SXSWi 2013 Recap

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 Back in March (3/7 - 3/13) I had a great time attending SXSW Interactive for the second year in a row (last year I wrote a short blog post as well). A couple of weeks ago I gave a 'lunch & learn' presentation at work giving an overview of SXSW and summarizing the highlights of my trip. For me, SXSW is all about broadening my perspective and exploring new ideas, and although it's somewhat of an overwhelming firehose of information to try to grok, I always come away from the conference feeling energized and inspired. Many of the sessions were recorded and are available as audio streams from SoundCloud here).

This year I found the sessions/events I attended to fall roughly into one of three main recurring themes: 'Hardware is the New Software', 'Harnessing Big Data', and 'Collaboration/Innovation'.  Here is a categorized list of the sessions I attended (marked with a ☆), along with some other interesting ones I couldn't make it to, with links to slide decks, video/audio recordings, etc.

  Hardware is the New Software

 3D Printing

DIY/Maker 

Internet of Things 

Wearable Tech 

  Harnessing Big Data

Quantified Self 

Data Science 

Personalized Health 

Collaboration / Innovation 

Lean / Agile  (Lean Startup mini-conference)

Crowdsourcing 

Sharing Economy 

Misc 

 

SXSW Interactive Recap

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I found the SXSW Interactive sessions I attended to be, in nearly every case, thought provoking and of a fairly high quality, and I typically found myself jotting down many notes and things to followup, such as books or web sites mentioned. Over the course of the conference, three core trends or convergence points emerged, at least for me, given my intrinsic interests/biases: (1) lifestreaming/tracking/curation, (2) leveraging technologies for creative collaboration, and (3) data mining/analytics. Each of these (admitedly, rather broadly defined) areas has an associated set of panel sessions, apps, companies, books, etc, and over the next few weeks I will try to give a meaningful overview of each one.

In the mean time, I think it's useful to at least summarize the sessions I attended:

Friday, 3/9/12

Saturday, 3/10/12

Sunday, 3/11/12

Monday, 3/12/12

Tuesday, 3/13/12

Wednesday, 3/14/12

Thursday, 3/14/12