I'm Joe English, welcome to Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm here at Eventech. And today I talked with Scott Wilcox of South by Southwest about how they integrate technology into the attendee experience. Scott Wilcox, thanks for joining us. It's my pleasure. South by Southwest film, music, multimedia. Interactive. Interactive. So this is a massive event in terms of logistics. Many, many venues. And here you have the logistics piece, the infrastructure you have to build. Correct. So let's talk about how you go through that in terms of the tech. Well, really on we realize the essentialness of having the internet everywhere. And so we followed a philosophy of we want Wi-Fi to be like electricity, we want it to be there, we want it to work. Diling back to the most recent show, we work with a company called Right Round. It specializes in temporary internet and high density wireless for events. So they bring in about three gigabits per second of additional bandwidth and install about 600 wireless devices across the city. That's point to point and point to multi-point devices. So we build a massive show network across the city of Austin where they install around 10 miles of cable and a few days. And by creating that backbone, you're enabling these digital conversations to take place. Our attendees have very high expectations in terms of what they'll expect. Everybody has multiple wireless devices and they want to be able to do their business, show off their apps, connect with people both face-to-face and digitally in real time. And so we create a massive network to be able to facilitate that. And on top of that, it enables us to do some really cool other things related to technology. We can essentially do streaming wherever we need, very quickly we can deploy massive amounts of bandwidth in a matter of hours rather than days or months. And we also use this company to install over 1,000 Beacons last year where we did a huge activation related to beacon technology that allowed our attendees to connect with each other directly. So the experience is you could see who is around you based on the Beacons that they were also seeing. So you can see that Scott Wilcox, the CTO of South-Based Southwest, and you could say hi very quickly and facilitate a face-to-face meeting. As opposed to trying to schedule something and go across town and then you get pulled in another direction. So we find that even though our attendees use our tools to plan in advance, our mobile app, our schedules, there's a certain amount of fluidity and dynamics that really can't be accounted for. So we build a system that accommodates that flexibility. So you're enabling another layer of say intimacy within this experience. It's not only creating a connected environment but trying to bring the individual people together. Absolutely. It's a huge priority of us to connect the right people with each other so that they can gain that direct business value. And many times I go off and start new business ventures as a result of meeting at our event. And so we put a lot of thought and care around the networking portion. So in addition to the hundreds of sessions that we offer at the 265 venues across Austin, in total 6,000 events that we produce over the nine days as part of South-Based Southwest Film Music and Interactive, we think about the creating intimacy within that context to drive business value. So a lot of this came out of our question about the logistics of the underpinnings of the show. But what about more on the attendee experience, the mobile app and things like that? What kinds of things are you doing directly to attendee? Well right now we're putting a lot of focus on mobile because it's got a number of advantages. Proximity-based alerts are really something that we're focusing a lot on and also recommendation engines based on how you describe yourself, matching attendees, looking at the sessions that you've flagged and other people have flagged to create opportunities to recommend things to you that people like you might like. And so I'm working a law on creating a responsive system that takes advantage of proximity-based alerts and this layer of data intelligence. That comes not only from what you've started on the schedule and who you're like and who you connect with digitally but also facilitates that in a real time physical environment using Beacons to create that kind of instantaneous connection. So how much of that is something you can do today versus that you're aiming for in the future? Well last year for March we installed 1,000 Beacons across our venues working with a vent base and our mobile app, South Bay Southwest Go and we enacted this around me feature, this who's here featured and was very successful. We saw 7 million visits to the Beacons and we sent out 450,000-ish messages that were proximity-based alerts that complement push notifications and rich push in some of those other technologies. So we definitely enacted that and this year we're looking at building on that by providing more data sources to create an intelligent experience. It doesn't get in the way but enhances the attendee experience because in the end we have free will and we can go where we want. And the people are there to have an experience and have fun and they just want to have the best experience. I think that's a really important point. It's important for people to have fun. It's possible to do business and have fun at the same time and that drives a richer experience. So where do you see it going in the future? What's exciting? Where are you looking out? I really think personalization and hyperlocalization is really exciting. I think there's a lot more that can be done there and I'm focused on that. I also think virtual reality and augmented reality have big roles to play in the event industry going forward and I think we're in the very early innings and seeing how those technologies can integrate into an event. So those are a couple of areas that I'm excited about. It's exciting time to be in technology. Absolutely. Exciting to do it at events. Yes. Thanks for joining us, Scott. It's very nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thanks.