Every March, the East and West coast nerds make their annual pilgrimage to Austin, Texas (AKA neutral territory) for what I affectionately call “Geek Spring break.” These past SXSW Interactive conferences have debuted social tools that have become huge hits, and I’d venture to say that even the ill-fated $41 million dollar investment and user interface blunder mobile app Color would have been successful had they launched just weeks earlier than they did in 2011, if they had launched at SXSW. When I asked then CEO Bill Nguyen why he didn’t launch then, he said “what’s that?” To be fair, he’s got a family and said he doesn’t like events crammed with people, but his team should have known.
This year, there were no real stand-out applications, and some press have also said the event has “jumped the shark” due to no break-out applications There were further notions that the events were more party and less substance, but we didn’t feel that way when attending the demo events events like those that our friends at TechCocktail host.
We caught up with an old friend and former “Cranky Geeks” producer Carlos Rodela there and had a nice chat about our software platform. He even brought up a very rare 1998 “radio wave capturing” hardware based Japanese product – the Lovegety which could be built today as an iPhone or Andorid application easily using the NewAer SDKs.
Here’s the video, and if you are so inspired to automate love like the Japanese, then download our SDK around proximity detection! Our team developed a similar app at the LAUNCH hackathon for connecting with like minded people in just a couple days. More on that story in the next blog post.
