I embarked on my first trip to Austin to attend the 2010 SXSW Interactive Conference. Boy, I had no idea what I would learn and who I would meet. For five days I was in a bubble with 13,000 other digital professionals and all-around smart folks.  It was an immersive experience that blew me out of the water and rearranged my brain and how I think.

[caption id="attachment_404" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="photos by ShashiBellamkonda"][/caption]

Here’s a highlight of what I experienced/learned:

Future of Web: Google had a vendor booth with mini classes, I hopped in and watched an HTML5 presentation. All I can say is that I’m super excited about it.

Future of  Social Media: Saw tons of Twitter analytic tools and social management tools, here’s a few of them: Sobees, Social Toaster, and Reviewd. Hard to say which one will be the winner.

I learned in some of the sessions that corporations are learning the benefits of letting their employees use social media sites at work. They are also investing time and resources in educating their employees on how to represent their brand on Twitter or Facebook. I think the fear of negative backlash is diminishing and social media sites will be seen more as useful tools instead of time-sucks.

Fun New Sharing Tools: Witnessed some exciting demostrations of some tools used to communicate between designer/developer or the client: JING and Glass

Best Message: Checked out the authors of the Trust Agents (Chris Brogan and Julien Smith) and it was one of the most entertaining panels I attended. They were constantly cracking jokes with each other while re-emphazing their message of “Don’t Be Boring”, “Do Good Work” and “Don’t do something hard alone”. Simple messages but I felt like they were well received in the crowd.

Future of Mobile: Mobile is huge, lots of talk about how phones can unlock the barrier between continents and enable anyone to get the information they need. There was a lot of focus on mobile ads and commerce, should be fun to see how that changes over the next year. Paypal and Volusion announced their ability to make shopping on the phone a painless process.

Tons o’Fun: Lots of goofy and fun stuff too- FreshBooks was passing out free bacon while I was standing in line to get into a party. The app “Foodspotting” had games to play.  Lots of people were trying to be the mayor of places through FourSquare,  I played a round of a game of “werewolf“, and so much more than is hard to capture without a photo.

Can’t wait to return a year from now and experience the conference all over again!

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