Tag: SXSW

Just a few minutes ago, I left my third session in 2 days because the speakers were pitching their companies. SXSW better get a handle on this! I have spoke at a number of conferences over the past 5 years and have been very careful to never pitch my companies products, during what is supposed to be educational sessions. Pisses me off big time that I could have attended another session of which there are many competing for people’s attention. He SXSW get a handle on your speakers and BAN them if they do this from ever participating in SXSW again!

I will have some more details on my next podcast, but here is a lineup of some sites launching at SXSW

• www.funtweet.it
• www.flavors.me
• pro.wholinkstome.com
• www.awarenessnetworks.com
• upstack.com
• www.pearanalytics.com
• www.edoorways.com
• www.phonebooth.com
• Pubstop by www.imagespacemedia.com

Yesterday in the last session of the day at SXSW Mark Cuban and Avner Ronen had what I consider to be one of the better debates of the show so far. While it was a bit over the top and some ego’s in play, both made great points about the future of how we are going to be consuming media from traditional broadcast sources. Mark contends that the web in it’s current state cannot support large segment of subscribers getting there HD content via an IP connection which is probably true. Avner contends that the younger generation wants their traditional content via Internet.

From Mark’s comments it is obvious that the only way he would make HDNet available on the net is by guaranteeing 500,000 subscribers a month and the entity would have to pay base card rates for the right to get the content aka $2.00 to $3.00 per subscriber.

Mark feels the Ala Carte model will never scale and doubtful that companies like ESPN would make their programming available anytime soon to companies that would like to make it available to consumers on the net.

I will have a much more detailed commentary and sound bites on my next podcast because the breadth of the conversation was pretty wide.

The first true sessions are about to kick off, but I want to relay to you my experience over the past 4 hours have been just hanging out and talking to people. One thing is for sure we live in a very small world. I have run into no less than 30 people I know personally in the new media space. I talked for a few minutes with Tim Street, Leo Laporte, Mark McCrery and a host of other familiar faces. I have also met no less than 20 new folks that will be fun to follow on Twitter and also potential business clients.

I read someplace that the best thing to do is say Hi to everyone. Folks tend to be a little shy until you say hello and wow some great conversations have resulted. The networking power of this conference for me thus far only 4 hours into is living up to the reputation I expected.