Here’s the gist: I went to SXSW Interactive (SXSWi) to discover the latest apps being developed, and investigate their underlying technologies. As I described in the first post of this series, what’s in this for you is:
- You stumble upon a few apps you may enjoy at work and at play,
- You meet real folks who create the apps & pick the underlying stacks, and
- You win friends & influence people with your industry-insider knowledge of how all these creative apps are emerging so quickly
And – since this *is* the Zenoss blog – you also get to hear the apps’ creators describe the impact to their businesses of any infrastructure hiccups. Being able to translate IT issues into business-speak is something we ALL need, in order to mitigate risks, secure appropriate resources, and move up the chain of command.
It’s not every day you can literally turn to the stranger standing next to you, ask what his or her application does, and jump right into a discussion of their IT operations. Unless you’re at “south-by” – and then that’s just your everyday chatter over barbecue.
I met Neil Mansilla, Mashery’s Developer Platform Director, because he was handing out popcorn in the hallway. After a chat about which customers were publishing and consuming which APIs (and why these need managing like the valuable business assets they are), we got to talking about their public cloud resources. Their provider recently had a widely-publicized outage, and they’d actually written a blog post about what this meant for them. Yes, resiliency turned out to be a competitive advantage.
httpvh://youtu.be/_5MrT2fzdC4
With big names like the Associated Press, Public Broadcasting, and Univision already committed to sourcing their video news feeds, I have a feeling that Watchup may be where my kids get their first introduction to “TV news” – on my iPad. Jonathan Lundell, their CTO and Co-founder, spoke with my right after they pitched as part of the SXSW Interactive Accelerator contest.
httpvh://youtu.be/hU7lVGgMwNc
Next up: both Applied Threat Intelligence and my new favorite open source do-gooder app…
