SXSW Interactive Days 4 and 5
Mar 16 2010

Just to round out the series of posts on SXSW Interactive, I feel I must finish this one.  I’m not particularly motivated to do so, but here’s a recap.  On Day 4, I showed up and checked out one of the Accelerator panels where companies were pitching in the personal social media category.  One was about sharing your favorite foods on the iPhone and another one was about getting opinions on what you were wearing before you went to a big event by sending people pictures of what you were wearing.  Both were interesting, but I couldn’t really see how they would scale and make significant amounts of money.

Then I went with my friend Cindy Lo who runs Red Velvet Events to a keynote speech by Gary Vaynerchuck who hosts Wine Library TV.  He was mighty entertaining and dropped the f-bomb several times.  He wrote a book called Crush It that he mentioned a lot and was overall very motivating.  Then Cindy and I went to go hear the keynote of Umair Haque of Havas Media Lab, who I think also wrote for Harvard Business Review, interviewing twitter founder Evan Williams.  About 10 minutes into the interview, I was bored to tears because Umair was so low energy and the questions he was asking were so dry.  I was wishing that Gary was interviewing Evan instead.  We left.  Because I had a headache and had to go pick up my kids from a friend of mine’s house who was so wonderful to watch them because they are off from Spring Break, I left the conference all together.  For some reason, the fact that there were seemingly thousands of people watching this unenlightening talk, made me feel kind of sick and I couldn’t stomach being there.

I sometimes get overwhelmed in crowds of people and the sensory overload of colors, sounds, and desperate people seeking meaning and attention in this world gets to me.  I couldn’t deal so I left. I decided not to go back on Day 5 (today) and instead go back to work where the desperation is slightly easier to handle. 🙂  Then I had dinner with some great long time friends who were visiting from Dallas at another one of our friend’s houses in Austin.  I had a wonderful home cooked Indian vegetarian food while catching up with friends who accept me for who I am…even if I don’t really know who I am at the moment.

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