Well,  I’m back from an extremely productive and fun trip to South by Southwest (SXSW), New York and other places. Incredibly, SXSW Interactive had 40% more attendees this year than last with almost 20k people. For those who didn’t go, SxSW is not just about awesome bbq and parties(although, I must admit I had the best). I was able to meet some impressive entrepreneurs and quite a few who were interested in augmenting their current programming team with the right partner just like one of our Austin based client has done for a while now.  We’ll see where things go, but I have a good feeling about some of these opportunities.

There were also some great panels.  In particular, I enjoyed the panels on lean startups by Steve Blank and Eric Ries.  Other notable news was that mobile app, GroupMe, came out on top in group messaging, winning the breakout award and beating Grouped(in). 

Also, there was a new competition called the Startup Bus, which had a number of developers making the trip from different cities in three days all the way to Austin.  During the trip, these entrepreneurs needed to create their new startup and start to market it.  Some of the new apps that came out of this initiative were WalkIn, which takes care of giving you a ticket number while waiting at a restaurant and TripMedi, a site with information about different medical tourism destinations.

This was also the first year that SXSW was hosting a multi-country Tech Summit where I participated as a panelist.  It was an extremely rewarding experience.  There were sessions for different countries (the Brazil session was particularly well attended) in Latin America.  It’s satisfying to see the growing awareness about the talent that exists globally (including in Colombia).