This was our second year to what can only be described as the mother of all Web Tech Events, each year thousands of entrepreneurs, start-ups, geeks, bloggers, and industry types attend SxSw in Austin, Texas.

Depending on who you talk to, SxSw is all about the 1000 different panelists talking tech to a very enthusiastic International audience, others refer to it as ‘summer camp for geeks‘. Being a super friendly conference means that it’s very easy to speak to a number of people from different backgrounds.

The best part of SxSw?

Is that everyone, whether they are ‘Internet Famous’ like Scoble, or whether they are freelancers is that the hierarchy is flat. So you can be sitting next to a CEO, and converse with a great variety of businesses in an informal setting. There are very few ego’s here, which I find quite refreshing compared to other events.

How to choose the right session

The level of information and user generated content that is generated from this event is staggering. 19 different panels happening at the same time, a choice of topics that covers everything from internet privacy to social media practices. Think like going to a music festival and having to choose just one panel out of 19, a tough choice. Two ways of getting round this, 1: if the panel you are in sucks after 5 minutes, walk out, and find the next one on your schedule. 2: Realise you can’t catch everything and listen to the podcasts when you return home.

The difference between this years event and last years

The mention of the word ‘downturn’ made some people look like you had just swore at them. However, the number of sponsored events around town and presence of silicon valley companies made it feel like the event was throwing caution to the wind, and giving people the opportunity to get on with business and make new connections.

Twitter usage. Each panel had a hashtag (#) on twitter so the panelists could take questions directly from twitter and also keep a track of what was being said in real time as they spoke. It’s hard to believe Twitter won a web award 2 years ago at SxSw for best newcomer web site.

The hashtag #sxsw has been a trending topic in Twitter search for two weeks now.

I must say that the Twitter network held up very well during this manic time where lots of data was being pushed from Austin over the week. The bloggers room was like a war room, there was a sea of laptops, people on phones, and after a few days it didn’t smell to good either.

Our favourite sessions

• The Kawasaki and Anderson keynote (youtube link)
• Version Control: No More Save-As (Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress) (no media yet)
• Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable (Folks from Google, Microsoft, and the CTO from Amazon) (no media yet)
• HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (podcast link)
• Curating the Crowd-Sourced World (podcast link)
• Designing for Irrational Behavior (podcast link)

Our favourite SXSW tweets

Our SXSW photos

This years set is here. More photos tagged SXSW are available on flickr.

Podcasts from SXSW

SxSw 09 Podcasts – More being added everyday. And from SxSw 2008 and the SxSw channel on YouTube.

See you next year Austin!

Our favourite social network, and site we visit on a hourly basis is Twitter. The network has truly come of age and hit the mainstream of internet users this week with a variety of indicators suggesting this.

Where did the idea for this site come from?

With an idea and a sketch by Founder and Chairman of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. He explains:

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more “live” LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects.

Photo of wireframe that was to become the basis for the design of Twitter

In 2006 Twitter launched, and immediately the service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”.

Early adopters we mainly web type people and various geek collectives sending their thoughts to other connected friends.

For us, it has been excellent for gaining instant insight into new products, people views on various web services and keeping in touch with colleagues, friends and peers without having to email or call them!

Brand and reputation management

However, it didn’t take long for forward thinking companies to identify that they could directly converse with their customers on this rapidly growing social media platform.

Never before has one been able to track and measure what is being said about your brand and product online. View the results for the keyword ‘cornflakes‘ using Twitter Search. This surely has to be the quickest and most cost effective way to communicate with your customers, increase coverage of your brand, and increase the strength of your company reputation, online.

Today, Twitter is one of the most visited websites in the UK

UK Internet traffic to the site has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months. For the week ending 17/01/09 Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period.

Source: Hitwise

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain’s most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK. As we reported a few weeks ago, on Christmas Day Facebook received 1 in every 22 UK Internet visits.

Prominent Users on Twitter

A number of politicians, celebrities use twitter to communicate with their followers/fans.

• Barack Obama with over 144,000 followers
• Jonathan Ross
• Alan Carr
• Stephen Fry
• Richard Branson
• 10 Downing Street

Twitter first for breaking news

Using Twitter search to monitor the ‘buzz’ over last years US elections was a fantastic way to get into the voters minds, as well as getting their opinions, gut reactions and feelings on what was happening at a very detailed street level with all the events and coverage.

