Well, that was fun. SXSW is over, and boy, we had a good time. Not only did we win Accelerator, we also caught a ton of cool shows, and met some incredibly nice and interesting people there.
Looks like everyone’s doing a Best of SXSW writeup, so here is ours:
We noticed everyone at SXSW is basically just trying to get noticed. By being on or hosting panels, by playing shows, or by wearing funny hats. Of course, some ways to get noticed are more amusing than others, and we thought we’d honor some of these.
So we decided to hand out individual Best of SXSW awards to noteworthy people. And this post is the first in a series that documents the winners. Stay tuned for more!

(Example of our awards. They come with a free song.)
This is Bridget, one of the throng of helpful SXSW volunteers:

After panels ended, it was usually time to head over to the Registrant’s Lounge across the street from the Austin Hilton, which was basically a fenced-off park with free booze for badgeholders. Good place to unwind, think about something other than blogging and social media for a change, and get some sun for the first time in the day.
Too bad it only opened at 5pm. But not to worry - there was Bridget, who let us in early because she was just nice like that. She also hooked us up with an extra drink coupon. So the Popcuts Award for Best SXSW Staff / Volunteer was an easy choice for us!

Veteran music recommendation researcher Paul Lamere (ex Sun Labs, now with the Echo Nest) led a panel named “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo!”. It was both insightful and hilarious at times. Our favorite slide was his example of what a “freakommendation” is: People who buy Pat Robertson’s book also shopped for The Ultimate Guide for Anal Sex for Men.
So Paul totally earned the Popcuts award for Most Hilarious Panelist.

For the very last timeslot of SXSW Interactive, we headed to a roundtable discussion titled Music 2.0 = Music Discovery Chaos? Also in the audience was Tim Malbon, who caught our attention because he dared to ask the question of questions (and we have to paraphrase here): “Is music discovery really such a huge problem? I don’t see people running around on the street screaming ‘I can’t discover new music!’”.
So Tim got our award for Ballsiest Question to a Panelist.

Speaking of music recommendation: A few months ago in Berlin, we ran into Petar Djekic at the booth of a cool new music recommendation startup called mufin. We saw Petar again here at SXSW and hung out for a while. And after getting us into Berlin Fest (which featured free beer and sausages), and giving us tips on a ton of other fun stuff, we decided Petar deserves the award for Extreme Generosity.

At Berlin Fest, we met Judith Govey from the British Music Embassy. Their mission is to promote British music in the rest of the world, which sounds like a pretty kickass thing to do. Judith received our award for Most Pieces of Flare because we noticed she was wearing way more than the minimum of 17! Because Judith knows that people can get a song anywhere. She even gave us a button to keep.
We’ll be posting more of the award-winning people we met in Austin! Signing off from Berkeley!