SXSWi 2010

Daniel Ek and Eliot Van Buskirk at SXSW Interactive

On the final day of SXSW interactive, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage with Wired‘s Eliot Van Buskirk to talk about the European music service that could give Apple some serious competition when it finally comes to the US.

The peer-to-peer music service is currently only available in 6 European countries; however there are currently 320,000 paid subscribers, and it is growing by thousands everyday (a beta version is available to US users by invitation only). Spotify streams across peer to peer networks, and users can pay for the service with a subscription, or they can use the service for free with occasional commercial breaks. Spotify works with mobile operators and the service is pre-installed on mobile devices, allowing customers to opt-in when purchasing their mobile phones. He considers it an operational highlight for selling mobile phones.

Ek didn’t announce a US launch, which is what many people in the audience were hoping for; but he did provide some fresh thinking about how the music industry could expand.

“The reality of the music industry is that there isn’t one business model. It’s figuring out how to monetize all distribution methods – downloads, streaming, promotion, ticketing.”

And, he believes that the industry is finally coming around.

“Labels are developing more and more in terms of technology understanding. If people could access music on any device legally, the music industry would be radically bigger.”

Ek demonstrated a slick mobile app that had the audience applauding. Though the application is well designed, it is the philosophy behind Spotify that engages users and outsiders (or, want-to-be users) most.

“We want music to be like water”, he said. “Music that I love I still want to own. I don’t want to own it in the format that it used to be in – a dumb, plastic disc.”

About the US launch, Ek says “We want to build the best possible product we can, and sort out publishing and partnerships. In the US there are almost 5,000 publishers, and it’s complicated.”

About the Apple competition, Ek speculated that they understand things are moving towards a cloud-based model, but didn’t say much more. He’s focused on the development of Spotify, and pointed out that over the next few weeks there will be a lot of new features.

“The big thing right now is working on the next generation of Spotify and getting it out there.”

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Saul Hansell, programming director for AOL’s Seed, may have provided the quote of the day to Silicon Alley Insider, although the day is still young: “If you think that of any set of 500 writers that all of them would have met their deadlines, I don’t know what species of creature you’ve been observing.”

Hansell was responding to a follow-up question by Silicon Alley Insider about doubts over Seed’s plans to publish interviews with all 2,000 or so bands that were set to appear at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.

Hansell’s email to Silicon Alley Insider:

I think the project is going great. At last count, we had interviews with 80 percent of the bands that are still playing published. That is a result of a lot of very hard work by both Seed contributors and Spinner editors who are not getting much sleep these days. The SXSW festival, after all, doesn’t release half the band names until two weeks before the start of the music festival.

To be honest, I think I’ve been a little sloppy in how I’ve talked about this project. I’ve been saying we wanted to publish interviews with 2,000 bands. That’s patently impossible. No one in journalism can talk to absolutely everyone he or she wants to interview. Not Barbara Walters. Not Tom Friedman. And certainly not anyone who tries to track down indie rock bands driving around the country from gig to gig sleeping on friends’ couches or in the back of their 1987 Corollas.

What I meant to say is we would reach out to all 2,000 bands. We’ve done that, and we will keep doing so. Let me ask this: Do more than 80 percent of the calls that Business Insider places to sources get returned?

Read more

Mobile social mapping service Loopt’s 3.5 million users in the United States dwarf that of Foursquare and Gowalla, who count about 500,000 and 100,000 users, respectively. Despite that fact, much of the chatter about location-based services here at the South by Southwest conference has been framed as “Foursquare versus Gowalla.”

That’s fine with Loopt CEO Sam Altman. Altman sees his company as a different kind of service than Foursquare or Gowalla. Loopt is taking a “hybrid” approach, Altman told WebNewser today, providing both “live tracking” and the “check in” model, which Foursquare is mostly known for. With Loopt, “you don’t have to check in to have a constantly updated map,” said Altman, adding, “mainstream users tend to be more lazy.”

As The New York Times‘ Jenna Wortham recently noted, the “live tracking” model poses a challenge for iPhone users, as the iPhone currently doesn’t allow apps to keep running in the background for continuous monitoring. However, this could change soon, said Altman.

With Loopt, users choose exactly what information they want to make public, and where they want to publish it. This includes the usual suspects of Facebook and Twitter.

