I have to be in the "Green Room" an hour before my 11.30 panel to prepare, so I don't catch any of the 10am panels, unfortunately. But, I do get the charger from Dav so my hiptop can be charged up for the panel. Adam, Mie, Molly and I spend a good hour getting the conversational wheels rolling, which really smooths things over for the panel.
We all take pics and moblog them up on stage while waiting to start. I feel like the panel itself went pretty well. Everyone got some good points across, Adam put good questions out there and most of the questions from the crowd were good. It is too bad we only had an hour as we felt we were really just getting going by then.
One discussion point concerned what had changed culturally in the world of moblogging since 1IMC in Japan. I had two points I wanted to get across: from the user standpoint, hiptop Nation certainly shows that we have moved from early-adopter, techie users to everyday people as well as the young urban market T-Mobile is courting. As someone said, this stuff really becomes more exciting the more mundane it gets, i.e. as the technology fades into the background, we see the interesting uses emerge.
My other point is that the media has moved from "Look what these geeks are doing now" to "Cameraphones - can they destroy your life? Film at 11" style stories. Once they get over that, I hope they can focus on the interesting usage patterns already emerging.
One interesting bit is that while not everyone there had a hiptop, just about everyone knew what it was. So, go go Danger marketing group :)
Oh yeah, guacamole
Lunch (at Las Manitas) was fantastic. Maine lacks any authentic Mexican food, so getting some good chips and guacamole was a big highlight of my day. Also got to talk to even more interesting folks. Pretty much, that happened non-stop unless you bothered to sleep.
Back at the conference, the Moveon.org keynote is a lot of fun and beyond standing room only (people were sitting down the aisles).
What I notice here is that people rush out of the panels so they can get the most out of meeting with people in the hallways in between talks. Around this point, I meet and chat with Kathryn Yu (who I had traded a few emails with a while back) for a few minutes.
I don't have much to say about the Wireless Future Scenarios panel except that I should have went to the Joe Trippi panel instead :) Conversely, the Wireless Commons panel was both informative and entertaining, and had the best Q&A session of any panel I attended.
Then, back to the Hotel San Jose for more drinks, cheese and olives. And of course, fun people. This time, the group is a bit bigger and I bounce around from conversation to conversation. I meet Liz, who also happens to be a hiptop user/fan. I happily lighten my load and give her some hiptop stuff.
So pleasant is the atmosphere at the Hotel San Jose patio and pool area I feel inertia kicking in and suspect I might just hang out there the rest of the night.
Acted upon by an outside force
But as it turns out, I don't. Instead I get into a great conversation with Evany, June and Kristin of Webmonkey fame. We then all headed off to some downtown bar instead. Drinking and good times ensued. Ran into Dav and Mie again for a bit before finally heading back to the hotel. I needed time to wind down so I packed up and watched weird cartoons. Then sleep.
Appendix A:
hiptop thoughts
Appendix B:
more on SXSW 2004
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