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.

Some fun facts from the aggregate data in Rseven.

1. Top users of Rseven on average sends & receives 30 SMS per day and talks on the phone for 30 minutes per day.
2. Rseven users on average only talk/text with 10% of the people in their contact list in a month. That means the size of your phonebook is not a measure of your popularity & “connectedness”.
3. Top Rseven users on average connects over the phone (talk/text) 1,692 times in a month (55 times/day). That is more than your average communications (poke, post on wall, message) with your Facebook friends. This shows that the mobile graph is bigger and stronger than the social graph.

Continuing from the previous post about the results of the survey, I want to share with you new features that you wanted to see & pay for in Rseven.

From the options given above, our users wanted the integration to Gmail the most. We have long wanted to somehow integrate the calls & messaging data from Rseven into Gmail so that you can have a seamless messaging experience. Our plan is to insert the calls & messages you had with a contact into the threaded view of your email exchanges with the same contact. How are we going to achieve that? The answer is by using Google Apps. I’ll let you know the details when we’re ready.

The next most wanted feature is an obvious one; transcription of recorded calls. We are exploring several options and all of them will require a form of payment, so this will be a premium feature. But some questions remain regarding the charging mechanism, since most of the transcription services charges per word transcribed. Which means Rseven user would need some control on which calls to transcribe & which ones to ignore. A bigger problem with recorded call is the fact that the Android platform still have limitations on call recording; it can only record from one side only (your side). Hence the conversation will be one-sided only and wouldn’t make much sense.

The bill checker feature will be a useful tool for users to keep track of their phone expenses. The idea is you can upload a soft copy of your phone bill and Rseven will add the contact name to the phone numbers in the bill. If there is no match, you can manually tag the phone number to a contact after comparing it with the call data in the Timeline. After that Rseven can group and sum the total cost for each contact per month. I bet this will be used by people that charges for their services by time such as lawyers, PR firms & consultants.

Since Rseven is a freemium service, we rely on a portion of ours users to upgrade to Rseven Pro to pay the cost of running & developing the service. However the results of the survey shows that a lot of users are willing to pay for the transcription services but not so much for the other features.  We will decide later whether we can offer those services for free and charge for higher usage.

Other than the options given you also requested some features not on the list. Some users wanted us to track the location of the person on the other side of the call. This is impossible to do, we can only get data that resides on your phone, not anyone else’s.

Thank you very much to the users that responded to our survey. Keep on using Rseven and email us at support@rseven.com anytime if you have other suggestions.

We’ve sent out our first user survey to our most active users earlier this month and this is what you said.

The most used and loved feature on the Rseven website is the Timeline. I’m not surprised by this as it is the core of what Rseven does – capturing your daily activities as recorded by your phone – and the best way to view these data is in a Timeline so you can go back last week, last month or even last year to see what you did, who were you with, where did you go and what were you thinking.

I was more surprised that lots of people use the Contact Manager, I suspect the ability to set your contacts as inactive is a useful feature because it removes them from the phone but you still keep it in the Rseven website just in case you need it later.

We received a few suggestions to add merging tools to help with duplicated contacts. This is a problem with many contact management tool and since we support multiple phones & multiple platforms, sometimes unexpected things happen. We hear you and now merge contacts is in our to do list.

Another popular feature is Conversation – very useful in recalling your exchanges with your contacts. We plan to make it easier for you to see the details of the calls by showing the Notes in the bubble and adding a unique icon for recorded calls.

On the mobile apps, Auto Backup is the feature used by most users – not surprising. Archive All which is a feature on Nokia app only was added to help you quickly archive everything now without waiting for Auto Backup to start or refreshing every item type. Now we plan to add this feature to all version of Rseven.

Call recording is also very popular but only available on Nokia & Windows Mobile apps. We received a lot of requests to remove the beep during the recording on Nokia phones – it’s something that we tried to do but currently it doesn’t remove it completely. I suppose we just have to live with it for the moment.

Thanks for all the responses. In the next post I will share with you what are the most requested features on Rseven.

Now you can use Rseven on the latest Nokia phone the Nokia N8 (above) and other Symbian^3 phones such as the C6, C7 and the E7 with the full keyboard (below). Just search for Rseven in the Ovi Store on the phone or go to rseven.com/d to download it.

Go ahead & download it!