Simon Willison’s Weblog

What new apps were used most at SXSW 2013, and why?

28th February 2013

My answer to What new apps were used most at SXSW 2013, and why? on Quora

Lanyrd will be at SXSW again this year, and we’ve continued to refine our unofficial schedule guide and session planner for SXSW Interactive. Here’s our site for this year:

http://austin2013.lanyrd.com/
If you sign in with Twitter, we’ll show you the people you follow who will be attending SXSW Interactive this year (we list over 2,000 Twitter attendees, increasing all the time)—we’ll also show you the sessions they are presenting.

You can then build your own personal schedule by tracking or plan-to-attending sessions—and get suggestions based on the schedules built by your contacts.

We’ve added rich topic metadata to the schedule, so you can slice and dice it in different ways. For example, here are sessions about marketing on Sunday: http://bit.ly/13p8c0g or Workshops about HTML5: http://bit.ly/XmtHK7

We’re also running a neat location-enabled now and next app—hit http://now.lanyrd.com/ during the conference and we’ll geolocate your phone and show you what’s on now and next at the venues closest to you—pretty handy at a conference taking place across most of Austin!

We’ve also built a snazzy grid view, so you can see the full schedule, your personal schedule or the results of a search as a grid (making it easier to spot sessions that clash). Here’s a grid of the sessions I’m considering attending on Saturday: http://bit.ly/Y2gyTr

Your personal schedule will also be available in our iPhone and Android/Mobile Web apps, which both include offline support so you can still see the schedule even if you don’t have a reliable data connection in Austin. More about these on our blog: Get more out of SXSW Interactive 2013 with Lanyrd
For us, SXSW is a great opportunity to showcase what our event platform can do. It’s a particularly good stress test—if you can handle the 2,000+ speakers and 1,400+ sessions at SXSW, any other event should be a breeze!