The Things That Got Us Excited From South By Southwest 2013:
The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals that was held last week (March 8-17) in Austin, Texas, is an annual festival that hosts film, music and interactive technology. The music festival is one of the largest in the world featuring new artist, established artist and disc jockeys. The film category focuses on new directing talent with independent films as well as big-budget films. With the interactive technology conference, we see emerging technology from different entrepreneurs, which has earned SXSW the reputation of being a breeding ground for new ideas.
This year we’ve been waiting for “the next big thing” in social media, mobile apps and tech to emerge from the South by Southwest Interactive. Why you may ask? Well, some of the big powerhouses like Twitter and Foursquare came out of SXSW! This is a marketer’s fantasy land!
After much anticipation, we found that unfortunately there weren’t many new ready-to-launch so called “powerhouses” like we have seen in previous years. But don’t you fret! There are a bunch of interesting tech startups that are generating buzz, that have us excited!
First thing to excite us is Speakerfy, which is a social way to listen to music across devices. This app lets users wirelessly sync music between different internet-connected devices. It was actually a winner of the “Pitch Shaq” contest! This is a great app because not only does it allow users to link their playlists with others, but you can also sync up everyone’s smartphones, tablets and iPods to broadcast through the speakers! That comes in handy for a day at the beach or other gatherings where there isn’t an audio system.
The next thing that has us really excited is Hyperactive! This is smart, social promotions for brands. This is one of the best things to happen in marketing. Hyperactive’s “Hashtagart” application creates a real-time mosaic of avatar images collected from social networks every time a fan publishes a status with a client’s marketing message. This encourages people to share a brand’s marketing message in order to be included in the mosaic in a fun way. Also, the company says Hyperactive’s platform is able to measure the number of clicks and activations each social media message associated with a promotion generates. Now that’s smart marketing.
LeadRocket also caught our eye. This concept is basically a social tool for salespeople. It achieves this by improving the way business owners and their sales reps communicate with clients over social media. You are able to listen for feedback, monitor clicks and count page views for pages on your site that originated from those social media posts. This way you will know exactly when a customer engages with your tweet or Facebook post. Ding! Ding! Ding! This is a winner in my book!
Lastly, South by Southwest also featured great gadgets like Leap Motion’s motion controller, Ouya’s game console and Makerbot 3-D printer. We are eager for the future releases and marketing campaigns for those products as well! All in all, SXSW 2013 was another success for new interactive technology and social media and we can’t wait to see what SXSW Spring 2014 has in store for us next year! Be sure to check out the links of these new technologies to be just as amazed as we were.
Author: Courtney Fabiano
Reference:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226065
http://sxsw.com/frontpage?page=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_by_Southwest
