SXSW Interactive 2009 lived up to its reputation as a “must-attend” media gathering in Austin, Texas. Here are some photos from the event.
Robert and Wouter, founders of Wakoopa, a social network that is all about software discovery, with their new Slife Labs t-shirts.
SXSW is all about real, face-to-face networking. One of the best ways to meet interesting people is to head to one of the many sponsored parties. UStream.tv was broadcasting this one live.
DJ Chicken George kept things interesting at the Belmont.
The Digg party at Stubb’s BBQ was a popular event. The Diggnation podcast was recorded live and the band Barcelona played afterwards.
Lots of energy at the SXSWi Expo.
One of the conference panels was about Getting Things Done (GTD). Lots of people, not enough room.
Twitter streams live in the convention center. Twitter was the ‘de facto’ communication tool for SXSWi.
Austin downtown in one of the last days of SXSWi, when the sun finally came out and brought perfect 75F weather to the city.
There are very few venues that match the coolness of SXSW in Austin, TX. It’s unique in so many ways and a great opportunity to learn and find out what’s new and exciting in the world of digital media and technology.
This year we will be in attendance from March 13th to March 17th, so if you happen to be in Austin for SXSW or in town during the event, drop us a line. We would be happy to organize a Slife Labs get together. We will have some t-shirts to give away too.
As I mentioned before, we participated in a start-up event in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. 50 companies went up on stage and described what they are working on in 3 minutes or less.
Videos from all the presentations have just been posted online, including ours. We took this chance to focus a little bit more on Slife Teams than the Slife client. Check it out:
Atlanta is not exactly a hub of high-tech entrepreneurship like San Francisco, Seattle and Boston, but there’s a growing community of start-ups in the area. Naturally, start-ups drive start-up events and the next big one in town is happening next week. It’s called Startup Riot.
Not only are we going to be at Startup Riot, but we will also be presenting. To be fair, it will be a super short presentation (not to exceed 3 minutes), so if you leave the room to get some coffee, you might miss us. But we welcome you to come if you are in the area – it should be a great get-together for the local community.
A few weeks ago Slife Labs flew to San Francisco to meet with users, partners and advisors for a few days, with a short stop at Macworld. With beautiful weather and a great atmosphere, San Francisco welcomed us with open arms. Here’s a quick report of our activities in the Bay Area.
Arriving on Wednesday, we skipped the MacWorld keynote and headed to the show floor. The event was not as crowded as we expected it to be. Without a doubt, the lack of any major Apple announcements played a major role in the lower attendance numbers. It’s unclear how many developers will return next year without Apple. It will be a different event.
One of the highlights of the show for us was a company called ClickStream Technologies. They help software developers understand which features in their applications are used and when, among other things. This was interesting because we’ve considered developing a very similar product using Slife. Pinch Media offers a similar solution for the iPhone.
While in California we also had the opportunity to present at the Silicon Valley Mac User Group. This user group regularly meets at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino and counts Apple employees as some of its members. As usual, we ran out of time – there were way too many questions given our 45 min. time slot. But we had a great time and hope to come back.
Finally, we had the chance to meet with several of ours advisors. Discussions centered on the benefits of open sourcing some of our technology in some shape or form, how to price Slife Teams and even if we should release a ‘pro’ version of the Slife client.
We are now back at work on the Slife 2.1 release and updates for Slife Teams. More details coming very soon, don’t touch that dial.
Welcome to 2009. We hope you have an excellent and prosperous new year. It’s been a few weeks since the last blog post, so a quick update on the state of Slife Labs is in order.
2009 is going to be an important year for us, as we continue to refine the Slife platform and our business model. In 2008, most of our resources were dedicated to development – we built Slife 2.0 (Mac and Windows) and Slife Teams.
This year we plan to promote Slife a lot more and get the word out about what it can do, especially with regards to Slife Teams. We believe Slife Teams is a great solution for activity analytics and we hope to work with partners and consultants to distribute it.
From a development point of view, one of our key goals for 2009 is to shorten the release cycle for our products. This is something we’ve had as a goal in the past, and we get better at it all the time. Ideally we would like to release updates every couple of months. Right now we are back at work putting the finishing touches on a new release of Slife for Mac and continuing with the beta program for Slife Teams. By the end of the month, Slife v2.1 should be available for download with improvements and some new features.
Also, we will be in San Francisco during MacWorld and presenting at the Silicon Valley Mac User Group on January 12th. If you happen to be in the area, please drop by – we would love to meet you.
January is around the corner and a new year always brings along the excitement of another MacWorld. Although we won’t have a booth at the expo, I am planning to be in San Francisco and attend the show.
We believe many Slife users will be in the area, so we were thinking of organizing a get-together to bring everyone under one roof for a happy hour, coffee or lunch/dinner. This would be a great opportunity for all of us to chat not only about Slife and Slife Teams but also discuss the latest and greatest from the show.
If you are interested, leave a comment here with your event preference, time availability and we will take it from there. Who knows, maybe we will even give away a t-shirt or two at the event.
On Tuesday this week, the inaugural event of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) took place in New York City. ‘What is the IORG?’, you might ask:
The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is “a group of industry practitioners, academic researchers, and consultants dedicated to reducing information overload, a problem which diminishes the productivity and quality of life of knowledge workers worldwide.”
The group was formed not too long ago by several researchers interested in the subject, and it has gained quite a bit of attention recently because of a New York Times cover story.
We took a trip up to Times Square to join several big and small companies such as IBM, Morgan Stanley, Seriosity and Basex to learn more about the problem of information overload and discuss possible solutions and best practices.
Most of the time, the discussion centered on email and interruptions, such as phone calls and IM requests. Not surprisingly, some of the numbers that came up in the presentations illustrated just how big the issue is. For example, an average executive at Morgan Stanley receives upwards of 500 emails a day. And according to Nathan Zelder at Intel, an average knowledge worker loses 6 hours per week when switching between tasks, the so-called “context-switch”.
From our experience here at Slife Labs, one of the difficulties that people have when they work in front of a computer all day is that when they hit a bump in their workflow, blogs, YouTube, games and much more are just a click away. Ten minutes here and there represent a big chunk of time at the end of the day and that leads to loss of productivity and frustration. I would argue that this is due to information overload as well, but these sorts of self-inflicted interruptions were not covered too much in the event.
Overall, a good gathering and we will continue to follow all the developments in this space very closely. For more details, quotes and numbers, you can check an extensive blog post from Jared Goralnick, who participated in the event and is working on an interesting email tool called AwayFind.
If you have any suggestions of how we can improve Slife to help you deal with the problem of information overload and productivity, let us know. Curious Slife Labs minds would like to know.