Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > March
March 2010
Mailbox: should you firmware-upgrade your Blu-ray player?
Here’s an e-mail I got from a reader this week:
I’m e-mailing about a Sony Blu-Ray player (model BDP-S360) I purchased recently. I’m having difficulty connecting it to my TV (yes, I have an HD set: Samsung 1080p), and an HDMI cable. Apparently this Blu-ray player gets “software updates”/requires Internet connection, but I’m unclear if that’s a feature you’d use only if you’re going to stream movies off the Internet or an online Netflix account (which I have no interest in doing), or if this is a feature that you don’t have to use. I just want to watch movies I’ve bought in a store or checked out of Blockbuster.Richard
My response:
The Blu-ray player should be fine as-is, but I’d install the firmware update anyway. Sometimes those updates improve video playback, speed up menus, etc. There’s always weird stuff going on with Blu-ray disc formats (like the BD-LIve features and Blu-ray profiles) and sometimes the firmware updates address that so that all discs are compatible with the player.
You don’t necessarily need to connect to the internet to do the update. There’s usually a way to download it to a USB drive from a computer, plug it in to the Blu-ray drive and install it from there (consult the manual on how to do this).
So, my advice would be to install the firmware update even if you don’t plan to use the online services or keep your Blu-ray connected to the Internet.
Good luck!
Omar
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Gadgets, Internet, Movies & DVDs, TV
On the road, running TWC’s Road Runner Mobile device
Mobile broadband — the kind you can pull out seemingly like magic from the airwaves instead of dealing with DSL or cable cords — if finally starting to come into its own as a viable alternative. Switching over (“cutting the cord,” you might call it) now seems like a decent idea if:
- You can afford it; mobile broadband prices vary widely and you might end up paying more than you would for a wired broadband connection.
- You don’t mind dealing with the early-adopter penalties of limited coverage areas and technical glitches inherent in an immature technology.
That being said, I was impressed overall with Time Warner’s Road Runner Mobile USB product. We were given a WIMAX Wave 2 USB adapter to try out for several weeks (model number USBw 25100 if you want specifics) and on a three-year-old Macbook, it ran extremely well within the city of Austin.
It was almost an identical experience to a similar Sprint-branded product I tried out last year (mostly because it runs on the same Clearwire 4G network).
This product, however, ran perfectly on a Mac once an included “Connection Manager” piece of software was installed from a CD-ROM. Although it would be nice if the USB adapter simply ran on its own as a network device without propriety software, it worked fine. It takes a good 30 seconds to a minute for it to locate a network connection, but once it does, the Internet flows reliably and is fast; I clocked speeds comparable to a low-to-mid-range cable modem connection, topping out at around 5-6 megabits per second. (My home Road Runner connection can sometimes reach as high as 10-12 megabits per second and I’m on the standard speed tier, not “Turbo”.)
The only glitches I encountered with the software, besides the time it takes to connect to network, is that the software can freeze if you closer your laptop and open it back up. It requires a force-quit, but it’s likely that might be a Mac-only issue.
During my coverage of South by Southwest Interactive coverage, I switched to the USB device whenever Convention Center Wi-Fi was slowing down or unusable (say, during the Evan Williams keynote) and the device worked perfectly. Of course, it’s a new network so it might be that those particular Internet byways haven’t been clogged with traffic yet.
At my home in New Braunfels, I didn’t get a signal at all. I don’t live too far away from IH-35 (perhaps two or three miles), but the lack of a connection made it unusable from my house.
The advantages of a device like this are obvious — it’s like having your home broadband speeds (or close to it) on the go. But the disadvantages are that if you go too far afield, you may not be in a 4G or 3G service area. (The USB stick downshifts to 3G if it can’t find a 4G network connection.) And there’s also the matter of pricing, which may prove too expensive for some.
The device, or a comparable one, is either free or about $50 depending on what plan you opt for.
I’ve had colleagues who’ve used Clear products and have reported that they’ve had trouble with inconsistent connections while on the go. But if this is going to be your primary Internet connection at home and you don’t plan to go too far afield, it might be a good option.
If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, Time Warner will be offering demos of its Road Runner Mobile service Friday at Austin Java on 12th and Lamar from 10 a.m. to noon.
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SXSW Panel: Crowdsourcing: The Ensemble’s Experience With the Netflix Prize
Panel: Crowdsourcing: The Ensemble’s Experience With the Netflix Prize (Twitter hashtag: #crowdsourcingnetflix)
Date/time: 12:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Greg McAlpin, The Ensemble
The gist: In light of recent news that the Netflix Prize was scrapped due to privacy concerns, this would seem to be a sad panel about a sore subject. People showed leadership and determination, McAlpin said. It took three years for a team to achieve the goal of improving Netflix’s recommendation engine by 10 percent (the so-called “10-percent barrier”) for a prize of $1 million. The solo presentation dealt with the politics of organizing such a project among separate teams (which competed and cooperated as needed). But the elephant in the room — how the teams used the data and how that might have raised privacy issues — was largely ignored by the half-hour mark. The presentation itself was the opposite of juicy; it was the Salt Lick dry rub of Ballroom panels. It turns out watching movies on Netflix is more entertaining than hearing about how people are working to make the service better. (Edited to add: my editor Debbie Hiott, who stuck around, says the privacy issue was addressed briefly at the end of the panel. Perhaps too little, too late.)
Quotes: “I want to walk through journal entries I made…” during the competition. — Greg McAlpin [Note to other panelists: this is unwise.]
Takeaways: Crowdsourcing is powerful, but it’s not easy. The crowd still needs resources and a project like the quest to win the Netflix prize can take years.
- Omar L. Gallaga
Edited to add, March 25: Shortly after this panel review ran, we received an e-mail from Greg McAlpin. In the rush of SXSW coverage, we were not able to post this immediately, but with his permission, we are posting his e-mail response in full.
Hi.I am sorry that my panel about the Netflix Prize disappointed you. Nobody wants to see a talk and feel like their time was wasted. I’m sure that time is extremely valuable to a reporter at an event like SXSW.
If I had any qualifications to talk about the Netflix lawsuit, I would offer to discuss it with you. It had no impact on the competitors and I only know what I have read on the web. From your remarks, I suspect that you know far more about the details than I do.
Since you were curious about the data, I can explain a little. In the data that Netflix provided us, users were identified by a number. We knew that user ID 1036 rated movie ID 2812 and gave it 2 stars. Our programs had to process a large amount of data and then predict things like: what rating did user ID 1378 give to movie ID 164? Netflix “perturbed” the data that they provide to us. They made changes to some of the rating data. I’m sure that this was to prevent any privacy concerns, but as a competitor, I was only interested in how it affected the statistical properties of the information.
We spent our time working to solve an extremely difficult problem. I didn’t have any extra time or incentive to see if the user IDs could somehow be mapped to real people. That could be an interesting problem, but it’s not a problem that has anything to do with The Ensemble’s experience with the Netflix Prize.
I’m sorry that I didn’t hold your attention or interest. I put a lot of effort into preparing and practicing my presentation and the truth is that I can’t do much better than what you saw. It is valuable to know that you expected something more or different.
Thanks for your feedback and please let me know if I can answer any questions about the data that Netflix provided to the competitors in the Netflix Prize.
Greg McAlpin
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The Linkdown for Wednesday, March 24
The Linkdown has finally recovered from SXSW Interactive ‘10, but keeps having flashbacks to that boring keynote with Twitter’s CEO. Oh, the horror. The horror…
- Austin Twestival is Thursday night at Molotov, benefitting Concern Worldwide.
- Internet radio station WOXY, which moved from Cincinnati to Austin last year, has gone off the air due to financial pressure.
- The Big Gig Austin movement continues to grow in an effort to catch Google’s attention for the company’s Gigabit Internet initiative. Last night, there was a party at The Highball. Friday is the deadline to nominate Austin.
- Austin-produced free iPhone/iPod daily quiz show QRANK has launched. You can find it here. The official site is here.
- The Skype for Android and BlackBerry apps that run on some Verizon phones are scheduled to be out tomorrow.
- If you want to test drive Time Warner’s Mobile 4G service, bring your laptop to Austin Java at 12th and Lamar on Friday between 10 a.m. and noon. Representatives will be there to answer questions and give demos.
- Speaking of 4G, Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G phone is due out this summer. No price or release date yet, but I imagine 4G will be more expensive than 3G service. I mean, it’s a WHOLE OTHER G!
- Fisher-Price has rolled out a Facebook app aimed at moms.
- Want to play an online, multiplayer version of “Missile Command” for free? Well, here you go.
- My NPR All Tech Considered wrap-up of SXSW Interactive [audio here] (and for the American-Statesman).
- Reschedule meetings in Google Calendar.
- iPad is here sooner than you think: April 3rd for the WiFi version (late April for the 3G version, we’re hearing.) We’ll be all over it, of course.
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Video game review: ‘Heavy Rain’ for PlayStation 3
Even if you’ve been playing video games most of your life, there are a few words and phrases you’ve likely not heard associated with the entertainment medium. Among them: “Emotional resonance,” “sacrifice” and “parenting.”
In the PlayStation 3 thriller “Heavy Rain,” a lot of unwritten rules about video games are broken and ultimately the game works because it takes huge risks that pay off. But to call it a pure video game at all isn’t quite accurate. The French studio behind the game, Quantic Dream, has described it more as an interactive movie with some gameplay elements included to guide the narrative.
Whatever your take on it (and some hard-core gamers will find the game’s simplified “Quick-Time Event” mechanics frustrating and limiting), “Heavy Rain” is a firm step forward for video games as an art form. It’s a dark, haunting game about a serial killer who targets young boys, drowning them in rainwater. At the game’s opening, you play a young father of two boys, Ethan, who suffers a devastating tragedy. Later, you guide Ethan through a series of grueling, “Saw”-inspired trials in order to save the life of his son Shaun.
Other characters join the mix, including a journalist, a drug-addicted FBI agent on the case and a private investigator who says he is trying to solve the crimes committed by the “Origami Killer” on behalf of the victims’ families. It’s not a particularly long single-player game (about 8-10 hours), but because of the subject manner, it can be draining when played at long spells.
There are plot twists. There are innovative bits of gameplay that at times frustrate and at other times enhance the mood of the game and your immersion into its story. There are also jarring plot twists, moments that will wrench the guts of any parent and moments of transcendent beauty — sometimes the games hazy, rainy, sepia-soaked palette makes it as gorgeous as anything we’ve seen in a console game before.
But other times, the voice acting, clichéd supporting characters (psycho rich guy’s son? Check. Victimized hooker with a heart of gold? Check.) and laborious plotting make it no better than a sub-par episode of “Law & Order” (with less competent acting).
When “Heavy Rain” works, however — when you feel the panic of a father losing his son at the mall or find yourself trying to extract vital clues from a nursing home resident as a child’s life hangs in the balance — it engages your emotions in a way that few games have before. That’s where the game places its largest bets: that it will come across as compelling instead of silly, resonant instead of contrived.
Through a combination of well-executed motion capture techniques, great art design and a game interface that mostly stays out of the way, “Heavy Rain” is a short novel that gets under your skin and demands completion.
There are a few major missteps that bring it back down from its lofty ambitions: the game’s only playable female character, Madison, is sexualized so often that she ends up mirroring the busty, butt-kicking video game vixens that game designers were clearly trying to avoid emulating. To gather information she tears her clothes and does a strip tease for a sleazy drug lord, and at one other low point in the game, she has sex with a major character who may be a killer for no particularly good reason. (The sex and stripping scenes never go beyond PG-13 levels, but they still feel gratuitous.)
Clumsily at times, the game is striving to be a truly adult interactive entertainment experience. Its themes of sacrifice, its pitch-perfect take on the grief of a mourning parent and its jarringly realistic character models make it a more mature endeavor than almost anything we’ve seen before in the video game industry. Its multitude of possible endings and the consequences of bad choices or failings as you play also make it more interesting than the hard-boiled crime thrillers it’s inspired by.
Not everyone will want to suffer through the darkness of “Heavy Rain,” but as game designer Peter Molyneux said at South by Southwest Interactive, it’s certainly brilliant in parts.
Those parts are plentiful enough in “Heavy Rain” to make it a milestone for video games.
‘Heavy Rain’
$60, for PlayStation 3
Rated M for Mature
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Grading SXSW Interactive
Everyone’s South by Southwest Interactive is different based on the panels you choose to attend, the parties you’re able to get into (did you remember to RSVP?) and the unplanned encounters you have along the way. It can be magical if you balance work and play, planning and going-with-the-flow, but it can also be frustrating if the festival stars don’t align quite right for you.
For 2010’s festival, the record attendance could have made the event a crowded disaster, but somehow, that didn’t happen. Instead, the fest felt busier, but also more varied and spread out. If the festival isn’t careful, it runs the risk of sprawling out and diluting its best parts, but you can bet organizers are already considering this for SXSW 2010.
So, with the understanding that my SXSW 2010 probably differed greatly from everyone else’s, here’s my grading on different parts of Interactive:
Panels: B+ — I complained before the fest (in a graphic, no less), that some tropes of panels seem to happen again and again and are noticeable to those of us who attend every year. Panel names frequently have attention-grabbing, curse-word-laden titles, include overly provocative speakers (say, porn stars), or rehash themes that come up every year and are never resolved. But attending the actual panels, I found more hits than misses and I left fewer panels out of boredom than any previous years. Smart panel organizers included good visuals in the presentations, opened up the floor early for questions from the audience and wisely used their expertise. That being said, I heard of several high-profile panels with audio problems and I attended at least two sessions featuring solo speakers who addressed big, empty halls (more on that below under “Organization”). But overall I found the panel programming to be more useful and varied this year.
Keynotes: C — The Ev Williams keynote was worse than a trainwreck: it was just boring. And despite her obviously gigantic brain, keynoter Danah Boyd was mostly preaching to the choir with obvious examples of privacy breaches by Google Buzz, Facebook and Chatroulette. I didn’t attend Daniek Ek’s keynote, but it sounds like it went well and Valerie Casey’s plea to keep the fest sustainable did draw attention. But Ek was at the fest to promote a service that isn’t available in the U.S. yet and which may be hurt instantly if Apple decided to offer a music streaming service. He was a good choice for a Tuesday keynote as the Interactive fest yields to Music, but his company, Spotify doesn’t feel like a slam dunk for the U.S. market. Casey of the Designers Accord seemed like a great keynote choice and seemed to have been greeted positively. So, overall, the good balanced out the bad, but it sounds like there was no knockout keynote like last year’s Tony Hseih talk or 2008’s emotional keynote from Post Secret’s Frank Warren.
Parties: A- — I couldn’t hit every big party, but the ones I did attend seemed to have fewer long lines and better attendance. The party scene seemed to have spread to a bigger variety of large clubs and to my eyes the lines seemed more organized and moved more quickly than, say, last year’s Facebook party or Mashable’s bash at Six Lounge. The stand-out for me was Scoot Inn’s Cog’Aoke and TechKaraoke at Six, both of which felt like the perfect combination of music (a live band served up karaoke at the latter), alcohol and geek energy. Less successful were parties like Gowalla’s fest at Belmont, which was packed uncomfortably indoors because of rain. Next year: less standing around drinking in crowded bars and more interactive events featuring live music.
Organization: B- — The 3 p.m. line to pick up badges the day before Interactive was a beast, but to everyone’s surprise, it moved quickly and efficiently. The new format of having panels in four different locations was a little less successful — while some events all the way over at the Radisson Austin did attract attendees, I found myself skipping anything that took me too far away from the Convention Center area during the day. Locations for panels sometimes seemed to make little sense: On at least two panels I saw a solo speaker address a cavernous exhibit hall with few people while a panel featuring speakers from CNN, MTV, Facebook and Mashable was packed to the gills with people. While I can’t imagine the logistics of organizing so much programming across so many rooms, some of the locations didn’t make a lot of sense and attendees and speakers sometimes suffered for it.
Weather: A+ / D — The first few days of the fest were gorgeous; the kind of weather that makes people move here (just don’t tell them about August in Austin). But Monday and Tuesday were rainy and cold. The Monday night parties in particular suffered as rooftops and outdoor patios were abandoned and the areas indoors were crammed with people. Venues that were only a few blocks away walking distance suddenly required a cab ride.
