Rseven Blog

I had some time to reflect on my SXSW experience as I flew over the mountain ranges of New Mexico. So far this is the best conference that I have been to because it combines my interests in tech, music & film in one long festival. I get to meet people not just from the tech industry but regular smartphone users that quickly see the value of what Rseven does.

I was initially overwhelmed by the number of panels that I should go to, bands that I should see and people that I should try to connect to but in the end, I discovered that the best way to experience SXSW is just by letting it happen to you. I got to meet and exchange ideas with people everywhere I go whether it’s at parties organised by large companies and investors or by just talking to people at the Airstream food trailer.

Here are the highlights of my SXSW experience.

• Seeing Nightmare and the Cat at the HP Mobile Park
• Eating ribs at Stubbs BBQ and discovering Fireman’s #4
• Listening to Keynote Speech by Blake Mycoskie from TOMS Shoes
• Watching live performance by Nicki Bluhm, Olin and the Moon, The Silent Comedy and Duran Duran!
• Meeting Ewan Spence (listen to the interview at All About Symbian) and Mark Cuban
• Inspired by Bob Geldof’s speech about “Rock ‘n’ roll needs to be against something. It can’t just BE!”

The SXSW Trade Show ended today, it was crazy hectic and super exciting with so many things to do and people to meet (see above). I’m going to write more later about it but suffice to say that I learned many things and a lot of iPhone users were disappointed to find out that we can’t support iOS. In the mean time you can read this AllThingsD article to see a round up of the mobile apps that was there.

The Rseven booth as the SXSW Trade Show is ready for the opening tomorrow. It’s a bit hectic here with cranes & forklift carrying heavier stuff for the bigger booth.

From the outside the Austin Convention Center looks like a college building with posters & stickers everywhere. I’m gonna add a few of my own now.

Rseven is going to be in SXSW next week, come and see us at stand 1126 at the Trade Show and collect your Rseven stickers. We are showcasing a new feature at the conference – Send Snapshot – where you can select some items in your Timeline and send them to your Facebook account as picture like above.

At SXSW, you can use Twitter to tell people what is happening, you use Foursquare to tell people where it’s happening but you use Rseven to tell people what really went down! With the snapshot you can show people what were you doing at what time, who did you meet, whose numbers did you get & text.

For the lucky people that get to be in Austin next week, hope to see you there. I’m gonna try to fill up my Timeline with as many pics/vid/calls/text as possible during the week.

I met Robert Scoble last night at a Rackspace event & he was very cool to hear my demo of Rseven and interviewed me about it (you can listen to the interview here). He quickly get what Rseven is all about and deemed it mondo cool; which is high praise indeed. When I had to explain to him the reason why we don’t have an official iPhone app (no API to access call history & messages), he saw it as an example of how the “openness” of  Android OS makes it better than iOS.

It is true, that we have more freedom with Android (and Symbian & Windows Mobile) to give the users the best features of Rseven but the limitation of iOS is not a technical matter, it’s more of a business decision by Apple. I’m not going to argue about the definition of open platform for Android, people far smarter than me have discussed about this at length (read this post by Tim Bray and the subsequent comments). To me the relative openness of Android vs iOS reflects more on how Google and Apple generates their revenue.

Google have stated many times that their support of Android is for the purpose of generating revenue from mobile ads ($1b annual revenue announced last fall). Thus they make Android open source and give a lot of control to developers to make anything they can think of. Apple on the other hand, develops iOS to sell their cool devices and the media that’s consumed on it. So it makes sense for them to control the user experience for consistency so that their customers can expect the same experience as they buy more Apple devices.

However this also means that Apple have more control over user data and sometimes you feel that you do not really have full ownership of the devices (read Charlie Brooker’s article and another view from the publishing industry).

Well we at Rseven are platform agnostic, we want to give the best Rseven features that we can make, on any platform that you use (WP7, Bada anyone?). And we feel that since you are the owner of your data, you should have the right to take the data from your devices, keep it anywhere you want and use them however you want.