Bye bye South by

The Film and Interactive elements of South by Southwest wrapped up on Wednesday, meaning it was time for me to head back to the UK.

The first couple of days of my visit were a little dreary and grey, but this all cleared by the time I left, meaning that as I headed to Austin airport, the city was bathed in sunshine and live music poured out of every bar. The Music element was just getting started and it was very tempting to extend my stay a few days longer…

The panels I enjoyed the most were probably Lessig’s (as mentioned before), and Gary Vaynerchuk’s which I just caught the end of. I had only tangentially heard of Gary before, and the topic of his talk was no doubt less epic than Larry’s, but the enthusiasm he brought was just amazing. Someone in the audience likened him to an eight year-old on speed; combine that with wicked humour and Belorussian DNA and you’re about there.

The word on the street is that the most valuable part of SxSW is not the organised panels, but the informal, serendipitous meetings which happen in all the after-parties, lunch breaks and hallways. Now I’m not sure about that; being lucky enough to live in San Francisco, I get those sort of chance encounters all the time – the range of amazing people you run into is one of my favourite things about the Bay!

Instead, it was the little glimpses of Texan life off the well-beaten SxSW track which I valued the most.

For example, on our last night, George and I headed out for a steak dinner (which is traditional in Texas), Brazilian-style (which is not). The idea is that you get a little marker with a red side and a green side. As long as the marker is green side up, obsequious chaps in jodphurs rush around with steaming spits of deliciousness, smothering your plate in fillet mignon, sirloin, chops, cutlets, sausages, … It was incredible.

Another highlight was going to a Texas two-step night. We only knew about it because Christoff’s friend, Pearl, put us onto it (then patiently pushed us round the dance floor while we stepped on her). Two-step’s a style of dancing with three steps in it, and although it’s hideously simple, I completely failed to master even the basic pattern. It’s galling to be shown up at a physical activity by overweight octogenarians, but this happened repeatedly – there was even a grandpa there with a special move – suddenly jumping a couple of feet into the air, clicking his heels, then continuing to sashay around the dancefloor as if nothing had happened.

Overall, I found that the everyday Austinites were much more down-to-earth and honest than the hipster San Francisco crowd, and unbelievably liberal given the state’s voting record. Still can’t wait to get back to the west coast though

Highlights of last day or two at SxSW

Yesterday, I went to hear Larry Lessig talk on campaign finance reform and how it’s relevant to everyone, no matter what your political afflilitation or pet peeve. The message was that the sub-standard handling of climate change, the financial crisis, Iraq, and any other issue, is a symptom of a government implicitly beholden to the lobbyists who finance re-election campaigns.

There seems to be a zeitgeist emerging from the Obama campaign of the people reclaiming the government for themselves. His election promises of more transparency and accountability definitely resonated with a lot of people; hopefully the much bigger challenge of campaign reform will be able to ride the wave.

Later that evening there was an interesting moment at the Digg party. It turned out that a queue of 150-200 people were all waiting to get an autograph from (Digg-founder) Kevin Rose. Meanwhile, Lessig walked in and no-one batted an eyelid. Kevin’s a smart guy and everything, and Digg is a great creation with legions of fanatical users, but there’s something wrong when a guy who has worked selflessly for copyright and campaign reform for more than a decade gets less respect than the poster-boy of the current fad.

On the bright side, I just saw an absolute flash of genius here. A company called Jungle Disk, instead of printing and distributing shiny flyers like everyone else, simply put their URL on a small piece of plain printer paper. They then stapled the paper to a $1 bill and threw handfuls of them off a balcony onto people emerging from the Nate Silver keynote.

Companies are giving away stacks of flyers here – the table I’m at now is entirely covered to a depth of 2 or 3 thick, matte card adverts. The problem is that people just take them and throw them away immediately without even looking what they are – there are special recycling bins just for this purpose. So to see a crowd of people actually rushing to grab flyers, rather than dispose of them, shows they really hit something there…

This post earned me cake

Currently at the South by South-West conference in Austin. I saw a fantastic talk from Larry Lessig this morning advocating campaign finance reform as the first step to fix America’s broken democracy.

