Apple first announced the new Apple TV broadband set-top box on September 1, pricing it at $99 and announcing a new business model for streaming rentals of TV episodes and movie files. With the new streaming model, Apple rents TV episodes from Fox and ABC for 99 cents, compared to the $1.99 price for standard definition episode downloads and HD downloads for $2.99.

To put that into perspective: Roku reported at the beginning of this year that it had sold 500,000 of its set-top devices after about a year-and-a-half on the market, and hopes to have sold more than a million of its box by the end of the year. So Apple is tracking well ahead of other, similar devices already in the market.

That said, Apple TV is still very much a hobby when compared to the other products it makes. Apple sold 4.2 million iPads and 3.9 million Macs in the third quarter, as well as 9 million iPods and 14 million iPhones. While those products were available all quarter, compared to just the last several weeks like the Apple TV, it’s clear that it could be some time before Apple’s video set-top box becomes a significant portion of Apple’s business.

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Users come to love services like Facebook and Twitter (even Foursquare) so much that it resembles a national crisis among some circles when one of their sites goes down for a few hours. How do they try to avoid these occurrences in the future? Well, they spend some of those millions improving their physical infrastructures and creating specialized software to address unique needs. Greenpeace aside, I don’t recall hearing any complaints about Facebook’s first data center, nor about Twitter’s planned data center, and these companies aren’t even making money.

So why is it that financial analysts and shareholders get so up in arms when massive public web companies like Amazon or Google embark on spending kicks? After all, they bring in billions in revenue each year, and Google is responsible for more web traffic than Facebook and Twitter combined. Because it detracts from near-term profitability, that’s why. Om calls such analysts “idiots and short-term thinkers,” and he’s spot-on with his analysis of the situation.

Imagine if Google’s search engine, or its paid Google Apps service, went down as frequently as Twitter. What about Amazon Web Services, which hosts a good number of popular web sites and relatively important enterprise applications? What if these companies never rolled out new services because that would require spending more money on infrastructure? The answer is that they wouldn’t be too popular for too long. Companies delivering services via the web have to spend money – on infrastructure – to make money.

I can only imagine the number of cloud computing providers who’d love to have the problem of needing to scale to meet demand, and actually having the cash to do so. That day will never come if they don’t do infrastructure right in the first place.

When we’re talking about companies for which millions today might mean billions tomorrow, it might behoove shareholders and analysts to lighten up a little bit on the bottom line.

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I, Cloud (From High Scalability) I agree that cloud computing probably will result in more job-shifting than job-cutting, but I wouldn’t be so sure that software can’t use context to make human-like judgment calls. (see, e.g., IBM’s Watson supercomputer).

Verizon Medical Data Cloud on Track to Serve 350,000 Doctors (From SearchCloudComputing.com) It looks like the “Field of Dreams” logic works for data clouds, too: If you build it, they will come. Even one of three doctors uploading records there could mean a big improvement in health care efficiency.

What separates New Relic from other APM providers is that its RPM service monitors live software from the inside instead of simply monitoring external web application metrics. RPM comes in five editions, ranging from the free Lite version, which gives basic monitoring capabilities, up to the Enterprise version, which provides a range of capabilities to discover and cure performance issues. According to founder Lew Cirne, the internal view helps customers identify problems early and avoid “the thorniest issues,” citing the recent Foursquare outage as a problem that might have been avoided if the company could have been proactive in addressing the problem.

Formerly, New Relic supported only Java and Ruby web applications, but as of today, it also supports .NET and PHP applications. This is nothing new for cloud-based services, which tend to start with a focused offering and expand their customer bases as they grow by adding additional language support. Even larger companies like Google and Salesforce.com took this approach with their cloud offerings. More applications mean more money, after all.

New Relic’s already-expansive footprint would seem to underscore the value of its service and of the SaaS model. The company counts just about every cloud provider as a technology partner (Joyent and Heroku offer it as an add-on in their offerings), and the company has experienced 200 percent growth annually since launching in 2008. Cirne says the company presently has 5,600 customers running the service in production, with 900 of them paying New Relic directly. Among them are large enterprises running New Relic within their data centers.

