The other day we covered the brouhaha over a New York ad firm converting the homeless into human wireless hotspots. Now it’s time for The Daily Show’s always delightful take! And no, John Stewart does not approve.
There’s a famous photo from SXSW taken 10 years ago, with just about every significant blogger at the time all gathered around one table. Many of them went on to form incredibly influential companies, like Flickr, Twitter and Gawker. Today, a lot of those same people are skipping the conference. And if you believe the backlash, South by Southwest has lost its cool. It’s just a marketing hypefest, where the most common achievement is barbecue bloat.
SXSW, the annual vanity carnival of schmoozing, marketing superficiality and barbecues, has something new to offer Austin’s visitors: unalloyed human degradation. A New York ad firm has converted homeless people into 4G hotspots.
The breakout app from SXSW this year may be Highlight, or it may be Pinwheel. But the most exciting news? It’s about Instagram, which is finally sort-of showing off a beta of its Android app.
If you’ve got even the slightest bit of cinephile in you, you need to watch this whirlwind tour of some of the most creative title sequences ever. Ian Albinson’s “Art of the Title” debuted recently at SXSW; put it on top of the pile of reasons you wish you’d made it out there this year.
Our Brian Lam, and the thousands of other gadget-hounds attending the SXSW conference/music festival in Austin this week, won’t have to stretch their legs in pursuit of a brand new iPad 2 – Apple’s opening a temporary store in the Scarbrough Building on Congress Avenue, from this Friday for two weeks. [Statesman]
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AT&T managed to keep its network from crashing and burning at SxSW this year by wheeling in three COWs, or cell towers on wheels. Rocketboom went inside one to check it out. [Rocketboom]
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We can’t wait for the day when we’ll read newspapers and magazines on our tablet computers, but what will happen to those darling newspaper stands and kiosks when that day comes? Based on this demo, they’ll become better than ever.
At SXSW, The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde helmed a conference via Skype, where he likened P2P to Coca Cola, and The Pirate Bay to sugar. He also said he could make Sergey Brin “want to marry me”. [TechRadar]
