Meet Us @ SXSW
,When: 13–17 March 2015
Where: Austin, USA
What is it? With almost 80.000 people roaming streets and venues in Austin, Texas each year South By Southwest (aka SXSW aka Southby) is without a serious doubt the biggest annual bonanza of the creative industry on this planet. Actually it's three festivals in one: SXSW Film (13-21 March), SXSW Interactive (13-17 March) and SXSW Music (17-22 March).
Since SXSW's inception in 1987 as a more music-focused conference it has diversified succesfully into other creative domains and went from one record-breaking year to another (almost) ever since. Now playing in a class of its own, the SXSW mix of conference, festival and fair has seen keynotes/speeches/interviews from/with people like Al Gore (again in 2015), Mark Zuckerberg, Ray Kurzweil, Jimmy Wales, Johnny Cash and Edward Snowden (via streaming video of course). As the Interactive strand surpassed Film and Music over the years regarding overall attendance, notable tech developments like an early presentation of Twitter in 2007 and the launch of Foursquare in 2009 were also staged in Austin. With this legacy at hand, SXSW program makers now receive more than 3000 session proposals for the Interactive section alone, which they have to boil down to roughly 600 that will go live and on stage.
Why are we there?
With this vast amount of panels, workshops, sessions, keynotes and speeches covering our dedicated home turf–the future of media and media technology–to a large extent FOMO is definitely an issue at SXSW Interactive. The search term "journalism" alone unveals about 290 relevant sessions encompassing everything from "Engaged Journalism: Connecting with new audiences", "Drones for Good: Journalism and Crowdsourced UAVs", "The dramatic rise and impact of video journalism" and "Virtual Reality Journalism" to cite just a few topics from the first page of the search results. Planning your day from Y (Morning Yoga, yes indeed) to AAA (Access All Areas) therefore is key in order to make the most out of this unique wealth of information and gathering of creative minds around the ever more important fine line between content and technology.
We will thus do our best to deliver highlights and snapshots from the conference via our Twitter channel (Hashtag: #SXSW) and blog. As we love to network, you can also get directly in touch with DW Innovation's Linda Rath-Wiggins and Wilfried Runde, via twitter or live in Austin, to find out more and/or discuss topics.