Perhaps more important than the product, however, is how the economics of New Relic underscore the power of the SaaS model –- specifically, the freemium model prevalent among SaaS 2.0 vendors. Nine hundred paying customers is no small feat when you consider that the company just increased its sales force to three from two a couple of weeks ago.  Cirne contrasts New Relic’s approach to that of Salesforce.com, which customers can’t start using without speaking with multiple salespeople, as well as to the last company Cirne founded, Wily (an on-premise APM vendor), which he sold to CA for $375 million.

When CA bought Wily, Cirne says it had 500 customers, 270 employees (about 150 of them in sales) and had raised $45 million. Keep in mind, New Relic just closed its latest round. Most of what it has accomplished was with about $10 million. Cirne says $20 million is way more than New Relic needs to achieve profitability, but it’s good to have some extra cash to capture opportunities in what he thinks will be a billion-dollar business.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons user KlausFoehl.

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One is its evolution from an internally developed virtualization-management solution at megabank Credit Suisse into, a spinoff company selling that software to the greater IT community in 2008. Credit Suisse was managing thousands of virtual servers and desktops while DynamicOps’ underlying Virtual Resource Manager software was developed, so scalability isn’t an issue. In fact, said VP of Marketing Rich Bordeaux, one customer currently manages 30,000 VMs and virtual desktops and is looking to have more than 60,000 within 18 months.

Furthermore, because the bank wasn’t about to move certain application from physical servers, physical-resource management is inherent in the Cloud Automation Manager. The new features in Cloud Automation Manager are what make it truly cloudy, though: multitenancy, self-service provisioning, and the ability to provision and manage resources from Amazon EC2.

DynamicOps’ other ace is that Cloud Automation Manager is an integral part of Dell’s recently announced Virtual Integrated System (VIS) offering. The DynamicOps software is the foundation of the VIS Self-Service Creator component. VIS is Dell’s attempt to combat competitors’ converged infrastructure solutions (e.g., Cisco UCS and HP BladeMatrix), so such an OEM deal should help validate DynamicOps’ claims of enterprise-readiness (if the Credit Suisse heritage doesn’t already do so).

Of course, it’s hard to get too excited about any cloud software right now before organizations actually start buying it. Web hosts and MSPs have been buying up software from vendors like VMware, Cloud.com and 3tera, but most other businesses appear to be doing no more than dipping their toes in the water right now.  DynamicOps has a strong virtualization-management history, though, and an existing customer base to tout (and sell), so perhaps it can break in where others appear to be left outside.

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Oracle today announced a slew of new products that, at least on paper, deliver one of the most comprehensive enterprise computing solutions around. The company has extended the concept of “stack” further than any other technology player, by covering the hardware from compute to storage, and every piece of software in between. While competitors like HP and potentially IBM, Dell, or Cisco might one day get there, Oracle appears far ahead of the other big technology vendors aiming to deliver the next-generation infrastructure for the data center. Currently, many of the hardware players will still have to turn to VMware if they can’t do the software themselves. Oracle has built and bought what it needs to go it alone.

More specifically, Oracle announced the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a tightly coupled hardware and software appliance that packs the most powerful CPUs, gobs of DRAM, InfiniBand networking, solid state drives, and high-capacity SATA drives into a server. The configurations come in quarter-, half-, and full-rack configurations and can scale up to eight racks total. The specifications are indeed impressive, if you like the expensive hardware approach. Make no mistake; this is not the direction of scale-out, commodity hardware that many people refer to around cloud computing.

Instead, Oracle has positioned Exalogic as the one stop shop to provision virtual machines, middleware, and applications, to offer a tightly integrated hardware and software solution that will be beneficial for a large number of companies that don’t want to assemble their own infrastructure layers. Essentially, this is Oracle’s build-your-own private cloud for the Fortune 1000 set.