Official app / Web site: C- — I didn’t talk to a single person at the fest who was impressed with the official “my.SXSW” app. In fact, people told me they gave up using it before the fest when it wouldn’t function (it was soon fixed) or gave it up after the first day when they couldn’t find information about panelists on the app. The app didn’t include a built-in QR reader, requiring attendees to download a separate app for that only to find that the codes on everyone’s badge only led to the attendee’s profile on the SXSW Web site. Once there, there wasn’t an easy way to import that contact information on the go. In short, the app was full of problems. The Web site was much better than last year’s version, but there’s still something about it that feels clunky and difficult to navigate. Luckily the Web site’s search (for panels, speakers, etc.) works quite well. But every now and then you’d find a weird glitch (like keynotes not being listed under “panels”).
Unofficial tools: A — Sched.org was still great on the Web, but a mobile app wasn’t available on Apple’s App Store until the fest was ending (oops). Luckily, tools like sitby.us took up the slack as did FourSquare and Gowalla, which proved extremely useful at the fest, as did the multitude of Twitter apps that attendees used to post photos and Tweets during panels and parties.
Vibe: B+ — The most unscientific of these categories, but I found most attendees to be positive, friendly and ready to learn, engage and participate. It was a departure from the gloom and doom of years past. With the emergence of tablet devices, more mobile and the explosion of social networking, it felt like new energy has been breathed into the fest since 2008.
Overall: B+ — Despite potential landmines and an economy that’s still hasn’t completely rebounded, the fest was bigger than it’s ever been and several people who’ve been to the fest repeatedly told me this was their favorite so far. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but for a fest facing so much growth so quickly, it’s amazing the whole thing came together with few hitches. There’s room for improvement for 2011, but the fest organizers should be very proud of how much happened this year and how much enjoyment festgoers got out of SXSWi 2010.
Want to know what other people thought? Take a look at some of the responses I got on Twitter to my question of how you’d grade the fest. The responses seem to range from A- to B-.
Got your own grades? Post them in the comments.
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Confirmed: SXSW Interactive paid registration surpasses Music
South by Southwest Interactive is over, but the post-festival analysis has just begun. Foremost on the minds of many who attended and who plan to return this year may be this question: is the festival growing too much too quickly?
Hugh Forrest, director of the festival, confirmed in a phone interview Wednesday figures we’d been hearing about attendance at Interactive. For the first time ever, the Interactive part of the festival has surpassed attendance of SXSW Music. Last year’s official tally of paid registration for Interactive (that is, everyone who had an Interactive badge or a Gold or Platinum badge that gave them access to the fest) was 10,741. Though Forrest says the fest doesn’t have an official head-count yet, the 40 percent increase we had previously reported will apparently stand. But that 40 percent is just for the Interactive portion of the 10,741, not the total number of Gold, Platinum and comped badges for the fest.
Make sense?
So, what sounded initially like an attendance figure that could have been as high as 15,037 will actually be closer to 12,000-13,000 for Interactive 2010, Forrest said.
“The growth rate is certainly a cause for concern,” Forrest said, “we’re gonna need to change things up significantly next year to even accommodate a growth rate that’s half that or less than that. These are significant challenges, but these are good challenges to have.”
Forrest said that he also believes that he’s been doing his job long enough to know this is cyclical; after years of swelling attendance during the late 90s, the festival contracted during the lean years after the dot-com bust. “Our cycle will be over soon enough and something else will grow,” he said
Organizers of the fest had estimated that the Film Festival was also growing this year, at a rate of about 25 percent over 2009. The music fest is expected to remain flat, but Forrest says the registration count for that part of the fest doesn’t include the many bands in town who don’t actually register with the festival. Including those non-registered out-of-towners, SXSW Music is still a bigger draw, Forrest said.
Last year, the Music fest had about 11,687 attendees or 13,165 including band registrations, according to the festival Web site.
The festival was blessed with four days of good weather before a downpour on Monday that crowded up some of the party venues with rooftops and kept people from far-flung panels in places like the Radisson Austin. Some panels and keynotes had long lines, but overall, Forrest said, “The response I’ve gotten so far has been very positive.”
However, “I’ve been through enough that often it takes a week or so to uncover the bigger problems that you didn’t know about,” he said.
Among the most popular topics at the festival were location-based services like Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla, user and app-interface design for emerging devices like Apple’s iPad and social networking for business, which attracted a large crowd at the Hilton.
“We may have underestimated how crowded that would be. Traditional businesses are trying to figure out how to leverage this power of social networking,” Forrest said.
Forrest responded to a string of blog posts and Tweets, many of them from non-attendees, criticizing the fest for being one big booze-and-party event.
“There’s a lot of fun things to do at night and during the day and Austin’s a fun place. As the event has grown over the last few years, one of the reason it’s grown is people realize they can get real business done here. I hope that that message isn’t completely lost in all the Tweets about parties.”
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The best SXSW Interactive badge I saw…
… belonged to Sweet John Muehlbauer. Check it out (photo courtesy @Sweetjohn):
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SXSW Panel: Balance is Bull@#*!
Date/Time: 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 16
Panelists: Stephanie Klein, blogger and author of “Straight Up and Dirty” and “Moose,” and Jennifer Lancaster, author of “Bitter is the New Black” and most recently “Pretty in Plaid”
The Gist: Creating a perfect balance personal and professional demands in today’s online age is nearly impossible. Or does it just boil down to how we look at it?
Takeaways: We all hear “work hard, play hard” but that just turns out to be hard, Klein said. Everyone says to find balance and moderation, but Klein says she gets nothing done if if everything is in moderation. “When I choose to work, I can’t help but feel like I’m choosing work over my children. And that sucks and I shouldn’t be feeling that way.”
We need to find a way to make peace with ourselves and our choices by acknowledging that perfection isn’t an attainable goal.
Making to-do lists and deadlines can help us stay on task instead of piddling time away on social networks or other distractions. If you give yourself a strict deadline, you manage to get it done, no matter how short the time is. It’s those times that we have the “whenever” attitude that we don’t get things done.
Use tools like the Pomodoro technique, which suggests working 25 minutes straight on one task and then giving yourself a five minute break.
Ask yourself: What do I want more of in my life and what do I want less of, and then find the courage to say no to what you don’t want more of.
Quote:
Klein: “Wishing takes the same amount of time as planning,” so if you don’t find joy in what you do, find something else to do.
Audience member: “Happy parents are good parents. I’m a lot happier when I’m with my daughter when I’m happy with myself.”
“You’ve got to find what your brand of balance is.” That could mean four-day work weeks, “silent Sundays” (where no Internet is allowed) or setting strict office hours.
Klein: “I strongly believe that I’m a good role model in teaching my children that I have my own passions and that they’re not the center of the universe.”
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SXSW Panel: David After Dentist - Family Video to Viral Sensation
Panel: David After Dentist - Family Video to Viral Sensation (Twitter hashtag: #davidafterdentist)
Date/time: 5 p.m., Tuesday
Panelists: David DeVore (DavidAfterDentist.com)
The gist: David DeVore, father of the boy (also named David) who became a viral Internet star from a video showing him drugged up after a dentist visit, spoke about how the famous video came to be. To date, the video has attracted 54 million page views and was the 2nd-most-viewed video on YouTube, behind Susan Boyle’s audition on “Britain’s Got Talent.” DeVore said he shot the video with a then-new camera and that the video took off very quickly, jumping from about 10,000 views to 3 million in a short time. DeVore showed the original video, family photos and some of the parodies that have been done based on “David After Dentist.” Nine-year-old David himself was not present at the panel, but he answered questions from his father on a video that was also shown. DeVore said that he wants to use money from the video to pay for his son’s college, but the family is also donating money to charity. Most revenue from the video comes from YouTube’s Partner ad program. The video was also licensed to a Vizio Super Bowl commercial (David Jr. did not appear in it — an actor was hired to recreate it).
Quotes: “Nothing has happened that we’ve been uncomfortable with. We’ve turned down some things, but overall it’s been a great experience.” — DeVore. “I got my teeth back!” — David, Jr. in a video for SXSW shot by his father. “It’s just one of those crazy things that happens in life.” — DeVore.
Takeaways: Not much, except that it’s impossible to determine why videos go viral. When they do, however, it can happen incredibly quickly and provide strong reactions, both positive and negative.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: How the Internet is Disrupting the Concert Industry
Time: 3:30 p.m. Tuesday
Speaker: Ian Hogarth (Songkick.com Inc.)
The Gist: A well-structured and executed look into the myriad ways online forces are changing the live music industry, from how shows are booked and promoted to how fans learn about concerts, buy tickets and remember or chronicle their experience. Hogarth started from the premise that there are five components to the live music industry - organization, ticketing, discovery, experience and remembrance - and broke each segment down before talking about companies like his own, Nextbigsound, StubHub, EventBrite and more are innovating in them. With live music representing a larger share of music industry revenues each year and growing in terms of real dollars, startups are crowding into the space at a rate of about one per week.
It really can’t be overstated how enlightening Hogarth’s talk was to anyone with any interest in seeing concerts, playing them or putting them on. Some of it was sobering - like the suggestion that an adjustment to real dollar demand prices for tickets would bring about withering change - but the session was a studied, easy to follow snapshot of how the Internet has transformed the live music industry and will continue to do so for a long time to come.
Quotes: “Going to a concert is one of the most tribal things there is, but even that is getting more interactive in ways like pictures being posted on Facebook while the show is still happening.”
“Part of me is glad that the basic experience of going to a concert hasn’t changed too much. Concerts, by their very nature, are unique events.”
Takeaways: Even though the field is crowded and continuing to grow - Hogarth discussed dozens of companies and their different roles during the talk - there are still opportunities for startups to make the concert experience better or make the industry more efficient on both ends. Also, if SXSW gives an award for best panel, the rest of the field is going to have to pull some Kobe Bryant-level game to top this one.
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Spotify will launch within 2010, Ek says
Online music service Spotify will launch in the United States within 2010, founder Daniel Ek said in an interview after his keynote speech at the South by Southwest Interactive conference Tuesday. More than 7 million people use Spotify to listen to music in several European countries. The service gives users access to almost 10 million songs.
Launched in 2008 in Sweden, Spotify offers free accounts, which are supported with advertising, by invitation only. Anyone can gain access to the service by purchasing an ad-free premium subscription. The premium subscribers can also access the service from mobile accounts. Spotify has more than 350,000 premium users in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain, the countries where it is currently available, Ek said during the keynote.
Ek said that the premium subscription in the U.S. would most likely cost $10 per month. Licensing deals with publishers and record companies still need to be worked out before the service can launch here. “You have to strike deals with almost 5,000 different record companies and publishers, which is a huge task,” Ek said.
Unlike online music streaming services already available in the United States, such as Pandora and Last.fm, which allow users to choose artists and genres only, Spotify allows users to choose specific songs or albums. During his keynote, Ek demonstrated the application, which resembles Apple’s iTunes.
Users can create playlists of their favorite songs and share them with friends via e-mail or social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Ek said he thought that Americans would pay for the service, equating it to cable subscriptions. “It might take a while for consumers to get accustomed to it,” he said. Jonas Woost, a digital media consultant and former head of music for Last.fm, says that people will realize the value of access to music. “Paying and not owning is a strange idea, but now people are starting to realize that they don’t own the music but they get access to everything,” he said.
A similar online music service, MOG, launched during the Interactive conference. The service boasts more than 7 million songs and charges a subscription fee of $5 per month for computer access and $10 per month for mobile accounts.
Ek said Spotify has a different focus than potential competitors such as MOG and Pandora, which focus more on recommending music to users. “We’re all about simplicity and managing music, as opposed to music discovery,” Ek said.
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SXSW panel: Airing Your Dirty Laundry Online: Therapy or Revenge?
Panelists: Alix McAlpine, sorry-mom.com
The gist: Alix McAlpine started a Web site called “Sorry Mom, I Bang The Worst Dudes,” airing her own dirty laundry about bad relationships and dating mistakes as a self- deprecating joke. Turns out dirty laundry is a guilty pleasure. The site blew up overnight getting 2 million page views in the first few weeks. Soon she found herself with a barrage of user-submitted stories. A year later, the stories on the site fall into two basic categories bitter ex-girlfriend tales or drunken mistake stories. The stories, that often include thinly disguised pictures of the offending guys, are all anonymously submitted.
So is it therapy or revenge? Probably a little bit of both. McAlpine tries to keep a humorous tone to the site, but acknowledges there’s a certain level of vindictiveness to some of the stories. Nonetheless, for the women who submit stories, and the women who read the stories she feels like there’s a certain amount of cathartic release, knowing hundreds of other women make the same dating mistakes.
Quotes: “It’s 2010, there should be no slut shame.”
Takeaways: If you own the incriminating pictures and the stories you tell are true then you can’t be sued for Internet smack talking, regardless of the intimacy of details shared. However, if you say something on the Internet it is going to get back to the person you said it about. Odds are impulsive airing of dirt might lead to regret. A lot of sorry-mom stories are rescinded by the authors.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW Panel: Could The iPad Have Saved Gourmet? The (New) Future of Magazines
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 16
Panelists: Rachel Sklar from Mediaite/Charitini and Figment’s Jacob Lewis, former managing editor of The New Yorker
The Gist: The iPad could revolutionize magazines, but is this a reality or a struggling editor’s pipe dream?
Takeaways: From the perspective of a panel led by a media critic who has never worked in magazines and the former managing editor of a much-loved magazine not known for its technological innovation, the iPad alone won’t save the struggling magazine industry.
This flat, uninspired panel came a day after Wired’s design team gave SXSWers a peek at its tablet edition, which had an entire room of magazine and design lovers chattering with excitement about the tablet’s potential in the publishing world.
Sklar and Lewis has lots to say about how magazines have always operated — the big editorial budgets, their reliance on advertisers, the turnover of subscribers — but hardly any ideas about where the industry is going.
Even though there is only 10-15 percent overlap in Web traffic and magazine subscribers, most magazines still don’t embrace the Web. Most of them treat it as an afterthought. Very little time was dedicated to what magazines are doing right, either in print or online. The panelists mentioned that New York and The Atlantic are putting as much effort into the Web as in the print product, but didn’t give specifics. Wired’s work on the tablet edition got a passing mention.
What won’t change is that magazines are ad-selling companies. They sell eyeballs that will look at ads, and they create content to get people to flip from ad to ad.
The key to a magazine’s success in the future is treating their Web site, print magazine and mobile edition as a cohesive triangle, with each part offering something distinct to users. “Magazines need to figure out what else they can offer their consumers,” Lewis said, citing Lucky magazine’s e-commerce site.
There biggest unknown with the iPad isn’t whether consumers will use it but whether advertisers will, which will be a challenge because advertisers are going to want to see metrics, and Apple doesn’t give out consumer data. One bright spot is iTunes, which can sell 15,000 units a month, is a magazine’s biggest newsstand, which proves that people are willing to pay for mobile content.
Quotes:
Lewis: “All the parts of a magazine create an experience of reading a magazine, but when you move that online, you create a different experience.”
Sklar: “Magazines as a whole were really slow to care about the Web, particularly the high-end ones. The magazine culture doesn’t support the pace of the Web.”
Lewis: “Magazines aren’t losing subscribers, but they are losing advertisers.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW Panel: Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills
Panel: Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills (Twitter hashtag: #digitalwills)
Date/time: 3:30 p.m., Tuesday
Panelists: Corvida Raven (SheGeeks)
The gist: The issue of what happens to your digital assets — from your Facebook account to your “Second Life” avatar to your blog — is incredibly thorny and the legal implications are nowhere close to being resolved. Complicating things is that many of your online accounts or other digital property are not considered “digital assets” in the eyes of probate law in some areas. There are services available that can help you manage your digital data in the event of your death, but the issue even gets thorny when it comes to who will have access to that (for instance, giving family members access to sensitive e-mails). Different social networking and e-mail service companies have different rules for how they handle accounts after death. In the space of the conversation, very knowledgeable audience members offered their concerns, legal expertise and examples. Raven herself admitted she doesn’t have all the answers, but she wisely let the audience contribute and did not attempt to dominate the discussion.
Quotes: “Digital assets aren’t even considered real assets in some places” — Audience member. “I think my Twitter profile is VERY real.” — Raven, on whether Twitter accounts should be considered a digital asset. “I can’t get my OWN password back!” — Audience member on retrieving a loved one’s password on an online service. “The legal profession is trying to catch up to this.” — Audience member. “”If you’re cheating on your wife, there’s no way you want her to have access to your e-mail (after you die).” — Raven.
Takeaways: Everyone needs to think ahead about what will happen to their digital life when they’re gone and whether they’d be willing to pay to have those assets managed. The law is complicated and unresolved on many of these issues, but those in the room agreed that the next year or two might bring many changes on this front. A “Digital Death Day” will take place May 20 in Mountain View, Calif., to discuss these kinds of issues.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW Panel: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Date/Time: 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 16
Panelist: Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”
The Gist: In a hyper-connected world, incessant connectivity and input of information isn’t just stressing us out, it is rewiring our brains.
