Case Study: The Texas Tribune Festival 2011
How will you know you’re the best if you aren’t familiar with the landscape? I know Apple is the best when I try an HP laptop. I know Tumblr is the best when I use CMS software I have to install myself. There are too many people trying to solve problems they never experience or have lost touch with. It’s why Hype Machine has been so successful. We got together everyday and solved our own problem of discovering music.
In my notebook this summer I wrote out a battle plan for Sched.org. I realized I had dropped the ball on being a real world expert in our niche. Months would go by without attending an event using my own software. The first list item I wrote down was “We have to be event experts” and became one of the biggest reasons I moved to Austin this month.
Attending events every week, talking to attendees and organizers, using our own software and competitors products is the path to sustainable improvement. It’s also the kind of company culture I want: A team building an events platform because it will improve their experience at events they want to attend.
On that note, I attended the The Texas Tribune Festival last weekend, who used Sched.org, with a self-assigned role of design geek. My mission? To observe and document how the schedule, navigation, and branding experience was. Check it out.
Lollapalooza’s First Mashup Contest: How To Change Free Data Into A $50k Return
Lollapalooza’s HackLolla was the first time a top tier festival took a chance to embrace the developer community and see what happened. The results are stunning.
I created this chart to show the criteria I chose for evaluating the entries. There were 15 apps completed over the 50 day contest and they are presented here in order of my ranking, then alphabetically if they had the same score.
Links: Lollascope, iLollapalooza, Bandcast, Set Pickr, Who’s Now Who’s Next, The Showcal, Veokami, Lollapaloobox, Lolla Search, Plan-A-Palooza, Droplat, Lollamania, myLollapalooza, Pilolo & Audiovroom.
Apps not reviewed because they were incomplete or didn’t work: Guessbook, Lolla Nation, CelluLight, Lolla2011.
My Judging CriteriaI used HackLolla’s judging criteria to come up with my own checklist:
1. Quality of the Idea
• Built from Scratch: Is this actually a new idea or are you just adding on to your existing company app?
• Personalization: Does the app tailor itself to me? Is it social or interactive?
• Original Idea: Is this something that’s been done before (ahem mobile schedules!) or true progress?
2. Implementation of the Idea
• Easy To Use: Is the UI well thought out? Does it have a high barrier to usefulness (all of my friends have to be on it before it’s cool)?
• Beautiful: Did you take the time to give it some polish to look professional?
• Mobile Friendly: No matter what it is, people are going to want to check it out on-the-go.
• Improves Experience: Does it offer something above and beyond what Lollapalooza already offers? They already have a personal schedule maker, iPhone app and Android app.
3. Impact
• Pre-Festival: I’m looking to discover and listen to new bands and brag that I’m going.
• During Festival: When I’m using a schedule, looking for my friends in the park, brag that I’m there.
• Post-Festival: Time to share my experience, photos, recordings, and brag that I went.
HackLolla’s Grand Prize Winner: Veokami
A few editorial curators sync up YouTube videos shot at Lollapalooza from different angles to recreate the live set. You can skip around different tracks and seamlessly switch perspectives/videos at the same time. The site is slick and beautiful and reminds me of the best streaming concert site that ever existed, Fabchannel (long gone due to bandwidth costs), but with a harder to remember name. The video quality, all shot by fans via their phones or flipcams leaves something to be desired and it’s pretty time consuming to get sets completed because they’ve only completed 15 band sets out of over 141 bands that played Lolla three weeks ago.
Now here’s something really interesting: Why did it win the Judge’s votes to be the Grand Prize Winner? What differentiates this app from the other high quality entries? As you can see in my chart, it is the only entry to score in the Post-Festival usefulness category. This is a glimpse of the next big thing in festival web stuff: reliving and sharing post-festival experiences with your friends. Make it easy for me to share the bands I saw, the photos I took, the videos I recorded with my friends. Package them into an easily shareable scrapbook and make it Tumblr-easy to share. Suggest what festivals I should attend next & what albums I should buy next.
