photo courtesy of Cory Booker

Presenting at the SXSW Interactive Festival often leads to exciting new career opportunities. Such is the case with Cory Booker, who earned the honor of Best Speaker at the 2013 event after his amazing on-stage interview with Time's Steve Snyder at the Long Center.

He authored the best-selling book "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" as well as the followup volume "Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World."

At the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival, internationally acclaimed big-picture visionary Don Tapscott covered the concept of Global Solution Networks, which he says can provide non-traditional approaches to problems such as climate change, conflict, poverty, water scarcity, infectious disease and economic stagnation. Now you can catch up with his talk, "How To Solve the World's Problems."

The 2014 SXSW PanelPicker entry process begins in just over three weeks on Monday, July 1. Given our numbers from 2013, we anticipate receiving more than 3000 speaking proposals via this interface by the time it closes at end of day on Friday, July 26. So what is the best way to make your incredible idea stand out from the crowd? In terms of scope of coverage, focusing on depth over width is one of the best ways to make your proposal stand out.

At the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival, Fu talked about her new book as part of the Featured Speaker lineup. Watch her enlightening talk, which pulls together the lessons she learned in childhood with the wisdom she has gained in her illustrious tech career.

The SXSW Gaming Expo comes to this year's E3, as we are helping out with the WIGI (Women In Games International) S.T.E.A.M. Punk Party on Wednesday, June 12 at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles.

Made up of female (and male) professionals, WIGI enthusiastically works to promote the inclusion and advancement of women in the global games industry. The WIGI party at E3 on June 12 will focus on one of the core elements of the WIGI agenda – S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) with various interactive displays and installments featuring high‐tech games and attractions to entertain and inspire a technical and creative audience. RSVP for this exciting get-together today!

2013 Passport Promotion stamps

In March 2013, SXSW ran a Passport promotion encouraging registrants to visit at least 10 specified locations over the course of the 5-day event. Registrants who visited these 10 specified locations (and collected a special stamp at each stop) were entered in a drawing to win a free badge for the 2014 SXSW Interactive Festival. The lucky two winners from this 2013 Passport promotion were Michi Catanese of Silicon Valley and Stephen Yeh of Atlanta. Also, congrats to our two runner-up winners (Scott Perry and Devi Ekanand), who both received souvenir SXSW 2013 t-shirts.

Did you miss out on purchasing a souvenir t-shirt when you were in Austin in March? Or perhaps you couldn't make it to SXSW this year, but want to pretend that you did. Either way, you are in luck because 2013 (and 2012) merchandise is still available at the SXSW online store with a full range of styles, colors and sizes to give you many different shopping options. Remember that SXSW merchandise makes your summer styles that much cooler!