I am writing this post from the airport getting back from SXSW. It was a great conference for meeting people in the social networking space. I liked a couple of panels.
One was "Building a web business part-time". The big take-aways from this one was that partners and an advisory board are really important. Plus, the more you can bootstrap through friends and family, the more you can be independent and take your time. Once you start looking at Angels and VC, you are on a clock and there are many strings attached.
The other was "Converting Piracy to Profit". They are trying to convert pirated content to syndicated content, so that content owners can make money off of it, and the "pirates" can become content distributors. They are trying to negotiate with Ad networks to provide a share of the revenues on this pirated content to the content owners. I think they have a good case, and DMCA takedown notices is their stick in the carrot-and-stick analogy.
We ate at a bunch of places. The Gnocchi at the Hilton was amazing and so were the custom made vegetarian Quesadillas at the Hyatt. Moonshine won the dessert prize with their fresh Stout Brownie topped with Coffee ice-cream and Whipped Cream.
And of course, I must talk about the Blogger party which was awesome. People had a lot of fun and they were all happy when they left. Also met up with an old friend, after 4 years, which was good. It was a fun, insightful trip.