HackLolla’s Popular Choice Award: Who’s Now? Who’s Next? AppThis is a bare bones, offline-storage native mobile app for Android and iPhones (huge kudos for supporting both platforms!). With more and more apps cramming twitter feeds, photos, augmented reality and more into the experience, it’s refreshing to see a focus on speed and efficiency. Usually genre browsing is presented with dozens of options as a giant tag cloud but they even find a way to simplify this! They crowd-sourced and categorized every band into 3 simple genres: Dance, Rock or Chill. I’m usually very meticulous about my genre naming (I separate my instrumental music into sub-genres of ambient, pop and rock) but when you’re at a festival I think these 3 capture what you’re really looking for. It might be tempting to add personal schedules, maps, etc but those would add to complexity. The only must-add I can see is auto-refreshing of event data.
My HackLolla Best Of Show: LollascopeThe premise is dead simple and the execution is flawless. Download this free iPhone app and it will scan your music library and provide both matches and recommendations of artists you should see at Lollapalooza. What really makes this bare bones app useful is with two clicks it emails you a text-formatted schedule of the recommendations. Why isn’t this inside every festival app ever?
It was thrown together in 12 hours (even SCHED* took 14 hours) by the Hurricane Party team and used Last.fm for similar artist data. In the small world department, I might be sharing some office space with them when I move to Austin, which means I’ll be prodding them for improvements in time for SXSW.
Room For Improvement: 2012Of course, there is room for improvement next year. They should be giving these apps, and the contest, more link love on the official site. There’s not even a link to Veokami or HackLolla on the front page of Lollapalooza right now or the mobile app page. And in fairness, the apps should be required to link back to Lollapalooza.com somewhere to tie things back together. This sounds obvious but I only counted one app that took the initiative.
The prizes should be expanded too. For example, The Popular Choice Award winner, WNWN had 4 developers but they only won 2 VIP passes. And I think a handful of the other excellent entries would have been psyched to get even a normal wristband.
They should also integrate the ChallengePost-powered HackLolla site entirely with their main site to promote awareness and maintain consistency. They should keep the HackLolla blog more updated (currently only 2 posts in 4 months) about how the contest is going, feature some app entries and developers, and even interview fans about what they wish existed to fuel ideas.
The Real Winner: Lollapalooza & Their FansThe motivation and time to write this up was fueled by my excitement that they gave this a whirl in the first place. The power of mashups are no secret but this is the first time a top tier music festival has tried it. What did they get out of it? The creation of 9 mobile apps, presence in 3 existing mobile apps, and even an entire fan-sourced video re-creation of live sets. My educated guess is at least $50,000 worth of development work paid for by passion and $5k worth of prizes (mostly VIP tickets). All of which helped to improve the experience for the fans.
I congratulate C3 Presents and DoStuff Media on trying this out and I hope this is a glimpse into the future. Nobody has the manpower or time to build everything, so comon’ music festivals, take a note from C3 and let the passionate music fan/developer community take a crack at it!
SCHED* will be opening up it’s API soon to everyone but if you’re interested in creating a mashup for any of SCHED*s music festivals like CMJ Marathon, Bumbershoot or Pop Montreal get in touch and we’ll get you an API Key.
Take Underwater Photos with your iPhone
Want better quality photos + way more than 24 shots like you’ll get out of one of those overpriced, waterproof disposable film cameras? I did, so I combined my TrendyDigital WaterGuard Kindle Case + TimeLapse iPhone app and the results were fantastic!
Most people use the Timelapse app to make… timelapse movies but I use it all the time when traveling to take self portraits or group photos when nobody else is around. You’ll want to turn Airplane mode on while using the app because a call or text will stop the shooting. Along with the “Dark Display” option turned on, you can take thousands of photos on a full battery.
Here are some fun ones we shot in the Florida Keys. I set the timer on every 5 seconds and just let it run for a few hundred shots at a time while hanging around my neck.
My Favorite Online Web Dev Tools
Markup.io: The easiest way I’ve ever seen to mark up and share comments about a website.
ProCSSor: I write disgustingly messy CSS and use this to re-sort and prettify everything for me. I use these: Brace Style: Pico, Fail-Safe Mode: Off, Sort Properties: Alphabetically and you end up with something like this css.
Border-Radius.com: Because I’m too lazy to type out all the multi-browser rounded corner code myself.
Sprite Cow: I’ve been obsessed with making image sprites lately (this is Sched’s) and this makes it easy to get CSS coordinates.
