friend