South by Southwest, the verdict: Location, location, location…
As the bloggers, tweeters, compulsive status-updaters, cyber-geeks and games fans return from the recent SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, the Guardian’s tech writers are already drawing their conclusions. It seems the buzz this year is all about developing location-aware experiences, be they online, over mobile or using close proximity technologies like RFID. There are countless enterprises (BrightKite, Foursquare, Fire Eagle, Bliin, Gypsii etc) whose core offerings revolve around organising, sharing and distributing location-specific information, with an increasing trend to connect with existing social networks such as those on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and LinkdIn.
This is all good news, considering the nature of the next Happy Packages release! We’re currently beavering away on our iPhone application which, funnily enough, revolves around location specific information, social network connectivity and even a little hint of gaming! Read the Happy Packages journal for updates, discussion, prototype launches etc
As an aside, Simon Games have been the talk of the festival with their Hat game, which was mentioned again by Alex Krotoski but in print this time – Thursday’s Technology Guardian. See Other articles here.
Tags: gaming, gps, location, network, Simon games, social, sxsw