Not much news coming out of the annual computing-hipster gangbang in Austin, unless you count the risible panel that argued that 50% of Millenials would rather have no job at all than a job they hate. In related news, 50% of Millenials should be ground up into free meatloaf for the unemployed. If you can have horse in a meatloaf you can have a horse’s ass in a meatloaf…but I digress.
The thing that gave SXSWi a name in Silicon Valley was its fame as the launching pad for Twitter in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009. Twitter existed, but the splash it made at the conference as essentially a cheap and easy solution to blast-group-texting sent it on the rocket ride to where it is now. Foursquare, meanwhile, added gamification to the social check-in functions of Dodgeball (from the same author). But Foursquare had an advantage: it happened After iPhone. Once the iPhone was able to run apps and use its internal GPS for location services, it was possible to take the key social features of Dodgeball and abstract away the need to fill in a place and location via text message. Dodgeball was acquired by Google, died a slow neglectful death, and was forgotten. Foursquare conquered the location-based social networking space. Smartphone Time again.
Problem is, these things burn out quick. No real news out of SXSW this year, nothing interesting or captivating. You can’t turn it on like a switch, and “South-by” has rapidly turned into another promotional clusterfuck, devalued by expansion and overexposure (TED talks, anybody?) – I suppose it’s nice to let Austin feel like it’s vital to the technology world once a year for a long weekend, but there’s a reason Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook can all be found within fifty miles of one another.
Speaking of…it looks like Andy Rubin is out as head of Android within Google, to be replaced by him what runs Chrome OS. If I had to bet I’d say convergence is on the way, and not a moment too soon – ChromeOS is a nice idea but a niche application at best and the Chromebook Pixel is the 20th Anniversary Macintosh of Google. A convergence between Android and Chrome, with Chrome becoming the browser-based runtime for an Android environment that can go on Windows or Mac hardware…that would be interesting.