go@ideamarket.ca |  Phone: 403-872-3110  |  Fax: 1-866-515-0076  |  Location

SXSW: Best Of.

Tuesday, 31 March 2009 11:04

We've been back at work in the office for over a week now, and I don't know about the rest of the crew, but I still wish we were on SXSW leave. We can sum up our "nerd conference" experience in one word: AWESOME. We loved Austin, we learned lots (relevant to our industry and about our team) and met amazing people. But that's a short short blog entry and really doesn't show the breadth of our adventure into the heart of the Lone Star state. In our own words, here's how we experienced SXSWi 2009.

 

ERIN:
• The people. The people of Austin are so friendly, and then on top of that you meet all sorts of interesting creative people from all over the world. Daniel was our generous host, we had burritos with some fantastic Hawaiians , we hung out with Will from California and the Palantir folks from Chicago, so great.
• The food! Flap Happy Crepes = Win
• The atmosphere. Everyone sharing their knowledge and creativity, and the lack of rockstar attitude that all of these brilliant people have. Everybody just seemed to want to discuss ideas and have a good time. And seriously, where else can you find a Harvard researcher telling you all about lolcats?

CARSON:
For me, far and away the best part of SXSW was hanging out with the Idea Market team. Nothing helps you really get to know each other than lively debate about CSS frameworks followed by immense portions of barbequed meat and a rousing edition of OK! Happy Cogaoke (karaoke hosted by Happy Cog ).

Randomly, other highlights were:
• meeting Paul Boag & Marcus Lillington from Boagworld and sitting in on their live show
• finally going to a concert where a guy with a giant head cooked bacon on stage and served it to the crowd
• seeing and listening to smart and funny guys like Merlin Mann and Andy Budd
• The Cathedral of Junk
• accidently interrupting a Jeffrey Tambor interview
• the CMS showdown and Steve/Joomla’s impressive showing there

NICOLE:
For me, the best parts of SXSWi were:
• Telling aforementioned Will from California that we do have grizzlies in Canada: I even ride one to work.
• Attending the world-premiere of Objectified (by the same dude that did Helvetica - the film, not the actual typeface)
• Seeing the unimaginably long men's room lineup compared to the TINY lineup for the women's washroom. (An explanation? Two words: Tech conference.)
• Seeing Heather Armstrong in person at her UR Blog Sux panel (along with the white guy from "Stuff White People Like" and Ben Huh, the CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger).
• A troll hitting on Steve
• Oh, and food. Too much amazing food to mention, but Erin's right.. those crepes rocked.

STEVE:
For me the best bits were:

  • Presenting a panel on open source content management systems .
  • Sitting in on a session by Jeffery Zeldman from Happy Cog . He's one of the guys who really gets the internet and its possibilities.
  • Going out for amazing meal after meal with new friends and of course the amazing team from Idea Market.
  • A troll hitting on me. I mean who doesn't want that!
  • Having dinner and drinks with the folks at Palentir and Matt Mullenweg from Automattic /WordPress
  • Running from the world-premiere of Objectified to the live recording of Boagworld with Carson.
  • Attending 4 parties in one night!

Twitter Updates