Hey! You may be wondering, “Did SXSW swallow Mike whole?” I’m back today to say no way. The last two days have been a blur of tech, meetups, and parties. I am utilizing my time way more than last year and because of that I haven’t had the to report all of the action. So, bear with me as I try to run down what’s happened. Let’s start with Saturday all quick fire style:

The first panel talked about ‘Tools and Processes for ADD Project Managers/Entrepreneurs.’ Essentially what this panel talked about was methods that one can use to help fight any external or internal items. There ended up being two people, one a marketer tech type and another, who was a therapist. Their whole gist was that we need to have hto counteract the different types of issues facing ADD type people. It wasn’t anything I was not used to. Some of the methods included using lists and to do lists, which I do already with the GTD methodology. That said, it was a nice refresher that pointed me to other methods to fight distractibility beast.

Next up was a whole set of Future 15 talks revolving around the government. My day job includes work in the government contract industry so these sets of talks helped me out to determine what more I can do as well as what ways my company to become thought leaders in. The gist of all of the talks revolved around 3 items:

• Open data from the government is ripe for the picking
• There’s still a need to make things super simple for all citizens
• The government retires more than half of their workforce and it’s time for young tech-type people to take their place

I have to say, no matter my or your political preference that there is ripe opportunity to take advantage of what everyone is saying is a slow, hulking beast. That’s right, the government. Not only will there be funding available, but there’s also innovation for taking some draconian methods and turning it into something more 21st Century.

The final talk was a workshop for yours truly. The workshop titled ‘Building Native Apps Across Platforms’ dealt with the delimma of supporting one application across many mobile devices. I saw Jonathan Stark’s talk last year and was happy to see him again with the guy from Sencha Touch and Appcelerator Titanium. What I got from this talk was a couple of cool CSS3 type methods and a great run-down of Sencha Touch. I didn’t know that you could do more than just include a library of mobile friendly frameworks. You can do MVC as well as more proprietary framework items. It’s a good thing it’s a free license.

Once again, I took to the night in all of its glory. Saturday night saw me and my lady head to the Frog Design Interactive Opening party. Just like last year they had some cool human interactive toys to play with. The favorite for me was the Angry Birds rip off called “Hungry Birds.” You had to jump a certain way on the stage to have your bird chomp. The other thing that was pretty cool was the Ableton Live like controller for humans that involved people actually standing on squares to activate signals to the layer. All in all it was pretty cool. I think we went to other parties but that’s all I remember now. I’m sure pics and recounts will follow soon.