Today marks the official start of the South by Southwest (SxSW) Festival in Austin – for readers outside of Austin, SxSW is a combination film, music, and technology festival. Despite its increasing commercialism, the week-long traffic slogs, and the temporary 50 percent increase in man-purse slinging hipsters, SXSW is the premier forum for new music showcases, and the film and digital conferences have attracted some notable and useful panelists. SxSW is one of the reasons Austin is at the top of so many “best cities” lists.
Additionally, tomorrow marks the start of the Austin BarCamp “un-Conference,” which is what you get when you try to “get the anarchists to organize” a tech conference. BarCamps are open, participatory workshop events which focus on open-source technologies, and early-stage Web applications.
Of particular interest to network engineers and those interested in Web application performance are these particular events:
BarcampAustin: Usability: Will Users Wait?
Saturday, March 8, Time To Be Determined, GSD&M, 828 W 6th Street., Austin, TX.
Elizabeth Gibson and Lin Howe, AT&T User Experience Design, want to talk about how long of a delay will users tolerate before becoming frustrated or dissatisfied and abandoning the website? Is there anything that can be done to help mitigate a bad user experience?
SxSW: Catching up with Accessibility: The Basics Quickly
Saturday, March 8, 10:00am, Room C, Austin Convention Center
Shawn Henry of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will demo how accessibility design can be incorporated into Web sites to allow people with disabilities or people using ways of accessing the site other than the traditional Web browser.
We’ll demo how accessibility makes your website available and more usable to people with disabilities; to people using mobile phones, PDAs, and other such devices; to people with low bandwidth connections (which is more of a problem than many are aware of in the U.S. and throughout the world); to seniors, an increasingly important demographic; and others.… This session runs through the easy things and the most important things you can do now to get your project up to speed on accessibility.
SxSW: Crunching and Streaming: Online Video Distribution Challenge and Opportunity
Tuesday, March 11th, 10:00am, Room 19AB, Austin Convention Center
Brendon Mills, CEO of RipCode, Todd Bryant, CEO of Netcast HD Inc., Jeff Kramer of Policyot Labs and others talk about digital video distribution.
Video compression is critical technology for media convergence, and the growing demand for online delivery of high-quality, preferably high definition, video is driving significant innovation in the areas of compression and distribution. This discussion focuses on the significant challenges and opportunities associated with the evolution of online video delivery.
SxSW: Take Municipal WiFi Back
Tuesday, March 11th, 3:30pm, Room 8, Austin Convention Center
Rich MacKinnon of the Austin Wireless City Project, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters, and others talk about the problems with top-down municipal wireless projects in San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and takes a look at the viability of Muni WiFi.
Grassroots approaches to WiFi have focused on leaving the bureaucracy behind, but face challenges in terms of expanding their reach and gaining momentum. Top-down municipal networks promise ubiquitous coverage but have run up against formidable barriers concerning cost of construction, cost of maintenance, and implementation. Both have a goal of eliminating unlawful WiFi “piggybacking” that opens up millions of Internet surfers to dangerous invasions of their personal privacy. Stop by this panel to find out the latest about attempts to bring safe, secure and ubiquitous WiFi coverage to our cities.
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