Alex Stone

So for those that don’t know already, this past 4-ish days were spent in Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive event. Some call SXSWi (or “South By”, if you need to get to your  buzzword-filled rant on social marketing quicker) a spring break for web folks and it seems that a lot of people come here for different reasons.

Of the people I got a chance to really have conversations with, SXSWi is a place to come and get a good feel for the trends ahead. Gowalla, Foursquare, Twitter, etc were all launched at SXSWi. Some seem to come here for the endless networking opportunities. Every night there are huge tech-sponsored events and Austin seems to be jam-packed with places to just meet people. I managed to meet a few really cool people just wondering around, waiting for a talk or panel to begin, while getting around in the ACC and the Hilton halls and escalators, or just waiting in line at the One Taco truck.

The People / Run-Ins

Amongst the few run-ins I had, I managed to run into Marco Arment, one of the developers I keep an eye on, to tell him I dug his work. I wish I could have stopped and talked to him longer. Next year, maybe. If he decides to go back. I spotted Leo Laporte and got a picture with him. Even told him about Super DVD Robot! and got a chuckle about the title (seriously: best. domain name. ever. - it’s a real attention-getter, it seems). I also tracked down the Flavors.me team to deliver some adoration, too. Only people I didn’t track down were the AnyClip, Appcelerator, and Vimeo folks.

Next year, though.

As my first time at SXSWi, I didn’t know what to make of it, exactly, but before I even landed in Austin, I started getting a feel for it.

On my connecting flight from Houston to Austin, I struck up a conversation with the man seated next to me to find that he was in charge of the mobile division at TweetDeck. We talked phones and cracked jokes about the airline industry, and upcoming projects. It was awesome.

Super DVD Robot!, an Actual Business Model?

SDR! was always meant to be a hobby project. Something I could have on my resume that was a solid showcase of my skills as an all-around web developer as well as a testing ground of UX elements and tricks I wanted to try on the backend. Not only that, but SDR! is such a niche thing (seriously? people actually buy movies in the age of Netflix/Redbox/piracy?) that I didn’t think it would be of interest to anyone outside of my friends and maybe a handful of others.

I was (somewhat) wrong. A large majority of the people I demo’d SDR! to thought the concept was great and agreed that it’s just missing a few features to make it huge.

Within 2 days of demo’ing SDR! to the SXSWi crowds, I realized there’s a business model buried in there. A damn’d good one, too. It just needs a bit more polish and a few more features and it’ll be there.

Not sure if you saw it yet, but I was interviewed by ProgrammableWeb? I was also interviewed by the Mashery team, but that’s not up anywhere, yet (and there’s no guarantee that it ever will be - if that changes, I’ll update this post).

After all the talking, the people, the popcorn, the endless-skewers of meat, the way-more-awesome-than-expected Austin area, the collection of new tech-related shirts, and trekking around SXSWi, I have come to the short conclusion that I’m not wasting my time. And that, my friends, is pretty huge.