Takeaways: The Internet is changing our relationship with information and how our neurons connect. Without a break from being online, we don’t have a protected space for reflection, which is where we recharge and find balance. “There needs to be time for efficient data collection and for inefficient contemplation. The development of a well-rounded mind requires both.”
Just like when you learn to read, when you learn to multitask for 8 hours a day, your brain starts to rewire. We sense this change because when we are offline, we find it hard to concentrate and feel ourselves wanting to go online. “It’s not just a matter of logging off; this way of thinking stays with us.”
The Internet — specifically sites like Twitter — is very good at giving us rewards for constantly taking in information. We love to feel connected and if we feel that someone is having a conversation that we’re not a part of, we feel left out.
Quotes: “The problem today is that we’re losing the ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Our information management has always been personal, but it has gone from being manual (file cabinets, etc.) to more elaborate and automated. We look to the machines that exacerbate information overload to organize it for us.”
“Computers have put more information at our fingertips than we have ever had before in quantities well beyond what our brains can handle. Information overload has become a permanent affliction, and there’s no way to overcome it. “
“True enlightenment comes only through quietness.”
“With a book, there’s nothing else going on. The book shields us from distractions.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW panel: Power-Ups & Press: How the Game Media Impacts the Gaming Industry
Time: 12:30 p.m. Tuesday
Speakers: Carly Kocurek (University of Texas at Austin), Chris Kohler (Wired.com), Karen Chu (PlayFirst Inc.), Matt Chandronait (Area 5 Media LLC), Philip Kollar, (Game Informer Magazine )
The Gist: Just like games themselves, coverage of video games and the gaming industry is evolving at a rapid pace with podcasts and video emerging as more common features to give fans more information and perspective on new releases, issues in the gaming world and morw. That development also offers more openness in the process, giving editors and writers a face and making them more of a conversationalist with readers/viewers and less of an all-knowing voice of authority. Also, mainstream media outlets (NewsWeek, USA Today) have moved into the field as gaming has become a larger cultural and economic force.
Quotes: From Chandronait: “The (gaming media) system has been manipulated by developers where everything is staggered in how it’s covered to produce the best results for a release. You can’t talk about the product without talking about the entire thing, and if we don’t we’ll never be able to move beyond a glorified Consumer Reports.”
Takeaways: The panel as a whole seemed to view the gaming media as healthy and useful, but said there are issues such as providing more enterprising coverage, writing about social issues (gender, race, etc.) and finding more ways to interact with users that have to be addressed in the near future to stay relevant.
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SXSW panel: Power-Ups & Press: How the Game Media Impacts the Gaming Industry
Time: 12:30 p.m. Tuesday
Speakers: Carly Kocurek (University of Texas at Austin), Chris Kohler (Wired.com), Karen Chu (PlayFirst Inc.), Matt Chandronait (Area 5 Media LLC), Philip Kollar, (Game Informer Magazine )
The Gist: Just like games themselves, coverage of video games and the gaming industry is evolving at a rapid pace with podcasts and video emerging as more common features to give fans more information and perspective on new releases, issues in the gaming world and morw. That development also offers more openness in the process, giving editors and writers a face and making them more of a conversationalist with readers/viewers and less of an all-knowing voice of authority. Also, mainstream media outlets (NewsWeek, USA Today) have moved into the field as gaming has become a larger cultural and economic force.
Quotes: From Chandronait: “The (gaming media) system has been manipulated by developers where everything is staggered in how it’s covered to produce the best results for a release. You can’t talk about the product without talking about the entire thing, and if we don’t we’ll never be able to move beyond a glorified Consumer Reports.”
Takeaways: The panel as a whole seemed to view the gaming media as healthy and useful, but said there are issues such as providing more enterprising coverage, writing about social issues (gender, race, etc.) and finding more ways to interact with users that have to be addressed in the near future to stay relevant.
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SXSW keynote conversation: Daniel Ek
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Tuesday
Speakers: Eliot Van Buskirk (Wired) interviewed Spotify founder Daniel Ek
The gist: Ek started by showing off Spotify, which is currently only available in Europe, to the audience. It is a lightweight application you can download to your PC or Mac. You can search by artist, song, year, etc. Users can make playlists, and can share lists or tracks with friends or on Twitter and Facebook. Ek said that the application’s speed is a big part of its appeal. He says that there will still be appeal for purchasing music. Social aspects of listening—friend recommending music to friends—help users browse the nearly 10 million tracks, but Ek said that they don’t want to be a social network. He also demonstrated the mobile application on an Android-powered Sony Ericcson phone. He was asked about when the U.S. launch was coming, and dodged the question, saying only that they are concentrating on developing the next generation.
Quotes: “Playlists are the new mixtape.” “Music that I really love, I tend to want to buy it.” “We want to be a platform that artists can use to reach out to an audience.” “There is no one business model for music.” “If people could legally listen to music on mobile devices, the music industry would be radically bigger.” “I think the music industry and the technology industry for the first time are quite aligned.” “Here you have to strike deals with almost 5,000 different publishers, which is a huge task.”
Takeaways: If and when it finally does launch in the United States, Spotify could have an enormous impact on the way we listen to music. With mobile access, it could mean that people stop owning or even possessing music, a “cloud” approach that would allow access to a far greater amount of artists than ever before.
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Online Tastemakers: Death or Rebirth?
Time: 11 a.m. Tuesday
Speakers:Anya Grundmann (NPR Music), Chris MacDonald (IndieFeed), John Hammond (The MuseBox), Christopher Weingarten (Rolling Stone)
The Gist: So the Internet has pretty much killed traditional journalism and the established music regime, so if you’re a music critic you’ve definitely seen better days. It wasn’t all moping, though, focusing a fair bit on how the role of music curation - presenting collections of worthwhile music to listeners rather than weighing in on everything under the sun - has sprouted as a much more important role for music fans. The main idea being that peer recommendation has become the dominant way people discover new music, with blogs and social media outlets as the main tools to facilitate sharing.
Quotes: From Grundmann: “We all believe, or at least enough of us believe, in the music we put on the air. If a record company comes to us to arrange some kind of preview we won’t put it up unless we believe in the music.”
From Weingarten: “Message board communities are where it’s at. It’s not about finding a blogger who’s just going to tell what they think is good and has the same taste as you. It’s about finding a group of people you can talk to and hash stuff out between them. It’s a group of people who’d go to Chili’s on a Friday night if they all lived in the same place.”
Takeaways: To truly have influence as a tastemaker these days, the key is to guide music fans to new music and giving them as many ways as possible to listen to music on their own. That doesn’t eliminate the role of criticism, but partners it with curation as an important role in influencing people.
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Making Sure the World Doesn’t Suck: How Independent Content Can Save the Media
Date/Time: 12:30 p.m. Tuesday
Panelists: Evan Shapiro (IFC TV/Sundance Channel), Jake Dobkin (Gothamist.com), Marc Lieberman (The Onion), Harvey Smith (Arkane Studios)
The gist: The discussion starts on the topic of whether blogs, etc. are killing long-form content. The panelists wonder if Tweeting a collective experience (i.e. the Super Bowl) makes it more enjoyable. Like other panels, there is some talk about how content creators now also need to be community builders. Shapiro wonders if indie culture is being endangered by low/no pay scales. Lennon wonders if the limited interface of social media misrepresents us as individuals. Dobkin (of Gothamist) asserts that good content is the key to success. The final part of the panel is spent showing examples of independent work.
Quotes: “Is free on the web so good?” “To make a living as an independent content creator, you better have a backup plan.” -Lieberman “You don’t have to be a dedicated person to be a blogger.” “Human beings can’t be articulated or expressed in multiple choice questions” -Lennon (on Facebook) “Web 1.0 allowed much more self-expression than Web 2.0.” -Shapiro
Takeaways: While this was an interesting panel, it was hard to listen to a person from IFC, which promotes independent work but is by no means a small entity, or Sean Lennon, who had much more access than most, talk about the key to independent work.
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SXSW Panel: SXSW Interactive Town Hall
Panel: SXSW Interactive Town Hall
Date/time: 12:30 p.m., Tuesday
Panelists: Hugh Forrest (director, SXSW Interactive), Shawn O’ Keefe (festival coordinator, SXSW Interactive)
The gist: In the very large Ballroom D where a panel on the digitally connected living room was scheduled (but was scrapped due to panelist cancellations), Forrest and O’Keefe gamely took questions from an audience of about a dozen. They addressed a question from me about Monday’s Twitter keynote on whether Umair Haque was the best choice of interviewer for Twitter CEO Evan Williams. Forrest said that Haque was Twitter’s choice of interviewer that they were most comfortable with and that there may not have been strong enough communication before the keynote between the festival and the keynote interviewer. “Some of our best keynotes have been people who have been a little off-topic and wouldn’t fit in your standard tech conference,” Forrest said. However, “…the keynote yesterday generated a lot of buzz and maybe didn’t live up to that buzz.” Forrest said that the interview format has worked well in the past, but that “It just didn’t click yesterday.” The interview format may not lend itself to doing as much preparation as a traditional keynote speech. He thinks that for high-profile keynotes, the festival may consider more strongly going to a solo, lecture-style format. The festival looks to conferences like TED in terms of documenting with videos the experiences and wants to do more of that and to better communicate with the public what they’re doing.
Quotes: “Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Do something completely different.” Forrest, on submitting suggestions to the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker. “Ultimately, SXSW has to take rsponsibility in terms of training interviewers better. We didn’t do that good a job with (2008 interviewer) Sarah Lacy and we didn’t do a good job with Umair yesterday.” — Forrest. “The most brilliant minds and the most amazing geeks aren’t always the best speakers. It’s a challenge for everybody. One big part of the event is bringing fresh blood.” — O’ Keefe. “To me the most interesting sessions there are the ones that are completely off-the-wall.” Forrest, on Panel Picker submissions. “Personally, I hate that. It is incredibly hard to keep speakers on track.” — Forrest, when asked if the festival could add live Twitter “back-channel” feeds as visuals in panels. “We don’t do a good job of sharing what we’re doing.” — O’ Keefe.
Takeaways: Panel Picker begins in june for next year’s festival. The festival is looking for more diverse, more unique panel ideas and also wants to work with non-profits and other organizations to do new and different things. One audience member described the festival as a good mix of “left-brain” and “right-brain event.” O’Keefe said he’s like to see a media library of people’s experiences at SXSW Interactive, including more video. He thinks the TED conference sets the bar for this. 63 percent of SXSW Interactive audience has iPhones.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: ‘Hulu and Hollywood: Love on the Rocks?’
Time: 11:00 a.m. Tuesday
Panelist: Seth Shapiro, New Amsterdam Media LLC
The gist: In the last decade, all hell has broken loose in the media business. The old broadcast paradigm of content creation and distribution with 4 minutes of advertising for each half hour of programming will not work on the Internet: Broadband; social media such as Facebook and Twitter; new pricing models; portability — all of these emerging technologies are confusing and terrifying to a broadcast network executive who hopes that their business model lasts long enough for them to reach retirement. Cable companies and other content providers must embrace the opportunities the Internet affords as a distribution platform and new advertising and monetization models (including subscriptions).
Quotes: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction,” Pablo Picasso. “Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman.
Takeaways: There will most certainly be more online video in the future but, as in the case of Viacom, which recently pulled two of its mot popular Comedy Central shows off of free, advertising-supported video site Hulu.com to make them available online exclusively at the network’s own site, that video will increasingly come from the networks themselves. Advertising online will increase as revenue models become more successful. Quantifiable social media measurements built around brands will be used as proof of success or failure. The user experience will improve as companies such as Apple continue to drive home the point that brand perception equals success. Real-time content, such as Twitter commentary, will continue to influence and be incorporated into the television experience. Finally, Internet content creators can learn from the successes and failures of television. For example, television writers are experts in the economy of words, whereas Internet content tends to be sprawling and unfocused.
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Why people walking out of the Twitter SXSW keynote is a good thing
I’m about to go to a SXSW Interactive Town Hall panel where next year’s festival will be discussed, but what’s foremost on my mind is what happened yesterday at the bland (but probably not disastrous) keynote featuring Twitter CEO Evan Williams.
As we discussed in today’s A1 Statesman story and yesterday’s blog post (video here), many people left the keynote early and many people I talked to after the keynote and at parties last night said they couldn’t follow the point of the keynote and weren’t getting anything useful out of the conversation. They also said they wanted more details about @Anywhere and that Williams and interviewer Umair Haque glossed over details.
But what I didn’t hear is how this might be a very good thing for South by Southwest Interactive. While organizers might be scratching their head wondering how a can’t-miss keynote misfired so badly, they should take heart in the fact that the mass walkout was a positive sign for this year’s fest.
What the walk-out means to me:
- Attendees value their time and weren’t going to tolerate having it wasted.
- Attendees know there’s much more going on at the fest, whether it was the trade show, side parties, blogging lounges or quick coffee meetings at the Hilton. There weren’t panels going on during the keynote, but if there had been, they would have filled up quickly.
- Attendees didn’t feel obligated to sit in their chair and suffer through a boring interview just because it was conducted with a huge tech celebrity.
- They knew they could read Tweets and blog posts, and see video later if something interesting happened after they left. Being physically present, especially when the room has gone stale, is not really necessary at a fest like SXSW Interactive.
Not to spin it too positively, but these signs give me hope for the state of SXSW Interactive. Yes, the choice of interviewer was a huge mistake, but we inadvertently got a sign that the people who attend the fest are getting savvier and finding much more to do at this rapidly expanding festival.
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SXSW panel: The City is a Platform
Date/Time: 11 p.m. Tuesday
Panelists: John Tolva (IBM), Jen Masengarb (Chicago Architecture Foundation), Dustin Haisler (City of Manor), Assaf Biderman (MIT), Ben Berkowitz (SeeClickFix.com)
The gist: Cities and metropolitan spaces are increasingly becoming a platform for interactive design. The city is becoming part of the Internet—it’s a space constantly being monitored by embedded sensors. Interactive designers can use their skills to connect a city with its citizens. Open source government will improve life for everyone involved. Better communication between people and government will eliminate anxiety that stems from lack of knowledge about decisions that are made.
Quotes: “The city is layer upon layer of place-based and time-based meaning waiting to be peeled back” -John Tolva “ “Until our cities can talk to us, we need to figure out how to talk to them.” -Jen Masengarb “Innovation in government is something that game mechanics can be applied to…this is like our Foursquare for government” -Dustin Haisler
Takeaways: This was one of the few panels that spoke to affecting real-world change. Though it’s a much larger place, the City of Austin cnould learn a thing or two from Manor’s system of citizen engagement.
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SXSW panel: Music Liscensing For Emerging Media: Apps, Widgets, Viral Video
Panelists: Joel Johnson (Gawker)-moderator, Annie Lin (The Rights Workshop), Randy Shefer (Sony ATV Publishing), Adam Blumenthal (Curious Sense), Colin Mutchler
The gist: Music licensing in the United States is complicated. There are no set standards for copyright fees. All uses of licensed music need to be negotiated on a case by case basis. Also there’s no easy way to locate who owns rights to much content. Copyrights aren’t static, catalogs change hands, rights holders die, etc.
With new media there’s the additional challenge of asking labels and rights holders to use music in ways that have never been envisioned, karaoke iPhone or Facebook apps, artist t-shirts in virtual worlds, etc.
Quotes: “If I had created something that was really precious to me I wouldn’t want it in a fart app.” Joel Johnson
“It’s striking to me the way big media companies are still bewildered about these new technologies.” Adam Blumenthal
Takeaways: The best time to figure out the licensing for music in you project is at the beginning. When your Web site, game or film gets big that’s when the lawyers come knocking. While there are younger people within the rights holding organizations, who understand technology and are willing to negotiate reasonable fees for new media uses, sometimes you have to jump through hoops to get to them. —-Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW panel: Music Liscensing For Emerging Media: Apps, Widgets, Viral Video
Panelists: Joel Johnson (Gawker)-moderator, Annie Lin (The Rights Workshop), Randy Shefer (Sony ATV Publishing), Adam Blumenthal (Curious Sense), Colin Mutchler
The gist: Music licensing in the United States is complicated. There are no set standards for copyright fees. All uses of licensed music need to be negotiated on a case by case basis. Also there’s no easy way to locate who owns rights to much content. Copyrights aren’t static, catalogs change hands, rights holders die, etc.
