No doubt about it - this year concretes for me the potential of a yearly event like the south by southwest interactive festival. This was my second year and a revisit from a slightly modified 'ontheground' team.
the testing process this year was to theme up a rezpondr page - very minimal design with intergrated google maps mashup tracking our geo located posts as we made our way around the city - tell people about lifecast and how the equipment could be used by small content producers to cover live events using the current raft of web 2.0 services that are often free and at our disposal.
dave goodchild aka @buddhamagnet has done some great work on the php version of our first alpha of the mspping and I am looking forward to working with him on future ruby versions. the map currently receives and displays bambuser posts and fireeagle location updates - every time an update is made the map is marked with a graphic for that service. we hope to expand on this service with bambuser so live moving updates are shown. we also aim to make the google map intergration a rezpondr theme addon for certain themes that everyone can use.
one thing that went very well this year was portable broadband - we managed to source with the help of sarah vela @orchid8 a sprint unlimited evdo card which costs $59.95 a month. One issue with this was that you had to take a two year contract, but the unit could be returned within 30 days if so wished and you can get out of the contract anytime for $200. I'm still confused why you cannot rent equipment like this at airports yet - cradlepoint and tekkeon would make a lot of money doing this as wifi between locations in a city is sketchy and unprotected.
as a side thing, the sheer amount of iphones in the austin area for sxsw completely saturated the AT&T network and emergency provisioning had to be put in place for the sxswi which I believe was up 30% from last year with over 10,000 in attendance.
apart from seeing a bunch of virtual friends old and new my focus was on the recording equipment, audio/video and keeping my cradlepoint phs300 running longer than a few hours with a new piece of kit called the tekkeon myPower 3450i - what actually happened with this device made sxsw very exciting for me in terms of the ammobox/eventca.st project. For the mobile broadband to work I used the merlin ex720 sprint evdo expresscard with the cradlepoint phs300 and a USB to expresscard adapter which allowed the card to rest on top. I then connected the mypower 3450i to the cradlepoint to keep it charged up - almost like mains power.
The tekkeon has a nice 'how much power do I have left' button like the apple laptops have apart from this is on top. In tests, running it all day - broadcasting the ssid (my twittername!) I found the unit to work superb and with still 4 lights at the end of the day. I think you can easily get 10-12 hrs of 'uptime' with this portable power solution. Another thing I really like is that they make lots of interchangable power connector heads and you can change the volts setting with dip switches. This box has been extremely well thought out.
Once located in the top section of my kata 3n1 20 backpack my concerns switched to heat - how well would all the kit cope with a closed compartment - I found that the only thing that struggled was actually the evdo card, requiring me a few times to reboot the router and hang the card outside the bag. if you have the correct webbing on your bag I suggest it has an external location instead.
this post was written completely on my iphone using lifecast 2.0 on the connecting flight from Austin to Newark on the 19th march 2009. my flight got in at 6:15pm I just made it! - phew, that was a close call.. ps - i wish I could post and size an image to post in the editor.
Posted with LifeCast
