Three of us have just returned from SxSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, after a week-long trip with UKTI as part of their digital mission.

There was a bumpy start to the trip involving travel difficulties, ultimately meaning we had a 3 hour drive from Houston to Austin. Not an easy task when you haven’t slept for 24 hours! After driving round the somewhat confusing surrounding roads of Houston, we eventually made it to our out-of-town hotel.

The event is an excitingly manic mixture of panels, talks, meetings, meetups, parties, free stuff and every big name you can think of including Christopher Poole, Matthew Inman and Guy Kawasaki. There is more information available in these few days than any one person could handle in a lifetime and we were keen to get in as much in as we could. Careful planning was required for us to be able to do and see everything we wanted, and the SxSWGO mobile application proved important here.

All the latest thoughts and opinions in user experience, technology, analytics, design and marketing were put across, mainly in panels. The panels were probably the most informative sessions; as they allowed 4 or 5 thought leaders to simultaneously discuss complex topics, each expressing their own opinion on the matter. This leads to a more rounded discussion rather than just taking one person’s opinion as gospel. We’d love to see more panels like these happening in the UK.

The second part of the trip for us was about the trade show. We were part of the UKTI digital mission, so we had a place on their stand where we set up our eye tracking equipment to give a free demo to anyone interested. We spoke to some really interesting people during our time on the stand – people we would never have otherwise met. Hopefully we’ll some of these people again, along with representatives from the other companies who came along on the mission.

If you’re planning to go along next year make sure you plan out your time, book early and stay in a hotel downtown. Other than that, just remember that you can meet your next customer anywhere – don’t limit yourself to the confines of meeting rooms and conference centres – if you have enough energy left at the end of the day make sure you get some networking events (parties) in too.

The trip gave us a lot of things we never would have got by simply staying in the UK – I’d recommend it to anyone in the industry – you’ll almost certainly get a lot out of it.