Earlier this month, US Airways Flight 1549 experienced multiple bird strikes and had to be ditched in the Hudson River after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Janis Krum, a passenger on one of the ferries that rushed to help, took a picture of the downed plane as passengers were still evacuating and tweeted it via TwitPic before traditional media arrived at the scene.

Twitter featured on BBC homepage

Perhaps the strongest sign that Twitter has reached the mainstream is being featured on the homepage of one of the worlds busiest websites.

Questions on the future of Twitter

There is no doubt Twitter is here to stay.

The question I have is the problem of friends on other social networks. How soon will they realise they have to start a new friends list on this site as well? Something we have been aware of for all too long, effectively a ‘Walled Gardens for each social network’. Perhaps mass demand will increase the adoption of OpenID. Although, single source sign-on was dropped from Twitters features during a company restructure in 2008 so is not currently supported.

Also with our current friends on Twitter are a bit more low-fi than some of the techy conversations we may have currently with colleagues on Twitter, this is leading to multiple profiles for the same person. For example, a business and personal (private) profile.

Another problem is that all the Facebook friends you’re currently avoiding will track you down on Twitter – so what then?

You can follow me on Twitter @JimCallender, where I continue to enjoy the service and would gladly pay for some additional features. I find the short method of communicating in 140 characters or less and ‘from one-to-many’ to fit my style and enjoy ‘following’ and updating my friends.

Further Reading

• Look out Twitter, the masses are coming!
• How Twitter was born

Believe it or not QR or Quick Repsonse codes have been around for a while now. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes.

A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.

You can use your phone to read QR codes by installing Kaywa Reader.

And make your own QR code like we have below on the same kaywa site.

QR code containing website link for callendercreates.com

An introduction to barcode scanning on youtube

Here’s a list of conferences and exhibitions you will find us at over the next few months, and into 2009.

Why? Not just because they are great fun, but also very valuable tools in training, learning emerging internet technologies and trends.

Getting to the cutting edge of Internet leaders minds is what it is all about, and chatting up close and personal with other exciting innovators on the web.
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Finding your own creativity, whether at home or in your office.

It takes a combination of hardware, comfort (Aeron chair, cough), and inspiration to get you working productively.

When starting a company, most unless you are funded by a Venture Capital (VC), you will have a limited budget. So, its whatever you have at hand to make things work for you. A few years down the line, and you’ll wonder how you got work done in an uncomfortable, noisy, corner of a room. I certainly do!
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We’re happy to let you know about two very exciting (local) web events that are happening this autumn.

Barcamp Brighton 3. We are helping to pay for the staffing for this event which is being held at Brighton University.

‘BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats”, Wikipedia.
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The keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference always creates a lot of buzz and hype surrounding Steve Job’s latest creation and tech. announcements, as they are renowned for their secrecy all bloggers can do before the event is make predictions which adds more excitement to the speculation.

Now we have time to calm down and review the real facts and services all focused around the iPhone and an emphasis on their mobile web technology:

• iPhone 3G – Still way behind in camera technology, no video either, 3G put the phone one-to-two generations behind the equivalent Nokia products running High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and a phone screen design that looks like it will scratch anytime.
• Mobile Phone businesses – it will be interesting to see how 3G affects the real-world user experience of iPhone users and if data consumption will climb massively. How will the subsidised 3G handsets affect Apple’s and the carriers margins from their mobile business. Will they make the difference up in increased sales volumes instead?
• MobileMe – sounds like service pack to fix the things currently wrong with .mac and a re-brand to hide the fact that its a service pack.
• iPhone AppStore – O2 to Launch iPhone 3G in the UK on July 11 O2 today announced that the innovative iPhone 3G will be available in the UK on July 11 for free on selected O2 consumer and business tariffs and that it will also be available for Pay & Go customers. It wasn’t clear that will Apple have the regular upgrade as part of its business model as well as being a software application broker?
• Enterprise – much was made of the support for Exchange server, what about Unix equivalents LDAP, IMAP etc?
• iPhone SDK – there was nothing in the news around the software development kit that we hadn’t heard in March apart from how the iPhone’s ‘push’ API worked.

There’s good coverage of WWDC 2008 at the Guardian.