Modular at SXSW Recap

The South-by-Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX was a whirlwind! After many days spent at great panels, workshops, happy hours, demos, and networking events, we are happy to be back to work but are thankful for the experiences SXSW gave us and can’t wait for next year.

South by Southwest is an annual conglomerate of film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences that take place in mid-March in Austin. It started in 1987, but has grown every year.

I live in Austin, so I am somewhat familiar with the conference after attending peripheral events for two years, but this was our first time with real badges for attending official festival events. The tech conference filled up the first 7 days of the conference, so we had our hands full!

Favorite Events

The excitement and events around blockchain at sxsw was staggering. There were dozens of official and unnoficial blockchain events every day and there were overflowing rooms for most of the panels and talks that I went to! I’d like to share a few highlights.

The weekend started off big with a huge event with Laura Shin and Joseph Lubin, with well over 1000 people in attendance. The talk was about how Ethereum was going to change the world and the subjects they covered were wide ranging, including the future of token models, improvements to Ethereum, and exciting projects on the horizon from Consensys.

Our friend Eric Olszewski from Transmute gave a great simple introduction to Ethereum development and explained their philosophy for building enterprise decentralized applications. We love the work that Transmute is doing and they are a strong team that has been building awesome dApps and development tools for a long time.

On Sunday, Consensys hosted the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance brunch at the Ethereal lounge and we got to meet some other entrepeneurs, talk with business leaders, and even hear an intimate discussion between Joe Lubin and Stephen Wolfram that covered some interesting topics like how Wolfram is using decentralized technology and how they view the future of oracles. You can see part of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLHogMjt6r8

Modular’s CEO, C. Brown also participated in a panel Monday morning called, “The Future of Ethereum and App Development.” Luke Autry from ERCdEX moderated the panel which included Chris, Orie Steele from Transmute, and Matt Swezey from Pactum. This was a star studded panel with developers from the Texas Blockchain scene and we were very happy to be a part of it! Check out a video of the panel here!

We also had the chance to meet with Jan Phillip Hofste and Philipp Schulz from TV-TWO, who are going to be using the Interactive Initial Coin Offering protocol implementation(IICO), that we designed for their ICO on April 24th! Their project is an application and protocol for Smart TVs used to orchestrate direct interaction between users, advertizers, and content providers. They even showed a live demo that was very impressive! We’re excited for their project and for them to pioneer the use of the IICO protocol!

I also attended the $100,000 Blockchain Investment Challenge, hosted by Capital Factory, the startup accelerator and coworking space in Austin where I have a membership. This was a contest for Blockchain based projects in Texas to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges and answer questions to have a chance at winning a $100,000 investment from Capital Factory. Congrats to Samsa for winning the challenge!

Mindfulness in Tech

From a non-blockchain standpoint, I loved the presence of natural wellness events and companies. The Palmer Events Center had a wellness expo that had many talks about mindfulness, yoga, and healthy eating, which are all things that I believe are not taken seriously enough in the tech world. The Headspace app also had a large presence in one of the hotels, which I went to every day to do a group guided meditation, or used one of their apps to do my own silent meditation.

It was a nice to take a break every day of the hectic conference to reconnect with my breath. I think if everyone in the world practiced mindfulness, we’d all be a lot happier. :) Everyone should check out the Headspace App for an introduction to mindfulness!

Headspace didn’t pay me to say that, I just really like what they’re doing!

Overall it was a awesome week for blockchain and technology in general. There were a lot of great people there and so much excitement around blockchain. We can’t wait to go to the next one!

You can find out what we are doing at Modular by checking out our website at https://modulartech.io. We’re building next generation wallet and ICO solutions and can’t wait to share them with everyone very soon! Contact us on our website if you are interested in any of these! And join us on our discord for more discussion about ethereum development, security, and usability.

Discord: https://discord.gg/sMu6Des