Bill Solominsky

I’d like to wish myself a warm welcome back to my blog. To my loyal readers… make that reader, I’ve neglected writing because I’ve been doing work for a local web startup. However, with SXSW in full swing, I figured there is no better time to get back in the swing of things.

There are plenty of other sources that can give you in-depth details of all of the panels and parties at SXSW. I’m going to give you my brief take-aways from the panels that I attended.

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age Doug Rushkoff

My thoughts were a featured speaker would be a great way to get into SXSW, especially since I was having trouble deciding which panels to attend. I lasted about 20 minutes and did not follow any of this talk. I knew I was in trouble when I did not get his analogy of tripping on acid at an ACDC concert in the parking lot with… whatever he was comparing it to.

Organizational Pitfalls on the Path to Multichannel Experience

I would have gotten much more out of this had I not spent the first half in the other panel. Seemed to be some good discussion, although hard to hear in the back of the room, about communication among different departments within an organization, and how they relate to customers. Also a tinge of Managerial Accounting in the question of which department, online or offline, can claim the sale.

Chasing Virtual Good in the Real World

The co-founder and CEO of Gowalla, Josh Williams, gave this panel. I was excited for this because 1) Gowalla is local to Austin, 2) I’m highly interested in Location Based Services (have been since long before the wide use of GPS), and 3) I was lucky enough to check in and win an Oktomat camera! The Oktomat icon that I found was the first one, so I now have a #1 item in my Gowalla vault.

The talk had parts of ones that Josh has done before, describing his path to Gowalla, but there was one comment that stood out. He’s seen that where there is a number, people want it to go up. Basically saying that competition and game play is innate in many people. Examples included RSS subscribers, Facebook likes, Twitter followers… any number that can be increased, the owner will try to increase it.

Pay TV vs. Internet: The Battle for Your TV Mark Cuban, Avner Ronen

This debate was interrupted a few minutes in with a false fire alarm that emptied the Austin Convention Center. Once it resumed, it was as spirited as I had hoped. I went to this session because I grew up in Pittsburgh, as did Cuban, and I wanted to hear him speak. Hopefully one day he’ll be able to buy the Pirates and put a winning product on the field, but that was not the topic of this session. Mark’s theme that kept coming up was that on the internet, you are one of basically infinite options. Marketing becomes prohibitively expensive in this situation to stand out.