At SXSW interactive I came across the booth for the cloud-based app Animoto. I was intrigued since I have seen a couple of Amazon Web Services presentations and both held up Animoto as a great example of an application that would have been impossible to deliver any other way.
Animoto, which creates videos for consumers and corporations, relies on a huge amount of processing power and has had gigantic spikes in usage (e.g. going from 70 servers to 8,500 servers in 5 days). You can say they put the “elastic” in Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud.”
Here is an interview I did with Animoto co-founder and President Jason Hsiao.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the things Jason talks about:
Total number of servers owned by Animoto = 0
The most expensive piece of equipment in the office is the espresso machine.
How the enterprise side of the business has taken off.
Why they’re based in New York and where the founders came from.
How their extreme processor intensiveness allows them to work extra closely with Amazon.
See how he deftly avoids the question about what feature he is looking forward to seeing from Amazon, they must be working on something
Charlene was at SXSW as a speaker and I caught up with her not long after she finished her session in the main ballroom. You can check out the slide deck she presented below. You can also access the Twitter feed and a summary of the presentation from Charlene’s post. [BTW don't miss the blooper reel at the bottom]
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Charlene covers:
Groundswell: How company leaders can leverage social networks rather than fear them
Which companies are making the best use of social networks
What social tools Charlene uses and her use of twitter (how it got her quoted in the Wallstreet Journal)
What Charlene is most excited about in the coming year with regards to social networks
The Blooper Reel
You may have noticed that there a few cuts in the video above. This is because they were shutting down the show floor and kept announcing it over the intercom. Check out the blooper reel below for proof — and these aren’t even all the interruptions. (Unfortunately I didn’t capture the part when the Elvis impersonator started singing.)
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I headed down town to the Austin convention center and SXSW. Although I’ve lived here in Austin for 2 years this is the first time I’ve checked it out. I drove down after lunch and bought myself a day pass to the show floor.
The entrance to the convention center
While the biggest part of SXSW, Music, doesnt start until later this week, the Interactive and Film festivals kicked off on Friday. Film and Interactive had a combined “Trade Show” which ran from Saturday thru today and that’s where I hung out on Saturday.
Although the show floor was a modest size it was chock-a-block full of tech and cinema offerings (here’s the map and list of booths — my unofficial guess would be it was 80% tech/20% film). I hung out there for about four hours catching up with old friends and checking out the various offerings.
Artifacts from the event: Rackspace tube socks, business cards, BarCamp pass, Montana film board leather coaster, a brochure from "Austin's only tiki shop" etc.
As you would guess, social media apps dominated the tech offerings and a lot things seemed to be some derivative of facebook/twitter/craigslist/linkedin with an innovative (or not so innovative) spin. Microsoft had a big booth as did Sun who was showing off its JavaFX.
Don’t touch that dial!
Coming up later this week, the video podcasts I did with Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Jason Hsiao of Animoto.
There were a fair amount of apps that looked like this.
Here are a few of the faces from the show floor.
A picture of Guy Kawasaki taking a picture of the Lunarr booth.
The ever helpful Josh Dilworth of Porter Novelli working the press info stand.
Ka’awa was there promoting a tour of singers from Hawaii.
Kevin takes the hand-off. PR firm Porter Novelli gives new meaning to the expression "booth babe."
As I mentioned in my last entry, yesterday I hit SXSWi. When the show floor closed, I moseyed over 311E 5th St. to experience the wild and wackiness that is BarCamp Austin. To accompany my video from the event, here are some stills. Enjoy…
MC Whurley: The Man behind it all.
The Schedule.
What’s in a Name
If you’re not familiar with BarCamp, contrary to what you may think, it has nothing to do with libations:
The name “BarCamp” is a playful allusion to the event’s origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O’Reilly –Wikipedia
BarCamps started in 2005 and they follow the un-conference format where topics are posted the morning of the event. Yesterday’s BarCamp was Austin’s 4th and masterfully arranged by Whurley and Sara Dornsife.
Update: An inside look into organizing BarCampAustin and how they leveraged the cloud.
The Bar Camp Bar. Serving Vodka & Red Bull and cheese hot dogs.
A portrait of the artist and his work -- Cody, the guy who did the BarCamp mural.
The pressure finally gets to organizers Sara Dornsife and William Hurley and they snap like cheap toothpicks.
I just got back from SXSWi and Bar Camp. I will post pictures from there as well as interviews with Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Jason Hsiao of Animoto in the next few days. Before then I wanted to post this one minute walk-thru of Bar Camp that I shot near the end of the event. Heck, watch this and you’ll feel like you’re actually there .
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Posted by Barton George 