With new media there’s the additional challenge of asking labels and rights holders to use music in ways that have never been envisioned, karaoke iPhone or Facebook apps, artist t-shirts in virtual worlds, etc.
Quotes: “If I had created something that was really precious to me I wouldn’t want it in a fart app.” Joel Johnson
“It’s striking to me the way big media companies are still bewildered about these new technologies.” Adam Blumenthal
Takeaways: The best time to figure out the licensing for music in you project is at the beginning. When your Web site, game or film gets big that’s when the lawyers come knocking. While there are younger people who understand technology and are willing to negotiate reasonable fees for new media uses within the rights holding organizations sometimes you have to jump through hoops to get to them. —-Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW Interactive Tuesday picks: the end is in sight!
The South By Southwest Interactive festival concludes with a big closing party and, of course, plenty of panels as things shift toward music. Follow our fest updates on Twitter at @360sxswi and right here on Digital Savant.
Some of today’s highlights, at the Austin Convention Center unless otherwise noted, include:
- “Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills,” which we previewed, is at 3:30 p.m. in 8A. Last year’s panel on this topic was said to be great.
- “Kids’ Online Video: Challenges and Success” which includes panelists from PBS and 4Kids is at 9:30 a.m. in Hilton H.
- “The Birth of Eye-Def Acting” with panelists from Ubisoft and AMD, is at 9:30 a.m. in Hilton K.
- “Can You Run a Serverless Business” with panelists from Yahoo, Amazon, Rackspace, Warner Music and GigaOm is at 11 a.m. in Hilton C.
- “Will Kiva Kill Your Nonprofit? Donations 2.0” includes panelists from Kiva, Amnesty International and Donors Choose, 11 a.m., 10AB.
- “Online Tastemakers: Death or Rebirth of Music Curation?” with panelists from Rolling Stone and NPR Music is at 11 a.m. in 12AB.
- Dustin Haisler of the City of Manor rubs shoulders with IBM and MIT big thinkers in “The City is a Platform” at 11 a.m. in Room 9ABC.
- “Making Sure The World Doesn’t Suck: How Independent Content Can Save The Media” includes panelists from The Onion, IFC and Gothamist.com, 12:30 p.m, in Room 18ABCD.
- “Swarming Plato’s Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies” features Henri Mazza of the Alamo Drafthouse and representatives from the Harry Ransom Center and the University of Texas, 12:30 p.m. in Ballroom B.
- “How to Save Journalism” (quick, tell us!) includes panelists from The Huffington Post, USA Today and Fark.com, 3:30 p.m. in Room C of the Hilton Austin.
- The viral video “David After Dentist” is discussed in a panel of the same name, 5 p.m. in Room H of the Hilton.
- Author and frequent SXSWi speaker Bruce Sterling closes out the panel programming with his annual peek into the future, 5 p.m. in Ballroom D.
- The closing party starts at 8 p.m., Mohawk, 912 Red River St.
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Panel review: Pass it Back! Kid Apps On Grown-up Devices
Panelists: Sara DeWitt Senior Director PBS Kids Interactive, Nina Walia, Associate Director PBS Kids Interactive
The gist: Sixty percent of the top paid educational iPhone apps target preschoolers. Parents want apps that engage a child and keep them quiet for a period of time, but feel less guilty if games are educational. In PBS Kids field testing of literacy games in 3-7-year- olds early results show that certain games are actually producing vocabulary acquisition. There are certain usability limitations that have to be taken into account when developing apps for kids, for example, kids don’t understand how to tap and most preschoolers can’t read, so text instructions need to be accompanied by clear icons.
Quotes: “The gaming industry really needs to sit up, a DS game costs $29 while these games cost $.99.” —Nina Walia
Takeaways: In households where children live below the poverty line cell phones, but not necessarily smart phones are more prevalent than computers. PBS is working with several government and corporate and non-profit partners to explore educational initiatives that can be brought into the homes through mobile devices.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW panel: Sound Unbound
Date/Time: 5 p.m. Monday
Panelists: Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Derek Woodgate
The gist: Miller’s latest book, “Sound Unbound,” deals with music in the digital age. Spooky showed clips from a documentary about music sampling and talked about the history of the idea of sampling. Interesting moments included Millers talking about how Igor Stravinsky was arrested for reworking the national anthem and when he demonstrated his iPhone app, which allows users to sample their iTunes library.
Quotes: “I try to create a tension between content and context.” “People are kind of boring if you are a computer, I imagine” (in reference to artificial intelligence).
Takeaways Miller pushes the boundaries of what we can do with music and other media, and he’s great to hear talk. In regards to sampling, it seems that our legal system isn’t keeping pace with culture.
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SXSW panel: ‘Transmedia Storytelling - Creating Stories That Work Over all Platforms’
Time: 5:20 p.m. Monday
Panelist: James Milward, Secret Location
The gist: Trans-media experiences take a core product, such as a TV show, and expand it to run on a variety of platforms, including other technological platforms (cell phones, the Internet), live events, and all forms of advertising. Successful trans-media campaigns don’t simply take the same content and scale it across all of these platforms, they exploit and adopt the particular strengths of each platform to add value to the core product. The product is enhanced across multiple platforms and places to create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.
Quotes: “Conversation, debate and feedback is the goal.” “Trans-media is inherently about creating culture.”
Takeaways: If your trans-media campaign is successful, users from the casual participants to hard-core fans will feel ownership of the property and evangelize it for you. Successful campaigns know what they are trying to achieve, have benchmarks for measuring success, know their audience and the genre they’re working in, involve knowledgeable talent and welcome passionate fans and advocates. Loyalty equals success. When you have people involved, they’re willing to support your product by purchasing merchandise, showing up at events, etc. Once you have obtained loyalty, you can imple ment monetization schemes for different platforms.
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SXSW Video: Evan Williams/Twitter keynote
American-Statesman videographer Jenni Jones shot this video of Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ keynote interview:
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SXSW Panel: Sex Education in a Web 3.0 World
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. on Monday, March 15
Panelists: Shelby Knox of Incite Pictures/Cine Qua Non, Herb Coleman of Austin Community College, Laura Rad
The Gist: Teens are getting online earlier, which gives them access to elicit material as well as information about sexual health. How can teens, parents and sex educators use the Internet to spread awareness about the positive and negative sides of sex.
Takeaways: Information changes fast, so many times, parents need a refresher about the science behind sexual transmitted illnesses. “The information you received in high school about HPV probably didn’t include info about Gardasil, panelist Knox said.
Also, there’s more wrong information online and in schools than right information. Texas Freedom Network found that only 11 school districts out of 1,000 have medically accurate sex education programs. Because there are no federal guidelines, it’s not illegal for teachers or others to share false information.
When searching about sex info, teens are usually looking for every specific information, but searches can also lead them to porn sites instead of verified information. (Teens can text specific sex health questions to 66746 and receive information in 5 minutes.)
Google, Facebook and other sites could take a more active role in separating educational material from porn. Sex educators have to intercept teens where they are likely to go, which means integrating sex education into games and other sites they already use.
Panelist Coleman created this Web site, which has links to sites to scientific information and how to talk to kids about sex.
Parents have a responsibility to warn kids about sexting — the sharing of sexually explicit text messages and photos — because photos can go public very easily. No matter how uncomfortable it makes them feel, parents should have an ongoing conversation with children from youth through their teenage years about all aspects of sex: the bad, the scary and also the good. “It’s up to parents to step up online and have an awkward conversation and say, ‘I just want to make sure you’re being safe’,” Rad said.
The Internet allows peer-to-peer education, which can bolster the information a parent gives. It’s important to use the Web to teach teens how to not only identify safe sexual practices, but also sexual assault.
Parents can find support and advice online, especially about how to be proactive in talking to kids before they are too old. By using the Internet, we can raise the bar for kids and teach them that they have a responsibility to protect themselves and their sexual partners.
Quotes:
“Parents need as much help as kids as knowing what to say.”
Knox: “Only teaching teens about prevention and not teaching about the beauty of orgasms, consensual sex and masturbation is like teaching music without rhythm or poetry without words.”
“Parents are usually looking for all the information they need for that one big talk. That doesn’t work. Sex education works over a long period of time.”
Rad: “The solution to sexting is not criminalizing children. Putting 18- and 19-year-olds in jail is not the solution. We need to teach them boundaries and that every device is a camera. We’ve had children who have killed themselves over this.”
Rad: “Parents don’t want to know the details of their kids’ sexual desires and needs. No parent wants to hear about their kids’ fetish, but it’s part of your job as a parent to listen to what your kids are going through.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW panel: Twitter Indispensable Tools Seminar
Time: 3:30 p.m. Monday
Speakers: Moderator-Guy Kawasaki (Alltop), Nick Halstead (tweetmeme), Laura Fitton (oneforty inc), Amita Paul (ObjectiveMarketer), John Yamasaki (Seesmic), Robert Scoble (Scobleizer)
The gist: With Twitter apparently here to stay, a panel of software developers for the social information service discussed ways to make Twitter more usable and manageable. Basically, Twitter without any filters is a random and intimidating sea of information and folks like Scoble and Halstead want to find ways to make sense of it all. The panelists shared their favorite Twitter tools - Tweetie, Friendorfoe, an array of Yamasaki’s creations with Seesmic - and talked about how developers can work better. Scoble made probably the most relevant call for a way curate conversations on Twitter by tagging, reordering, updating and adding feedback to relevant groups of Tweets, from the Chil earthquake as an example.
Quotes: None really. This was some hardcore nerdy stuff.
Takeaways: Useful as Twitter is (and for the most part unchallenged in the marketplace) it’s still very much in its infancy and creators need to work as openly as possible with developers to create ways to filter Tweets and add context and relevancy to the wild wild west nature of content flowing through at a rapid pace.
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SXSW panel: ‘From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?’
Time: 4:10 p.m. Monday
Panelist: Richard Bullwinkle, Rovi Corp.
The gist: The Internet will change television, but not in the ways you might expect. The convergence won’t be about checking your stocks or the traffic on your family room TV (you already have convenient devices better suited to those tasks) but harnessing the power and content of the Internet to enrich your entertainment experience.
Quotes: “You buy a beautiful, 50-inch device, hire a carpenter to hang it on the wall, have it wired by a professional and then it just sits there. To upgrade from MySpace to Facebook you just change the url; upgrading your television requires a carpenter and a guy to drag wires through your walls.”
Takeaways: The challenge of convergence will be to create interfaces that can help entertainment consumers find content that is relevant to them and to be able to inform others about content they create themselves, more similar to a computer search than an “ugly” television program guide. Bullwinkle encouraged individual content creators to get used to writing about their creations and to create social networks around their content
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AI 2010: Wall-e or Rise of the Machines?
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Monday
Panelists: Mason Hale (OneSpot), Doug Lenat (Cycorp), Bart Selman (Cornell University), Natasha Vita-More (H+ Lab), Peter Stone (UT Austin)
The gist: As artificial intelligence continues to advance, what are some of the issues we need to be concerned with? It took a while for each of the speakers to explain what they worked on, so the panel didn’t quite get to whether it was going to be a Wall-e scenario or something more sinister, but they did show some very interesting examples of AI, including a project to develop humanoid robots that will eventually be able to compete with a human team (the goalies need a lot of work), and a model of how automated vehicles would negotiate an intersection without the need for traffic lights or signs. Quotes: “Looking ahead ten years, we’ll see mental prostheses that help us think better.” “Overall, while AI will augment human abilities in many different areas, artistic abilities are going to be doable, but they’re not going to replace what humans can do.” - Doug Lenat
“At best we cannot fully predict the behavior of an AI controlled system” -Bart Selman
Takeaways: While we still haven’t gotten to the point where Google can fully understand what we are asking, we have gotten to the point where a humanoid robot playing soccer can make a decision of how to act based on the position of its teammates and the ball. That seems to skew more toward Terminator than Disney, but who knows.
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SXSW Keynote: Evan Williams of Twitter
Panel: Evan Williams keynote (Twitter hashtag: #evwilliams)
Date/time: 2 p.m., Monday
Panelists: Evan Williams (Twitter), Umair Haque (Havas Media Lab)
The gist: After fest director Hugh Forrest reminded the audience that Twitter got its start in 2007 when it began to make its public push at SXSW Interactive, Twitter CEO Evan Williams broke news early. He announced that a new platform, “@Anywhere” was set to debut on several content-heavy sites including The New York Times, Amazon.com and The Huffington Post. He explained that the platform allows sites to integrate Twitter services onto their Web pages. Twitter users would be able to Tweet content from sites and sites can build Twitter communities (or have Twitter users log in with their Twitter IDs). The rest of the keynote focused primarily on Twitter’s business practices and Williams’ vision for the future of the company. The service transmits about 50 million Tweets a day.
Though Williams’ keynote was perhaps the most anticipated event of SXSW Interactive, some attendees left the crowded Exhibit Hall 1 early and posts on Twitter itself criticized the panel for being unfocused, short on details about @Anywhere and, in a word, boring.
Slavin Rubin, one of the founders of start-up IndieGoGo, who drove from Miami to attend the fest, called the keynote, “Borderline terrible.”
“I thought that they were going to talk about either his experiences or advice from an entrepreneur or the guts and glory of Twitter. It felt very superficial, a lot of softballs,” Rubin said. “Twitter is so dynamic and has so much information and is so concise and offers so much stimulation… the things that were covered were the exact opposite of that.”
Matt Trego, an attendee in town from North Carolina, said, “It wasn’t as interesting as I thought. It was hard to follow the (wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk) talk.”
Twitter’s history is inextricably linked to SXSW Interactive’s recent explosive growth, Forrest said in his introduction. After Twitter put up screens at the festival in 2007 to promote their nascent service, it made headway with early tech adopters. In 2008 and 2009, Twitter became a vital part of the festival. In 2008, SXSW Interactive audience members attending an interview between BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used Twitter posts to help derail the presentation, creating a “Back-channel” effect that is still feared and marveled at within the tech industry.
Since then, hundreds of start-up companies have come to SXSW Interactive in hopes of being crowned the next Twitter.
Quotes: All from Williams: “It’s critical that it’s a two-way system.” Williams says he wants to “Make Twitter a tool for you that helps you get stuff done.” “People have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of attention.”
Takeaways: Williams says it wants users to spend less time on its Twitter.com Web site and more time exploring the online world with Twitter integrated into other Web sites and services. Williams continues to hope that people will use Twitter to get information quickly and to learn about the world around them and to have richer experiences online. “We want to make that easier, better, faster,” he said.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW session: Gary Vaynerchuk
Time: 12:30 p.m. Monday
Speaker: Wine entrepreneur, author and social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk
The gist: The man who’s arguably the biggest rock star of social media spent the early part of his talk hammering on the importance of listening to and having genuine interactions with customers in the new economy. Vaynerchuk, who peppered the word “passion” into his talk liberally as an outgrowth of his recent book “Crush It,” shared anecdotes about the effort he puts into interacting with customers and fans and called out (in his artfully profane way) companies who outsource their social media services, arguing that “you can’t scale caring and authenticity.”
After that opening, Vaynerchuk spent 45 minutes answering questions from the near-full ballroom. During this time he playfully embraced and groped a male fan, asked an audience member if he could auction her off on eBay and received a dual-microphone shout out from a pair of MCs in the crowd. Clearly, when the man is on stage you can take a match to just about any rulebook.
Quotes: All from Vaynerchuk-
“Companies don’t care about users enough, which is why when Zappos comes along and actually gives half a (care) we go crazy over it.”
“I’m passionate about the ‘thank-you’ economy. People said the book wouldn’t sell because I gave away too much content for free. I knew people would appreciate all the hours I spent sharing with them things I really cared about.”
“People want experience, and that’s going to be incredibly powerful for a long time. People who give that different level of interaction are the ones who are going to win.”
“No matter what you do for a living right now you’re going to be in a number of different industries and one of those is always going to be customer service.”
Takeaways: Care, and act like it, or get out of the way. Vaynerchuk has little patience for those who either don’t get the need for customer interaction, or try to take mercenary shortcuts in doing so.
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SXSW panel: A Brave New Future for Book Publishing
Date/Time: 12:30 p.m. Monday Panelists: Kassia Krozser (Booksquare.com), Kevin Smokler (BookTour.com), Debbie Stier (HarperStudio), Pablo Defendini (Tor.com), Matthew Cavnar (Vook)
The gist: Like the newspaper business, the book publishing business faces a test as the world quickly converts to digital technology. It’s not clear whether the upcoming launch of the iPad will have an impact on books, though some of the panelists think that its reader function will appeal to readers who do not consider a single-function ereader such as Amazon’s Kindle a necessity. The panelists also discussed how the shift to digital will further deconstruct the traditional relationship between editors and writers, leaving writers even more responsible for their own publicity.
