Roving reporter, here. Hanging out in the blogger lounge at SXSW. I sat down to recharge next to Zac Bowling from SeatMe, a startup aiming to give Open Table some competition. Zac was just featured in Wired because he's a self-professed hackathon junky.

There's been some interest at Traction for throwing a hackathon so Zac gave me 4 tips for running a successful Hackathon...

I haven't even landed in Austin for SXSW yet, but already I'm caught up in the frenzy.

This morning, American Express has raised the bar for marketers trying to make a splash at a major cultural event.

To announce their new Twitter program, AmEx is throwing a Jay Z concert on Monday and giving away free tickets to SXSW attendees.

Brands should look to what's hot and new in the start-up community to identify patterns. More often than not, these patterns reflect trends in the consumer mindset so brands should be mindful of them when creating their own products and marketing efforts.

What am I seeing when I gaze into my silicon ball these days?

Better experiences are winning.

I'll be speaking in two weeks on March 20 at the Digital Edge Live conference here in San Francisco. Other speakers at the event include Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group, Petra Neiger from Cisco, Seimens CMO Tom Haas and a bunch of other really awesome speakers.

sfBIG has elected a new Board of Directors and I'm proud to announce I'm one of them. 

I'm particularly excited because at the first board meeting I participated in, we made the decision to change the name from the San Francisco Bay Area Interactive Group to the San Francisco Bay Area Innovation Group.

Traction was just named one of the top 5 Agencies Built for Technology Marketing in a report put out by Focus.com called The Technology Marketers' Handbook, 2012 Edition.

On the Oscar's tonight, Chris Rock told America that being a voiceover artist was the easiest job in the world.

"I just go into a booth. A guy tells me the next line. I say the line. He tells me the next line. They pay me a million dollars." (not an exact quote, but close enough)

My 8-year old daughter, Alice, asked me, "Daddy, is it really that easy?"

Many brands are confused about their mobile strategy. They ought to be. The landscape is confusing, rapidly changing and obscured by the promises of scores of vendors trying to sell you magic bullets.

There's no denying, however, that at the core of your mobile strategy is your presence. So, let's tackle that.

This week, we embraced revolution.

Sure I'm a bit biased, but I believe we've got something great going on at Traction. 

However, like any organization we also have room for improvement. And who better to know where Traction has room for improvement than the people who are Traction.

So we had an offsite yesterday that we called #OccupyTraction.

This week's Ad Age predicts that creative agencies are going to have to learn to move faster. What will be the implications if that's true? How will we adapt?