But Exalogic is just one piece of the overall puzzle. Oracle intends to couple many other pieces that should, in theory, provide a cloud-like infrastructure within a corporation. This includes its own version of Linux, dubbed Unbreakable Linux, an option that breaks away from strict Red Hat compatibility in order to take advantage of complimentary hardware and software capabilities, or a version of Oracle Solaris. Additionally, Oracle is touting Exalogic integration with WebLogic, its Java application platform, and Coherence, its distributed data manager. And of course, there’s Exadata, the precursor to Exalogic, which supports high-capacity, data-intensive workloads.

So what does this dizzying array of announcements mean? Here are my takeaways:

There’s still big business in integration. Plenty of customers have no interest or intent to qualify different hardware components, test for compatibility, manage configurations and optimize for performance. A pre-configured solution makes those headaches go away. Yes, cost is a factor (integration doesn’t come cheap), but obviously, not for everyone.

Java will be the money-maker for cloud computing over the next few years. There’s a reason VMware focuses on Java, that Google App Engine added Java, and that Oracle now emphasizes Java performance. Enterprises pay big bucks for Java speed, and those moving to cloud architectures want as much Java performance as they can get.

The proverbial “you can move your apps” card must be there. Similar to VMware and its emphasis on application portability to VMforce or AppEngine, Oracle is also making application portability possible to Amazon EC2. Oracle plans to create specific Amazon Machine Instances for Oracle apps.

More tightly coupled solutions simplify an increasingly complex stack. With architects now needing to plan for compute, middleware, data processing and analytics all at the same time, the complexity can be overwhelming. Oracle aims to simplify that by providing a set of pre-configured options for those that want to focus more on their business and less on their technology.

Specs still sell. Oracle’s news announcements about Exalogic and Exadata read like a sports car fanatic’s wish list. The underlying components still matter to many, and Oracle has spared no expense to make sure they include all the bells and whistles.

All in all, the payoff from the hardware and expertise acquired from Sun appears to be showing. Oracle has amassed a comprehensive stack that covers the major software layers, plus an impressive array of server and storage power. Oracle’s expertise in middleware shouldn’t be discounted as the race to improve the various Platforms-as-a-Service continues.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Oracle, and as I also mentioned, for VMware following VMworld, will be how to continue sales momentum with a product line that includes much more than traditional Oracle software markets. But don’t discount Larry Ellison in any of this. Though he mocked the cloud-washing early on, his company now has a comprehensive cloud portfolio. He knew hardware would be needed to compete with HP, IBM, Dell, and Cisco; he got a snazzy portfolio on the cheap in Sun; and he knows how to pull in top executive talent to keep the machine moving forward. This game is far from over.

Gary Orenstein is the Host of The Cloud Computing Show.

Image via Flickr user yatra.

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Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

• Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
• Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
• Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Here are a few tips for meeting organizers to help make sure that they have a great meeting over the phone (with “phone” being loosely defined here to include Skype and other online real-time audio):

1. Give people plenty of notice for the meeting, if possible. Ideally, try to schedule your phone meetings with plenty of advance notice to make sure that people have time to prepare. I know this isn’t always possible, but a little planning ahead of time can really help. Keep in mind that what seems like two days’ notice to you might be considerably less for international participants who won’t see your request until their morning, which could mean they have considerably less time to prepare.
2. Keep time zones in mind. In cases where people are spread out across time zones, taking the time to find out where people are physically located so that you can pick a time that is most convenient will help your attendees be alert and prepared for the meeting. With phone numbers becoming less tied to your location, don’t assume that you know where people are based on a phone number. Take the time to ask where they are and find out if they have a preferred meeting time. For example, I work with one person in Finland who prefers 10pm calls to 5pm calls, so he can have meetings after his kids are in bed.
3. Send a written agenda and materials out via email (or post them online) when you schedule the meeting, or no later than 24-48 hours before the meeting, when possible. This gives people plenty of time to prepare for the meeting, especially for people who primarily speak other languages. Giving people who are less fluent in your language a little extra time to assimilate the information can make a big difference in their level of participation. Don’t forget to include the phone number or other logistics for the meeting with local dial-in numbers in other countries, if they’re available.
4. Send a reminder about an hour before the meeting with any last minute updates. This reminder gives people one last chance to prepare for the meeting and can help forgetful participants, especially those for whom the meeting is at a non-traditional time.
5. As people join the meeting, make sure that they announce themselves so that you know who is attending the call. A quick prompt like, “welcome, who just joined us?” can help people know that they should announce themselves. I do this even for Skype calls where you can see who joined because it gives you time to make audio adjustments for anyone who can’t be heard clearly.
6. Double-check that everyone has all of the materials for the meeting. Start the meeting with some introductions (if needed) and a quick review of the agenda and what you plan to cover. This gives you a final check that people know how the meeting will be conducted, and you can make sure that they have all of their materials before the meeting.
7. Consider using online meeting tools. There are many tools that can be used in real-time to manage the content during the meeting and make sure that people are all looking at the same pages of the materials (GoToMeeting, for example). You should make sure that the solution you pick will work for most people given their bandwidth rates and system configuration. For example, if you have some people running on Macs, don’t pick a tool that only works on Windows. I always consider this an optional step for international meetings, especially if you have people located in countries where maintaining a stable Internet connect can be a challenge for people calling in from home outside of the work day. Using these tools doesn’t replace the need to send materials out in advance, since you want to give people time to assimilate the information and have a copy as a backup in case they can’t get connected during the meeting.

