Everyone who is anyone in the World of Internet says that the best conference you can go to is the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, TX. Widely known as “spring break for geeks” or “South by” as the veterans call it, the conference is held in conjunction with a film and music festival of the same name. It was a last minute decision, but we decided that I (Jeff Lee – Co-Founder) should attend as a representative for 7Specials and quickly geared up for the spontaneous trek to Austin.

South by Southwest is famous for king-making, as it was the conference that propelled Twitter in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009 to legendary status. Going into the conference this year, the most hyped group of apps was a gaggle of group texting apps. Long story short, the upstart app GroupMe seemed to have won this war, and everyone was talking about how this wave of group texting was going to take over the World. It certainly will be handy.

I, like many of the people attending, used the conference as a way to network with many people I could only see in one place at one time. I attended sessions, panels, and parties ranging from food blogging, dining technology, automotive technology, location based services, startup fundamentals, government, and hardcore technology.  I also attended big interviews with keynote addresses by the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library, Vayner Media, Author: Crush It, Thank You Economy), Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week), Guy Kawasaki (Alltop, Garage Ventures, former Apple chief Evangelist, Author: Enchantment), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media), Marissa Mayer (Google), Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn), and Barry Diller (IAC).

One of the best parts of South by Southwest (besides the amazing Texas BBQ) was meeting people in person that you have followed on twitter, friended on facebook, E-Mailed or only read about. You run into these people in the hallways, between panels, on the street, in line for coffee, BBQ, or the bathroom, and at the many amazing parties. Tech journalists, venture capitalists, angel investors, startup CEO’s, bloggers, authors, and even actors or musicians are some of the many people I ran into at the Festival. People such as Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com, Co-Founder of Weblogs Inc. and creator of the “This Week in Startups” show. Last August, 7Specials was featured in This Week in Startups and its corresponding blog.  We’ve followed each other on twitter and I was finally able to meet Jason in person after his interview with Tim O’Reilly. I thanked him again for having me on his show, and told him a little about how 7Specials is progressing.

Not 0nly did I meet Jason, but I was able to attend the SXSW Microsoft Biz Spark Accelerator where I met MC of the event Mark Suster.  Mark is the host of the This Week in Venture Capital show on Jason’s ThisWeekin.com Internet TV network and the author of the popular Both Sides of The Table blog. In competition at the accelerator was Bump.com. I met Mitch Thrower, CEO of Bump.com as well as David Bain, and some of their team.  Bump.com happens to be related to 7Specials in that our co-founder, John Albano, who built our app and is working on more exciting new features for 7Specials, also recently built an app and license plate based social network called Plateside, which is now powered by Bump.com. Mitch and his team are really great people and I was glad to meet them in person.

Some food related panels I attended included “So I started a food blog”, featuring many food bloggers and honest talk about the ins and outs of food blogging. Food bloggers are some of the most passionate people you will ever meet.  I read their posts religiously, and am a bit of a food tweeter myself. I also attended a session called “How Technology is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat” which was a really neat open discussion on all the cool tech and websites related to food, cooking, and dining out. I was even allowed to do an elevator pitch to the entire room about what 7Specials is, and how it works. Later on, as people talked and asked questions, I found out that there were people in the room from Food Network, Martha Stewart OmniMedia, Epicurious,  Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, and the producers of Food Inc. as well as representatives of other restaurants, cooking sites and food bloggers. It was an honor to talk in front of such amazing foodies and I would love to do it again!  I also attended a panel called Dining Out in the Digital Age, moderated by Restaurateur Brian Canlis, and featuring panelists from Urbanspoon, Groupon, and Facebook, and the foodspotting food truck court. The food and restaurant industry was definitely well represented in Austin.

I met some cool people and made great connections all week long, but I think the highlight of my SXSW trip was Saturday March 12th.  I got to spend the entire day at the University of Texas at Austin for the Lean Startup & Startup America panels. I learned from Lean Startup kingpin Eric Ries, the take no prisoners Dave McClure, and their enthusiastic Lean Startup cohorts about how to truly build a startup the right way. Rackspace’s Robert Scoble and many other tech leaders were presenting, judging, and hanging out to answer questions between sessions. They held a full day of sessions and it was a packed room of hungry programmers and entrepreneurs throughout. I urge all startups to look at Eric Ries’s Lean Startup Methodology.

The other part of my Monday included two sessions of a panel for the recently announced Startup America Partnership.  It is a partnership between the US Government and business leaders that will help America build more startups and create more jobs by working with investors, companies and incubators like the TechStars network. The US government has realized that more jobs will come from innovation and new companies and technologies, rather than older businesses hard hit by the economic crisis. The panel was more of a Q&A sounding board where people expressed concerns and asked questions about the barriers to building a startup company in America. The panel was comprised of the US Patent Department, Small Business Administration, US Federal Government CTO Aneesh Chopra, and Startup America CEO T. Scott Case (Co-founder of priceline.com).  Josh Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of Gowalla, and John Batalion, Co-Founder and CTO of Living Social, also gave short talks about building startups. It was a very inspirational session, and it was great to meet these people who are changing America in such a profound way. As an aside, I also attended a great Startup America Panel the following Wednesday hosted by IBM.

My first SXSW experience was amazing. I had the best BBQ of my LIFE at the Salt Lick on the way into Austin, and great BBQ at Stubbs BBQ in town.  Stubbs also housed a live taping of Diggnation, and a free Foo Fighters concert at the closing party. I met all kinds of WordPress Professionals (my other tech passion), went to tons of parties and just had a wonderful time overall. I will definitely go again and it was totally worthwhile. So if you want to go to the biggest tech party in the country, South by Southwest Interactive is where it’s at. See you there next time, y’all!