PHOTOS! Singapore At SXSW 2011 – Part 1

SXSW 2011 is over. About 20K people from all over the world descended upon Austin, Texas (USA) for two weeks to experience the Music, Film and Interactive South by Southwest festivals.

This year was the first year that our tiny city state of Singapore had an official presence at SXSW Interactive (technology). Made possible by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (the CIO of Singapore government), SXSWi saw several of our startups exhibit and pitch there.

SXSW has grown in breadth, depth and number of attendees over the past 25 years: check out this cool infographic. This year was my first time there, as with most of the Singapore delegation. Here are some photos! Gorge yourselves. (Part 2 here.)

(P.S.: Be cool. Know how to pronounce it. Refer to the entire festival as “South By” or “South by Southwest” in full even if you type it out as “SXSW”. Or “Interactive” for “SXSWi”.)

For two weeks, Austin = SXSW. This was an AOL@SXSW ad at the Austin airport when I arrived.

The Interactive and Film portions of SXSW were going on at the same time. The Music festival started after Interactive and Film ended.

As I arrived in Austin two days prior to the actual start of SXSW Interactive, I didn’t have to contend with huge masses of people while registering and picking up my badge:

The wait for my badge: 3 minutes. Time went up to an hour or so on 11th March.

There were many, many, many panel sessions, with an average of 30+ different sessions going on at any one time. It was really hard to pick one to attend.

In the program: All the sessions for just one time slot.