Pingdom: See all the files being loaded and what’s slowing everything down. I like that it has a history feature so you can compare this week’s improvements to last weeks.
ySmushIt: Yahoo’s online image optimizer saves a few kilos. Then take that and put it into the Image to Data URI converter to store smaller images directly in the CSS.
CSS Lint: Like the title says, it’ll hurt your feelings but make your code better. Super, super nit-picky CSS parser.
Bonus: Smashing Mag’s Weekly Newsletter always has something killer in it.
What are yours?
My SXSW 2011 Mixtape
A complete listing of the 36 bands I saw during SXSW, all playable.
Career Move: Hype Machine to SCHED*
As of this month I have made the transition from working on Hype Machine to working on SCHED* full time.
It’s been an exciting and scary decision for me to arrive at. A decision like no other I’ve made because I absolutely love working on The Hype Machine, with a team that is passionate about this little revolution born from Anthony’s dorm room. In the past year I’ve tried balancing Hype Machine, SCHED* and Phobooth and have come to conclude that I’d rather be the VERY BEST at one thing instead of doing 3 things very well. I’ve already left Phobooth to my dad and sister in January, who’ve already booked $40K+ of booths this year.
What’s Next?
SCHED* turns 4 years old this month and we have a passionate team of 4 people (Marvin, Sasa, Davor and myself) that are set on being the world’s best scheduling platform for conferences and festivals. Currently we’re all living in a house we rented in Austin for the month, then Marvin and I are driving around the country for awhile, wandering. I’m building my dream company, one where travel is ingrained into our culture and we give up office space for house rentals and team meetups around the world.
I’m REALLY looking forward to showing off our team’s killer progress on our product at SXSW:
SCHED* Unofficial SXSW 2011 Schedule
Nothing has changed since the first SXSW event we ever did. I wanted to make something for myself and got insanely excited that other people enjoyed it too. Now I thrive on building something nobody else is doing right and making atttendee’s scheduling experience efficient and enjoyable so they can enjoy attending actual parties and shows. I’m excited that I get to be obsessed/focused on one thing instead of having to change gears so often.
Help me spread the word and make this the very best year for SCHED* @ SXSW ever. It will mean the world to me. Tell your friends to use it, tweet it, and most importantly give me feedback on what we can do even better.
And now, a retrospective of my favorite Hype Machine projects over the years:
* Joining Anthony in 2007 and redesigning the original site into what you see today.
* Being able to work with Anthony, Scott, Zoya, Arkadiy, Dev, Abbey, Seb + other collaborators while following our passion.
* Music Blog Zeitgeist from 2010, 2009 and 2008 and 2007.
* Running a goofy little merch shop and getting things like vinyl necklaces and pillows custom made.
* Throwing various events, but mostly the 4 day long, 80+ band lineup we did for last years SXSW 2010 party.
* Almost getting bought, funded, and various other adventures but remaining self-sufficient and independent.
* Traveling to London to meet the Last.fm team, numerous work trips to NYC and random trips to LA, Berlin and Barcelona.
* Contributing to the much demanded, always around the corner iPhone app that I use every day and hope to see in the store soon :)
My email is taylor *at* sched *dot* org if you want to chat!
Obsessive Life Experiments; Changing Behavior
On Friday I completed 6 full months of not drinking alcohol. It was my attempt to recalibrate things, force myself to learn other ways to relax, and see what I would fill my time with while observing changes in myself.
I was less social. Bars were my main places to hang out before the experiment and instead of finding new places to hang out I mostly stayed home and skyped with my girlfriend. Going out less lead to more productivity while working on three full time businesses (Hype Machine, SCHED* and Phobooth).
I never danced at shows/clubs unless I was really drunk, so I finally learned how to dance sober. It was just as enjoyable and less dizzy-ing.
I got in the best shape I’ve been in since early college (7+ years ago). Both by eliminating empty calories from my diet and instead of going out drinking at night I would run instead. I ran both the farthest I’ve ever run in my life at one time and the fastest mile of my life during this period.
I didn’t really save money. Unsurprisingly I found other ways to spend or reward myself for not drinking like $160 running shoes that really do make it feel like you’re running on a cloud.
I didn’t really find an easy and effective equivalent way to relax. I tried meditation and yoga but I never stuck to either consistently while traveling. I ended up watching more hulu/netflix than I’ve ever watched in my life, which was a disappointment.
