RockYou, along with rival Slide, is one of the big in the red-hot social net apps space. Huge on Facebook, the San Mateo-based company is getting set to plant a stake in the other social nets—just as soon as they roll out their various platforms, most of them based on…

It was. And now it’s over. Everyone else flew home yesterday or today, having experienced a whopping 8 square blocks of Austin. Sure, I’ll take 8 blocks of Austin over your whole city any day, but I’m glad I’m sticking around for awhile to collect some thoughts and do some…

Of course a panel on online music business models was going to degenerate into a food fight. The only surprise was that about 45 minutes into it, all of the thrown detritus managed to reconstitute itself into something resembling an edible meal. Technically, the topic of the panel was Ad-Supported…

Michael Eisner may not be the same hot ticket at SxSW as he would be elsewhere, but the conference organizers made the curious decision to put an interview of him by Mark Cuban in the smallest room in the house (just the Mavs fans alone could probably fill all the…

(Update: The video of the session is here online, on Austin-American’s website.) Take a wild guess why that’s a picture of a screen broadcasting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, rather than the Zuck himself. Apparently there are three or four packed auditoriums packed with the spillover. Frankly, anyone hoping to hear…

When Google (NSDQ: GOOG) launched its Open Social initiative last November with an impressive roster of industry partners, pundits hardly took a breath before writing Facebook’s obit. That was premature. In the intervening months, things have been pretty quiet on this front, prompting some to use the dreaded vaporware tag…

We see tons of startups predicated on the so-called “wisdom of crowds”, an idea that’s been so thoroughly internalized by people, the actual premise, that crowds are wise, are rarely questioned. But maybe when the individuals within the crowd don’t know anything, the crowd doesn’t either. Bryan Caplan, an econ…

It dawned on me pretty soon after looking at the schedule for this year’s SxSW Interactive conference that that it would be a mistake to try staying rested. So it was gratifying to hear, when I poked my head into How To Rawk SxSW: The Basics, a panelist say that…