This article is come from http://www.batteriesshop.co.uk/batteries/2009/06/24/what-people-are-really-looking-for-at-sxsw-is-a-better-battery/
There are nerds with plugs scattered throughout the 900,000-square-foot Austin Convention Center.
That’s not entirely accurate. There are nerds with cords. Many of those cords are attached to battery packs, but there are a sizable number of other cables. I know this because I am one of them. I’m sitting in Ballroom E with my Dell Latitude (and power cord), my Kodak EasyShare Z740 (with lithium-ion battery and PC connector cord), my PalmTreo 650 (with power and sync cords), and my Logitech USB Headset 350 with Microphone (and the attached USB cord).
It’s the first day–the first hours–of registration at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Music, Film, and Interactive Conferences and Festivals, a 10-day confab that runs from March 9-18, and the nerds have already staked out the corners and crannies near power outlets.
It’s strange. While consumer electronics and software have changed immensely in the 13 years of the conference, there is one thing that hasn’t changed: the need for batteries and power cords to recharge them. Throughout the next week, tens of thousands of people will find their way to the convention center, and there won’t be enough outlets for everyone.
In his seminal book Being Digital, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte described the cords and batteries he packed when he traveled the world. That pack, he wrote, was nearly as heavy as the gadgets he took with him. And today, it’s still a horrific problem for those who have gone mobile, who rely on their technologies to connect them with their equally mobile peers.
When I worked at Technology Review, I dubbed editor Kevin Bullis “Battery Boy” because he’d just started writing about battery and fuel-cell technologies. I found (and continue to find) his stories fascinating and necessary because anyone who travels knows that lugging around cords and dell inspiron 6400 battery packs is awful. Deep into the technology revolution, when I’m supposed to be untethered, I’m sitting here next to an outlet because my computer only has two hours of juice.
However, there’s more to the SXSW experience than simply staking out areas of the convention center. SXSW held the inaugural Music and Media Conference and Festival in 1987. The event showcased smaller, independent groups and acts from small labels. For a time, it was the event for those of us who covered music. The major record labels and national media were quick to pick up on two things: the weather in Austin is better than the weather where they lived (San Diego excluded), hp pavilion zv5000 battery
,and the networking opportunities (read: parties) were amazing. By 1994, SXSW had grown so much that the company decided to launch two other programs: the SXSW Film Conference and Festival and the SXSW Interactive Festival.
The interactive festival and conference not only celebrates creative Web-based applications and design, but this year it will focus on three main areas: mainstream media’s toe dipping in the “new media” realm (complete with a keynote by Dan Rather, famously smacked by bloggers who questioned CBS News’s reporting on President George W. Bush’s war record), Web 2.0 applications, and virtual worlds with interactive storytelling (which includes The Sims creator Will Wright discussing Spores, his latest project).