Posts tagged sxsw
Which Apps Might Outlive SXSW
You can think of South by Southwest Interactive as a spring break for nerds: tens of thousands of people gathered in a strange city to indulge in things they might not normally try at home.
Beyond barbecue, tacos and live music, many of the 24,569 paid attendees at SXSWi found themselves leaning on old and new social-media apps to find their way around Austin. (Disclosure: I was a speaker at one of the conference’s hundreds of panels.)
In recent years, SXSW has become a stage for these apps to win a burst of publicity and new fans. Many of those debuts can sputter out later on, but some cross into pop culture: Twitter’s success since its 2007 SXSW launch doesn’t take 140 characters to explain, and Foursquare effectively cemented its transition from 2009-vintage fringe startup to mass medium at this year’s event.
Homeless People Are Wi-Fi Hotpots At SXSW
When the music portion of the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival kicks off tomorrow, Austin, Tex., officially reaches its zenith as a tangled knot of buzz bands, label reps and corporate sponsors trying their best to appear indie. Ensnarled in that muddle of Wayfarers and Telecasters will be a legion of journalists, bloggers and fans desperately in need of Wi-Fi connections so that they can be the first to break that new band to the unhip masses.
Austin streets aren’t the only highways and byways experiencing traffic jams. With so many craving a connection, the information superhighway is bumper-to-bumper.
Helping to alleviate all that bottlenecking is marketing agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. For this year’s SXSW festival, they’ve launched a controversial marketing charity campaign called Homeless Hotspots, in which homeless people are being used to serve as Wi-Fi hotspots.
T-shirts that read “I am a 4G hotspot” have been issued to the homeless who want to participate. Customers ravenous for Wi-Fi can pay what they want, either with cash or by PayPal, to obtain a hotspot device from the vendor and gain access to an online 4G network.
