SXSW is full of companies looking to give beer away in exchange for them showing you their wares.
The coolest product I saw at SXSW was this little robotic ball that you could control with your iOS device. It could move in all directions, change colors and looked like a great novelty item. I hope that it’s saliva proof, as it would make an excellent dog tormentor.
An interesting company was NewsIT. They are attempting to prove some structure and verification around user generated news. On interesting idea is analyzing tweets for correlation. If a large ratio of tweets have similar content, one can say with some certainty that the content is true. They also had iReport-like functionality, plus gamification. Uploaders might like that, but I think most will continue to upload to iReport since it is a bigger, well known brand
I wandered over to the Nokia center where they were pretty heavily pushing their new phone. I found it illuminating that none of their displays or comparisons had any iOS devices within site. They had clearly set their eyes on Blackberry and Android. The phone itself was nice, but I don’t find very much compelling about the non-iOS mobile space.
I have to throw a special shout out to the blog SXSW Fail, who “kidnapped” @jeremyporter, @rkischuk and I on the way to a party by putting us on a trolley bus and giving us beer. The fact that they don’t have a microsite is what I would consider a SXSW Fail.
