Monday I saw Gary Vaynerchuk's talk. Gary's a very inspiring and animated speaker. I had not heard of him before the panel. 

Gary spent some time talking about a forgotten art in the online space: customer service. Not the kind where you greet and upsell; the kind where you genuinely thank and appreciate your customer.

He attributes all his success to his customers and family. I have not seen such a grounded and real view of how to do business from any presenter at SXSW.

True to his word, he spent the majority of the panel fielding questions from the audience. A lot of the questions were directed to how he got to where he is now. His answers were short and to the point: seven years of answering every email and phone-call directed to him.

Gary's lesson to us was really simple: if you want to have a successful brand in an increasingly noisy online space you've got to be authentic and answer the people talking to you.

The back-channel at this talk was really active. It's worth a read to see how strong the audience participation was.

After Vaynerchuk's talk we had lunch. I had intended to take in the panel on what Google has learned about mobile since the release of the Android, but it was canceled.

Near 5:00pm I met up with Travis Bell from Freshview (makers of Campaign Monitor) for a panel on the future of email.

The panel turned out to be less about the future of email and more about how to get your inbox in shape. Wasn't terribly interesting so we left.

At 8:00pm we went to the Microsoft party at Speakeasy. The first 500 people in got a copy of Windows 7. Sadly I wasn't one of them. 

We rounded out the night at Buffalo Billiards, chatting about user experience with modern computers. 

All of us agreed that touch was rapidly changing the barrier of entry to using a computer. I think the insight I took away from talking with my friends was our baseline for what's simple was much to high. A lot of the discussion was centred around the iPad.

Multitasking? An unsophisticated user won't ever need to do it. When they want to do email things, the device should transform to do email things well. Facebook? The device changes to become the best possible interface to Facebook.