Meetings held over the phone where you can’t see the other people are challenging enough, but add international participants, time zones and language challenges into the mix, and you can end up with a seriously unproductive meeting. Taking the time to prepare and keeping a few of these tips in mind can help your meeting go much more smoothly.

What are your tips for making sure that your international phone meetings are successful and productive?

Photo by Flickr user StephenMitchell used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

The challenge in corporate web working is to be able to consistently prove that you can accomplish just as much, if not more, while working remotely as you could in a traditional office setting. You’re also fighting the perception some people have that “working from home” is really a euphemism for goofing off.

As a result, you need to work extra hard to make sure that people know you are productive, and there are so many things you can do to ruin your chances of being a successful. There are also plenty of things that your company can do that will make it difficult for you to be successful, but I want to focus on how avoid the many things that you can do to limit your chances of being a successful corporate web worker based on your behavior when working remotely.

Here are just a few examples of ways to make sure that you’re never allowed to work remotely again.

1. Refer to working from home as a “day off.”
2. Brag about how little you accomplish while telecommuting.
3. Spend all day on Twitter and Facebook talking about everything except work. Make sure that your co-workers and/or your boss is connected to you on those networks so they can see your bragging.
4. Start a side business and spend all day working on your personal projects, instead of work.
5. Don’t bother to set any goals or figure out what materials you need to do your work from home.
6. Better yet, make sure that you leave some important documents or technology at the office to make sure that you can’t do much work.
7. Make sure that you don’t have the infrastructure you need for working at home (such as a phone headset or solid Internet connection).
8. Squeeze in as many household chores as possible and plan to do big piles of laundry, dishes and home improvement tasks while you are at home.
9. Ignore all of your email and don’t respond to any messages.
10. Don’t answer the phone or return voicemails.
11. Make sure that you set your IM status to offline and ignore any incoming IM.
12. Take long naps. Bonus points for sleeping through scheduled meetings.
13. Fall asleep during your conference calls. Snoring is optional.
14. Refuse to speak during conference calls, especially if someone asks you a question.
15. Don’t bother to mute the phone line on conference calls when your kids or pets come tearing through the room.
16. Spend all day catching up on your soap operas, cartoons or other television shows.
17. Take conference calls or other business calls with the television on in the background.
18. Don’t bother to change out of your pajamas when you have video conferences over your webcam.
19. Don’t accomplish anything tangible or complete any deliverables.
20. When your boss asks what you did when you were working from home, just shrug and say “not much of anything.”

Some of these are obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, but they do represent real things that people sometimes try to get away with when telecommuting. This isn’t to say that you can never to a load of laundry while working from home, but any of these activities can get in the way of being productive or prevent you from coming across as a responsible professional. We need to think carefully about how our actions might be perceived by our managers, co-workers, customers or other business people that we interact with on a regular basis. At the end of the day, most people are measured by their output. If you consistently get a lot of great quality work accomplished, your chances of success are much higher, but you don’t want a few bad habits to reflect poorly on your work.

