Another great day at SXSW. Great networking, sessions, speakers, and entertainment. Here are the highlights of the day:
- Listening to Ray Kurzweil’s session titled “Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit” for a second time. I had the opportunity to listen to a very similar session by him at Shop.org last year. Ray Kurzweil has been involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments, all inventions that are embedded into gadgets we use on a daily basis.
- Seeing Biz Stone talk about his experiences and the thought process behind Twitter. Biz is best known as the co-founder of Twitter.
- Then to finish the education part of the day, we had the opportunity of seeing Al Gore interviewing Sean Parker, founder of Napster and co-founder of Facebook. (Think Justin Timberlake if you saw the movie The Social Network)
- Another great part of the day was walking the show floor. It was a great reminder of how important face-to-face communication is, and why we are in this business — Tradeshows.
- After learning a lot at SXSW, the next stop was the entertainmet part and some more networking. We headed to the Jay-Z concert. American Express had a campaign where they asked us to sync our AmEx credit card with Twitter as they are launching a campaign that allows credit card members to Tweet their way to savings at SXSW. That gave us free tickets! Watch the video below.