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SxSW Interactive: Day Four

The sun is shining today in Austin (finally!) and walking between venues in the 80+ degree weather has been the highlight of the day. I got shut out of “Social Media in the Underground World of B2B” this morning (to my intense disappointment) but used the time to walk the trade show floor.

The SxSW trade show floor, not surprisingly, is loud, crowded, colorful and wonderful– all at the same time. It’s cool because the vendors aren’t all specific to the Interactive Festival, so you get a great mix of people walking around from the Film and Music Festivals as well.

I listened to A LOT of elevator pitches on various products, apps and platforms today and wanted to share the ones that most intrigued me. Full disclosure: I haven’t had a chance to try any of these out yet as the wi-fi in the Austin Convention Centre was definitely struggling.

  • OtherInbox: “Regain control of your Inbox by automatically organizing email clutter, maximizing your real life relationships, as well as making your inbox more efficient and effective.” The demo on this app was really cool – you can search your inbox by keyword, industry type, attachment, etc. and it does appear to organize the information in a variety of logical ways. The one downside from what I can see it that you can only use this with a single email address. It won’t allow you to upload multiple addresses. But the app did just launch last week, so maybe with enough success and feedback that issue will be addressed.
  • Beautecam: “Beautecam is a new app that lets you check your skin condition by equipping your iPhone or iPod Touch camera with a special magnifying lens (sold separately) to take a magnified photo of your skin.” This one wins the award for most interesting, at least for me. The theory behind this is that once you go through the trouble and expense of uploading the magnified image of your skin, the app will make product and regimen recommendations for you (i.e. “The climate you live in is dry this time of year; it’s time for a heavier moisturizer. Here are a few recommendations.”) As someone who is regularly overwhelmed by beauty counters, this could be very helpful. You can buy the magnifying skin lens from within the app, but I haven’t been able to determine the cost on that.
    Trade Show Floor
  • Pointburst: “Manage all your social media content from one place using Pointburst’s cloud-based library. Simultaneously publish relevant communications such as messages, documents, photos and videos to your selected social media networking sites and to those of your affiliates with a single click.” So the concept behind this is one-click publishing to a variety of properties and it’s ideally suited to companies who want to push a message out to multiple branded social channels, but have the message appear as though it comes directly from that affiliate (i.e. an Association with individual regional Twitter handles who wants the message from the home office to be consistent but with a local branding). This could actually be a cool application for an agency managing multiple social accounts for a client.
  • Hibe: Coming to us from Canada, Hibe is a social network that allows you to have multiple profiles (up to 5 at this point) that you can tailor to your interest. So let’s say you’re a dad who also happens to be a professor who blogs about mountain biking in your spare time. Oh, and you’re looking for a job. You could have four profiles: Family, Professional, Job Seeking and Public, all with access and content customized to your audience. It’s an interesting concept and one that no other social network allows you to do, although you could argue that one could configure Google+ in a similar way. And it’s got a nice user interface. Unfortunately, I think it’s going to suffer from social network fatigue. Most people don’t want another social network and this one isn’t unique enough to draw users away from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Filmaster: “Filmaster allows you to discover the world of movies. It recommends what you should watch tonight at your local theater, on TV, or on Netflix, based on your unique taste in movies.” Filmaster is available for iPhone/iPad, Androind and Apple TV. You sign up, indicate any memberships you have (Netflix, etc.) and over time it learns your film preferences and makes recommendations for you. The coolest feature is that you can purchase the movie rental right from the app. It will also aggregate info from your local movie theaters, so it’s not just rentals in your recommendation pile. Of all the apps I saw today, this one is the biggest no-brainer.
  • Social Media Monthly: Our only entry in the old-school category, “Social Media Monthly” is actually (gasp!) a printed monthly magazine. As in, printed on actual paper. The cost is $6.99 an issue and while I haven’t had a chance to read through the current one, it is the only publication geared toward social media. Plus the Editor, Robert Fine, wrote “The Big Book of Social Media Case Studies, Stories, Perspectives” which I did thumb through and looked quite interesting.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/sxsw-interactive-day-four/