“You can’t type in to Google, ‘parties in Austin tonight,’” and get relevant, up to the minute results, said Altman. With Loopt you can.

“In the last year we’ve seen this change, where we’ve hit a critical mass on smartphone penetration with data plans and continued excitement about these services,” he said.

“Ten years ago the most requested feature in phones was a camera. That has shifted to GPS capabilities,” he said. Loopt has deals in place with Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, and the company still generates most of its revenue from these deals, where carriers pay Loopt to bundle the service onto new phones, Altman said.

However, “location based coupons are increasingly part of our revenue,” said Altman. He said brands are eager to set up loyalty programs with the service.

Chevrolet is driving 30 percent of its advertising commitment for 2010 into digital, and the automaker revealed several examples of its initiative at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, AdAge.com reported.

Among the social-media elements deployed by Chevy at SXSWi: teaming up with Gowalla to have users who check in from the Austin area receive messages and SXSWi offers on their cell phones, such as a free ride from the airport to downtown in an Equinox; QR codes on the hoods of cars that launch microsites with features information when photographed with camera phones; and the iReveal app, which allows users to view three-dimensional, augmented reality models of cars on the streets of Austin, according to AdAge.com.

General Motors director of social media Christopher Barger told AdAge.com:

The reason we’re doing this here is so really smart tech people can make suggestions. This is a place for us to learn. How do we apply this to the rest of the marketing we’ll be doing moving forward?

If really all you’re doing when building a strategy is looking to what others have done, you’re not going to be successful. You need to draw attention to your own brand and find something unique to you.

Barger also spoke with WebNewser sister blog PRNewser prior to SXSWi, and he said:

In the short term, we’re looking at how many times it is being tweeted, how much interaction is taking place, how much it is being mentioned, how many posts or articles are out there. It’s traditional PR measurement.

We don’t look at this as a nine-day campaign and then it’s over. The more relationships and more long-term engagement we can get out of this is what it’s all about.

Video by Kirsten Cluthe/mediabistro.com

In today’s SXSW keynote, Evan Williams comments on how publishers can use their new service @anywhere.
Interviewed by Harvard Business Review’s Umair Haque.

[Photo: Joe Ciarallo/mediabistro.com]

Twitter CEO Evan Williams didn’t announce an ad platform today at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, but instead something he called an “at” platform.

@anywhere, a new platform that will integrate Twitter data with Websites.

“Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page-and that’s just the beginning,” wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company’s blog.

The platform will launch with partners including Digg, The New York Times, MSNBC.com, eBay, Amazon, and Bing.

Some are already speculating on how Twitter can drive revenue from the platform, including having content partners pay for the data, as the company did via their deals with Microsoft’s Bing and Google.

Williams was not clear as to when the platform will go live.

On another note, Williams also mentioned that the company is sending sending cease and desists “every day” to shady Twitter marketing companies that look to scam the system by allowing people to buy followers and influence on the site.

More to come…

Digg event at Stubbs BBQ, Austin

The annual Digg event at Stubbs BBQ is a who’s who in tech for SXSW Interactive – an evening of hanging out in what is essentially a field of dirt, to drink cans of Lone Star and listen to live entertainment.

This year, Digg made a big announcement at their event- they are about to launch the next version of the popular social bookmarking news site, which promises to be faster and easier to use. Digg CEO Jay Adelson highlighted new features – log ins will no longer be required to submit news, opening up the number of submissions to millions. Users’ home pages will be tailored to their own interests, and any keyword can be its own category, creating an unlimited number of topics. The new Digg will increase the amount of content one can consume, and Adelson made sure to stress personalization and curation – “The people who curate this stuff are you guys.”

Post announcement, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht took the stage for a live edition of Diggnation. The crowd was completely enthralled; they have become the Rolling Stones of the web. I stuck around for the live entertainment, NYC band The Walkmen, though when they finally took the stage, the audience was down to half. The excitement was truly over Digg and their news about what’s next. More exciting, it seemed, than a free live show by a hot, indie band.

People can sign up to test the new Digg here: new.digg.com.

This post was authored by Kirsten Cluthe.

Sunday, day three: One of the major themes this year has been sustainability. Though this isn’t a new idea, the term has slipped through panelists’ lips like an elephant on ice. And although the issue is a major topic of conversation, one thing is obvious: sustainability is not a practice.

