Having attended both Ad Age’s Digital Conference here in New York (#AADigital) and South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, TX (#SXSWi) we thought we’d share our thoughts comparing the two conferences. As a preface, keep in mind that SXSW was a MUCH larger conference, with three separate sub-conferences—Music, Film and Interactive, all wrapped into one. It lasted for 9 days and had over 36,000 attendees. AADigital on the other hand, was a two-day event with less than a thousand attendees. That said, we felt a comparison was warranted since both events focused on the marketing, technology and the confluence between the two.
Sick of your Twitter profile picture? Try this site that lets you design your very own 8-bit avatar, EightBit.Me. It’s a cool little tool that lets you transport yourself back in time to the age of Super Mario Brothers—well at least your Twitter profile picture anyway.
You can customize just about everything from head to toe in an effort to make it look just like you. Or just have fun with it and create a quirky character to share with your friends.
The site also has a web app that you can access by going to eightbit.me in safari on your iPhone. It’ll let you check in to places using Foursquare and the makers behind it even had a cool promotion during SXSW that allowed users to check-in to different venues for a chance to win an NES cartridge-shaped hard drive. Try it out today and join the Eight Bit Revolution!
Last week LinkedIn launched their new feature, LinkedIn Today. It’s a customizable news portal featuring relevant news to you and your industry.
We’ve seen the ability to personalize the news you receive before but LinkedIn has leveraged their professional community and given members the ability to share stories within their own networks. Users are also able to see who has shared a particular story and even filter those results by industry to get a better sense of who is sharing and why.
Users are able to share stories with their networks and by binding your LinkedIn with your Twitter account, you can also Tweet stories to share them. Could there be a Facebook integration coming? We’d normally say—without a doubt—yes, but due to the professional nature of LinkedIn compared to the quasi-professional Facebook, users may not be too keen on blending the two.
All this comes shortly after their release of LinkedIn Skills, a feature that allows members to highlight their respective abilities and connect with those who have the skills they are looking for.
All and all we think both ideas are great and after seeing Reid Hoffman‘s keynote at SXSW we learned how LinkedIn really focuses on using their data to create features like these that help the site to constantly grow and improve. The digital landscape is constantly changing and social media networks have to change and adapt along with it. In terms of LinkedIn Today, they have taken their sense of professionalism and the workplace and applied it to news aggregation—supplying their members with the news that is most relevant to them and their respective industries.
SXSW is one of the largest annual Music/Film/Interactive events in the U.S. and Squeaky and Crowdbeacon are excited to take part in it again this year. On our last trip down, we were in awe at how many awesome venues Austin had to offer (way too many to try them all). So this time we figured we’d better prepare for the sensory overload that will invariably occur.
After asking the good people of Austin (via Crowdbeacon) the places that must be tried while attending SXSW, we came up with an extensive guide to everything from the best karaoke bars to the best 24 hour spots with omelets at 2 am. Besides, who knows Austin better than the locals?
The Squeaky team had a lot of fun meeting some really cool and interesting people at SXSWi. We wanted to share some of this with you, so we decided to interview some new friends. First up—Josh Karpf, Manager of Digital Communications for Pepsi. Josh was kind enough to share his thoughts on SXSW and the interactive industry—as well as his Flip cam! Thanks Josh, next round’s on us!
We are digital enthusiasts with an affinity for art, culture and everything in between. Occasionally we see things we like, work that wows us and ideas we wish we came up with. Here’s the beef.
