[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #221: SXSW buzz

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4Cast #221: SXSW buzz
March 16th, 2011

<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/sxsw-150x150.png>South 
by Southwest Interactive ("SXSW <http://sxsw.com/>" if you 
want to be cool) is happening this week in Austin, Texas. 
"Interactive" is one of three simultaneous conferences based 
around music and media, film, and emerging technology that 
have become increasingly popular over the last 25 years and 
expect to attract around 20,000 attendees this year. 
Recently, SXSM Interactive has become a great place for 
small, emerging technology companies to try to create some 
buzz around their products. For example, a new company 
called Twitter spent $11,000 to promote their product at 
SXSW 2007, and the rest is history 
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381941,00.asp>. Even 
if a company is not present at SXSW, the time period around 
SXSW has become popular for announcing new products and new 
features of old products, so in the past week there has been 
a flurry of tech news that might be of interest to libraries.

    * Recommendations and discovering good reads
      <http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/271.Recommendations_And_Discovering_Good_Reads>
      (Goodreads blog/Otis Chandler) "We built Goodreads so
      that you could find new books based on what your
      friends are reading, and now we want to take the next
      step to make that process even more fruitful. To
      tackle this highly complex challenge, Goodreads has
      acquired a company by the name of Discovereads.com.
      With their deep algorithmic book recommendation
      technology, we're going to be able plumb our database
      of 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users to
      find general patterns of the kinds of books people
      read and to generate high-quality personalized
      recommendations."
    * Now we can read alone, together: Instapaper adds
      social features
      <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/now_we_can_read_alone_together_instapaper_adds_soc.php>
      (ReadWriteWeb/Marshall Kirkpatrick) "It was already a
      great way to read good articles without internet
      connectivity. Now it includes: an in-line browser that
      will make grabbing things to read offline really easy,
      qued social sharing so you can post links to share
      great articles automatically when you come back
      online, social discovery of articles your Twitter and
      Facebook friends have Liked on Instapaper and much
      more. It's a big update to a great app."
    * Start-ups are in a rush to bring the chat room to the
      smartphone
      <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/technology/11group.html>
      (New York Times/Jenna Wortham) "Apps from a wave of
      new start-ups allow multiple people to participate in
      the same conversation on a mobile phone, like a group
      chat room or conference call held by way of text
      message. The new applications, most of which are free,
      include GroupMe <http://groupme.com/>, FastSociety
      <http://fastsociety.com/>, Beluga
      <http://belugapods.com/>, Kik <http://kik.com/>,
      TextPlus <http://www.textplus.com/>, PingChat
      <http://www.pingchat.com/>, HurricaneParty
      <http://hurricaneparty.com/> and Yobongo
      <http://yobongo.com/>. Several of these services have
      made their debuts just this week, right before the
      opening on Friday of South by Southwest
      <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/south_by_southwest_music_and_media_conference/index.html>..."
    * 1UP: The importance of platforms, and how we're
      extending ours
      <http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/03/14/1up-the-importance-of-platforms-and-how-we%E2%80%99re-extending-ours/>
      (foursquare blog) "One huge part of the Venues
      Project, which we've now made some headway on, is
      building a comprehensive Venue Harmonization Map.
      Right now, there's no Rosetta Stone for location,
      allowing you to link information about a real-world
      place from one database to any other. For instance, if
      you look up a restaurant in the foursquare API, we
      give you our ID number for that location. But if you
      were to look up the same restaurant in The New York
      Times <http://www.nytimes.com/> or MenuPages
      <http://www.menupages.com/>, they'd have a different
      ID number in their database. The Venue Harmonization
      Map aims to solve that, by translating those numbers
      so that you only have to look up the ID once."

*/Event fact:/*

SXSW buzz is not just for emerging companies. Apple erected 
a temporary pop-up store at an undisclosed location in 
Austin this week to launch the iPad2.
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