SXSW 2010: Even, Even More Five Good Minutes

Posted on | March 15, 2010 | View Comments

Jenny Toomey, Program Officer for Media and Cultural Policy, Ford Foundation (Washington, DC/New York City, NY)

Jenny and I met back in 2000 when I was working at Wired News. She was in the early stages of conceptualizing what would become the Future of Music Coalition. Over the years, she’s been actively involved in music rights, copyright legislation, low power radio and other “access” issues. Now, she’s in charge of a grant program through the Ford Foundation that seeks to fund groups working towards ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access and Net Neutrality.

Sarah Krueger, Marketing Specialist, RGK Foundation at the University of Texas (Austin, TX)

The RGK Foundation is a collegiate philanthropic organization that seeks to fund ideas college students have to change the world. But Sarah and I met last year during the South by Southwest conference. Well, we “met” on Twitter and kept in touch throughout the year. A marketing specialist for the grant program, she uses social media to reach out to college students around the world.

Brian Zisk, Co-Founder, Collecta (San Francisco, CA)

Brian is a serial entrepreneur. He helped Jenny launch the Future of Music Coalition, but that’s just one of dozens of ventures he’s been involved. He helped launch Greenwich Radio and Ogg Vorbis, an open source alternative to MP3s (which is one of the reasons MP3 compression remains free). These days, he’s working with Collecta, a real-time search and widget application.

Toby Padilla, Vice President of Mobile for TweetDeck

Toby is the recently-hired VP for Mobile strategy at TweetDeck, the desktop application that helped move Twitter from an interesting mobile experiment into a full-fledged information system. The “social media” dashboard enables users to search, update and archive Tweets and Facebook posts. More importantly, Padilla knows how people use this tool, giving him great insight into emerging trends.

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