This isn’t the first time I jumped right into something…
I went from eating everything to full vegan for 6 months in 2009. Throwing myself in that new behavior taught me lessons in eating right, trying new things, learning to love to cook, and how behavior can be embraced as identity.
I took a photo every single day in 2004 with a low end digital camera that forced me to learn everything I know about framing and hunting out interesting things. I repeated the project in 2006 with a digital SLR and learned everything I know about aperture, focus, iso, shutter speed and lighting.
In college I skipped all my classes and didn’t leave my room for a week and taught myself how to build a web site.
My next project will be no tv, movies or online videos for 6 months starting tomorrow. I want to stop wasting time on stuff I could live without, breaking out of the habit of watching stuff to fall asleep and spend more time outside. People always take my obsessive life experiments as me saying something is bad (not drinking really weirds people out). I love movies as much as the next person and will return to them after it’s done. I just want to alter my relationship with them and this is the most effective way I’ve found to do that with myself.
One of my new years goals is to give a non-techy/music talk (what I usually speak about at conferences). The idea is growing around the idea that short-term obsessive life experiments are the best way to permanently alter your relationship with that thing. I’ve been staring at this presentation on the Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Chanage by some brilliant folks at Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab and think they will be useful too.
So I’ve tried these experiments on food, alcohol and soon television. What do you want to change your relationship with?
Phobooth, 2 Year Anniversary!
Our first photo taken at our first event on December 12, 2008
Yesterday, December 12th, marked our two year anniversary for Phobooth. Things have gotten pretty crazy, especially over the last 6 months…
At the end of 2009, I wrote down a few goals for the upcoming year. Have Phobooth pay for itself and get 2 bookings, paid or free, per month. We were only serving the Gainesville/Ocala market, so this was a reasonable if not short-sighted goal.
12 months later we’ve found ourselves in a completely different position. December is already a record month for us in number of bookings, some days with all of our booths booked at once. We have four booths now and we serve the entire state of Florida, a move that multiplied our bookings by many fold. Just this month alone we’ve served everything from high end weddings to Whole Foods’ corporate party in Miami to Grooveshark’s holiday party in Gainesville.
We now have a team of 6 people. My stepdad quit his job and started working full-time on Phobooth this month. We have a branch in Jacksonville run part-time by my good friends Thomas & Stephanie, who on their first date ever snuck into an event we were doing and got their photo taken. Our Tampa branch is run part-time by my step-mother, who taught me a lot about business when I was a child, so it’s cool to show her all the hard work paid off.
Last non-risque photo from Grooveshark’s
Holiday Party at ~2am December 12, 2010
We’ve literally made improvements on the booth every month since we were founded. And I still think there’s plenty of room for improvement, but our #1 focus is still offering the best quality photos at a killer price. I think we are doing a kick ass job at this. It, surprisingly, doesn’t get old either. I still love to go in there and get my photo taken. It’s kind of magical what a camera + black box + props can unleash.
We still have road bumps. Tracking expenses/income accurately is probably the most difficult. I have no excuse, I got an A+ in Financial Accounting at UF. It’s really not a passion for me and my sister isn’t yet experienced enough to handle it all herself, so it’s something we still need to get on top of. Managing the daily email flow + dispatching jobs in a timely manner are something else we’re finally catching up on.
I continue to use Phobooth as an opportunity to learn about Adwords and refine what it means to write compelling ad-copy. I relaunched the site 2 weeks ago with many of these things in mind. Two skills that haven’t really had a place in Hype Machine but ones that I will definitely need for SCHED.
My vision for Phobooth has expanded a bit from simply a way to help my sister pay for college. I’d like to set a new goal for 2011. I want Phobooth to provide a full time livable wage for two of my parents plus my sister. Here we go…
How to stop me (and 700,000 others) from hacking your Facebook and Twitter account
Firesheep is a free Firefox plugin that detects browser sessions when you are using an open wifi network. It lets you login, with a single click, to sites like Facebook and Twitter as other unsecured users also using that wifi connection. It has been downloaded over 700,000 times in the past two weeks.
I ran the program for 15 minutes at a coffee shop and the screenshot to the right are all the accounts I could log into, read messages, and even post tweets. I will provide solutions below on how to fix the most obvious vulnerabilities for Facebook, Twitter, and the other default sites.
