When the folks on the Community Development team are not working directly with the companies in the Catalyst, they’re looking for opportunities to help and serve our huge network of business incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces and startup events. As a result, we stay pretty busy. To give you an idea of what a given month looks like for us, Catalyst is supporting seventeen different startup-related events in six different countries over the course of the next thirty days. We’re lucky that we love what we do so much … Otherwise, that schedule might seem pretty daunting.

If you’ve been an avid SoftLayer Blog reader (as you should be), you know that we work closely with organizations like TechStars and 500 Startups, but you haven’t heard much about the other types of partnerships we build in the startup community. We want to provide Catalyst companies with resources outside of hosting that can make their lives easier, and that means we have to find killer partners that focus specifically on the needs and wants of startup companies. To give you an idea of what those partners look like, I’d like to introduce you to a few of them via their video interviews from SoftLayer’s Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW:

As we’ve done with the Startups Speak interviews, we’ll be adding videos from our partners to the YouTube playlist above so that you can meet them and learn more about the value they uniquely provide to the startup community.

I’d love to take more time to explain how we incorporate services from these partners in the Catalyst program, but I think I’m late for a plane to Vancouver … or Chicago … or New York … or San Francisco. In any case, I should probably head to the airport.

-@PaulFord

In my last blog about mentorship and meaningfulness, you heard from George Karidis and Paul Ford about the vision to make Catalyst a part of the startup ecosystem, committing to helping participating teams with more than just their hosting needs. While we attended SXSW Interactive, I ran into a few of our phenomenal customers and had the opportunity to sit down with them and talk about their businesses, their connection to SoftLayer and what the future holds:

Over the next few weeks, we’ll add video interviews to that YouTube playlist to show off all of the startups that stopped by the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW 2013. When a new video is published, it’ll be added to the embedded playlist above, and we’ll send some social media shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook.

With SoftLayer’s 7th birthday coming up on May 5, we still feel like a startup, and a lot of that has to do with how closely we work with our customers … Their energy is contagious, and it only encourages us to keep innovating and building our platform for the future. That’s why entrepreneurs like the ones you meet in these videos choose SoftLayer. The fact that we have better technology and provide a more powerful cloud infrastructure winds up being a fringe benefit.

A big “Thanks!” goes out to the folks from Epic Playground, Flowmio, Medved, Urbane, YouNoodle, KeenIO, Cloudability and Preferred Return for taking time out of their busy SXSW schedules to chat with me. We love you guys!

-@JoshuaKrammes

SoftLayer is able to offer the entrepreneurial community so much more than cloud computing instances and powerful servers. As a startup ourselves not so long ago, our team knows all about the difficulties of being an entrepreneur, and now that we’re able to give back to the startup community, we want to share battle stories and lessons learned. Mentorship is one of the most valuable commodities for entrepreneurs and business founders, and SoftLayer’s mentors are in a unique position to provide feedback about everything from infrastructure planning to hiring your first employees to engaging with your board of advisors to negotiating better terms on a round of funding.

The Catalyst team engages in these kinds discussions with our clients every day, and we’ve had some pretty remarkable success. When we better understand a client’s business, we can provide better feedback and insight into the infrastructure that will help that business succeed. In other words, we build meaningful relationships with our Catalyst clients, and as a result, those clients are able to more efficiently leverage the hosting credits we provide them.

The distinction between Catalyst and other startup programs in the hosting industry has never been so apparent than after South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year. I had the opportunity to meet with entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts who have been thirsting for a program like Catalyst for years, and when they hear about what we’re doing, they know they’ve found their oasis. I had a chance to sit down with Paul Ford in the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW to talk about the program and some of the insights and feedback we’d gotten at the show:

Paul was quick to point out that being a leader in the startup community has more impact when you provide the best technology and pair that with a team that can deliver for startups what they need: meaningful support.

Later, I had an impromptu coffee with one of the world’s largest, most prestigious Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms — probably THE most respected venture capital firm in the world, actually. As we chatted about the firm’s seed-funding practices, the investment partner told me, “There is no better insurance policy for an infrastructure company than what SoftLayer is doing to ensure success for its startup clients.” And I thought that was a pretty telling insight.

That simple sentence drove home the point that success in a program like Catalyst is not guaranteed by a particular technology, no matter how innovative or industry-leading that technology may be. Success comes from creating value BEYOND that technology, and when I sat down with George Karidis, he shared a few insights how the Catalyst vision came to be along with how the program has evolved to what it is today:

Catalyst is special. The relationships we build with entrepreneurs are meaningful. We’ve made commitments to have the talented brainpower within our own walls to be accessible to the community already. After SXSW, I knew I didn’t have to compare what we were doing from what other programs are doing because that would be like comparing apples and some other fruit that doesn’t do nearly as much for you as apples do.

