A Mobile Companion for SXSW 2008
If you are among the 6000+ technologists / entrepreneurs / designers attending this year’s SXSW conference (or are just interested in following what’s going on in the conference), check this out: The SXSW 2008 Mobile Companion (http://webclip2go.com/sxsw08) is a free mobile web application that lets you access everything about the South by Southwest conference right there on your mobile phone. Try it in a web-based iphone simulator (Safari and Firefox only). It works on iphone, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and just about any smartphone out there. The way it works is that it takes live content about the conferences from all over the web, and make the content suitable for display on small mobile phone browsers. Through the companion, you can check:
* Panel / presentation schedules by day
* Session abstracts
* Film / music performance schedules by day
* Official and unofficial conference news, blogs and wikis
* Blogs of conference speakers (full posts w/ comments)
* SXSW parties!
* Austin local news
* Music and film listings by venue in the Austin area
* and much more …
All you need is to load the following URL in your mobile phone browser. Or, if you do not want to type the URL, simply text the word sxsw08 to phone number 41411 to get a link returned in an SMS message (the SMS works in the US only!).
http://webclip2go.com/sxsw08 (Try web-based iphone simulator in your Safari or Firefox browser)
Why did I create it? Well, as a veteran technology conference speaker / attendee, I can tell you that conference WIFI is flaky at best in most big conferences. In fact, WIFI was the #1 problem in SXSW 2007. It is quite frustrating to take out your 8 lbs laptop just to find out that the WIFI is down or has no coverage in the Hall. Well, with the mobile companion, you can check out just about anything about the conference / speakers in real time on your phone. I personally would use it a lot. And I encourage you to try it out if you have an iphone / blackberry or other connected device. I plan to do the same for most other conferences I attend this year as well. 
The technology behind the SXSW Mobile Companion is WebClip2Go. The goal was to let people clip live content from any existing web site / blog, so that those content can be viewed from mobile phones. It has become a hit among my friends — especially those with iphones, since the web content loads much faster and requires simpler navigation in WebClip2Go, compared with directly loading the original web site in iphone. Much still needs to be done to make WebClip2Go ready for the general Internet audience (e.g., we need a Firefox plugin that lets people “clip” web content via drag and drop). In any case, I will blog about WebClip2Go in a separate blog entry later this week. Stay tuned!
BTW, for my Seam readers, it might be comforting to know that the application is built on top of JBoss Seam technology.