Excursions

Shirky: Napster tapped into our primate instincts

AUSTIN, Texas--Author and New York University professor Clay Shirky thinks he's getting old, or in other words, "my average age has been going up at the alarming rate of about one year per year." Recently, he said, he had to explain Napster to a class of his students because they were too young to have known much about the groundbreaking music-sharing service in its heyday.

But that wasn't the point. Shirky's talk on Sunday morning at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival was called "Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,&… Read more

Selling a car the iPod way

AUSTIN, Texas--Analysts reported on Saturday that Apple sold 120,000 units of the iPad, an untested device that the vast majority of consumers have never seen or touched. Can you tap into that same gadget mania to sell an electric car?

General Motors thinks so. The company's Chevy division is a sponsor of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which it's using as a test platform for all sorts of edgy social-media marketing projects, but perhaps more importantly, it's previewing its forthcoming Chevy Volt plug-in electric car. The skeleton framework of a Volt was set up … Read more

SXSWi: Emergency alarm evacuates convention center

AUSTIN, Texas--Was it caused by all the hot air?

The debate had just begun in a fourth-floor ballroom at the Austin Convention Center between billionaire Mark Cuban and Boxee founder Avner Ronen, where hundreds of people had showed up for their a highly anticipated panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Friday evening. Then the emergency lights started flashing and everyone was told by a voice recording to evacuate the room because "an emergency has been reported."

"Keep going!" audience members shouted at the pair of media execs, who were appearing onstage for the … Read more

Drowning in ads at SXSWi

AUSTIN--They like to say that at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), everybody acts like they're living in the future, which tends to be a very polite way of saying that everyone treats their smartphones as prosthetic extensions of the body. But if it's indeed the future, it's the future from one of those dystopian films where nearly every millimeter of available physical and digital space is somehow plastered with advertisements.

This happens every year. Marketers and advertisers eager to snare the attention of SXSWi-goers away from the glowing screens of their iPhones and Droids flood … Read more

Airline Twitter promotion attracts huge crowds

NEW YORK--It was apparently one step short of a cattle stampede when low-cost airline JetBlue used its Twitter account to announce that as part of its 10th anniversary celebration it would be giving out about a thousand free round-trip tickets at three undisclosed locations in Manhattan on Wednesday.

"One of the things we knew was that people were just going to follow us," JetBlue public relations representative Morgan Johnston told CNET, relating anecdotes about one woman who claimed she sprinted in heels from midtown to the Financial District (one of the giveaway spots), people chasing the JetBlue team … Read more

Wearing your Stickybit on your sleeve, or elsewhere

It'll be stashed somewhere in the promotional "swag bags" handed to South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) attendees when they check into the conference starting Thursday, squirreled away like a hidden piece of Halloween candy--a matchbox-like pack of Stickybits.

They don't look all too different from the bar codes that you'd see on a magazine or a six-pack of beer. But Stickybits, a new start-up from co-founders Seth Goldstein (most recently the founder of SocialMedia) and Billy Chasen, has been talked up as one of this year's SXSWi runaway hits. It's got just about … Read more

In geolocation wars, SXSWi is mere skirmish

With the days leading up to this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) turning into hours, all eyes are on two scrappy rival start-ups, Foursquare and Gowalla, which both want to use the Austin, Texas digital-culture bash as a strategic playing field. They're the two most talked about start-ups in location-based social networking--using GPS on a mobile device to "check in" to places around you and announce it to your friends--and neither company wants to lose out to the other.

But in the real geolocation wars, these start-ups may be little more than toy soldiers. … Read more

SXSWi: Let the geolocation games begin

"We're going to be giving away, literally, hundreds of tacos," Josh Williams, founder of mobile networking start-up Gowalla, said to CNET in an interview last week about his company's plans for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which runs March 12-16 in Austin, Texas.

"We're bringing, like, playground-style balls and chalk," said Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Gowalla rival Foursquare. "You'll be able to win prizes at ad-hoc foursquare games that you see around the convention center."

Eighteen months ago, neither Gowalla nor Foursquare existed. But their similar &… Read more

Foursquare unveils its SXSWi arsenal

With only a few days to go before the annual South by Southwest Interactive, location-based mobile networking service Foursquare has unveiled its plans for the Austin, Texas digital culture festival: 16 new "badges" that users can unlock by "checking in" to certain venues, with cryptic names like "Swimmies," "Decathlon," and "Survivor."

The company says users will be able to score temporary tattoos of the badges if they show the digital badge to a member of the Foursquare team at a designated location, meaning that there will likely be many SXSWi-goers … Read more

For SXSWi, Chevy plugs into social media

For certain brands, a "social media strategy" consisting of a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account is last year's model.

One of the trends you tend to see at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) in Austin, Texas, is that it's where big, nontech brands show up to test edgy social-media marketing initiatives in the ultimate geek test bed. A brand we'll be seeing a lot of at this year's SXSWi, which starts Thursday, is the General Motors-owned Chevy.

A sponsor of the festival, Chevy is going all-out with just about every … Read more