I had a blast at SXSWi this year. You couldn’t tell we are coming off the worst recession in decades because the city was buzzing with tons of energetic entrepreneurs and attendance this year was way up. I stopped by the Facebook Developers conference (via UStream) for a brief moment but lost interest so I headed out to the parties (via Leo Laporte’s live stream). The Mashable party was buzzing and there were a ton of cool people from as far away as Romania (Yola.com) and South Africa. A smart woman from South Africa said that the flight was 32 hours to Austin. Of course Pete Cashmore was there with Robert Scoble and Molly Wood from CNet. Pete said that he had to book the venue for the party 1 year in advance. I followed Leo to Gary Vaynerchuk’s party where Gary was passing out 100 bottles worth of wine and Kevin Rose showed up. The talk of the conference was not Four Square or Gowalla, but rather Leo Laporte’s crowd surfing at the Digg Party.
So I wasn’t actually at SXSWi this year but it was fun to live vicariously through Leo Laporte’s live stream and following people on Twitter. Hopefully I can make it out to Austin in the next few years.
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mager/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
