I got a chance to reconnect with Erik Hersman at SXSW & FOWA. He was on a great panel called Africa 2.0. I interviewed him about the site he helped create called Ushahidi.com to track the violence in Kenya surrounding the recent elections.

Erik Hersman - Ushahidi Interview from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Erik on all he is doing, I encourage you to visit Ushahidi.com and get involved. More about Erik can be found at WhiteAfrican and Afrigadget. As a fellow african-american, (born in Nigeria, raised in Kenya), the violence in Kenya has been very upsetting and I really appreciate all the effort that Erik (Hash) is making.

I got this e-mail yesterday:

Hi there,

I met you at/shared a cab with you after FOWA in Miami.  It was interesting talking with you; I didn’t see you at the party afterwards - most probably because I didn’t stick-around for long, which is a shame.

I hope you had a good time at SxSW. I intend to go one year, it sounds fantastic and seems like a good excuse to visit TX.  How’s things in The Big Easy?

Kind regards,
Chris Hart

P.s. I’ve made you a ‘favicon’ for Voodoo Ventures that would appear in the address bar/browser tab/favorites menu.

If you choose to use it, just chuck the .ico file in your root directory (Mozilla browsers find it automatically there) and add the following to the head of your pages:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

Out of all the emails I’ve had flying around since my three conference swing this month, this one just blew me away.  Chris Hart, a web developer in the UK who I met in shared a cab with at FOWA in Miami, took the time to check out Voodooventures.com, noticed we didn’t have a “favicon” in the browser window, and created one for us.  I don’t know if this took him five minutes or an hour, but the thoughtfulness really strikes a chord with me.

Here’s a guy that  I’ll keep in touch with.  I’ll file this away in my memory, in addition to using what he created for me. And hopefully will be able to cross paths again and potentially do business together at some point.

Being helpful is cool. Thanks Chris.

PS: Anybody looking for a web developer in the UK would do well by contacting him. chris (at) everyone (dot) eu

I’ve been slow on the draw and have been meaning to write the guys from AwesomeHighlighter.com up since FOWA in Miami, and in the short three weeks since I met them they managed to amass more than 10,000 users.

Yep, thats right, three weeks ago they showed me a prelaunch version of their app that they were using to share awesome stuff with each other, and now they are top ranked on del.icio.us and growing like a weed. Speaking of del.icio.us, there hasn’t been too much innovation in their camp since the Yahoo acquisition, I think AwesomeHighlighter could have a real chance to add new value here and become a prefered bookmarking tool.

I met Joel & Luke at BarCamp Miami when I accidentally took Joel’s slot on the preso grid (you snooze you lose buddy;). But it was serendipidous because we ended up in some of the same sessions through out the day and decided to go to Cuban food for dinner.

These guys are everything that is cool about what is going on right now. Over a great ropa vieja, we rapped about Y Combinator, business models, funding needs and the lack thereof, and why building something that you would use yourself is the way to start. By solving problems you face every day:

Like, sending stuff to your friends, but not making them read the whole blog post or page to figure out what you wanted to share. What you think is cool is highlighted for them on the page. An idea so simple, it works.

Luke and Joel just applied to Y Combinator. I wish them them best of luck. I wish we had our funding strategy in place here in NOLA. Well, maybe we will.

In the meantime, check it out. It is awesome. (See this post Awesomely Highlighted).

This time every year something very strange happens.  As the snow melts up north, the allergies start kicking in down south, and people shake off the winter blahs all over, techies and web folks from all over the country flock to Austin, Texas for the annual rite of spring known as South by Southwest.

Last year was a great one, and I made many new friends and reconnected with old ones.  I made a prediction before SXSW last year that Twitter would be the social communication tool of choice, but who could have known the breakout it saw from SXSW last year.  I wonder what the breakout web app will be this year?

• I was asked just that yesterday in an interview with Austin’s Geek News hosted by Paul Terry Walhus.  Go check out the video interview at AustinCast to see my response.
• My schedule for SXSW is online so we can meet up in the sessions.
• I’m really looking forward to BarCamp Austin on Saturday.  I hope to lead a session and connect with a lot of old friends there.
• Want to hook up for coffee, dinner or a beer?  Hit me up on Twitter or on my cell at 504-931-6099.

See you in Austin!

Lots of people ask me: “what is Twitter? I don’t get it.” I’ve finally found a way to explain it. Thanks to Common Craft for putting together Twitter in Plain English.