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A week at SXSW 2014: Hashtag of the week

by Alexis Serneels

After a week of tweets, hashtags and slefies about the Oscars ceremony, all the social media were looking at Austin Texas last week, to cover the famous South by Southwest festival a.k.a #SXSW on Twitter.

What's SXSW?

Southby (for the regulars) is a cinema, music and tech festival that take place very year in the United States since 1987. Its success increased over the years to become one of the biggest festival in the cinema, music and tech world. Each category has its own event with countless venues, shows, projections and conferences, presented by personalities

What could we see?

Music stars and performances, movies premiere, well-know actors, directors, internet personalities such as Edward Snowden or Julian Assange and, of course, the last high tech innovations.It's would be pretty hard to summary this gigantic event in a few lines, so we're going to focus on the SXSW Interactive, the part of the festival dedicated to new technologies, and we will highlight some of the best moments of this issue.Mobile, integration and connectivity

Naturally, we saw a whole bunch of new objects, gadgets and apps, all using the same words that start establishing themselves in our lives and drawing our future.

It's the Internet of Things, connectivity everywhere and in everything. Mobility as well, or should I say "wearable" a way more trending term referring to the big wave of smartwatches and other smart objects designed to be wear and to monitor every breath we take.We couldn't resist to show you LIVR, the fake social network for drunk people that fooled everyone and made us have a big laugh.

Some serious talk

As I said before, they were famous guests to the SXSW Interactive. They mostly talked about us, users and about the effects that new technologies have on our private data and on our citizen life.Snowden summarized it well:

« "The NSA...they're setting fire to the future of the Internet. And the people in this room, you guys are the firefighters. »

To make it short, it's time to stand up! Politics get more and more involved in our digital lives, and big internet figures raise their voices to warn us and make us fight for our internet rights in order to be able to defend freedom on the web.

Top tweets

Let's close this post with some subjects that draw our attention and made Twitter buzz:

-SXSW Cinema was hosting for the first time TV series. Game of Thrones fans had the opportunity to climb the wall, sit on the iron throne and enjoy a live set from DJ Hodor.-We liked the "Swag for good" initiative that asked the attendees to give the freebies they'd get from brands (and they will never use) to help homeless people.-At last, we congratulate the smart and useful marketing stunt from RadioShack and Samsung who thought about attendees and their smartphones and provided tech-savvy with fully charged batteries.

If you want to go further and learn more about what happened at SXSW Interactive, we recommend you these summaries from @verge here and the one from @wearesocial here.

That's it for SXSW! If you were lucky enough to attend and if you want to share with us something you enjoyed over there, don't hesitate to comment below or tweet us @applivetweet.

Have a nice week!