Saturday, March 10th

Well, today’s my first day here…I got up at 3:30 so I could get down to Austin and meet everyone in time to get registered, etc. Make sure to get here early when you register…the line gets long very quickly.

Panel: 10:00 am - Emerging Social and Technology Trends
This was pretty lame and the panelists only went on about obvious stuff, so I skipped out after about 10 minutes.

Panel: 10:00 am - A Decade of Style
This was a nice discussion, if only because I got to see some influential people: Doug Bowman, Molly Holzchlag, Chris Wilson, and Eric Meyer. Essentially, the discussion was about the current state of CSS, how it’s progressed, and what we need to work with it better. Doug and Molly brought up two of my favorites: variables/constants support and better layout for columns rather than using floats like they were never intended.

Overall, a good discussion, but nothing new for me.

Panel: 11:30 am - Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses
I really enjoyed this panel…I’ve been trying to think of how to monetize a lot of my side projects, and there were some really good comments and ideas for how to do things. A couple things stood out to me: 1) spending 50% of your time marketing/selling your products or services is about right, especially during startup. 2) Using contractors, rather than hiring full-time employees saves expenses and other hassles. 3) Donation-based systems where people can feel like they’re actually giving a gift are a good way of making extra money, especially for a service. Ze Frank’s Gimme Some Candy is a great example.

A good mix of repeating old stuff with new and fresh ideas.

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All right, I’m done posting about the panels. Here’s what I found out about SxSW: you can go to all the panels you want, but the real benefit comes when everyone’s hanging out afterwards talking about how they run their businesses and applications. It’s about collaborating in real time with people that are a lot like you. That’s the real benefit to going to conferences in general–the human element.

I really enjoyed hanging out with the rest of the guys from innerTee and chatting about ideas–that was truly my favorite time of the entire weekend. Thanks to Miles and Jamie for sponsoring the trip; I appreciate it.