Quotes: “I don’t think its possible anymore that the publisher is going to get your books reviewed and get you on the Today Show.” - Debbie Stier “Any device that makes reading easier…is ideal.” -Kassia Kroser, on the iPad.
Takeaways: While it’s still not clear what the future of book publishing will look like, books are still very appealing to a large segment of the population, something will not change anytime soon.
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SXSW Panel: After Magazines: WIRED’s Digital Rebirth
Date/Time: 11 a.m. on Monday, March 15
Panelists: Jeremy Clark of Adobe, Scott Dadich, creative director of Wired
The Gist: The design-heavy magazine Wired will launch the tablet version of its magazine this summer, so what will it look like and what design challenges did the team face?
The panelists gave a preview of what the tablet product will look like, and you could tell the audience was impressed with the new features, which will create an entirely new magazine experience. Wired is at the forefront of this new design, but we can presume that many other magazines will be experimenting with interactive designs for mobile devices such as tablets.
Takeaways: The tablet edition of Wired will combine strong design of the print magazine with the connectivity of a wireless device. The better the design means the easier reading experience, the deeper engagement, the more connected consumer and the stronger brand relationship.
Right now, it takes 24 days for a rough draft of a story to go through 10-15 different people and end up at the printers. With this new tablet product, the editorial side will have to rethink how the magazine is reproduced, Clark said.
Creating two, possibly three layouts (one for print, one for tablet and another for Web) comes at considerable cost to a publication, but the reward is great. In the tablet design, you can build in interactive maps and audio components. Illustrations can come to life. Users can rotate images and look at more images than a designer could fit on a traditional page, and they can scroll either horizontally or vertically. “We can engage in all kinds of new ways,” Dadich said.
Typography is lost in most web design, but designers shouldn’t forget the importance of readability on any screen. A 4,000 word article can be easy to read on a screen is the font is right, Dadich said. The tablet allows a poster-style design instead of just two pieces of paper side by side.
Advertisers can create interactive ads to, for example, schedule a test drive of a new care, talk to a dealer or find a store location. Readers can also rotate photos in ads, just like in features.
Quotes:
Dadich: “High level of design and engagement is still here. It retains the sense of place and info-density in the print magazine.”
Dadich: “Ads are as important to the magazine as the editorial content, so you have to (force users to) flip through them just the same.)
Dadich: “The web is great at some things and print is great at some things. We’re trying to combine the best of both.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW panel: Can the Creative Class Revolutionize the Energy Business?
Time: 11 a.m. Monday
Speakers:Mark Kapner (Austin Energy), Richard Donnelly (GRIDbot), Joel Greenberg (Tech2Energy), Greg Kallenberg (filmmaker, “Haynesville: The Relentless Hunt for Energy Future”)
The gist: As institutions all over the world embrace the idea of cleaner and more efficient energy, there are great opportunities for creative minds in engineering, art and design to deliver ideas that can reinvent or modify how we generate and consume power. The greatest room for innovation will like come in the area of consumer devices and programs to reduce energy usage, along with marketing campaigns to encourage average citizens all over the world to embrace cleaner energy usage. Those efforts can lead to Austin’s gradual move to renewable energy, currently at 12 percent of the portfolio and mandated to increase to 30 percent in the next 10 years.
Quotes: From Donnelly: “It’s only when middle America thinks it’s cool to adopt better practices that we’ll achieve real change and results, so it’s up to the creative class to help make that happen.”
From Kallenberg: “We’re all (activists and energy interests) finally listening to each other sitting at the table trying to figure this out, and all of you can sit at the table, too. You (creatives) need to stick with it because people are listening all over the world.”
Kallenberg again: “Energy companies are looking for solutions to big problems and so creative people are really needed more than ever. The big guys are looking for ideas because finally we all seem to agree on the need for a clean energy future.”
Takeaways: A refreshingly open back and forth on how dire the future could be if our energy creation and utilization processes aren’t transformed. That need creates lots of opportunities for adventurous thinkers willing to look into the energy sector.
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SXSW Panel: Nooks & Grannies: Exploring Older Niches Online
Date/Time: 12:30 p.m. on Monday, March 15
Panelist: Christopher Quigley of Rubber Republic
The Gist: There are 42 million people in U.S. who are over the age of 65, and in the next 20 years, that number will double. About 30 percent of them are online, but if you remove e-mail-only users from that number, it drops dramatically.
Takeaways: What’s beyond forwarding e-mail for older Internet users? Many of them find niche hobby areas, such a knitting or card games, to play, but in general, e-mail is their version of social networking. They stick to areas that are comfortable, not just browsing to see what’s new and interesting.
(Panelist Quigley created a blog called What My Dad Sent Me, which is not to be confused with Shit My Dad Says.)
Older women were one of the fastest growing demographics on Facebook — five percent of the SXSW registrants are over age 50 — and as American boomers age, they’ll take with them their agility online, negating some of the issues that seniors-as-beginners now face.
One thing that won’t change is the need for Web sites, computers and mobile devices to be ergonomically built or designed for seniors to use. Another area that we’ll see grow are games to help keep their minds sharp.
There is a big opportunity now to aggregate and store the personal history, which together creates our collective history, that right now is only in seniors’ memories.
With its large membership base, AARP is a leader in reaching this online demographic, but the conversation about its interesting and innovative engagement with seniors, unfortunately, was held mostly through the Twitter hashtag instead of in the actual core conversation room.
Quotes: “Many of the seniors who are online now are digital immigrants, not digital natives like their children or grandchildren are.”
“E-mail is their Facebook.”
“It’s important to empower the user no matter what they feel comfortable with, rather than trying to force them to feel comfortable with Twitter or another technology.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW panel: ‘How Pandora Navigated the Smart Phone Seas’
Time: 12:30 p.m. Monday
Panelists: Pandora CTO and head of product Tom Conrad, with moderator Mark Phillip of Are You Watching This?!
The gist: Conrad gave a history of how Pandora dramatically gained popularity when it began developing for smart phones.
Pandora knew that it wanted to go mobile because most music-listening doesn’t take place when people are sitting in front of a computer.
Pandora became available for feature phones like the Motorola Razr, but growth was slow. There were lots of incompatibilities, monthly fees hurt growth and customers for the phones weren’t necessarily looking for Web content.
Things changed when Pandora became available for the iPhone. Within hours of the App Store launch, more people were listening than on iPhones than on feature phones. Similar success followed on the Blackberry, Palm and Android (Conrad says his infamous “I need Android like a hole in the head” quote was dead wrong.)
Coming soon: Conrad says we’ll soon be able to control Pandora from our car dashboards.
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Spotted at SXSW Interactive: Dell Mini 5 Android tablet
We got a peek at the Dell Mini 5, a 5-inch-screen tablet device running the Android OS. It plays video, makes phone calls (though Dell hasn’t said which wireless carriers will offer service for it), and has cameras on both sides. The model we saw was red, but other colors will be available. No release date or pricing yet. The video is by Jenni Jones:
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Streaming music site MOG.com demos mobile apps, drives silly blue van
With the buzz around tomorrow’s keynote address by Daniel Ek of the much-hyped European mobile streaming music service Spotify building, Berkeley, CA-based streaming music service MOG.com demo-ed a rival product for iPhone and Android in a low-key press event this morning.For $5 a month MOG.com’s online service currently allows subscribers to search for music by artist, song or album, develop and share playlists and use a “radio” service that operates as a sort of hybrid of the Pandora model to explore an artist’s catalog and discover new music. The site, which includes Music mogul Rick Rubin on its board of directors, boasts over 7 millions songs and licensing deals with all of the major labels and most of the indies to provide a steady stream of new tunes. The MOG mobile application would allow subscribers to access the site’s full music library on the go and download songs, albums and playlists to their mobile devices for use offline.
With subscriptions priced at $10 a month, the company hopes to launch the service for Android and iPhone and iTouch early next quarter. When asked if he was worried about getting the app into the iTunes app store, MOG CEO David Hyman hedged slightly, noting the Apple has given the green light to other music subscription services, including Spotify in Europe. “I do know that Android won’t be a problem,” he said.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW panel preview: ‘From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?’
Richard Bullwinkle from Rovi Corp. joins the future of television SXSW Interactive bandwagon with a panel on the future of TV. Rovi contends that now that technology has transformed the computer into a television, the reverse is about ready to happen. Technologies such as Internet-connected televisions and widgets (small applications that will run on these sets) will turn the television into a computing device — but entertainment-focused. Rovi Corp. creates smart “guide” software: imagine the program guide on your television, but able to aggregate not only netwrok and cable television programming, but also photos from your PC, movies from services such as Netflix and any video you’ve got stored on local hard drives or care to pull from the Internet.
I spoke with Bullwinkle prior to his panel this afternoon at SXSW.
What can we expect to hear you talk about at your panel?
Bullwinkle: There’s a lot of new technology that’s sort of happened over the last, let’s say, two to three years — the ability to first download movies and then stream movies. At first we had proprietary boxes. Well, first we could download things and stream them to our computers — that’s the YouTube sort of thing. And also Cinema Now, which really had a PC app and there were very few other devices you could watch Cinema Now content on.
And then we started trying to integrate that content with the TV, but sort of with specialized boxes — I’m talking about the Rokus and the Vudus and the AppleTVs, where you’d go buy yet another set top box to set on top of the stack of set-top boxes and try to get a little more content.
And now we’re sort of in the third generation, which is I think you’ll start seeing connected TVs that can access that great Internet content and they will also access the content you’ve always gotten — your cable, your satellite, and also they’ll access the content in your home. So anything you already did download — your music, your photos or whatever you have on hard drives around the home — they’ll access that.
What about the idea that people don’t really want the Internet on their televisions?
I’m not really talking about e-mail or Facebook or things like that. I don’t think consumers want that on their televisions; there are too many wonderful devices to do that stuff. I love it on the computer, I love it on my iPhone. They’re great devices for interacting with that stuff. On my TV, I prefer to be entertained. I’m not saying that everybody’s that way; there are going to be people who want that stuff on their TVs. But I think putting a browser on a TV is probably the wrong approach. I’d much rather see things that bring more content in on the TV.
And also, by the way, in the third generation it doesn’t just have to be the TV. It can also be things like the Xbox, which do multiple things: it plays games; it accesses Netflix; there are some rumors that it will have access to Hulu and things in a few months. So I’m not just saying it has to be a connected TV. There’s lots of connected devices that do multiple things. But the idea of the one-trick pony — the box that only accesses one service — I think that’s going to die very quickly.
Does this go both ways? There’s also, certainly, television on the Internet.
Yes. So, that’s the interesting thing. With Hulu, a lot of people last year were talking about disconnecting their cable and switching to Hulu only. That didn’t work out, because Hulu has prevented that content from coming back to the TV. Netflix has gotten to the TV on a lot of devices but, for example, YouTube has pulled away from the TV. They announced a lot of products that would do YouTube to the TV, but also pulled back and didn’t offer those people the opportunity to ship. So, there is a lot of great Internet content; I don’t know how quickly it’s going to get back to the TV.
But TV on the INternet is somewhat successful.
Somewhat. I don’t think anybody’s making money hand over fist, but that’s just because this is a new market and the advertisers are not sure how quickly to shift their advertising dollars over to the Internet and the experience is a little rough right now. For exapmle, on Hulu, the night “Lost” airs, you can’t view “Lost.” The next day you can, but then you can only view it for about three days and they pull it off. So you have to be a bit of a wizard at memorizing when are the times to actually go visit things to get them. And that’s confusing to people. So the repeat customers are not as high as they’d like them to be, but that’s just because it’s too hard right now.
From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?
Monday, March 15 at 04:10 PM
Austin Convention Center, 12AB
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SXSW panel: ‘BAM! An Entire Statewide University System Goes Virtual’
Time: 11 a.m. Monday
Panelists: Mario Guerra, University of Texas’ Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment; Riley Triggs, Lecturer in Design at the University of Texas; Jessica Mullen, master’s design student at UT
The gist: How the University of Texas System uses Second Life for virtual learning.
Takeaways: Part of Transforming Undergraduate Education grant, the project funded three Second Life islands for every UT campus and health institution, as well as administration. Students and employees can download Second Life for free. What to do with island is up to each campus, although they do get guidance. The project is funded for a year. Campuses had a variety of experience levels with Second Life.
Second Life offers a space for remote teaching. Students participate in projects within Second Life, which helps them take responsibility for their own learning. Possibilities for classroom use include bringing in speakers via Second Life or replacing expensive real-world excursions with virtual ones. It’s not being used as replacement for the traditional classroom, but it can help in situations such as connecting an instructor at one campus with students at another.
Students came to feel very at ease communicating in Second Life. An audience member discussed use of Second Life at his own school and said students who may have felt self-conscious in class became more at ease with sharing online.
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SXSW Web Awards recap
Austin-based Web company Gowalla won its second award of the night Sunday at the 13th annual SXSW Web Awards.
Other winners included financial site Mint.com and travel site Atlas Obscura.
Comedian Doug Benson hosted the ceremony, which took place at the Hilton Austin. Awards, given in 18 categories, included games, mobile, music and activism.
Over 500 people attended the award show, which included a pre-show reception and circus performers.
For a complete list of winners, click here.
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SXSW Panel: Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online
Date/Time: 9:30 a.m. on Monday, March 15
Panelists: Jay Rosen of New York University, Matt Thompson of National Public Radio, Staci D. Kramer of ContentNext Media, Tristan Harris of Apture
The Gist: Journalists treat context as an afterthought, presuming that readers know the backstory to a news article. Rather that burying context into a single sentence after a nut graph buried in the story, we need to be thinking about ways to give more attention to the bigger picture.
Takeaways: A big part of a media organization’s role to educate its readers. Presenting the news is important, but if you don’t explain how today’s news fits into the bigger picture, readers aren’t going to get much out of it. As journalists, we can presume the readers have read every word we’ve written, but that’s usually not the case. How many of use as consumers have to look up a topic on Google or Wikipedia to get a backstory before we can fully comprehend a story? Newspapers and media outlets should be finding ways to package that information and not just link to it from within a story, but stick it right there at the top of the page.
Putting context first would change how news sites look. An article is valuable today, but not tomorrow, unless you’re building upon a solid contextual base.
Matt Thompson of NPR gave an example of the financial crisis. In 2008, that was such a huge story, that the daily updates were meaningless if you didn’t go deeper. He took two days and created a site, Money Meltdown, of links to stories that gave background information to this crisis. Instead of just automatically pulling links that mentioned the crisis, each day he hand-pulled one story that he thought incorporated the day’s news into the bigger picture.
For more information and to chime in on the conversation, check out the Future of Context site that the panelists put together.
Quotes:
Thompson: “We need to flip the model. The context should be the foundation. The systemic stuff should be what you should be able to access first. The episodic stuff should be the more info link you click.”
Thompson: “We currently present context as more information, but I don’t think that the consumer desires more information. (They have) a desire for less information. We’re overloaded. We (should be thinking about how) to present the minimum you need to understand the subject.”
Harris: How do journalists find time to create more information to build context: “We need to figure out how to reuse words we’ve already written. If we can create that great infograph that explains a subject, we should be using that every time a story comes up on that topic.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW Video: Statesman Texas Social Media Awards
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon about the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards presented by Clear which were presented Sunday night at Cedar Door:
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SXSW Video: Arc Attack at Dorkbot
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon about the Tesla coils at the Dorkbot party:
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SXSW Video: Rooftop Party at Fogo de Chao
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon about the nightlife at SXSW Interactive, including the nightly Entrepreneur’s Lounge rooftop party at Fogo de Chao:
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SXSW Video: Ustream Party hosted by Pete Wentz
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon on the big Ustream party:
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SXSW Interactive Monday picks: too many panels!
The South By Southwest Interactive festival continues today with a big keynote speech, lots of parties and even a karaoke event. Follow our fest updates on Twitter at @360sxswi and right here on Digital Savant.
Some of today’s highlights, at the Austin Convention Center unless otherwise noted, include:
- Twitter CEO Evan Williams delivers his keynote, 2 p.m. in Exhibit Hall 1. Will he roll out Twitter’s new ad platform? We’ll be there to find out.
- “Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online” is at 9:30 a.m. in Hilton H and features Jay Rosen of NYU.
- “Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate,” 9:30 a.m. in 10AB includes panelists from NASA, “This Week in Science” and Google.
- “What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work” is at 11 a.m. in Hilton H.