The event’s been brilliant so far; lots of interesting talks on interesting topics by interesting people. The only real frustration has been the labyrinthine Austin Convention Center venue. The architect seems to have deliberately hampered any attempt to get from the 4th to 3rd floor – there’s a variety of lifts, escalators, even staircases, which go to one floor and not the other. Very confusing.

On the plus side, when trying to get to the 4th floor just now I ended up in the 3rd floor bloggers lounge, where they’re giving away free cake. So this post is justification for the delicious sponge cake I just took and demolished.

Visa saga part 3: tax records special!

My trip to the US Embassy was quite an experience.

The debacle really started while organising a time to go to the embassy and get the O-1 visa processed. Visa petitioners have to make a pre-arranged appointment (so far, so gravy), these appointments can only occur at 8am (inconvenient, but acceptable), and the appointment “hot-line” costs £1.20 per minute. One pound twenty per minute!? I was living on that much per day in Nicaragua.

On top of that, the ludicrously expensive phone call culminates in you authorising them to take a further $131 as a Machine Readable Visa fee, whatever that is. What are they doing which costs $131? Doesn’t machine-readable just mean a barcode? Specially formatted text, like we have on passports? An RFID tag at a push?

Onto the actual appointment itself. One of the warnings included in the appointment confirmation is that you are required to wait outside “even in inclement weather”, so I was quite pleased to find it a clement, if nippy, morning in Grosvenor Square.

Other warnings include the restrictions on electronics in the embassy: no mobile phones, laptops; even USB sticks are verboten. After enjoying my traditional English queue, the security drone’s eyes lit up when I produced a few coins and a pair of headphones from my pocket before going through the metal detector.

“You can’t take those into the embassy, sir”, he japed. “Ha ha, good show”, I chortled heartily. Unfortunately, the steely, lifeless eyes framed in his frozen, mirthless visage made it all too clear that he was actually serious. The headphones posed a threat to national security.

“Those could be used as a transmitting device”, he asserted with a mind-bending mix of inaccuracy and self-assurance. Not wishing to get down to the brass tacks of just how egregiously incorrect he was, I conceded defeat, and paid £5 (five sterling) to store the headphones in a plastic bag for an hour.

Security checkpoint cleared, I was in the building. After a modest wait, I was called for an interview with a chap from Texas. He seemed perfectly happy with all the O-1 visa stuff; perfectly happy until it came to tax records. As I’d spent a few months in the US last year, paid for in part by my company, it now appears that full tax records for me and the company are required reading for some lucky State Department employee.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we really have any tax records… We haven’t paid anyone any money, and I haven’t been paid any money, so there are no IRS filings. We have an ID for the company and an ID for me, with no documents associated with either. Still! I suppose in a way this is what they’re looking for: proof that I haven’t been paid. It just seems a little fallacious to prove something by producing a lack of evidence.

So this means that I’ll need to come back to the UK again, after my trip to Austin. On the bright side, it should be super-simple from here on – the hard part is over. All I need to do is mail in all the required documents (or lack of them), in a nice big envelope to really emphasise the volume of tax records which don’t exist, wait for them to check that the envelope really is empty, stamp the old passport and I’ll be heading back to Cali.

Quite a week

Even for one with as rock and roll a lifestyle as I, this last week as been pretty eventful. And surprisingly, all good events.

We’ve taken massive steps in partnering with two huge companies, got good coverage in TechCrunch, various venture capital firms are getting very chummy, we’ve sorted out my attendance of the South-by-South-West conference, as well as Microsoft’s MIX event in Las Vegas, pushed out a major new release of the product and, last but not least, I got a visa.

It’s at times like these that I appeal to my rationality and remind myself that we’ve been working, and working hard, towards all these things for a while. There’s no such thing as karma; at least I hope not, or next week’s going to be crap!