Tomorrow morning at 11:10 am EST, I’ll be boarding a big ole jet airliner and heading to Austin, TX, for this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival! I didn’t get into web work until October of 2005, and I wasn’t really a “professional” until January of 2006. A lot has changed in that amount of time, however, and now I’m departing for the festival to join those who are pioneering the web. Although I’m a newbie, I’ll have one distinct advantage over a vast majority of the participants – I’ll be able to parade around my uber hot girlfriend.
For those in the know, SXSW is the largest gathering in North America (perhaps in the world) of web professionals. The talent at the show is going to be unbelievable, and given the nature of the industry, I’m sure the presentations are going to be some of the best of any tradeshow on the planet. Veerle, whose site puts mine to shame (but just wait till I re-design ;) ), gave us all a hint of what she’ll be presenting, and it looks amazing. I’m pretty sure all the design-heads out there will fill me with the desire to come back home and go on a creative binge – at least we can only hope.
There is an embarrassing caveat to all this, however. When you go to a tradeshow, what’s the number one thing you need to have with you? An uber hot girl to provide arm candy and incite a tidal wave of nerd lust? Although that’s highly recommended, that’s not what I was going for here. The most important thing to take with you to a trade show is your freaking business card, and naturally, I don’t have one. Niiice.
You know, when will the day come when we can bluetooth our V-cards onto one another’s phones, PDAs, or whatever? All this pen and paper crap is so inefficient. In fact, the best application I’ve seen to date for business cards is from Hugh at GapingVoid.
My plan to combat the lack of business cards? Throw around this website’s URL. If that won’t scare em off, nothing will!