I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in fatigue.

Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be.

At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.

By the second day, I had cut the services I would check-in to in half. It still wasn’t close to being something I would consider doing on a regular basis. By the end of my time in Austin, I was down to using only two services — yes, the two in the midst of the “war” — Foursquare and Gowalla.

Pretty much everyone I knew in Austin were also using both Foursquare and Gowalla to send out all their check-ins. And all seemed to agree: it was still too tedious to use even just two services to do the same thing. In the end, there should be only one.

And so it should be no surprise that a few companies are already working on a solution for this problem. One is by the creators of Brightkite, who managed to obtain the killer check.in domain name. The team showed me a preview of the app at a party one night, and I immediately knew it was exactly what I needed (see a preview of it here).

But there’s a problem with this solution too. Currently, Gowalla’s API is read-only, which means you actually can’t use another app to check-in to the service. I spoke with CEO Josh Williams a bit about this just prior to SXSW, and he noted that the main thinking behind this is to maintain the user experience Gowalla is looking for (a very Apple-like argument). But, he did say that eventually he thinks they will open up a two-way API — maybe once they have time to create some best practices documentation, he noted.

Another problem is that currently each of these check-in services has their own places database. That means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Worse, there are plenty of duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious.

A better solution would be for the various services to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo may also be able to implement such a system on top of its WOEID system. Of course, any service that adopts such a standard would be risking at least part of their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service.

Meanwhile, Facebook is thinking about aggregating data from both Foursquare and Gowalla for its own upcoming location implementation. Might that be the one location stop to rule them all (of course, the writing back to Gowalla would still likely be an issue)? Not if Twitter has anything to say about it.

I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks.

During our Realtime Crunchup last year, I brought up this issue during our panel on location. All the players on stage (including Twitter, Foursquare, Hot Potato, Google Latitude, GeoAPI, and SimpleGeo) seemed to want to say that they could all get along and play nicely together for the betterment of location as a whole. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m definitely not buying it now.

From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for these guys to all play nicely with one another and make it so you don’t have to use their services. The need to take steps to ensure that you will use their service, and will do so instead of a rival service. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it has always worked. And that’s why it’s a war. Right now, it’s just the early stages where all sides are arming themselves. Soon, they’ll try to kill one another. And that may not be such a bad thing.

[photo: flickr/intagiblearts]

San Franciscans complain that Burning Man used to be better. New Yorkers claim that everything used to be better. While it’s no surprise that some attendees of the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas, deemed SXSW to be “over” compared to previous years, what’s interesting is the why. The complainers cited three major themes.

Bigger event

This year’s Interactive portion of SXSW (there are also separate multi-day events around music, and around independent film) was the largest ever, with an estimated 12,000 attendees. ReadWriteWeb blogger Jolie O’Dell complained that the bigger crowd behaved much less like a group or friends. Her laptop was stolen and her car damaged, presumably by other attendees. In past years, O’Dell wrote, a greater sense of community and togetherness led to more talk about tech and less theft, damage, groping and ogling.

Bigger sponsors

Nick Douglas, a former Gawker Media writer who now edits AOL’s URLesque blog, wrote that the number of big-brand, non-tech sponsorships and events made him wonder what exactly SXSW was about now. “More than ever, SXSWi is just a mass of people ready to be sold the same shit everyone else gets sold,” he wrote in a post for the SF Weekly.

Bigger egos

Douglas also cited examples of greatly increased social tiering at the larger-than-ever Interactive confernece. “We’re the crowd who demands VIP access,” he said. But, he added, ”tiered access cuts crowds apart and hurts people’s chances of making meaningful interactions. The fence eventually shuts out more and more of us.”

One solution: Do some reporting

VentureBeat reporters Kim-Mai Cutler and Anthony Ha, who covered SXSW for our site, came back without complaining that “South by,” as insiders call it, was too big, too impersonal, or too mass-market. That’s probably because they put extra effort into finding and reporting the actual technology discussions at the event. I counted at least five VentureBeat headlines from SXSW on Techmeme this week, and I wasn’t really paying attention. The nutritious content is there at South by. You probably need to work harder to find it. Here’s a suggestion: Stop looking in the VIP lounge.