- “FCC Broadband Plan: Apps, Innovation and inclusion” includes members of the FCC talking about the future of Internet service in the U.S., 11 a.m. at the Radisson.
- I’ll be interviewing Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns at Studio SX in the exhibit hall at 11:30 a.m. Come say hi!
- “A Brave New Future for Book Publishing” is at 12:30 p.m. in Hilton H.
- “The Life Graph: You Are Your Location” includes staffers from Twitter, Google and Loopt. It’s 12:30 p.m. in Hilton K.
- Wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk speaks at 12:30 p.m. in Ballroom D.
- “Haiti CrisisCamp: Techies Unite for Earthquake Relief” is at 3:30 p.m. at Radisson Austin.
- “Twitter Indispensible Tools Seminar” is at 3:30 p.m. in Ballroom D and features folks from TweetDeck, Seesmic and Guy Kawasaki of Alltop.
- “From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?”, 4:10 p.m., 12AB. We like TV!
- “Customer Support in a 140 Character World,” which we previewed, is at 5 p.m. in Hilton AB, sponsored by HP.
- Parties: Plutopia at the Mexican-American Cultural Center, GDGT.com’s party and TechKaraoke at Six Lounge from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. I will be singing “Pretty Woman” at 11:55 p.m. Be there at your peril.
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Gowalla CEO Williams overall winner in Statesman Texas Social Media Awards
A-List photos: Texas Social Media Awards
Statesman Story: Social Media Awards winner Williams hopes Gowalla gets people exploring
Against the backdrop of an expanding South by Southwest Interactive festival, the Austin American-Statesman Sunday night awards its Texas Social Media Awards presented by Clear.
Williams’ company has been much buzzed-about at the festival, along with other companies like Foursquare that offers ways for people to network based on their location. So-called location-based social networks are a hot topic at SXSW Interactive this year.
The American-Statesman’s Social Media Editor Robert Quigley said Williams was part of a varied group of winners that also included Mobile Loaves & Fishes founder Alan Graham and travel writer Sheila Scarborough.
“More industries are embracing social media and they’re doing a better job of it,” Quigley said.
More than 160 people were nominated by the public. Judges Quigley, Greer and food writer Addie Broyles judged the awards. About 500 people attended the awards ceremony.
Tim Lott, vice president for audience strategy at the American-Statesman said the social media efforts of the newspaper and the people celebrating the awards at the Cedar Door have “allowed our audience to be the largest it’s been — ever.”
Williams, whose company has been aggressively attracting users at the fest, thanked his wife and the City of Austin. “Austin is bar-none the densest quality of really great places to go out and check in. We’re thrilled to be here and honored,” Williams said.
— Omar L. Gallaga
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Statesman Texas Social Media Awards online guest book
This is the online guest book for the Statesman’s Texas Social Media Awards. Guests of the party and awards show can sign in here and give their thoughts about the party and SXSW.
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SXSW Panel: The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart?
Panel: The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart? (Twitter hashtag: #emotionengine
Date/time: 5 p.m. Sunday
Panelists: Peter Molyneux (Lionhead Studios), Frank Rose (Wired.com).
The gist: Peter Molyneux (“Fable,” “Black & White,” “Populous”) is “Pioneer of the God Games” (said Rose) and he has a reputation for trying to break down the barriers between good and bad and creating moral consequences in games, but leaving it up to players to decide which way to go. Though his games have not always been commercial successes, he has always pushed the envelope of what games can do and be. He’s found success with his Xbox/Xbox 360-based “Fable” games and in his next game, he wants to make characters and situations that involve the player, create empathy and engage emotions in new ways. In a demo Molyneux showed of “Fable 3,” he showed the main character you play holding your daughter’s hand and walking though the streets of a Dickensian London-like location. It was very charming and emotionally compelling. The game’s “Touch” interface will allow players to interact with anything around them in contextual ways — use the same hand that walked your daughter to reach for a beggar’s hand and you can take him to a factory and sell him (if you want). Molyneux believes many game designers have become complacent and that new technologies like Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera, code-named Natal, will open new ways of interacting with games and making them more compelling.
Quotes: “The staffing problems must have been a nightmare!” — Molyneux on the plight of the bad guy in movies. “It’s so emotionally more powerful than hitting A… you physically have to drag him and force him to do these things. A simple game mechanic changes your emotional involvement with the world.” — Molyneux. “Natal is a fantastic amazing device because it is so different… it makes designers like me sweat like we never have before.” — Molyneux on Microsoft’s motion-sensing Xbox 360 camera, due out later this year. “It is all about the skill of what we create.” — Molyneux
Takeaways: While movies make us sit passively, video games have the opportunity to engage us in ways that other forms of entertainment can’t. Games like “Heavy Rain” (which Molyneux believes is brilliant, but which he couldn’t finish because he was too emotionally disturbed), are pointing the way to where interactive entertainment is going. Molyneux believes we need more amazingly talented game designers to make interactive art that matters.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: Inside the Workings of Funnyordie.com
Time/Date: 3:30 p.m. Sunday
Panelists: Richard Glover and Andrew Steele
The gist: Glover, CEO, and Steele, creative director, discussed techniques that have made the sketch comedy site successful. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the site was founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (Upright Citizens Brigade) and that they have access to their celebrity friends. Opening the floor to questions after showing popular clips, they also spoke about their HBO show and their upcoming foray into film production with comedic duo Tim and Eric.
Quotes: “The secret of the Internet is to swear; swearing kids are even better, and so are naked women.” “The minor-league aspect of Funny or Die is very much a part of why it exists.”
Takeaways: While Funny or Die has resources that no Web start-up is going to be equipped with, Steele and Glover emphasized the fact that the celebrity element of the site was less important than well-done comedy, and that effective use of social media sites is essential to maintaining an audience.
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Panel review: From Trolls to Stars (the Commenter Ecosystem)
Panelists: Dashiell Bennett, Anthony De Rosa, Kate Milner, Jaime Morelli, Kelly Reeves
The gist: Bloggers have a love/hate relationship with commenters. A strong commenter community reflects a strong site, but commenters can begin to drive the tone of a site. Moderated commenter communities tend to be more successful. Lack of moderation degenerates into noise as does anonymity in comments.
Blog posts no longer exist only on the originating site. Through social media content spreads all over the internet. Social media arenas Facebook/Twitter, etc. are becoming big forums for commenters. Some sites with quiet comment sections have very active Facebook communities.
Quotes: “You have to be careful about what you put out there. You’re not as anonymous as you think you are.” Anthony De Rosa
“Don’t feed the trolls” Anthony De Rosa
Takeaways: There’s a fine line editors have to walk between giving people the freedom to express themselves and managing the tone of the site. Letting people know what’s expected of them, and empowering productive commenters to help police the site can be effective. Even sites with well-established, self-policing communities sometimes have problems as “star” commenters start to lord over conversations and alienate new users. Forcing commenters to use their real life identities, through Facebook Connect for example, tends to lead to more civilized conversations.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW Keynote: Valerie Casey
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Sunday
Speaker: Valerie Casey, founder and executive director of The Designers Accord, which works with non-profits to develop innovative technology.
The gist: Casey’s area of focus is systems design, and during her speech offered an explanation of what that means and what that has to do with the idea of sustainability. She began by referencing Kurt Vonnegut’s narrative chart, which visualizes the dominant type of narrative arc, and contrasts that arc with the narrative of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which is flatly negative. The narrative of sustainability, as told through popular stories and images such as an albatross that died from eating trash, is Kafka-esque, Casey said.
Her program, the Designers Accord, works to combat this negativity. She went on to outline how the group was reworking systems, providing a series of examples of ways in which different people or organization have been able to solve problems to affect change. She talked about how a water transportation project in South Africa was derailed when the people involved refused to use raw plastic rather than recycled materials, which weren’t feasible. In a similar example, she talked about a “pizza lab,” NakedPizza in New Orleans that was developing healthy, affordable pizza, but couldn’t use recycled boxes because it drove the price point to high.
She concluded by pointing out that the interactive community was conspicuously absent from these types of efforts. Rather than start another group such as Designers Accord of LEED, though, they should work to help existing groups communicate and work more efficiently.
Quotes: “When will we stop thinking that less bad is good?” “The focus on just the technical aspects of sustainability…completely misses the point.”
Takeaways: A big player in the push for sustainability thinks that the interactive community isn’t doing enough. It will be interesting to see if next year’s conference includes more on this issue.
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SXSW Panel: CrowdControl: Changing The Face Of Media Or Hype?
Panel: CrowdControl: Changing The Face Of Media Or Hype? (Twitter hashtag: #crowdcontrol)
Date/time: 12:30 p.m., Sunday
Panelists: Jason Rzepka (MTV), Joseph Kingsbury (Text 100), Lila King (CNN), Randi Zuckerberg (Facebook), Pete Cashmore (Mashable.com).
The gist: Big media brands (CNN, MTV) and new-media ones (Facebook, Mashable) are both utilizing the crowd for news coverage and to help shape the content it provides. In the case of Facebook, which has about 400 million users, the company used crowdsourcing to help translate its site into 70 languages. In the case of CNN’s iReport, the network is getting many new and different points of view from its iReporters than it traditionally offered. Less certain is how crowdsourcing can benefit labor-intensive efforts like long-term investigative journalism. In this over-packed panel, questions that have echoed through other panels at the fest (how will mainstream media survive? What will take its place if it goes away?) were brought up, but the answers were no clearer here than in other sessions.
Quotes:“You don’t need a printing press to be the press and create media anymore. If you’re on the scene, you’re a journalist, basically.” — Cashmore. “There’s always going to be a need for the person in the field… I can’t see that going away.” — King. “Everyone has an original experience to share with the world.” — King. “What a incredible world we live in!” — Zuckerberg on how open people are on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Takeaways: Trusted brands are still important to get reliable information, but crowdsourcing can still play a role in the way news and entertainment organizations provide content. The mainstream media has failed to adopt practices that have become common in the blogging world (like linking back to sources), to their detriment. Sites like CNN are experimenting, but they don’t yet have all the answers; they do feel they’re going in the right direction. Sometimes the best solution is crowdsourcing for specific goals (like Facebook’s translations), or to supplement existing products or coverage (like iReports bundled with CNN’s staff news reports).
- Omar L. Gallaga
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Panel review: Story.next
Panelists: Sanjay Gupta, Sunil Gupta
The gist: The Kahani Project is the “passion project” of brothers Sunil and Sanjay Gupta. The objective of the project is to create an online community chronicling the stories of the South Asian community that emmigrated to the United States in the 60s and 70s. The inspiration for the project is based around the work of documentarian Studs Terkel, the idea that everyone has a story to tell. The Gupta brothers have chosen a specific focus for the project that reflects their own family history. The goal of the project is to create a mass archive of stories with deep engagement among community members. All material in the Kahani Project is licensed under creative commons and community members are encouraged to collaborate with each other and create remixes and collages using each other’s work.
Quotes: “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share.”
“Every community has stories that are worth preserving”
Takeaways: There are beautiful powerful stories hidden in the living rooms of every family. Technology is catalytic and creates new opportunties for people to explore their collective histories.
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Panel review: Story.Next: Narrating the Crowd
Story.next: Narrating the Crowd
9:30am Sunday
Panelists: Sanjay Gupta, Sunil Gupta
The gist: The Kahani Project is the “passion project” of brothers Sunil and Sanjay Gupta. The objective of the project is to create an online community chronicling the stories of the South Asian community that emmigrated to the United States in the 60s and 70s. The inspiration for the project is based around the work of documentarian Studs Terkel, the idea that everyone has a story to tell. The Gupta brothers have chosen a specific focus for the project that reflects their own family history. The goal of the project is to create a mass archive of stories with deep engagement among community members. All material in the Kahani Project is licensed under creative commons and community members are encouraged to collaborate with each other and create remixes and collages using each other’s work.
Quotes: “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share.”
“Every community has stories that are worth preserving”
Takeaways: There are beautiful powerful stories hidden in the living rooms of every family. Technology is catalytic and creates new opportunties for people to explore their collective histories.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW Panel: 2009 Iran Election: Women’s Revolution? Twitter Revolution?
Panel: 2009 Iran Election: Women’s Revolution? Twitter Revolution? (Twitter hashtag: #sxswiran)
Date/time: 11 a.m., Sunday
Panelists: Roja Bandari (UCLA), Mona Kasra (University of Texas - Dallas), Shireen Mitchell (Digital Sisters/Women Wired In), David Parry (UT - Dallas).
The gist: Though Twitter brought Iran election protests and how the government deals with technology to the world’s attention, women in Iran have been fighting for rights for 100 and there’s been a blogging/social networking protest movement since at least 2001 with the introduction of Blogsphere. And the women’s rights movement is very intertwined with the Iranian green movement. The government has clamped down on speech and protest by throttling Internet speeds to slightly-better-than-dial-up and even filtered the search term “Women” at one point. One panelist contented that Twitter did not change Iran or create a revolution there, but it did make the rest of the world more aware of Iran’s political crisis and in that way did benefit the pro-democracy movement there. It also benefitted Twitter, which received attention when the U.S. State Department the site not shut down for maintenance during the height of the Iran protest Twitter activity.
Quotes:“I think it was this instance that catapults Twitter into… ‘oh it’s a serious medium and journalists can use it.’ ” — Parry on 2009 Iran election Tweets. “Iranian women been fighting for rights for 100 years. Tech made decentralised organization possible.” - Bandari. “These are just tools. The same way pro-democracy can use it, the government can use them, too.” — Kasra. “”We’re not used to companies being major players in the geopolitical landscape.” — Parry on Twitter. “Suggesting it’s a Twitter revolution removes human agency from the equation.” — Parry.
Takeaways: Technology tools like Twitter have certainly created more tools for election protesters and proponents of the women’s rights movement in Iran, but it has also created new ways for the Iranian government to stifle speech. Iranians were very happy to see Western media get the word out about what was going on. Making connections with real people in Iran, say artists or journalists connecting with artists or journalists from Iran, is one way to support change in Iran.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: ‘Monkeys With Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature and Digital Data
Time: 11 a.m.
Panelist: Clay Shirky
The gist: Sharing can be a powerful force for social change.
Quotes: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Abundance is a bigger challenge to society than scarcity.”
Takeaway: The tech tools we have increase our ability to share, and increase our motivation to share. Using the impact of Napster as an example, Shirky illustrated how technology can change something we had thought of us sharing goods to sharing information. Humans are wired to have good feelings about sharing information.
Sharing within a community (like an online medical support group) is valuable, but what Shirky called “civic sharing” or “jackhammer sharing” (because of its power to dismantle old institutions) can change the whole culture. He used the site Patients Like Me, where patients share information on their symptoms with a goal of transforming the medical system.
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Augmenting Maps with Reality
Date/Time: 9:30 a.m. Sunday
Panelists: Chris Pendleton (Microsoft), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Ryan Sarver (Twitter), Laura Diaz (Navteq), Kellen Elliott-McCrea (Flickr/Yahoo!)
The gist: In the first location-based discussion of the day, the focus was on the evolution of the map. The high-profile panel discussed challenges to mapping indoor spaces, how cloud computing and user data might inform maps and the value in documenting user location history.
Quotes: “Indoor mapping is the next big challenge.” -Pendleton “Users create really good data, but they also create really bad data.” -Diaz “We have nailed accuracy; what are the other things we can nail?” -Elliot-McCrea
Takeaways: Another location-based panel, but there’s enough to talk about that it is still not redundant. One interesting aspect of the discussion was all the talk of history—not just user history, but the idea of adding history to maps by geotagging historic photos, or adding information about architecture, etc. Also interesting was the mention of z-axis data such as floors in a building and time. The field of mapping is moving forward with an amazing amount of detail and speed.
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SXSW panel: Merch - The Other White Meat of Monetization
Time: 11 a.m. Sunday
Speakers: Mikhail Ledvich (BustedTees.com), Burnie Burns (Rooster Teeth Productions), Jennifer Shiman (angry alien productions), Joel Bush (Amplifier), Justin Sewell (Despair Inc.)
The gist: A mediation on the benefits and challenges of content-driven Web siotes moving into the world of merchandising as a way to derive income from an audience. In a talk that covered every related topic and question possible, the panelists kept their points concise and helpful, making it useful to would-be Web entrepreneurs of just about every stripe.\
Bush started off by framing the move into merchandising as a way for readers and users to become more active patrones for arts on the Web but warned of risks; that unsold shirts and coffee mugs become wasted money on a shelf and time spent running the merchandise operation can - and often does - take dramatic amounts of time from the creative end of the Web site. Ledvich offered that merchandise offers a monetary safety net because products stay at the same price point while Web advertising rates can vary greatly.
