Another Texas VC

South By Southwest is the best creative conference in the world. Between Interactive, Film, and Music the festival covers an absurd amount of ground which can’t help but get the mind turning.

In March of 2007 SXSW introduced the world to Twitter, a service that proves absolutely indispensible during a conference that boasts 108 films (54 premieres), 1,400 musical acts, and 11 concurrent interactive sessions at a time spread across 3 venues. I counted at least 30 friends at the festival with whom I coordinated using just my Blackberry Pearl running Twitterberry and Opera Mini.

That was the big take-away from this week. Mobile devices have advanced to the point where the laptop is no longer mandatory as a mass communication tool. Although I am not the first to mention it, I feel like many are missing the point of what is happening with our connected devices.

Before this week, I loved telling people about the segregation that was occurring between content creation devices like my Thinkpad, and content consumption devices like the Amazon Kindle and Asus Netbooks. This week taught me that ubiquitous connectivity has much larger implications. Not only are our phones reclaiming their rightful place as our primary coordination tool form factor, but eye fi memory cards make our cameras capable of loading content directly to our favorite websites, kicking the pc out of the picture.

The question for me isn’t if netbooks will replace laptops for content consumption, but if netbooks have any meaningful role at all. I don’t need them to upload content to the web, and my phone is replacing the need for a rich email terminal. My quick take is that fewer people will buy laptops as only a slim minority ever used their full feature set anyway, but for those who opt out, I doubt they will need a machine that looks like a laptop at all. Their phones, cameras, mp3 devices, and devices will give them all of the access to the internet they ever needed.