SXSW 2008 will most likely be remembered for the Zuckerberg interview controversy. But a more interesting phenomenon, that in some ways broke through at SXSW, was health care and tech. Specifically the movement to user (or at least employer) owned Web-based health and wellness apps and services.
One of the most popular sessions was 'Transforming Hospital Systems: The Digital Future of Healthcare'.
Today Marshall Kirkpatrick interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW, with the main topic of discussion being Data Portability. Later in the day at the festival, a star studded panel discussed building portable social networks. The panel highlighted four technologies that help make identity and data more portable across social networks: hCard; XFN and FOAF; OpenID; OAuth.
I'm back at SXSW as one of the RWW contributors covering the interactive festival. This afternoon I attended Jason Fried's presentation on "Stuff We've Learned at 37 Signals". 37 Signals is a software company headquartered in Chicago, IL that started as a interactive design company and has since become one of the leading software companies for personal productivity software.
Online comics service Bitstrips will be one of the startups hoping to become SXSW Breakout App of 2008. In fact they responded to our Breakout Apps post by creating a special comic strip for ReadWriteWeb (see below). So what is Bitstrips? It's an online comic strip that you can create and run as a series, kind of like a visual blog. I think this has a great chance of gaining traction, because a lot of people think visually and everyone enjoys comics.