Quotes: From Sewell: “Advertising is like rain water because it comes when it wants to without you doing much, but merchandising is like irrigation. It’s the hard work you do tha gives you more control over how successful you’ll be.”
Sewell again: “It’s great because fans are paying you so they can advertise you to future customers.”
From Shiman: “Merchandise kind of becomes the end connection of your work, because people are making the choice to wear your work, or drink their coffee every morning out of something using your work.”
Takeaways: Merchandising represents a boon to Web creators that far outperforms advertisements and subscription revenue, but it has to be properly and efficiently managed without overwhelming the site’s creative purposes.
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SXSW panel: Exploiting Chaos - How to Spark Innovation During Times of Change
Time: 9:30 a.m. Sunday
Speaker: Jeremy Gutsche (TrendHunter.com)
The gist: Standing out during tumultuos economic times when “the deck gets reshuffled” takes fearless innovation by observing customers’ behaviors in their own environment, having a firm grasp of the company’s central mission and utilizing as many new channels as possible to expose products and ideas to the public.
Quotes: Gutsche’s talk, which doubled as a soft sell session for his book “Exploiting Chaos” was long on anecdotes and slogans instead of spontaneous give and take. Among the better talking points: “Culture eats strategy, so at the end of the day it’s about how the culture inside your company can embrace and adapt to change,” “Win like you’re used to it. Lose like you enjoy it,” “Innovation starts with observing customers in their zone and learning to use the words they use.”
Takeaways: Killer ideas matter all the time, but especially in times when a bad economy causes consumers to lok in new directions and seek changes that increase value. To lead that edge, companies need to take chances based on unbiased research and an understanding of what they want to accomplish in the marketplace.
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SXSW Interactive Sunday picks: plethora of panels
Today is one of the busiest panel days at South by Southwest Interactive with tech celebrities, online comedy stars and even CNN’s Sanjay Gupta on the festival schedule. Follow our fest updates on Twitter at @360sxswi and right here on Digital Savant.
Some of today’s highlights, at the Austin Convention Center unless otherwise noted, include:
- A keynote presentation from Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord, 2 p.m. in Exhibit Hall 1.
- “Story.Next — Narrating the Crowd,” a 9:30 a.m. panel featuring Gupta in room 10AB.
- Experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! and Navteq discuss “Augmenting Maps with Reality” 9:30 a.m. in Room G at the Hilton Austin.
- Always insightful technology expert Clay Shirky gives a talk, “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data” at 11 a.m. in Ballroom D.
- Is there a monkey theme today? “Perfectly Irrational: Who Put the Monkey in the Driver’s Seat” is at 12:30 p.m. in Ballroom D See our story on the front page of this section about author and researcher Dan Ariely.
- “Crowd Control: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?” features Randi Zuckerberg (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister), Pete Cashmore of Mashable and representatives from MTV and CNN, 12:30 p.m. in 12AB.
- “From Trolls to Stars: The Commenter Ecosystem” is 3:30 p.m. in 12AB. We’re especially eager to hear commenter tales from Meg Frost, founder of cuteoverload.com (aka that site where you waste time looking at kitten pictures instead of working).
- “The Inside Workings of FunnyOrDie.com” goes behind the scenes at the Web site co-founded by Will Ferrell, 3:30 p.m. at the Radisson Austin.
- Comedian Doug Benson hosts the 13th-Annual Interactive Web Awards, 6 p.m. on the sixth floor of the Hilton Austin.
- The American-Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, presented by Clear, start at 6 p.m. at Cedar Door (sold out).
- Mashable’s MashBash party hits Buffalo Billiards starting at 10 p.m. (RSVP required).
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SXSW panel: Banking 2.0: Financial Services Driven by People & Emerging Technologies
Date/Time: 12:30 p.m. Saturday
Speakers: Rob Garcia (Lending Club), Jennifer Openshaw (Family Financial Network), Kenneth Lin (Credit Karma Inc.), Aaron Forth (Mint.com), Bob Weinschenk (SmartyPig)
The gist: The future of banking, or at least part of it, will include front-end companies like Mint.com and SmartyPig that help demystify money and financial transactions for customers. It could be Mint guiding users toward better saving practices or SmartyPig’s mission of helping users save toward specific goals, most emerging companies in the personal finance space utilize existing banks’ infrastructure and acts as surrogates for niche services. Another difference from traditional banks; they all have social components at their core and use customer feedback and interactions online to improve their services. Worth noting; both Mint.com and SmartyPig were represented at a similar panel at last year’s SXSW. Since then Mint.com was purchased by financial services giant Intuit and SmartyPig’s accrued funds in goal accounts has grown from $42 million to more than $350 million, and Weinschenk said his company will very soon announce a partnership with a major national bank.
Quotes: From Weinschenk: “I look at every comment on our profile pages. When you’re running your own company in the social media realm it’s different to be right there to see and hear about every mistake your company makes. But because of that the last three top product ideas we’ve had have come from customers and working with what they have to say.”
Takeaways:While banks’ government charters and regulations will make them the money holders and movers of our economy for the forseeable future, online startups that value transparency and innovation will continue to crowd into the realm of financial management and stewardship for customers. Basically, if there’s some way to make your financial health better and easier, a company will soon emerge (if it hasn’t already) to do that.
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SXSW Panel: A Conversation with Ze Frank
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Saturday, March 13
Panelist: Designer and online performance artist Ze Frank, interviewed by Scott Kirsner
Takeaways: Unfortunately, this conversation was short on usable information for creative types looking for inspiration and long on the details of Ze Frank’s history on the Web. With his personable nature and funny take on life online, Frank has gained a substantial following through his quirky Web projects, the most famous of which was a yearlong daily video series called The Show that ended in 2007.
Frank, whose first name is pronounced “zay,” talked about his fascination with the emotional content being shared online. His online projects, such as Young Me Now Me, harness our desire for deeper, meaningful connections, even though the content might seem superficial. He once got a lot of hate mail from a project he hosted, and he turned the text of the hate mail into an origami paper and asked people to make something beautiful out of it.
He touched on the importance of our digital legacy and how we use the Internet in the grieving process. “We’re discovering how resonant our thinking is,” he said. If you react strongly for or against something, you’ll be reaffirmed by finding others online who share your view.
Designers need to know how to code, but they should also be aware the social interaction behind online usage.
Quotes:
Frank: “No’s come in the form of silence.”
“Designers need to understand code, as a way of algorithmic thinking, but be aware of how social interactions work. What does it mean to be alive. The big questions of what makes life worth living.”
“The online world is such an amazing place. There’s a part of me that feels like returning home. This is the place where all this incredible energy is going on.”
“Social media lets us realize that the little emotions we feel and believe are uniquely ours but are often shared by virtually everyone.”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW panel: ‘Sleeping Giants: Digital Awakens TV and Media’
Time: 5:00 p.m. Saturday
Panelist: Domenic Venuto, Razorfish
The gist: TV is alive and well; it’s here to stay and the future is promising. Razorfish conducted a study to map television’s DNA and discovered 9 “genes” that will remain constant even as technology changes. The Internet is changing people’s expectations and, sooner than later, the television viewing experience is going to expand to include social media, video gaming concepts, interactivity, portability and new forms of advertising.
Quotes: “You won’t have to know what to record; it will come to you.” “People will be channels.” “Brands won’t just talk to people, but play with them.”
Takeaways: Consumer demand will drive these changes. Most of the technology exists, but not yet at cost-effective price points. Venuto says we could be there in 5 years, “25 if the cable companies have their way.”
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SXSW Core Conversation: Gaming the System With 4chan
Panel: Gaming the System with 4chan (Twitter hashtag: #gamingwith4chan)
Date/time: 5 p.m., Saturday
Panelists: Christopher Poole (4chan), Jason Scott (Web historian).
The gist: Christopher Poole, the founder of the controversial, highly trafficked site 4chan.org (600 million page views a month with about 8 million users, he says) sat atop the back of a chair, looking impossibly young for someone whose site has caused so much grief (and, to be fair, laughs-out-loud). Known more famously as “moot,” was paired up with tech historian Jason Scott, who provided some uproarious commentary on how sites like 4chan and WIkipedia resemble games where the point is to do battle with others online. Sites like MetaFilter and SomethingAwful were cited as good communities that take action and have taken measures to weed out trolls (mostly by charging small fees that have a large impact). Despite the site’s reputation for being synonymous with Web trolls, Poole comes across as smart, extremely self-aware and bemused by the goings-on of the site. He does delete posts and moderate the wily community, but it has a brain and a life of its own. He says the site works for what it is, so he won’t mess with the recipe and make any major changes anytime soon.
Quotes: “Before trolls there were bureaucrats.” — Scott. “4chan is like an RPG that mounts a quest every 30 seconds.” — Scott. “4chan functions like (expletive). It looks like (expletive). At one time we were probably the largest site using Times New Roman. So we switched to Arial.” — Poole. “Does anybody here really hate my Web site?” — Poole. “They would just (expletive) steamroll the Internet!” — Poole, on what would happen if he shut down 4chan and let loose 8 million rabid users on the rest of the Web.
Takeaways: Sites like Wikipedia are just as much game sites as 4chan — on Wikipedia you compete with other people with knowledge as if you’re engaging in a video game boss battle. On 4chan it’s a contest to post the best stuff, start memes and gross each other out. Though Poole is creator of a site where people frequently harasses people and posts the worst of the Internet, he seems no more in control of it than anyone has over the whole of the Internet.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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Is Wordpress killing web design?
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Brendan Dawes (magneticNorth), Dan Mall (Big Spaceship), Dan Oliver (Future Publishing/.net magazine), Jina Bolton (Crush + Lovely), Shane Mielke (2Advanced Studios)
The gist: The debate was whether content management systems such as Wordpress are bad for web design. Though everyone on the panel admitted to using Wordpress, there were differing opinions on its merits. Most criticized the template feature on the popular blogging platform for promoting homogeneity. At least one panelist did assert that by providing a predetermined set of boundaries, CMS makes designers lazy. All of the panelists agreed that the key to creativity in design was to find ways to incorporate outside interests and hobbies.
Quotes: “What’s really good about Wordpress and other CMS tools is that they allow everyone to do it.” “What is killing web design is a lack of imagination.” -Brendan Dawes
Takeaways: From the perspective of someone with experience on Wordpress but very limited exposure to anything more complex, the panel demystified the field by explaining that CMS tools can be used to learn about design.
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SXSW panel: ‘Rules of Brand Fiction from Twittering Mad Men’
Time: 3:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Helen Klein Ross (Brand Fiction Factory — tweets as Betty Draper); Michael Bissell (Conquent — tweets as Roger Sterling)
The gist: Two advertising professionals who use the social media service Twitter to extend the characters of Betty Draper and Roger Sterling beyond the boundaries of the television series explain the concept of “brand fiction — entertainment in service of a brand.” Brands used to tell stories that ended when the commercial was over, the panelists explained, but the invitation to participate is the new ad. Other outside-of-show, digital initiatives including AMC’s MadMenYourself.com inspired the show’s fans to participate in the advertising, creating cartoon versions of themselves to be used as head shots on social media sites (Ross called them “advartars”).
Quotes: “What did you call them? ‘Advertars?’ I hate made up words.” — Bissell; “It’s interesting how little you have to do (on Twitter) to keep (the brand) alive.” — Ross
Takeaways: Interactive brand fiction is an evolving concept but can be an effective way to deepen audience engagement, obtain new audience, build goodwill and collect useful statistics.
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SXSW Panel: Unsexy and Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Matt Chasen, uShip; J.R. Johnson, Lunch.com; Alan Martin, CampusBookRentals; moderator: Paul Carr, TechCrunch
The gist: Sexy spaces in the market — online music, viral video, social networking, etc. — are crowded and very competitive. A lot of companies go into business with the dream of the great sale to Google or Facebook that never comes. Another approach is to find a niche market where there’s a need and build a company that fills the need, even if it’s something that seems unglamorous. One of the most successful companies on the Internet is nutsandbolts.com, which does $1 billion a year selling fasteners, but gets no hype.
Quotes: “For every Twitter that’s out there, there are 10,000 businesses that didn’t make it.” — Matt Chasen
“Journalists are interested in writing about sexy companies, all of you should just add a location feature to your site.” — Paul Carr
Takeaways: Sexy is overrated. Find opportunities to make profit where other people aren’t looking. Don’t blow your budget on PR and buzz-building exercises before the quality of your service is established.
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SXSW Panel: E-Food Revolution: Interactive Tools to Feed the World
Date/Time: 11 a.m. Saturday, March 13
Panelist: Elizabeth McVay Greene, MIT Sloan
Takeaways: The world food supply is out of balance. Obesity and malnutrition occur side-by-side and are causing millions of deaths. Each year, we have to feed millions more people on less land. Technology such as genetic modification is currently being touted as a way to grow more food on less land for less money, but we don’t know the longterm consequences of doing so.
Core conversation leader Elizabeth McVay Greene led a great discussion — to a packed, educated room, which indicates that this discussion could have been better suited as a full-fledged panel instead of a core conversation — about how we’ll be using technology to solve some of the world’s food problems. “It won’t require some radical new technology, but it will just require an application of existing technologies,” she said.
Greene, a graduate student at MIT, has worked with PepsiCo and Cargill, two large companies that people don’t associate with being active in sustainable agriculture. She says that many large companies, or at least people inside the company, are interested in these issues, but they aren’t likely to make changes until there’s an incentive.
Greene said that there’s an abundance of data in this field, but we struggle with how to harness it and use it to make change.
As more people move into cities, we’ll be using technology to teach people how to grow their own food in smaller space, as well as building food supply management systems to loop in restaurants, farmers, property owners and aspiring gardeners/farmers.
Farmers are started to get more connected online and using tools like spreadsheets to help them be more efficient. In the past two years, the number of community-supported agriculture programs has grown from 12,000 to 20,000.
Quotes:
Greene: “We call it cheap food, but if we considered the long term effects of that food, it would become much more expensive, especially in health care costs. We need to make it apparent that people will save money over the long run.”
“In emerging markets, people are already closer to their food. They don’t have the disconnect between their food and who produces it like we do here. Why do we pay less for products that have more processing and more ingredients?”
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW Panel: How Austin Got Socially Experienced
Panel: How Austin Got Socially Experienced (Twitter hashtag: #austinsociallyexperienced)
Date/time: 3:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Chris James, AMD
The gist: The things we take for granted here — that Austin is laid-back, has money and is technology savvy — are the things that make it attractive, but they’re also the things making Austin grow perhaps too quickly. But there’s a lot to like: it’s a melting pot (but not as inclusive as it needs to be) with big companies, a big university and a distinct culture. People love it here so much that people from elsewhere think Austinites are brainwashed. Other issues brought up included the backlash brought on by new condos bumping up against live music and the City of Austin Web site debacle — both examples of the city’s changing culture and growing pains.
Quotes: “I’m not trying to be a douchebag! I’m a recovering douchebag. From Seattle.” — Audience member asking about social media being synonymous with marketing. “We have to err on the side of giving it a shot if we want to do anything.” — James on city incentives, such as Austin’s recent efforts to woo Facebook to town. “We like to do things our way. We have a certain way of doing things. It’s got a really strange culture.” — Audience member. “Austin Ventures is an incredible force for the next generation of businesses (in Austin).” — James.
Takeaways: Austin is awesome and you should live here. But if you do so, you are warned that you are expected to keep it weird.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: Content Strategy FTW
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Panelist: Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic.
The gist: And introduction to what content strategy is and why it’s important. Halvorson compared the current world of Web content to the piles of trash that cover Earth in the movie “Wall-E.” And she’s tired of all that garbage.
Quotes: “It’s the content that we leave out there to die on the vine that hurts our brands the most.”
Takeaways: Content strategy centers on what we want people to do or understand when they visit a site. Anything on your site that doesn’t support your users’ goals or your business’s objectives should go.
What you can do to improve content no matter your role:
— Audit. List what’s on your site and other places such as your company’s Facebook page. What’s broken? What are the easy wins (the redundant, outdated or trivial things you can fix quickly)?
— Ask. When others say a site needs content, ask why, who will do it, when, with what, etc.?
— Analyze. What are all the factors that have an impact on your content? What else is going on in your company that affects you?
— Align. Align everyone around a content life cycle. Content evolves and changes.
— Assume responsibility. When you put content online, you are a publisher. It is our job to ask “what about the content?”