I was told once on the campaign trail for President Clinton in ’96 that so long as you have a rock-solid strategy, you cannot be beaten if you continue to execute on that strategy. Execute, Execute, Execute. If you waiver and react to the competition, you’re dead in the water. With that in mind, we’re going to keep executing on our strategy of being available to our Catalyst clients and actively helping them solve their problems. The only question that remains is this:

How can we help you?

-@JoshuaKrammes

SxSL

If you’ve ever been to a SoftLayer soiree, you know that we know how to get down with our bad selves to throw a good party, and SxSL was no exception. The Cactus Room at Iron Cactus was a perfect venue to unwind after the first day on the trade show floor, and it proved to be a great setting for many interesting conversations about hosting, cloud computing and SoftLayer’s plans for world domination … err … growth.

As you can see from a few of the pictures we took at the event, Snappy – HostGator‘s mascot – made an appearance, and he was quite the popular guy. He made so many friends at the party, he actually followed us back to the office in Dallas.

Server Challenge

If you followed the link to the Server Challenge at the top of this post, there’s no need to reintroduce the competition, so we’ll dive straight into how it went. Before I tell you what I think, listen to what @ipbrian had to say about it on Twitter: “Congrats to @SoftLayer for having the best contest and booth at #sxswi. I have NEVER wanted to repeat visit a vendor more.”

Brian was a fierce competitor who pushed the limits of how fast our rack of servers could be reassembled, and prior to SxSW, he’d never heard of SoftLayer. As he hurried to reattach network cables, he experienced what we do in our data centers, and that experience is worth more than any piece of collateral we could have given him. That experience was our goal in designing the challenge, and based on our first show with it, we’re confident that our goal is being met.

Some attendees saw the blazing times on our Server Challenge leader board as inspiration to complete an “Eye of the Tiger”-speed assembly while others – like the two squirrels from getacorn.com in the video below – knew they might not win the iPad 2 for being the fastest at SxSW but wanted to try anyway:

In addition to the official Server Challenge competition, we were happy to take part in Das IronGeek for the second year in a row. Das IronGeek put six press and bloggers through a series of five technology-related challenges to test their “geekiness,” and the SoftLayer Server Challenge was the final “make it or break it” event to determine the champion. All of the competitors stared down the SoftLayer server rack and had a blast completing the challenge. Joshua Baer bested the other participants to become the 2011 Das IronGeek Champion, and if I were him, I’d be showing my kids the 2011 Das IronGeek wrap up for years to come.

As the trade show wound down on Thursday, our booth had a last surge of Server Challenge participants looking to reach the top of the leader board to with an iPad 2, but as you learned from Highlander, there can be only one. That “one” at South by Southwest was Erik Wagner from Netbiscuits with an amazing time of 1:08.8. When he recorded that time, we knew it would be tough to beat, so we had him complete it one more time on camera to show future generations of Server Challenge participants where the bar has been set. Even with the additional pressure of being on camera, he recorded a faster time than any other participant:

We have a few tweaks and improvements planned for our next Server Challenge competition, and we’re excited to see how attendees at other shows respond.

As I write about SxSL and the Server Challenge, I’m reminded of stories about the popularity of the good ol’ SoftLayer switch-ball and the hallway war we may or may not have been responsible for supplying with foam missile ammunition, but those stories will have to wait for another post. I’m still tired from SxSW sleep deprivation, and I need a nap.

-@khazard

In SoftLayer’s booth, we have a 12U rack loaded with five servers and three network switches, and the challenge is to put it all back together as fast as possible. Check it out:

If you’re roaming the trade show aisles, swing by and try your hand! Fastest time wins an iPad 2.

-@khazard

There are many use cases for LBS, many for social media, and the intersection of the two are even more interesting.

As seen with foursquare and Gowalla, bringing in LBS into a social application that lets you add tips/comments to restaurants, bars, etc. instantly turns it into a quick way to see where the “hot” places are currently in your area. Adding game mechanics (like badges) only makes foursquare even more addictive.

This is the new hotness.

The intersect between Location-based services and social media.

Is it any surprise that twitter started supporting location-based tweets this week? They’re simply keeping up with the trend. I expect to see location-appropriate contextual ads in applications on mobile phones more now. If you’re walking down 5th street, and you’ve given your application access to GPS information, advertisers would love to be able to tell you to drop by their shop on your way to wherever you’re headed.

ShopSavvy, for instance, could push notifications to customers using that app letting them know where deals are in their proximity.

There are detractors. Plenty of people still want to keep their location private. If you’re an at-risk person (in an abusive relationship, for instance) you should think twice before turning on location-based services. More and more websites/applications these days are starting to set very “open” defaults rather than restrictive defaults. As Danah Boyd recently said, we were once a people who kept information private and decided what to make public. Now we are more and more making data about ourselves public by default, and take more effort to decide what to make private.

Edit: A day after I posted this, I found an article by Kevin Nakao which provides more detail on location-based services. It is a great reader and can be found here.