What the CES or the Mobile World Congress is to gadgets, SXSW is to apps. I’m amazed by not only the number of apps that are launching, but by how prepared attendees are to try new apps out. Mobile-focused development has reached a tipping point. Read More »
Tech
Geo-local services were the center of attention at South by South West. Thanks to all the hoopla, Foursquare and Gowalla, the two major competing geo-location services managed to snag tens of thousands of new subscribers. Both companies had released updates to their apps before the event. Read More »
“Location wars” between rival services, unmet expectations of the Twitter keynote and the hordes of newbies crowding out regulars were some of the leading threads at SXSW. But I saw three things I think showed us the way social technology will work in the near future. Read More »
LikeCube combines metadata, user activity and personalization to help its clients, such as Qype, the European Yelp, recommend locations on a per-user basis. It works around the idea that the wisdom of the crowds isn’t smart enough to find the right place for everybody. Read More »
In a world of web-based services that depend on aggregating other data sources, your product will only be as strong as your weakest API call. We are seeing the emergence of new ecosystems of data built around cloud providers and popular APIs such as Twitter’s. Read More »
Picture a tech startup founder. Are they male, maybe around 27 years old, and a resident of Silicon Valley? Apparently that’s what it takes to build a tech startup according to the explicit and implicit wisdom shared at the Seed Combinator’s panel today at SXSW. Read More »
After attendees waited an hour see the event, Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ keynote at SXSW disappointed thanks to a lackluster product launch with @Anywhere, and a dull interview by Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque which had the audience tweeting complaints and finally leaving. Read More »
Google, to its credit, is rolling with the punches thrown in response to its Buzz launch. Members of the product team spoke on an inside-the-scenes panel at SXSW today, facing industry-wide criticism as well as cutting attacks over privacy issues from keynoter & researcher Danah Boyd. Read More »
Dealing with the awesome amounts of data generated by users and serving up relationships tied to that data quickly are forcing web-scale sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook to investigate a variety of home-built, open sourced solutions. Here’s what they are using and why it matters. Read More »
Today social technology theorist Clay Shirky delivered a fitting counterpoint to Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy at SXSW the day before. Where Boyd spoke of the danger of making information more public than users intended it, Shirky talked about new opportunities for sharing information. Read More »
How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year’s SXSW. Is privacy just a technical problem? Read More »
Researcher Danah Boyd brought fighting words to SXSW, where she delivered a well-received keynote on the subject of online privacy and publicity, calling out Google and Facebook for being cavalier with their users’ personal information, including repurposing it for a larger audience. Read More »
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