SXSW – Day One.5

I flew in a day late Sat on an A320 with about 17 people on it. Can't remember the last time I was on a flight with that few people, usually they just cancel the flight and your SOL. Anyway, flight landed rubber side down, all went well. Ended up hooking up with some Boulder friends Brian Makare and Andrew Curry - closed down the day about 2:00am, early by SXSW standards.

Sunday brought lots of cool stuff. Got up about…err 10am (hey, Daylight savings time) and headed over to the convention center. Lots of cool stuff.

My favorite item was the motion based Indy car race setup from voodoo. I drove it WAY more than my turn. And I was pretty damn good. Cruised through the hall and said hello to Alex Iskold from AdaptiveBlue and checked out the SocialThing guys set up their big screen TV's.

However, I have to say that I kind of bonded with the film side of the house rather than the interactive. Don't get me wrong the interactive is fun (I even broke down and just gave into the twitter) but the real "passion" is with the film people.

I blew off Zuckerberg and went and saw Helen Hunt talk about the movie she wrote and directed. It was wildly fascinating and interesting to compare the startup world to the independent film world. When she talked about making a low budget movie some of the parallels where interesting. She recounted the story of recruiting great actors for a low budget movie and talked about how they would offer to bring more money into the movie.

Helen, tried to explain that you "can't" do that as the "size" of the movie was predetermined by distribution partners. Of course I immediately understood this to be the venture equivalent of "pre-money valuation". In other words you can't sell more the 100% of the movie to someone. Really, really fun to listen to her. I have to see the movie now.

Got a few minutes with Scoble to talk about lijit which was cool. Seems like a pretty cool guy.

About 7pm, Micah, Tara and I jumped on a bus and headed to the SXSW bowling event. Had a great time bowling with technosailor from b5media and RSS guy who is interested in applying for TechStars. David Cohen owes us one for the sales job :-)

I brought my best game but could not beat Jim Turner. He beat me by one pin in the first game and 4 pins in the second. He's the man, I just couldn't get it done.

Finally, I found a filtrbox sticker in my pocket from TechCocktail Boulder and decided to give our friends at filtrbox a virtual SXSW presence at the bowling event.

I'm a lightweight so I'm going to bed, at 12:30. Tomorrow is another, really busy day.

Comments

[Ari]

Thanks Todd! We had a great time eating pizza at SXSW (virtually, of course)...

[David Cohen]

Dude, I owe you at least 6.