This is nowhere clearer than around the conference’s many events, in the various gift bags and hanging from each attendee’s neck: most of what is being given away here will be thrown away. SXSW is a microcosm of America: a big wasteful beast parading as the future.

Today’s keynote from Valerie Casey‘s was called Systems Design and Inspiration. Casey is a consultant in the area of organizational processes, helping organizations, government and companies optimize their behaviors in a sustainable way. Often, she said, change is only possible when a unit’s internal structure is changed. Applying this rule to SXSW itself, the event will never be environmentally friendly if it continues to allow sponsors to waste paper, plastics and energy so rampantly.

Casey (site) referenced an enlightening case study from a research project done by students at California College of the Arts’ URBANlab, which broke down how far the ingredients of a locally bought taco traveled. The 19 ingredients traveled a total of 64k miles, or about 2.5 times around the globe.

Again, let’s apply this to South by Southwest. A few days prior to the event, the New York Times published a story deeming Austin the breakfast taco capitol: “When it comes to breakfast tacos, however, Austin trumps all other American cities,” the paper reported. Since arriving, all we’ve heard about are these breakfast tacos. Locals eat them every day, but for the 15,000 attendees who have descended on the city, it’s a safe bet half are jonesing for the “local” dish. I’ve had no fewer than four since arriving.

If URBANlab’s calculations stand up (and let’s assume that Austin’s tacos use a combination of locally and internationally sourced ingredients), food I’ve consumed has potentially traveled 256,000 miles &#151 or 10 times around the earth.

Certainly, tacos aren’t the only food with such a well-stamped passport. Rather, much of what we eat, wear, and otherwise rely on has traveled unfathomable distances to land in our laundry hampers and refrigerators. The problem is all anyone at South by (and at home) is doing is talking about how astonishing that is. Including me. Worse yet, the sum total of hearing and talking about tacos has made me hungry for another &#151 and so the wheel turns.

My only hope is to find a locally brewed beer and a locally distilled shot of vodka to wash away the weight of my desire for tacos. Who knew that indulging in a local treat would have such global implications? I’ll have to submit that as a panel idea for next year’s conference.

Today at the South by Southwest conference, Huffington Post Chief Technology Officer Paul Berry previewed one thing his team is working on launching in the near future: sponsored comments.

Berry said that brands are “getting good at listening,” but, “being able to actually respond is something that they’re struggling with the ‘how to.’”

When asked what trends he is looking at to help HuffPo continue to grow its traffic, Berry said, “I think it’s pretty clear that real-time is tremendously important to covering what’s happening in the world.”

Real time for HuffPo includes Twitter and Facebook of course, but also Google Buzz, which Berry said “is going to become tremendously important.”

What is the future of television, and how can anyone make money in the business of internet TV? Mark Cuban, founder of Broadcast.com and HDNet, and Avner Ronen, founder of Boxee, took a heated debate that began online to the stage yesterday at SXSW.

It is pretty clear that their business philosophies are intrinsically different. Mark Cuban is a successful entrepreneur turned investor, and he’s all about making money. Avner Ronen would like to make money, too – eventually. His start up, Boxee, is one of several new online entertainment products trying to be the new television network, studio, and distribution platform. Though innovative, Boxee is not yet profitable.

Their disagreement is over how quickly the Internet will become the primary method for high-definition video delivery. Cuban believes that television, as it is now, will never go away. His points are well made; the technology to deliver high quality content isn’t here yet, and such disruption would require the public to change their behavior.

“If you think the Internet is going to replace cable, you’re crazy,” Cuban said.

For the audience as SXSW, this is a foreign concept: what do you mean, there are people who don’t watch Hulu? Everyone in this crowd streams, downloads and believes the Internet is the solution to just about every problem there is. But, what is the business model? Not one that could totally change the broadcast television and cable ecosystem.

When the conversation turned to the audience, many people just wanted to complain about their cable providers. One audience member said, “I dropped my cable and moved to watching everything online, because I don’t want to be screwed by the man.”

“The man’s always going to screw you, dude,” Mark Cuban responded.

But the SXSW crowd wants a revolution, and they see companies like Boxee as leading the charge.

This post was authored by Kirsten Cluthe – thanks for letting me borrow your MT account, Joe!