“I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
And…exhale. SXSW 2010 has officially come to an end so I wanted to take a moment and reflect on this year’s show. It’s easier to have a little perspective out here in Yountville, CA where I write this –- good food and wine always seem to do the trick.
First and foremost, I am humbled by our clients’ achievements. WolframAlpha won the SXSW Web Awards for Technical Achievement and Best of Show, while Siri won the Microsoft Bizspark Accelerator for Innovative Web Technology.
Twine was acquired at the very start of SXSW by Evri, escalating excitement for Nova and Sanjay’s new project, LiveMatrix. The SXSW debuts of LugIron, Bandwidth.com’s Free Phonebooth, Lasso, Superglued, Challengepost and knowmore left our team especially proud of the JDI client roster and the agency we are building together.
And lest I forget one of the absolute highlights, the first annual Data Cluster meetup that we helped organize — sponsored by Rackspace, Infochimps, knowmore, Wolfram Alpha, and Factual — was a great opportunity to get together and geek out over beers, open data, and the Semantic Web. It’s an event we in fact hope to replicate in top tech cities around the globe, with the help of local organizers.
More importantly, though, this year represented an imporant shift to me personally. Over the years, SXSW has become more and more a gathering of true friends — much moreso than colleagues, or close collaborators. As I looked around our dinner table on Tuesday evening, feelings of gratitude pervaded. I realized what an honor it is to be a part of a real family of talented, ambitious, and exceedingly intelligent individuals who together no doubt will leave the world a better place than we found it.
Cote, Lauren Sell and I failed to record our annual swag video – that’s one regret that will have to be rectified sooner rather than later.
I really do feel strongly about what I told Christina in this interview:
“Right now we are doing a lot of work to mash up social data with business data to get cause and effect. Some products are starting to support this action — but only a few. I think this is the next big wave. You’ve got to be able to tie causes to effects, and that is the big challenge right now, what all our clients want, and what is frankly the hardest to accomplish.”