What are your favorite examples of what not to do as a corporate web worker?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Vaarsi used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Telecommuting and working from remote locations works well for me, and it has worked for many, but not all, of the people that I’ve managed. I’ve seen examples of both extremes: people who were incredibly successful as web worker and those who got their telecommuting privileges revoked.

Being able to work from home is a nice benefit, but only if you can continue to successfully perform your job, and there are a number of things that you can do to help improve your chances of success. Here are my top tips for being a successful corporate web worker.

1. Office space. Start by finding a place where you can work remotely without distraction. I’m one of the lucky ones with my own dedicated home office with a door that I can close to distractions. If the best place you have to work is a kitchen table and you have family or roommates at home, working from home might not be the best option. The key is to find some arrangement where you can focus on your work. This could be a location in the house, a coworking space or even a garage / workshop.
2. Set goals. Know what you plan to accomplish and set goals for what you will accomplish when you are working remotely. Obviously, you should do this anyway, but it becomes even more important to have solid goals when you are working outside of the office, since you’ll need to be able to justify your efforts to your manager who can’t just walk by your desk to see you hard at work.
3. Know what you need. Make sure that you have everything that you need to accomplish those goals that you outlined. Do you have access to that document you need to update and solid connectivity to all of your networks in the office? Nothing ruins your day like planning to complete a specific task and realizing that you left some critical piece of documentation or technology sitting in the office.
4. Great output. In most corporate environments today, you’re judged on your output. If you can demonstrate to your manager that you have consistently high quality output while working remotely, your chances of success are pretty good.
5. High volume of output. Quantity is just as important as quality when it comes to working remotely. If all you have to show for your day of remote work is one really high quality email, you probably aren’t going to be successful. Make sure that you are cranking out the deliverables to prove that you are working hard and not goofing off.
6. Focus on work. Stay focused on your work-related activities, and remember that you are working from home, not taking a day off. Save the laundry, dishes, and other household chores for after you finish a solid day of work. You should be doing the same work, just from a different location.
7. Be present. Because you aren’t in the office, you’ll need to find other ways to keep in touch with your coworkers. Stay online, keep your IM client open and use any other collaboration tools available so that your colleagues can see that you are online and available to them.
8. Be responsive. Respond quickly to email and phone messages to demonstrate that you really are working and that people can get answers from you regardless of your physical location.
9. Planning. Plan your remote work days to focus on a couple of big tasks that require quiet concentration, but that you can show off at the end of the day as solid accomplishments. I like to save big creative tasks for the days I’m working at home where I can focus with fewer distractions. Creating reports, documentation or writing presentation materials are all great remote tasks for me.
10. Show off. I know, nobody likes a showoff, but the harsh reality in business (any business) is that people are busy, and if you don’t tell your manager how awesome you are, then she might not notice. Make sure that you take the time to let your manager know exactly what you accomplished when you were working remotely. If she knows that you will do a great job regardless of where you are doing the work, then she’ll have no reason to doubt your ability to work remotely, and it won’t reflect negatively on you when it comes time for that yearly performance review.

What are your secrets for being a successful corporate web worker?

Photo by Dawn Foster used with permission.

Karen recently wrote a post that has some interesting thoughts on why it is important to take the time to have face-to-face meetings with clients, so I’ll skip past the question of “why” and move right into some tips and techniques for finding ways to get people together in person when they are spread out all over the globe.

