SXSW 2016 – Final Day 5
On the final day of the interactive portion at SXSW we begin to notice the conferences lighten up and the digital geeks starting to fade. The festival is in transition and preparing for the launch of the music portion. Guitar cases, speakers and audio wiring litter the areas where we saw designers and web developers huddled around charging stations during the days prior. It’s the cool kids’ turn and they know it. Skinny jeans, giant beards, and sunglasses… oh my. We had a couple spots that we wanted to poke our head in to see if there was any additional information that we could sponge before heading off to the airport at noon. The remaining conferences were not incredibly relevant to our day-to-day but they were pretty impressive. Robotics, smart watch developments, and self-driving cars were way over our head but fascinating nonetheless. There was a robotic samurai that had facial recognition software and placed us into a memory database. To be honest, we’re not certain that was a good or a bad thing. If we’re ever in the same place at the same time and the robots do decide to rise up and take out the humans, we can only hope we made a good first impression on this Samurai at the 2016 SXSW.
Our experience during the festival was very positive. It’s a bit of sensory overload and there truly is no amount of time to take it all in. We followed all social channels for the latest information being pushed out and discussed during the time, which does help you feel included in more conferences than you are able to attend. Additional compliments to the large sponsors who all did a great job with geo-fencing the festival hot spots to push ads and notifications during the week. We commuted the city with Lyft over Uber this week since they were the primary sponsor of SXSW and offered us timely discounted rides (for the record, they are almost identical in UX). The SXSW app was an incredibly useful navigation tool and the iBeacon push notifications seemed to be flawless from our perspective. It exceeded our expectations and we feel like we’re walking away with some inspiration and insight. That’s more than you can ask for in most cases. Bon Voyage, SXSW! MassMedia is heading back to Earth.
Casey Floyd – Exec. Digital Director
Tommy DiGioia – Exec. Creative Director