SXSWi Day 2

Wow. 12 hours of SXSWi festival madness, including 4 or 5 sessions, 1 movie, 2 meals and 1 party. Whew! Since it's spring forward night, I must make this brief. Here are a couple of takeaways:

• Gaming IS the new social. Yesterday I mentioned seeing a lot of gaming content, and that trend continued today. The conference keynote presentation was all about gaming and game theory driving interactive content in the 2010s. I find many aspects of this fascinating -- encouraging engagement (the games themselves), use of incentives (points, badges, stickers), up leveling (e.g., "super user" status), individual ownership (e.g., mayorships), collective ownership (e.g., "society" memberships). Along with all of this talk of game theory, I've been using Foursquare, which is a great example of social gaming. SXSW is a Foursquare hotbed -- everywhere you go, that place is an official location, and when you check in, you often receive bonus points and special badges. As someone who plays Foursquare in a non-Foursquare town, it's much more fun to play in a place that has Foursquare mania. I feel as though I am a living embodiment of the "gaming is the new social" mantra. As I head home, I need to figure out what this means for tech market research (whether as a research tool or as a subject matter to be researched). Stay tuned...


• SXSW = indie. The thread that seems to hold all 3 parts of the festival together -- interactive, film, music -- is that the creative works are being developed by independent artists. The more indie your project, the harder it was to scrape together the funds, the more SXSW cred you have. iPhone app developers working out of their basements; A-list actors Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page working for scale pay on their new indie flick SUPER; social media startups proud of their shunning tech titan suitors. While I really appreciate this independent spirit, I strongly suspect that all of these indie organizations don't have funds allocated for market research spending. Sigh.


• Paul Rubens rules SXSW. This really has nothing to do with technology or market research. But I was fortunate to be able to see a screening of "Pee Wee's Playhouse on Broadway" this afternoon, complete with post-show Q&A with Paul Rubens himself. I suppose Pee Wee is the ultimate "indie" artist -- doing for decades what he truly believes in, and once again being recognized and revered for it. Oh, and he tweets constantly, and even awarded me a special Pee Wee Foursquare badge when I checked in at the theater. Pee Wee is a social gamer...are you?