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SXSW 2011 is over. About 20K people from all over the world descended upon Austin, Texas (USA) for two weeks to experience the Music, Film and Interactive South by Southwest festivals.
This year was the first year that our tiny city state of Singapore had an official presence at SXSW Interactive (technology). Made possible by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (the CIO of Singapore government), SXSWi saw several of our startups exhibit and pitch there.
SXSW has grown in breadth, depth and number of attendees over the past 25 years: check out this cool infographic. This year was my first time there, as with most of the Singapore delegation. Here are some photos! Gorge yourselves. (Part 2 here.)
(P.S.: Be cool. Know how to pronounce it. Refer to the entire festival as “South By” or “South by Southwest” in full even if you type it out as “SXSW”. Or “Interactive” for “SXSWi”.)
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For two weeks, Austin = SXSW. This was an AOL@SXSW ad at the Austin airport when I arrived.
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The Interactive and Film portions of SXSW were going on at the same time. The Music festival started after Interactive and Film ended.
As I arrived in Austin two days prior to the actual start of SXSW Interactive, I didn’t have to contend with huge masses of people while registering and picking up my badge:
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The wait for my badge: 3 minutes. Time went up to an hour or so on 11th March.
There were many, many, many panel sessions, with an average of 30+ different sessions going on at any one time. It was really hard to pick one to attend.
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In the program: All the sessions for just one time slot.
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An open chat with Tim O’Reilly and Jason Calacanis.
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Mass of both SXSW (and non-SXSW) attendees.
There were many people who didn’t get a badge to attend SXSW but still hung out in Austin to meet folks (i.e. attend parties, get drunk, and oh wait, network). StartupBus took this to another level as there were 6 buses from 6 different US cities/regions (San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York City, Miami, Cleveland) with teams of “buspreneurs” working on building prototypes in 48 hours. The destination was SXSW.
Singaporean Derrick Kwa, who’s currently doing his undergraduate studies at Hampshire College, was part of the EventBacker team on the Chicago bus. Watch a video interview with the team done by pop17‘s writer Josh Chandler:
Back to the rest of SXSW…
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A TechCrunch and About.me set up.
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Book signing: Tim Ferriss, author of 4 Hour Work Week and 4 Hour Body.
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Lego…
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Free entertainment and food at CNN hideout. There were many company-sponsored day parties.
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The official Frog Design SXSWi Opening Party had cool bathrooms.
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The SXSW Interactive program book.
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IDA took out a full-page ad for Singapore.
Check out the Singapore Pavilion and party at SXSW in pictures in this next post!
This post PHOTOS! Singapore At SXSW 2011 – Part 1 appeared first on Tech in Asia.