Many a link-baiting slideshow and BuzzFeed post have been using animated GIFS, the moving images assembled from videos, sequences of photos or original animations.
But how did the initially cheesy, early computer and Internet age animation trick using a file format become the au courant method for obsessing over celebrities and being web-ready shorthand for expressing emotions? SXSW has the answer: According to the GIF artists and writers in “The Economy of the GIF,” you can blame your phone and microblogging platform Tumblr.
The GIF lineage goes something like this: they were first used in website banners and as quickie animations in those quaint AOL disc days of the Internet — and then Flash animation came along. Remember when websites resembled the futuristic, highly-interactive interfaces of science fiction films? With those slick drop-down menus and fancy moving ads? That was Flash.
Flash still exists, but with Apple and its iPhone (which famously does not support Flash-based animations or videos), web designers and animators and branding gurus had to rethink their media strategies. Suddenly, entire websites were rendered unreadable on phones and other mobile screens.
So as Flash fell out of fashion, simpler web designs prevailed and led to a GIF renaissance of sorts — because GIFs will still display on phones and tablets and other magic, mini computer devices. And it helps that social networking sites and phone web browsers have made using the Internet much more photo-centric (hence, Tumblr).
Plus, GIFs, says writer Lindsey Weber (who’s done some GIF work for BuzzFeed and New York magazine) are better representations of how we consume the Internet in 2013.
“[GIFs] span this space between photos and videos,” Weber says. “The GIF takes the best parts of a photo and the best parts of a video and puts them together. It’s just a better way to ingest that.”
And they’ve become so wildly popular, argues artist Jimmy Repeat (who’s GIFed for MTV in the past), they’ve become a new art form all in themselves.
“GIF is the new medium because it’s more of a challenge than a static image,” he says.
Perhaps their greatest claim to legitimacy is their looming legal precedent: Weber says GIF-related lawsuits and copyright cases are just around the bend — she’s come up against all kinds of rights issues with the GIFs she worked with.
But for now, there’s still plenty of GIF fun to be had. Just go on Tumblr and get lost for days.
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Austin tops 2026 list of best U.S. cities for startups
The Texas Capital has topped a new list ranking the best U.S. cities for starting a new business, with Austin's favorable economic climate enticing new opportunities for entrepreneurship and growth.
The recognition comes in CommercialCafe's recent "Best Cities for Startups" report, published December 10. The study analyzed large U.S. cities across two population categories: cities with more than one million residents and cities with populations one million and 500,000 residents. The report analyzed relevant metrics such as office or coworking costs, Kickstarter funding success, startup density, and survival rates, among others.
The study found Austin has several major entrepreneurial advantages over all other U.S. cities with 500,000 to 1 million residents.
"Specifically, the Texas capital was the frontrunner for indicators that looked at the overall share of startups within the local economy, as well as growth rates in five years (2019 to 2023)," the report said. "On top of that, Austin also topped the rankings for its percentage of college-educated residents and its consulting firms, which provide vital support for burgeoning enterprises."
About 12 percent of all businesses in Austin are startups that have been active for less than a year, the report revealed. These new businesses have a survival rate of 67.5 percent, meaning that more than two-thirds of all startups in the city will still be running up to five years after they were first established.
CommercialCafe cites two examples of successful Austin startups: Home finance company Homeward, and Jasper AI, an artificial intelligence-powered marketing platform co-founded by Forbes 30 Under 30 Local Austin honoree Chris Hull.
Surprisingly, Austin has a 52.6 percent "success rate" for its Kickstarter campaigns, an online crowdfunding platform for creative projects. Over 6,000 Austin-based campaigns were created since the platform launched in April 2009, and 3,187 were successfully funded.
"In this case, the city’s high concentration of engineers, developers and tech entrepreneurs, along with its annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival — which acts as a launchpad for various hardware, software and gaming projects — provides highly favorable conditions for Austin Kickstarter projects to succeed," the report said.
Freelancers are another vital resource for new businesses that may need "specialized services" for a fixed amount of time, and Austin's freelance workforce has grown 10.2 percent from 2019-2023. The report found there were 46,655 freelancers working in Austin in 2023, compared to 42,322 freelancers in 2019.
Fiverr's annual Freelance Economic Impact Report discovered Austin-based freelancers generated nearly $4 billion in 2023, proving just how beneficial the local independent workforce has been for Austin's booming tech scene and other markets.
The report notes that Austin startups may run into difficulties renting an office space in the city. As many Austinites already know, rent doesn't come cheap: the report found that the average asking price for a 1,000-square-foot workspace in the city (for five employees) added up to $45,456 annually. For startups that want greater flexibility for their workers, the annual cost for a coworking space for the same number of employees in Austin came out to $14,100.
Other Texas cities with attractive economic environments for startups
CommercialCafe also revealed that Texas as a whole is one of the strongest states for starting a new business. Several of Texas' major cities – San Antonio (No. 2), Dallas (No. 3), Fort Worth (No. 4), and Houston (No. 7) – were all recognized among the top 10 best places to start a business in the category of U.S. cities with more than a million residents.
The top 10 best cities in the smaller range to start a new business are:
- No. 1 –Austin, Texas
- No. 2 – Nashville, Tennessee
- No. 3 – Indianapolis, Indiana
- No. 4 – Tuscon, Arizona
- No. 5 – Mesa, Arizona
- No. 6 – Charlotte, North Carolina
- No. 7 –Fresno, California
- No. 8 – Albuquerque, New Mexico
- No. 9 – Las Vegas, Nevada
- No. 10 – Louisville, Kentucky