"People Are Tired of Holding Back"

Attendance may have been slim, enthusiasm restrained, but dedicated attendees of new media conference SXSW in Austin are ready to look to the future again.

John Halcyon Styn, who's been attending SXSW Interactive in Austin for several years and, for the last three, has emceed the festival's Web Awards, delivers a snappy summary of the event's history: "In 1999, we all thought we were going to change the world. In 2000, we saw that that wasn't going to happen, but we thought maybe we could it."

2001, of course, was the year everyone in IT was running around saying, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!" 2002 will go down in Styn's brief history as the year he and his fellow unemployed -- er, freelancers -- have been telling themselves, "Well, hey, this is cool. I've finally got time for some of those projects that were always on the back burner."

Since the Nasdaq and all its wannabes (e.g., the Neuer Markt) took their nosedives in the spring of 2000, humbling digital revolution and new economy hypesters and pink-slipping great swaths of an entire industry, even the schadenfreude has grown old. During a panel hopefully entitled "The Revolution Isn't Over," consultant Laura Kusumoto noted that "the ground in San Francisco is starting to thaw a little bit. People are getting tired of holding back."

She was talking about creative types, engineers, programmers and venture capitalists alike. After all, it's not like there are no more new ideas to realize. And VCs can't sit on their cash forever. So if ideas and cash do slowly start to flow again, where might they be going?

Adam Dell of Impact Venture Partners is bullish on Bluetooth, distributed computing and, particularly in this post-911 climate, anything having to do with security. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's new evangelist, Cory Doctorow, both see a zillion possibilities opened up by the US's latest fad in wireless standards, 802.11b. Overwhelmed by spam coming at him via email, the phone and any other route into his life, Steve Jackson, who runs a games company that famously played a role in Sterling's Hacker Crackdown and the early days of the EFF, would bet on whatever helps him "control what gets to me."

Overall, there was a tendency to look up from the keyboard and away from the computer. The television set, though, is probably not the direction to gaze in search of the future. Early dreams of fully interactive TV may never be realized simply because weary viewers insist on a passive experience. So developers are concentrating on minor add-ons such as chat, games or shopping opportunities running alongside shows we already know too well.

Nonetheless, this frequent attendee and panelist saw something he'd never seen before: when Richard Bullwinkle of TiVo was introduced, spontaneous applause broke out at the mere mention of the company's name. TiVo, the personal digital video recorder advertisers think of as "the spawn of Satan," according to Bullwinkle, is a classic example of a brilliant innovation the general public simply does not get. While the company sold 100,000 units in the last quarter of 2001 and may actually begin to turn a profit, business is still not exactly booming. TiVo has spun off its UK unit and, sadly, has no plans to launch in Germany or anywhere else for that matter in the foreseeable future. So in January, the company switched gears. The idea is to allow third parties to develop applications "on an open source basis," that buzzword being loosely defined, of course.

3G could be NTT DoCoMo's Achilles Heel

If any IT company in the world is going great guns right now, it's probably NTT DoCoMo, which launched its fabulously popular i-mode service in Japan in February 1999. With 40 million subscribers (31 million of them i-mode subscribers), DoCoMo holds 59 percent of the Japanese mobile telephony market and aims to expand throughout the world. 70 percent of Japanese mobile subscribers use the service to access the Net but only 5 percent in the US do. DoCoMo wants to see that number rise to 40 percent by 2005.

Masaki Yoshikawa, President of DoCoMo's Pacific Division, was chock full of bright numbers like these, but freelance journalist Justin Hall and Business 2.0's Erick Schonfeld are skeptical that all will go so smoothly for the company. DoCoMo is pouring money into FOMA, its third generation technology, but so far has only 30,000 subscribers, 60 percent of whom are corporate.

"3G may be DoCoMo's Achilles Heel," says Schonfeld, an observation that could well apply to more than one or two European telcos. Hall finds that J-Phone, Japan's second largest mobile company, has a better offer for what average, non-corporate users really want. For over a year, J-Phone subscribers have been able to snap photos with their phone and email them immediately. This does not require outrageous UMTS-like investment. Just a cheap camera and ability to send attachments.

It's this sort of modest approach -- the cheap and easy way of offering people what they really want (see: email, SMS, etc.) rather than trying to reimagine the universe and insisting that consumers buy into that vision, an approach panelist Mario Champion calls "technological wankery" -- that seems to most fit the mood not only of the remaining die-hard SXSW attendees but of anyone out there in the real world with money left to spend as well.