To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really know what to expect at SXSW 2010.  I had heard stories of how great it was from others who had gone before, but I never expected it to be like this!  As soon as I got to Austin, I went to the conference held at the Austin Convention Center in downtown, said hi to the PepsiCo folks at the refresh everything lounge, and then listened to a discussion on Google Wave: Communication Revolution being led by a panel including one representative from Google and one from Yahoo!

After that we headed over to Paramount theater for the premier of the new movie Kick Ass which is coming out this summer.  We got front row seats . . . yeah! The film was directed by Matthew Vaughn who was there as well as the main actor Aaron Johnson and geek/villain Chris Mintz-Plasse (also in Superbad).  Wow, the film was funny, gory at times, and all around a great hit according to the crowd of 1200 that were laughing hysterically.  This was a perfect film to premier for the SXSW crowd, and they were saying after that this was the “best premier they’ve ever had at SXSW.” In the movie they were drinking Mountain Dew and actually had a line where they mentioned Pepsi.  Way to go marketing!  After the screening, the director and actors were there to answer any questions from the crowd.

Right after the premier, we went to the party for the movie held at Buffalo Billiard’s on 6^thstreet.  It was catered and we took note of the Frito-Lay chips spread out on a table.   We ended up meeting Chris Mintz-Plasse and getting pics with him.  He’s a very nice and down to earthguy who stopped what he was doing to talk with us.  We told him how much we loved his comedies and to keep up the good work.

Let me sum it up like this:  It has been non-stop so far and I’m not expecting it to let up anytime soon.  And this is just the beginning of South by Southwest 2010.