Domain companies among those coming to Austin for big tech event.
South By Southwest (SXSW) is coming to Austin March 9-18, and plenty of domain name companies will be in attendance.
SXSW is actually a series of conferences: interactive, film, and music.
The interactive festival attracts tech startup people, along with all of the big tech companies. Last year’s official attendance was 19,364 at the interactive (SXSWi) fest, although unofficial attendance is about double that.
SXSWi had 935 sessions last year. This year there will even be a session about domain names:
Sedo’s Jeremiah Johnston is holding a session about new top level domains called DotAnything 101: Demystifying New Domain Extensions.
But SXSWi has a lot to do with parties as startups launch products and large companies recruit talent and build their brands. Most of the parties are unofficial, but there are also a few (understatement) official parties going on as well.
Last year’s SXSW Film festival had 140 films and 153 shorts. The music festival had 2,098 official acts (out of nearly 11,000 that applied). My guess is there are at least double the official acts as every band that doesn’t get in tries to play a gig in Austin that week.
It’s not to late to get a badge to this year’s show. The bigger problem is finding a place to stay. All official show hotels are sold out. There are still a couple hotels in the “area” that have rooms for $300 a night or so. You can also get rooms on AirBNB.com for about $300 a night. Small homes rent for $3,000-$6,000 for the week.
Are you coming to SXSW?
John Berryhill says
At this point, anyone “mystified about new top level domains” is not going to be demystified by the close of the application window.
Andrew Allemann says
It’s a 15 minute session, too.