An interactive sculpture, broken down into four pallet-based crates, each one of them about 48 by 44 by 48 in., was already on its way from Massachusetts to Texas when South by Southwest (SXSW) was canceled.
Boston-based MASARY Studios’ “Sound Sculpture” installation, the piece in question, had been selected as a finalist for the SXSW Innovation Awards in the Music and Audio Innovation category. An enormous, interactive musical instrument, it was slated to be showcased on Saturday, March 14. Project director Ryan Edwards had already coordinated the logistics and planned to fly to Austin himself this week.
Then, on Friday, SXSW canceled the festival and conference amid fears of the novel coronavirus.
SXSW said in a statement that it was exploring options to reschedule the event and was working to provide a virtual SXSW online experience for 2020 participants. But for MASARY Studios and several other local companies that had planned to participate—some of them small startups getting their work in front of investors and influencers for the first time—the consequences can be significant.
“I’m just at the beginning of trying to get some things reimbursed and understanding really how much we stand to lose,” Edwards told BostInno on Monday. “It’s kind of in that place where there’s probably not any insurance that will kick in and cover anything, and it’s all pretty low-level losses. My attitude is, I would rather things happened in this way than be there and things be canceled or some other level of, you know, nuttiness. I’m keeping a good attitude about it.”
MASARY Studios is just one of a handful of Massachusetts companies that was going to showcase at the festival. Digitas, AirFox and Owl Labs were also finalists for the 2020 Innovation Awards. Meanwhile, workplace productivity startup Marlo and e-learning startup Arist were finalists in the SXSW Pitch competition. Those startups were founded by Harvard Business School and Babson College students, respectively.
Ankith Harathi, Marlo’s co-founder and CEO, said that he and his team were weighing whether to pull out of the event even before SXSW officially canceled. Last week, Twitter became the first big name to back out of the conference, followed by Facebook and then a cascade of tech and entertainment companies.
But the calculus is different for a small startup.
“These are companies who have the gravitas to pull out and maybe try to preempt the official event to close, while us pulling out or declaring a public ‘Oh, we’re not going anywhere’ doesn't really move the needle for anybody,” Harathi said on Friday. “For us, would we love to go and pitch there? Yes. No doubt. However, we don’t want to put ourselves or anybody else in jeopardy of health and safety. There’s no amount of award that’s worth that.”
When BostInno followed up with the Marlo team on Monday, Harathi reiterated that point. “Cancelling SXSW was the right decision,” he said in an email.
Arist, a Babson Summer Venture Program startup that enables users to create and deploy text message-based learning courses, is taking a different tack. The team had other plans in Austin in addition to the pitch competition.
“We had originally planned on going down there to make some connections, talk to potential investors for future rounds and really just kind of see what kind of movement we can get with any potential partners,” Arist co-founder Ryan Laverty said on Monday.
To that end—and because some of their travel expenses were non-refundable—a few members of the Arist team are still traveling to Austin this week. There will be no SXSW, but they’ll explore the city of Austin, experience its culture and, of course, drink and eat. Laverty noted that SXSW’s cancelation means that Austin could stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Having a few Arist employees patronize local businesses could offset that, if only slightly.
As the head of an e-learning startup, Laverty also believes Arist has an opportunity to educate users about the novel coronavirus. This week, Arist deployed a text message course on the disease, with tips on prevention, news about the mechanisms of its spread and up-to-date information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with biologists and infectious diseases experts.
Somerville startup Owl Labs was slated to compete its Meeting Owl Pro, a 360-degree rotating camera designed for remote video conferencing, in the Innovation Awards’ Robotics and Hardware category.
But in this case, SXSW’s cancelation isn’t slowing anything down.
Chief Revenue Officer Karen Rubin told BostInno that Owl Labs has seen a 41 percent spike in sales over the last two to three weeks, especially in Italy—which is currently entirely quarantined—along with Austin and the West Coast, particularly California. Rubin noted that she has also seen an increase in order volume, with companies placing larger orders of Meeting Owls than they had previously.
“I have a hunch that it’s a lot of organizations that were planning to do this at some point this year or were thinking that maybe they should, and suddenly, they're realizing, ‘Oh, goodness, we can't wait—we need to do this now,’” Rubin said.
Owl Labs also publishes content on its website to advise workplaces on how to set up and support remote teams. Those pieces have seen a 6,000 percent increase in traffic, Rubin said.
Owl Labs and other companies are preparing for SXSW itself to go virtual. Marlo has created a custom landing page for its SXSW presence. Fintech company Airfox said in an email Monday that its team was “continuing to brainstorm innovative ways” to showcase banQi, the mobile banking solution that was selected as a finalist for an Innovation Award in the New Economy category.
“We’re so proud of our team of Boston-based developers for securing this nomination and look forward to celebrating their innovation on the stage of SXSW—even if that stage is a virtual one,” a spokesperson said in the email.