If you are using WIFI that you do not have to login to, you are at complete risk of other people accessing your Facebook, Twitter and other accounts. Once Firesheep is installed and running, it will immediately find anybody on the same wifi connection as you that is using the following sites by default:
facebook.com, google.com, twitter.com, amazon.com, basecamphq.com, dropbox.com, yahoo.com, cisco.com, cnet.com, enom.com, evernote.com, foursquare.com, github.com, gowalla.com, harvestapp.com, live.com, news.ycombinator.com, nytimes.com, pivotaltracker.com, slicehost.com, tumblr.com, yahoo.com. yelp.com and every single wordpress installation.
If you are using Google Chrome:
Fidelio will automatically make sure you use the secure versions of facebook and twitter. You can also add other sites that offer https versions.
1) Install by clicking http://nikcub.appspot.com/projects/fidelio.crx
2) In OSX toolbar go to Window -> Extensions
3) Find Fidelio in the list and click Options
4) Add these: google.com, amazon.com, basecamphq.com
If you are using Firefox:
HTTPS Everywhere is provided by the EFF and will by default take care of:
Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Wordpress blogs, Paypal, Google, Wikipedia, NY Times, Washington Post, EFF, Tor and Ixquick.
1) Install by clicking https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-latest.xpi
If you are using Internet Explorer
1) Use Google Chrome (or Firefox I guess).
To fully protect yourself on an open wifi network you have three main options:
1) Suggest your coffeeshop turns on WPA2 key encryption and hand out a password.
2) Setup an SSH Proxy, but you will need a webserver (or home computer) to do this.
3) Every site you login to needs to use HTTPS fully. You can tell if you type in https://examplesite.com and a lock icon appears in your browser. If a site you use doesn’t, email them and let them know they should. Sites that are part of Firesheep by default and can’t be protected by the above Chrome/Firefox methods because they do not offer SSL: foursquare.com, gowalla.com, news.ycombinator.com, nytimes.com, tumblr.com, yahoo.com. yelp.com
Further Info:
* Original presentation about Firesheep and security concerns:
* Blacksheep is a Firefox plugin to that alerts you when somebody on the network is running Firesheep.
Twitter Swap Confession
For the last five weeks @kkaitlynreedd and I switched Twitter accounts as a bit of a social experiment.
Not a single thing on @gtmcknight came from me, yet my follow numbers not only continued to grow but even the CEO of Twitter started following me.
Who You Follow
Kaitlyn and I follow pretty different crowds. Besides my personal friends, I follow a bunch of tech/music nerds. She follows bands and a few famous people. I began reading people I didn’t know anything about and quickly learned quite a lot about them.
One of the fun parts was getting together and asking each other questions about our followers or proudly showing off bits of gossip that we had learned about each other’s friends.
I discovered the power of Twitter that can take somebody from stranger (that I’m not even interested in or followed on my own account) to the feeling of kinship.
Who Follows You
We didn’t make all that much effort to hide the swap. She kept tweeting about the things that interested her and I did the same. I posted things like Limewire’s debt, what beers I was drinking and what music I liked. Neither of our followers seemed to notice.
The only person that hit me up in real life, knowing that tweets about Justin Bieber and Eclipse weren’t my style was my old roommate @bwc.
I also learned it’s way easier to go from 1300 to 1350 than 80 to 100. It was toughhh attempting to get her over the follower milestone (I tried to follow/tweet people I thought would enjoy what she wrote about usually not me).
Oversharing Culture
There were quite a few moments where I REALLY wanted to share cool things going on in my life with my followers. Music I wanted to recommend or that crazy stripclub I was at in New Orleans. It was good for me to break that (what had become) instinctual need to share share share.
That said, I still got it out of my system usually by posting photos to Tumblr/Facebook so it was an entire digital ‘sharing cleanse’.
Phobooth Facebook Project
I want people who have taken photos in our booth to be able to instantly share them on Facebook via an iPad.
Steps in my head so far:
1) Setup a webserver on a PC laptop and share via WIFI signal
2) In Safari on the iPad go to the internal site that has all of the recently taken photos and the ability to use Facebook connect to login and post a photo to my wall.
I originally saw something similar at the photobooth that the IFC house had at SXSW, but I don’t recall what company did this.
Any ideas on how existing stuff that could help make this happen?
Priceline for PROs
There are only three things that matter when you are Pricelining hotels:
Price, Location, and Hotel Rating.
