City buses that cost 50 cents and have on-board wi-fi access…

The first Obama ‘08 t-shirt I’ve seen…

Buildings that have nozzles on them to shoot a refreshing mist onto the sidewalks…

A hotel with a TGI Friday’s in the lobby…

Austin is a wonderful place.

I know… this is the first post but it’s day “two”. That’s just because day one was a light day of registration and a couple of laid back sessions. The real schtuff started this morning and the totally decent time of 10am. Thanks SXSW organizers - no need to make it earlier than that.

The first panel I attended this morning was Emerging Social and Technology Trends, featuring Pete Rojas of engadget fame. There were some good discussions around the democratizing of media and content, and how today’s youth are more comfortable than older generations sharing and publishing so much of their personal lives. Implications arise, of course, around privacy, copyright and whether we can expect a backlash from future generations that reject the hyper-connected state of being.

The next session was entitled Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses and featured Ryan Carson of Carson Systems. I’ve always been a big fan of Ryan’s work so I was keen to hear some of his thoughts on the subject of monetizing ideas. A good chunk of the panel covered the various ways that money can be made on the web: regular ads, site sponsors, affiliate programs, selling products and subscriptions. A couple of the more innovative techniques were new to me: virtual gifts, virtual currencies and micro sponsor donations. When it comes to online communities and relationship-driven websites, I think these revenue models offer some really interesting and profitable options.

After lunch, I sat in on a couple of 30 minute sessions (an addition to this year’s programming) that were quite good… but unfortunately, too short for my liking. The first, a presentation by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz, examined the product design process and emphasized the 3 tiers to successful design: providing technology, providing features and providing experience. As you might expect, Apple and Steve Jobs references were plentiful. As Peter succinctly put it, the difference between well-designed products and poorly designed ones is that the good ones “know who they are” and they know that because they’ve been designed from the outside in. Too often, developers miss the point because they design from the inside out, leaving the user interface to the end. 37signals is a great example of a company that designs from the outside in. I’ve often heard Jason Fried say that they start with the Photoshop and HTML mockups of a product to make sure they’ve got the interface just right before they start on development. That’s typically not how it’s done. The last good point Peter made (and this was all packed into 30 minutes!) was that it’s important to realize what your product does and how it fits into a “system”. What do people expect it to do and what do people not expect it to do? Peter used the iPod and iTunes example to illustrate - the iPod is light on features because it’s job in the “system” is to play music and that’s it. iTunes software’s job is to manage music and the iTunes store’s job is to acquire it. Three clearly defined jobs handled by three distinct products with little feature overlap.

The last couple of sessions were a bit more technical and touched on usability concerns and how they play into the user experience and then tracking the next career step for the web coder/developer (cleverly titled “From to Riches“). I certainly took something from the latter - the challenges of transitioning from doing the work to managing those that do the work, and the pitfalls of being a “techie” in a more senior position.

That’s about it for today. Just taking a bit of a bloggin’ break before heading to the Frog Design opening party.

Oh and we saw the Trailer Park Boys walking outside the convention centre this afternoon. Let me tell you - Bubbles looks really different without glasses on.