Back in Ottawa in the office today and thought I’d take a few minutes to write a quick recap of the last 5 days in Austin…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, everybody knows the whole Web2.0 craze (for lack of a better descriptor) just seems to be exploding all over the place and SXSWi was no different. I have to say I’ve got a bit of the fever too and a lot of the panels I selected had to do with the whole productizing-your-ideas model. Why? Well, it can be pretty lucrative if your idea takes off (especially if you’re bought out by one of the big players) and obviously it’s incredibly rewarding to have something you built yourself succeed.

Naturally, I couldn’t help but think about our own situation… we’ve been toying with the idea for a few years of productizing one of 76design’s very first projects: agent76. agent76 is an internal tool that we use to track our time, manage projects and complete monthly invoicing. It’s proved invaluable to us and we’ve always thought in the back of our heads that it’d be a great move to bring it to market someday. About a year ago we did a quick study and determined that the time wasn’t quite right, but after this weekend I’m thinking it might be something worth revisiting.

Here are some other nuggets of wisdom I picked up (in no particular order):

• “Functional specs are stupid”
• “Corporate design makes you mediocre”
• “[Excessive] planning is a waste of time”
• “Never make a decision out of fear”
• Listen to the users and let them guide your development process - iterative design is the way to go
• We’re still not sure if this Web2.0 explosion is another bubble or the first whispers of something much bigger
• Oh, and saying “AJAX” or “Web2.0″ is becoming a major faux-pas… thanks to the abundant (and mostly inappropriate) uses of these buzzwords it now just brings on a lot of eyerolls

All in all, it was a great experience and Brett and I hope to be back next year for SXSWi 2007!