[Photo by SF Weekly / Erin Broadley]

P.S. Big brand sponsorships aren’t always a bad thing. Nikon and photo-tweeting site yfrog assigned a handful of popular bloggers to shoot and post photos and videos from South by Southwest, something many of the citizen journalists in attendance never get around to doing.

Tags: sxsw

When former NetObjects CEO Samir Arora founded Glam Media in Brisbane in 2003, his strategy was one it would be hard to float past funders today: Let’s use great writing, great photos and magazine-inspired layout to bring big-brand advertisers onto the Web.

Doesn’t the guy know it’s all about dumbed-down “content” written by the lowest bidder, auto-promoted by a search engine optimization specialist, and flipped on an ad network as an arbitrage property?

I mean, come on, no one online actually wants good articles, right?

In 2006, VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall wrote that Glam’s reported $150 million valuation was an exercise in reality distortion. “It will be very difficult to turn a media company into something worth that much in the real marketplace,” Matt said.

Arora kept right on going, though. He built Glam’s 1,000-site network into one of the very fastest-growing brands on the Internet. In February of this year, he closed another $50 million in funding at a $750 million valuation, and is now preparing for an IPO.

An IPO! In 2010! For content not written by robots!

Glam has successfully and wonderfully bucked the trend toward auto-generated anti-content, growing 35 to 50 percent year to year. Glam kept expanding while other good-content networks, such as Gawker Media, lost ad sales and laid off writers.

Arora, in a phone interview, said his formula is simple: “Glam respects content, but brings the scale that advertisers need.” He means big-spending consumer brand groups like Proctor & Gamble, who largely keep right on spending during a recession.

Now, Arora’s Glam Media France is expanding onto the home turf of L’Oreal and Louis Vuitton. These companies are based in France, but spend big in Japan and elsewhere.

Here’s a quick tour of the sort of content that’s made Glam a top 10 Web property, according to comScore’s February numbers:

• Supermodels Take to the Runway at the Louis Vuitton Fall 2010 Show
• Michelle Obama Wears Talbots on the Cover of Essence Magazine
• Tom Binns Creates Alice in Wonderland Designs
• Wall Pops: DIY Home Decor

Arora says brand advertisers prefer display ads to targeted search ads. And Glam avoids “remnant” ads, the punch-the-monkey cheapo banners used to flood unsold space on websites. “You’re not going to see a brand like an Apple or a L’Oreal start doing at-home targeted emails,” he told me. “It doesn’t convey the classiness of the brand. That’s why Google expects display advertising to get very big. And we feel the downturn part of the recession is coming to an end.”

The company was recently deemed the most innovative media company of the year by Fast Company magazine. If Glam keeps going, it will be a welcome alternative to the big, but kind of boring AOL / Yahoo / MSN triumvirate of big content.

Arora is pretty blunt: “We should be bigger than AOL very shortly.” Samir, are you hiring?

Companies: Glam Media

People: Samir Arora

Zector, developer of cloud-based storage platform ZumoDrive, announced today that its solution is now available for Palm Pre and Android mobile devices.

Zumodrive offers users the ability to store several forms of content, including music, video and photos, to a cloud-based storage platform that can be accessed from multiple devices. The service is valuable as many devices — both PCs and mobile, alike — have limited storage capabilities. Its a good option for people worried about content size and losing data. ZumoDrive automatically provides backup to specifically selected folders so that consumers can access their content both online and offline.

Recently, the company made several big announcements, including that Hewlett-Packard agreed to have ZumoDrive power an “HP CloudDrive” service installed on the computer maker’s new line of netbooks. It also closed a new round of funding for $1.5 million from investors Ram Shriram, plus original investors Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron.

The Burlingame, Calif.-based company, founded in 2007, offers several tiers of the ZumoDrive application. The application is available for Mac OS X, PC, Linux, iPhone, Android and Palm Pre platforms.

