Title:
Tens of Thousands of Technology Lovers Head South to
Austin
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Tens of thousands of people travel to Austin, Texas
each year to attend the South by Southwest festival.
The festival is most famous for its music and film
presentations. In recent years it has also become
one of the biggest new media events of the year.
Last year more than fourteen thousand people from
fifty-four countries attended the event. It is the
place to learn about promising new technologies.
Margie Newman describes the event as "a sea of
Mac-toting, smartphone-obsessed, new media snobs on
a mission to know what is next." Ms. Newman is a
public relations professional in Washington, D.C.
She made her third trip to the South by Southwest
festival this year. She said: "A lot of people call
South by Southwest Interactive the geek spring
break. And that's pretty accurate." South by
Southwest Interactive has seen the successful launch
of several products. It helped push Twitter into
mainstream popularity in two thousand seven. In two
thousand nine, a company called Foursquare launched
its mobile networking service at the festival. The
service lets friends tell other friends where they
are by "checking in" using a mobile application or a
text message. Foursquare's owners say they now have
more than six and a half million users around the
world. Margie Newman says quick response codes were
big news at this year's festival. The codes turn
URLs and text into barcode-like images that can be
scanned using a mobile phone or a QR code reader.
She said it looks like a scanning device used in
supermarkets but it's a square. She said people
aren't using QR codes for marketing just yet. But it
was very popular at South by Southwest Interactive.
Cloud computing and group messaging were also
popular. The five-day festival ended March
fifteenth. Hundreds of events were planned each day.
They included speeches by some of the world's
leading technology industry experts, hands-on
training workshops and many group discussions.
Margie Newman said:"South by Southwest Interactive
is the place to be if you are into digital new
media. You don't want to miss it." For VOA Special
English I'm Alex Villarreal. Transcripts, MP3s and
podcasts of our reports are at
voaspecialenglish.com. We're also on Facebook at VOA
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