1. Spend time optimizing the online experience. While this post is about how to get people together in the real world, don’t forget to spend time making the online collaboration experience a regular occurrence and a pleasant one. This will give people a starting point to get to know each other before you have your face-to-face event. Our team has regular online meetings, and plenty of ways for people to collaborate both formally and informally online. If you want more details on how to blend online and offline collaboration, Beth Kanter recently posted some good tips.
2. Schedule a yearly summit. If at all possible, plan a yearly gathering where people get together to learn and get to know each other. The team event that I mentioned earlier is a yearly event, and we are planning another summit for our open-source community that will have project-specific content. This type of yearly event is fairly common for the larger open-source projects. Not everyone can attend, but you can make it easier for people by rotating the meeting locations between the areas where you have the largest concentrations of people. You might even think about holding it somewhere off the beaten path in a location that is near an international airport, but not in the middle of a city with many distractions. While swanky downtown locations are nice, you have a much harder time getting people to work together and get to know each other if they are always sneaking out to go sightseeing.
3. Take advantage of other industry events. Look for events where you have groups of people attending and find a way to get everyone together. I’ve done this in the past by getting a formal track at a conference, and by taking advantage of informal gatherings and hosting a meetup or social activity for a group of people. The advantage here is that people are going to be attending anyway, and you can scale the meeting to fit your available time (both organizing time and attending time) and budget. I’ve attended events with big budgets where I’ve had someone buying all of the drinks and food, all the way down to gatherings with no budget. Both achieve the goal of getting everyone in one place to work together. Don’t let budget stand in the way of getting people together; organizing an informal meetup is something anyone can do.

There are many more ways to get people together in the same room even when you have people spread out across the globe. While it can be difficult and expensive to get people together, it is worth it in the long run. As Karen said in her recent post, “After spending just an hour with my clients, I had a significantly deeper sense of who they were, how they operated and their personalities. All of which will make me more productive in working with them in the future. Besides, when I email them now, or speak to them on the phone, I can see their faces in my mind’s eye.” Make the time and find the budget to get everyone together in real life, at least occasionally.

What are your tips for creative ways to get your online community or team together in person?

Photo by Dawn Foster, used with permission.

1. Parties. SXSW is all about the parties. Seriously. OK, maybe it’s more about the people and the conversations that you have at the parties. More on the parties in later tips.
2. Pronunciation. SXSW is correctly referred to as “South by Southwest” or”‘South by” for short. Never refer to SXSW as S-X-S-W.
3. Pace yourself. It isn’t unusual for various activities to continue well into the night. Nothing starts before about 9:30 a.m., so sleep in, plan for an afternoon nap if you need one, and pace yourself by not drinking too much or too early.
4. Skip the big parties. The big, official parties are usually too crowded to be able to move or have conversations with people, so skip those and head out to some of the smaller parties or informal gatherings. You can usually find these by asking about them on Twitter or keeping track of your friends on your favorite location-based social networking service.
5. Prepare to walk. Just assume that you will need to walk further than you expect. The convention center is huge, with sessions spread out all over it; you’ll probably want to walk somewhere for lunch, and many of the hotels and parties are a short hike away. Wear comfortable shoes and think carefully about how much gear you want to lug around all day. Consolidate everything into one bag, since it can be too easy to lose track of things in the crowd.
6. Arrive early. SXSW is a huge show, and it suffers from long lines and overcrowding. The line to get your badge on Friday is likely to be very long, so plan for something to do while you wait. You should also arrive early to keynotes and popular sessions, since they often fill up quickly and start turning people away or moving people into overflow viewing areas.
7. Power is scarce. Arrive with a full charge and don’t count on being able to easily find power. The back of many of the rooms and the hallways often have power, but you’ll find a huge crowd around most of the outlets. Consider bringing a backup battery if you have one or a power strip to share power.
8. Attend sessions. SXSW has some amazing speakers, so plan to attend the sessions. It doesn’t hurt to do some advance planning to work out which ones you want to attend, but you should also talk to people and be prepared to switch sessions based on feedback from others. If you get into a session that isn’t as great as you expected, take a quick look at Twitter to see what sessions people are talking about and move on. The number of sessions is overwhelming, so attend what you can, but keep in mind that in past years, the sessions have been released as podcasts after the event. I attend what I can in person and then catch up on a some others after the event by listening to the podcasts.
9. Crazy weather. The weather in Austin is unpredictable. I’ve seen it alternate between pouring rain and blinding sunshine or freezing cold and really warm, so dress in layers and bring a rain jacket or umbrella. Like most convention centers, the indoor temperature can also vary widely, so dressing in layers can also help while you are inside attending sessions, too.
10. Guacamole. The Iron Cactus makes fresh guacamole right at your table, and they have decent margaritas. Enough said.

These are my top SXSW tips. What are your favorite SXSW tips and tricks?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.