Purple Hippo at SXSW

March 13, 2008 9:26 am | 1 Comment

Fluff piece: I was at SXSW Interactive this past weekend. Just like that AT&T commercial, my youngest daughter (5 years old) snuck her purple hippo into my suitcase. It’s always hard leaving my girls behind. Emailing photos back via my iPhone made the trip easier for them and me.

Most of the action was on the 4th floor of the convention center, so everyday started with a long escalator ride. This was my first year at SXSW, but several veterans mentioned how sessions were spread out more than usual. Several times I saw Freddy Wong, the US Guitar Hero 3 Champion, rocking out. Purple hippo wanted some of that action.

Most of the sessions were panels. This is definitely cool, but some talks that had specific content to relay would have been better as presentations. There were a ton of industry gurus there. I was able to catch lunch with John Resig, the creator of JQuery who works at Mozilla. We talked about JavaScript performance and browser optimizations. He kindly agreed to pose with purple hippo.

After more panels from folks like Jeff Veen, George Arriola, Lindsey Simon, and Artur Bergman, it was time for some fun. Luckily Aza Raskin and his buddies from Humanized had brought some product samples from their new startup, Bloxes. These are cardboard templates that you fold into interlocking blocks, like giant legos. I’ve already ordered a couple packs to put in the playarea at Google. With a few parties and good meals under my belt, purple hippo and I were ready to head home. We’ll both see you at Web 2.0 Expo April 22-25 in San Francisco.