Determining a Price Check out the non-bidding pages of Priceline or sites like Kayak. Then browse BiddingForTravel’s Hotel page to see other people’s actual winning bids.
Bidding & Rebidding If your first bid is accepted you probably bid too high. The key is taking advantage of ‘free’ re-bids.
In order to re-bid, you have to change at least one parameter of your bid like adding a zone, changing the quality level, or changing the checkin/checkout date. Once you have exhausted all of those, you must wait 24 hours before bidding again.
What if you just want to slowly increase your price without sacrificing your location/rating? A free re-bid is adding a zone that only has a lower quality level than you are bidding, to a rejected bid.
For example:
1) I bid $55 on Zone A / 4* / Downtown and it is rejected.
2) I add Zone B (which only has 3* hotels in it..more on that in a minute), keep Downtown, and raise my price to $60.
All I actually changed was my price from $55 to $60.
This is the only way you can find the actual price floor of a hotel instead of randomly shooting in the dark.
Finding which zones offer which star levels on Priceline
Quick, lazy, sometimes unreliable way: Biddingfortravel boards which list the hotels/ratings that are usually included in zones. I say unreliable because Priceline adds/removes hotels sometimes on a whim.
Completely reliable way: On Priceline’s bidding map page, place a check mark in the box of the zone as though you were going to bid that zone. Note the highest quality level offered in that zone. Then uncheck the zone and repeat for each zone and note the highest quality level offered in that zone. When performing this check, make sure the checkin date is not the current date, or you will not be able to check the zones that do not offer same day bidding.
For the even more advanced, check out using permutations to maximize available free re-bids. Heavily sourced/reworded from BiddingForTravel’s Hotel FAQ.
I just used the above technique to score a 3.5* hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans for $55!
SCHED* @ SXSW 2010
Ever wonder how many people come together to make a silly little schedule site for the sole purpose of making your week more enjoyable?
From the bottom of my heart, thanks guys:
Al Kirby, thank you for being a ridiculously good friend, designing the Austin Venue Map, our hoodies & tote bags, and all kinds of branding/design help. Even if it meant blowing off your wife to work all weekend with me.
Arkadiy Kukarkin, thank you for gathering data, fixing all kinds of features, and genuinely just being around all the time to help out when others weren’t around.
Ben Hine, thank you for the iPhone app, sticking with us all year, making improvements, and working long hours to get the app approved with augmented reality.
Chirag Mehta, thank you for building something with me, over a weekend, that turned into more than I could’ve imagined.
Dameon + Jakprints team, thank you for seeing my vision and helping me bring the venue map idea to life (something I had been wanting to do for years).
Evan + Mimobot Team, thank you for supporting the venue maps and being excited about helping others.
Ian Van Ness, thank you for building the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn integration to make SCHED* a truly social experience and ease signup.
John Herren, thank you for stepping in at the final hour and helping out with all kinds of backend issues big and small, adding caching to ensure the server will stay up, and being there for me.
Michael Galpert, thank you for knowing before I did that SCHED* would grow to be something real.
Keaton Kustler, thank you for running our street team, being genuine, self motivated and as excited as I was the very first time I attended SXSW.
Leonard Lin, for improvements and rewrites to backend and frontend to ensure that SXSW and events going forward would enjoy a faster, more reliable experience and the amount of thought and planning to help us grow.
Levi Weaver, thank you for listing an ungodly amount of unofficial events and parties to help keep the goal of being the most complete listing of all things official and unofficial around SXSW accomplishable.
Mark, Amanda + MailChimp team, thank you for believing in SCHED* and helping us bring this tool and hundreds of man hours together for the simple reason of making people’s experience in Austin more enjoyable and easier. A lot of the site and team wouldn’t be around without you.
Marvin McTaw, thank you for believing in me, having never-ending patience and understanding, helping our clients at all hours of the night and living the dream with me.
Paul Lamere, thank you for loving SXSW as much as I do, and wanting to push the limits of what others were doing around artist discovery and building an amazing new tool with me that makes it possible.
Rob Duffy, thank you for being one of my favorite people in the world, always supporting us on your blog, and matching my obsession with a crazy weeklong event in the middle of Texas every year.
SXSW, Inc + Team, thank you for creating my favorite week of the entire year.
