vancouver fashion and portrait photography

Wrote this photo essay for the fine folks over at PBS MediaShift . Our favorite blog. Every March for two weeks the town of Austin, Texas welcomes the world for its annual South by Southwest Festival, otherwise known as SXSW. This festival consists of three parts: Interactive, a four day geekfest for the internet community, Film, ten days of international cinema programs and Music, a four day non-stop schedule of live music. The Interactive section of the SXSW Festival is always a hotspot for the early adoption of the newest technology in the digital landscape. 2010 was the year of location-based application war between Gowalla and Foursquare, the debut of Google Bike Maps and a foray of citizen journalism at its geekiest.Here is our photographic recap of when the geeks come out to play at SXSW Interactive 2010! The talk of SXSW 2010 Interactive was the war of the location-based applications, Gowalla and Foursquare. These applications use your GPS on your smartphone to allow you to check-in places. Austin-based Gowalla was the crowd favorite during Interactive.Google launched their new Google Bike Maps this year at SXSW Interactive. The official launch was celebrated during the Mobile Social Bike Ride sponsored by Google Maps, Bikehugger and Gowalla. These new bike maps will provide bike-friendly directions in Google maps. With the location-based application war going on at SXSW Interactive, it was really no surprise that every geek was on their phone the moment they entered a new place. Gotta check in! Gowalla made an interesting digital cross-over in their SXSW updates of this location-based application. Entrance wristbands to the Gowalla Tiki Room Party could only be found while playing the application. Digital items were traded in for real world items.The Social Media Clubhouse was SXSW community extension of an international organization called the Social Media Club. This clubhouse hosted three days of summits, tweetups and live music, as an additional track of programming to the SXSW Interactive schedule. Geeks can have fun too! Guy Kawasaki got the most out of the photo booth at his wild west inspired Girl + Guy Party.  Tech Zulu hosted a daily wrap-up show during the four days of SXSW Interactive at the Social Media Clubhouse. Host Amanda Coolong is interviewing Nic Adler, who is the owner of the Roxy Theater in LA. Nic is part of a community movement called the Social Strip which include restaurant, business and venues on the Sunset Strip who are using social media to build a collective neighborhood. The best part of SXSW Interactive is being able to share knowledge with others in the community. TED presenter Amanda Koster and Amazon.com's CTO Werner Vogels work on installing Ushahidi, software that was developed by Erik Hersman, on Koster's site Salaam Garage.Armed with a handheld video recorder and a tripod, anyone could be in interview heaven with the amount of people that attend SXSW Interactive. Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case is on the forefront of augmented reality development for the mobile platform. Here she smiles with the tool of the trade.Austin-based band The Octopus Project created a multimedia presentation of sound and visuals in the parking lot of the Austin Whole Foods. Technology has made its way into the music portion of the SXSW Festival. La-based group The Glitch Mob has an impressive amount of technology (with an even more impressive amount of cords!) that is needed for their digital music performances. Cameras were everywhere, from the ones on your phone to higher end models. With this type of accessibility at a festival as large as SXSW, music journalism was on a digital upsurge. This was probably the most analog camera that was out and about at the SXSW 2010 Festival.  The Hootsuite team was out in full force at this year's SXSW Interactive Festival. Quickly tearing up the mobile internet ranks with their new smartphone application releases, Hootsuite is becoming one of the best ways to access Twitter. Once again, geeks having way too much fun! Static Photography's Kris Krüg shows off his rope skills with internet star Shira Lazar at the Girl + Guy Party. SXSW 2010 nearly just finished and still everyone has a buzz for what will be the hot topic of next year's SXSW Interaction! Guess we will have to just wait and see!