Tags: Android, cloud storage, Palm Pre

Companies: Zector, ZumoDrive

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini is being replaced as the CEO of Ning by COO Jason Rosenthal .

Many people (including myself) have come to the conclusion that Gmail, with its threaded messages, spam filtering, and vast storage space, is one of the web’s best webmail providers. In fact, we like it so much that we use it for both our personal accounts and work accounts using Google Apps. But that also poses a problem: many of us wind up having to maintain two separate Google accounts, which means we have to swap logins whenever our Gmail, Reader, or other data is stored under the other account. Fortunately, there may be an end in sight for this juggling act.

As today’s SXSW panel on Gmail came to a close, the panelists revealed one last juicy tidbit: they’re working to resolve the problems with multiple namespaces that users have to deal with. The team didn’t get specific — they simply repeated that they have to deal with the same problems, as they have “@google.com” accounts for work and standard Gmail accounts for personal use. And they know it’s a pain.

There’s no time frame, and we have no idea what form the feature will take. But at least we know Google is working on it.

Image by Helico

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

Unquestionably, the major obstacle for indoor, or household-friendly light-emitting diodes is price. No matter how long a bulb lasts, nobody wants to spend $30 on one light. Exacerbating the situation, there are too many competing uses for LEDs, according to electronics market research firm iSuppli, slowing their development for home use.

Back-lighting for televisions is a huge growth market for LEDs, with 2.5 million LED-lit sets manufactured in 2009, and an estimated 25 million to be built this year. Estimates range up to 100 million LED-lit TVs to be made in 2014. All this demand has created a shortage of LEDs for other uses.

In response, LED makers are buying up the MOCVD (metal organic chemical vapor deposition) systems that manufacture LED materials. Aixtron and Veeco are two prominent MOCVD makers. Between them, an estimated 120 MOCVD systems will be shipped this quarter. With so much new production capacity being scaled up, one might expect the shortage to end quickly.

But this isn’t the case. Once Veeco or Aixtron ship a MOCVD system — already about five months after it is ordered — the purchaser must customize it for its own LED chip design. This takes an additional three to four months, as Jerald Kolansky writes. There is typically a ten-month gap between new production equipment being ordered and the actual start of production.

Since LEDs are growing so explosively (the prediction is double-digit percentage increases over the next three years), most LED companies are looking to boost production capacity. In two years or less, the LED shortage will be over, and the LED glut will likely begin, analysts say.

Kolansky writes that an over-supply situation “is likely in 2011″ — unless lighting moves into mass production. In order to do so, LED makers will want to satisfy their immediate customers first, which brings us back to LED-backlit televisions. TVs use up to 500 lights per panel, whereas a notebook computer uses 50. With demand so high in these areas, it may be difficult for lighting companies to drive prices lower.

This is especially true when one considers the bulk purchasing power that TV makers have. It would take an awful lot of light bulbs to equal the purchase of just one TV. If manufacturers have to devote resources to one of the two markets, one proven and one emerging, the new guy is likely to be left out. In other words, LED lighting is unlikely to take off until after the display market is stable. This could lead to a period of market saturation, with LEDs being overproduced for display applications and under-utilized for lighting.

Aixtron and Veeco are both planning to double production capacity by the end of 2010. The LED market itself is expected to more than double by 2014.

Companies: Aixtron, Veeco

Ray Muzyka, chief executive of popular video game-maker BioWare, spoke at our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco about building game franchises. While onstage, Muzyka talked about his Electronic Arts-owned company’s upcoming games in the Star Wars, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age franchises — all across BioWare’s “future portfolio,” he said it’s shifting toward selling games as an ongoing service rather than a standalone product.

Afterwards, I did a brief video interview with Muzyka, during which he elaborated on how his BioWare’s business model is changing, described the company’s new games and downloadable content (DLC), and offered his advice for up-and-coming game entrepreneurs.

See all our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC.

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC

Companies: Bioware

People: Ray Muzyka

Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay’s Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos.

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

Sonos wouldn’t comment on this story. But we believe the deal will close and be announced in the next week or two.