The results of content strategy are better user experience, greater brand consistency, new operational efficiencies, better risk management through better controls, improved SEO and analytics, more effective personalization and targeting.
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SXSW panel: ‘I Don’t Trust You One Stinking Bit’
Time: 12:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, co-authors of “Trust Agents”
The gist: Expanding your network while being genuine.
Quotes: “Am I actually interesting or am I boring as (expletive)?” “It’s amazing how little you have to do to be interesting just by doing the thing you love the most.” “It’s amazing how people don’t value their human network.”
Takeaways: Make yourself stand out — the best way to do that is do what you love and do it well.
Invest in your network. Stop asking people to do stuff and start taking interest in people and asking them about themselves.
Find ways to connect people with the work they’re passionate about. Make connections even when you have no self-interest.
Be more interesting. If a conversation doesn’t go well, don’t blame the other person — think about how you could have improved the encounter.
EDITED at 3:11 p.m. to remove “preview” from headline
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SXSW Keynote: Danah Boyd Opening Remarks, ‘Privacy and Publicity’
Panel: Opening Remarks - “Privacy and Publicity” with Danah Boyd (Twitter hashtags: #openingremarks and #danahboyd)
Date/time: 2 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research
The gist: After fest organizer Hugh Forrest joked about yesterday’s non-emergency evacuation, he introduced Danah Boyd, who was thrilled to be at the fest and thanked Forrest for his work on bringing so many creative people together. She began by saying that privacy is not dead, but that privacy may not be what we think and our perception of it is changing. She began by talking about Google Buzz, which called a “Total privacy fail.” She accused Google of violating privacy, then backpedaling on the mistake of bringing a social network to a very private place: people’s e-mail inboxes. She then talked about the way that we’re jarred by changes in the architecture of our online spaces, moving on to talk about Facebook’s privacy policy changes (which she contends most people clicked through without realizing the implications). Most people are not ready to be celebrities and to be stalked, which makes the idea of public services becoming more public a scary proposition. In fact, many people have lost their jobs or suffered physical harm because the wrong information was made public. She concluded by talking about the latest Web hot topic, Chatroulette, where you can Webcam with strangers. Although Boyd is obviously incredibly well-versed on these issues and is presenting important issues, her examples (Google Buz, Facebook, Chatroulette) are already well-worn topics for attendees in the room and her delivery (fast, fast, fast) was informative at first, but exhausting in the end. The visualizations — random gauzy photos and screengrabs that sometimes fit the discussion, but other times just seemed distracting — did not help. Great topic, intelligent speaker, but not as illuminating or engaging as some of the festival’s best past keynote speeches.
Quotes: All from Boyd: “Be very very careful of the tequila.” “Privacy is not dead… But what privacy is may not be what you think.” “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want it publicized.”
Takeaways: Help users understand the proposition and ease them in on new services (like Google Buzz). A video isn’t good enough to get people on board when you change the space where they interact. People are not used to be followed around by paparazzi and some online services are the equivalent of turning that kind of camera on yourself. There are many privacy questions that simply aren’t being asked or addressed, even by the companies in charge of helping protect some of our information.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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Panel review: Can You Copyright a Tweet?
12:30 Saturday
Panelists: Fred Benenson, kickstarter.com, NYU; Wendy Seltzer lawyer, Berkman Center & Silicon Flatirons, Jon Phillips, status.com
The gist: Can you copyright a tweet? Well, it depends. Mark Cuban posed the question after his tweets disparaging a ref at a Mavs game were published on ESPN and it led to a 25K fine. In that case most legal types say his tweets would be considered public speech. Twitter says you own your own work, but copyright law doesn’t protect names, titles and short phrases. Haikus, however, are protected as are streams or collections of work. Much nebulous legalese surrounds the issue but most people agree it would be easier to copyright a collection of tweets, a novel developed and released through Twitter for example, than an individual tweet. Retweeting is not copyright infringement. There’s also a distinction between mentioning a tweet, as a quote in an article, for example, and using a tweet as a graphic on a t-shirt. Two books developed out of crowd sourced, contributed tweets have been published and in both cases the publishers felt it was important to seek out individual authors for permissions.
Takeaways: Resolutions to the legal questions surrounding these issues are unclear. For most Twitter users attribution is more important than copyright. Most people are happy to see their tweets broadcast on CNN, but less thrilled about seeing them on a t-shirt someone else profited from even though both are commercial reproductions.
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SXSW panel: Playing with place: Location-based Games and Services
Date/Time: 12:30 p.m. Saturday
Panelists: Jack Becker (Forecast Public Art), Brooke Thompson (Giant Mice), Catherine Herdlick (Scenic Route), Seth Priebatsch (SCVNGR), Zach Saul (Retronyms)
The gist: In another of several panels dealing with location-based mobile technology, the panelists interestingly veered away from the dominant conversation about Foursquare and Gowalla, focusing more on location-based games are focused on the idea of checking in. Organization-specific scavengers hunts, the Dept. of Defense’s DARPA Balloon project and non-network location-based games were among things discussed.
Quotes: Catherine Herdlick: “Lots of people don’t have smart phones. People have been playing in public spaces before that technology.”
Takeaways: It was interesting to hear a discussion on this topic without it focusing completely on Foursquare/Gowalla. For the second time in as many days, one of the panelists said that augmented reality (games that utilize a photo image of the immediate environment from your phone) is the future of location-based technology. As mentioned above, Herdlick suggested that location-based technology was going to become more popular on traditional cell-phones, which still account for something like 70 percent of the world-wide market.
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SXSW panel: How to Create a Viral Video
Date/Time: 11 a.m. Saturday
Speakers: Jason Wishnow (TED) Jonathan Wells (Flux) Margaret Gould Stewart (YouTube) Damian Kulash (OK Go)
The gist: We are constantly bombarded with “viral” videos, but how exactly does a video earn that designation? For the successful TED conference, the key to their online success was higher production quality for their talks. Rather than a static video of the speaker, they shoot from several angles in high definition. For Damian Kulash of the rock band OK Go, which produces choreographed videos that regularly earn millions of views in a matter of days, it’s making sure that there is still something “homemade” about the production. Viral videos can be spontaneous, or they can be planned, but they usually have a positive theme, and they usually involve an element of surprise. The most successful viral video producers spend time developing a subscriber base on sites such as YouTube.
Quotes: Stewart: “It’s very rare to see content that’s negative or depressing go viral. Humans like to share good news.” Kulash: “Exclusivity online just doesn’t work…there’s always a way around it. There’s no such thing as driving traffic to a website.”
Takeaways: There is no secret formula to creating a viral video. Many people who create them were in the right place at the right time. The key to building an audience for your video, however, is something that goes beyond getting people to watch a video of your cat. Building a subscriber base and using social media to spread a link are a necessity for anyone looking to attract n audience online.
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SXSW panel: ‘Universities in the Free Era’
Time: 11 a.m. Saturday
Panelists: Gene Platt (Miami University Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies), Peg Faimon (Miami University Design Collaborative)
The gist: The traditional model of universities is breaking down. The panelists talked about why and gave ideas for how universities can evolve.
Takeaways: Reasons for the breakdown include the rising cost of higher education and that students have to “go to the mountain” — go to a specific place to get learning. The panelists also said that universities are slow to change.
The factors driving change include changes in the way today’s students learn, the rise of interdisciplinary fields and the paralysis of traditional disciplines (the panelists cited the old joke that academics know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing). Technology makes it unnecessary to go to a specific place to get learning.
Ideas for universities to evolve included stressing experiential learning, encouraging collaboration between faculty members and between different institutions and getting rid of traditional departments to focus on finding answers to big questions.
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Parties: Day One at SXSW Interactive
Tanner Moehle and Ingrid Camacho
I’m no Michael Barnes (who is also covering SXSW parties at a whole other level than what I can do on five hours sleep), but here’s a few thoughts on last night’s events.
Fogo de Chao was the scene for two big parties running concurrently — Girls in Tech, which filled up the lower level with a large concentration of Austinites, and Porter Novelli’s annual meat-and-drinks fest on the rooftop (which continues for the rest of Interactive). It was a mix of local techies (Lynn Bender, Michelle Greer), film folks (producer Lupe Valdez), PR people and others. At the Girls in Tech party, I caught up with William Hurley, who sill be introducing his new company Chaotic Moon, Saturday night, as well as Olga Garcia, Meg Strout, Kate Buck and many other friends.
Then it was off to the Microsoft Windows Phone Series 7 / TechSet party at Speakeasy which was packed, but not nearly as badly as some of last year’s larger parties. Inside, feather boas and 80s-style white shades were given out and the band played audience-friendly pop and funk, while upstairs in the VIP section, two go-go dancers in what a friend called “Bordello chic” red lace, danced on platforms. It wasn’t what you’d expect from Microsoft (this certainly wouldn’t have flown in the Windows 95 era), but the real action was on the giant, plush couches near the open-air area. Nice cool breeze, Austin skyline, good times. By 11, the place was starting to empty out for non-SXSW patrons.
I ended my night at Frank with a hot dog while others partied on at the Tweet House, Emo’s, Molotov and other party spots. I was saving my energy for the big parties tonight (Frog Design), Sunday (Statesman Social Media Awards, Mashable) and Monday (TechKaraoke!).
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SXSW Panel: Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple
Panel: Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple (Twitter hashtag: #whykeepblogging)
Date/time: 9:30 a.m. Saturday
Panelists: Guy LeCharles Gonzalez (F+W Media Inc), Lizzie Skurnick (Old Hag/Jezebel/Politics Daily), Scott Rosenberg (Wordyard), Josh Fruhlinger (The Comics Curmudgeon), Emily Gordon (Emdashes).
The gist: Few bloggers are making money, at least on their own. But even though Twitter and Facebook have taken over, blogging still exists as a livelihood, especially for people who are blogging for companies or print publications that want to know what people out there are really thinking. But keeping up your passion for blogging can be an ongoing battle, and perhaps comes out of an unnecessary sense of obligation.
Quotes:“Blogging started an outlet for people’s passions.” — Rosenberg. “Initial enthusiasm, devition, love and eventually exhaustion over time. It’s natural.” — Rosenberg. “Half the traffic to my blog comes from Twitter.” — Gonzalez. “I really come from the day when blogging was for losers.” — Skurnick. “I love it, but it has no past.” — Rosenberg on Twitter.
Takeaways: Blogging is hard and it’s easy to burn out and repeat yourself, but sometimes you’ve gotta feed the machine, especially if you’re blogging for a business. Twitter may not kill blogging; in fact, it may help refine it and strengthen what blogging is because Twitter can’t do certain things that blogs can.
— Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW Saturday picks
“Building a Bullet-Proof Personal Finance System.” We’re expecting I Will Teach To Be Rich blogger Ramit Sethi to deliver a blunt, funny and useful session. 11 a.m., Hilton E
“Rules of BrandFiction from Twittering MadMen.” The presenters at this session (who tweet as characters from the TV show “Mad Men”) were a lot of fun at a similar panel last year. 3:30 p.m., Hilton D
“How to Unplan Your Business.” Long-term plans are overrated, says co-presenter Ian Sanders. 5 p.m., Hilton E.
Read our interview with Matt Chasen of the panel Unsexy & Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype, 3:30 p.m., Hilton A/B.
We also have an interview with Aldo Ramon of the Core Conversation “Austin Latino Internet Capital of the World.” 12:30 p.m., Courtyard Rio Grande A.
“I Don’t Trust You One Stinking Bit” features social media gurus Chris Brogan and Julien Smith (12:30, 9ABC, Convention Center).
The festival’s Opening Remarks will be by another social media expert, Danah Boyd (2 p.m., Exhibit Hall 1, Convention Center).
Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos), New York Times columnist David Carr and others ponder a future without Carr’s employer in “Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” (3:30 p.m., Hilton H).
The SXSW Interactive Opening Party hosted by Frog Design begins at 8 p.m. at the Mexican American Cultural Center.
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Video: False alarm interrupts SXSW Interactive
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon about the false emergency alarm that stopped panels at around 5:15 p.m. Friday at SXSW Interactive:
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Video: The TechSet/Microsoft blogger’s lounge at SXSW Interactive
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon from the blogger’s lounge featuring Zane Aveton, a social media expert from Dallas.
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Video: Walking and talking during Day 1 of SXSW Interactive
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon from the halls during the first day of SXSW Interactive: me walking and talking.
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SXSW panel: Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Saturday
Speakers: Greg Beato (Reason Magazine), Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos), Amy Langfield (NewYorkology LLC), David Carr (N.Y. Times), Henry Copeland (Blogads.com)
The gist: A giant (and packed) “What if…?” session pondering how the media landscape in New York, the nation and beyond changes changes when the Old Grey Lady is determined to be no longer fit to print. That question extrapolated into a debate on pre-Internet media values and practices vs. the merits of crowdsourcing and the customer as expert and participant in news coverage. It needs to be stated that the audio and acoustics for session were atrocious, with panel members often not able to hear discussion at the panel table and the audience getting lots of mud and echo. Still, Carr and Moulatsis perked things up with some spirited jawing about the Times’ inertia and perception of complacency vs. how much knowledge can be gained from faceless types banging out 140 characters on their iPhone.
Quotes: Sadly, the sound made getting a proper and accurate quote pretty much impossible. That’s shame, because Carr brought his aged wiseacre A-game the whole time and NEEDS his own keynote next year, regardless of topic.
Takeaways: It’s community, not the blogs that rely on community, that will be the next great wave in journalism. That will liikely come at the expense of investigative reporting for a while, but demand for news should cause someone or something to fill that role as well. Also, David Carr is awesome.
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SXSW panel: Building A Bulletproof Personal-Finance System
Date/Time: 11 a.m. Saturday
Speaker: Ramit Sethi, author “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”
The gist:The key to managing personal finance isn’t cutting back on all the small things (the “fewer lattes” philosophy as Sethi describes it) but setting up a system for how money enters, leaves and grows under your purview. Sethi, who it should be said, could sell ice to eskimoes, stresses the benefit and pretty much essential use of automated systems such as employer enrollment in 401(k) systems and online tools to control money flow. Other strategies; “dominate” your credit and credit cards, create a conscious spending plan and open investment accounts with monthly contributions.
Quotes: “Spend money on what is important to you. If you want $250 jeans you can buy them as long as you have control your money and what you’re doing with it.”
“There are small but profound psychological barriers that keep us from taking the simple steps we need to take to greatly increase how much they’re able to save and have available for what’s important. If we overcome those, we start getting into the big wins.
Takeaways: Sethi’s six-week program (the basis for his book) seems profoundly easy and his ethos is grounded in overcoming the psychological and behavioral obstacles that hinder personal wealth. With hard-to-argue logic and personal stories, he makes a case for why the road to finance health doesn’t have to be a long one.
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SXSW panel: Fashion 2.0: Hotter Styles vs Better Community Engagement
Date/Time: 5 p.m. Friday
Speakers: Ngozi Odita (Society HAE), Roger Wu, (Klickable TV), Tina Shoulders (Laidback)
The gist: Fashion is one of the only remaining industries that hasn’t “gotten” the Web yet in the way retail giants like Amazon have, and social media presents a tool box for large and small clothiers to use to reach out to customers and make their clothes and lifestyle attractive. The panelists also held up small labels such as Brooklyn Circus and Johnny Cupcakes as companies that present digital visitors with an abundance of looks behind the curtain so they can better evaluate whether their clothing fits well with their lifestyle.
Quotes: From Odita: “I’m not just selling clothing, because my store is also an art gallery and we put on events that our customers will find enjoyable. Don’t just talk about a great product you might have on sale, find different ways to give the consumer what they’re looking for.”
“BKC and Johnny Cupcakes are showing you everything that goes on with their brand and that lets people know what they’re all about. Companies like The Gap are almost too big to break it down that small and do it in a way that matters.”
Takeaways: Fashion designers and retailers need to look for as many ways as possible to reach out to their audience. Video is a tool that’s growing in relevance and in most forms quality of content is what matters more than production value, so it’s better to try as many different ideas as possible.
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SXSW panel: ‘PayTV vs. the Internet — The Battle for Your TV’
Date/Time: 5 p.m. Friday
Panelists: Avner Ronen (Boxee); Mark Cuban (HDNet)
The gist: In this corner, Avner Ronen, who believes that sooner than later, all video will be delivered into your living room via the Internet; In this corner, Mark Cuban, who contends that the Internet is fine, but is no threat to cable and satellite systems as a video delivery system. A few minutes into this panel, the emergency alarm went off at the Austin Convention Center (“I told them to hit that if you started a monologue,” Ronen joked) and the building was evacuated. I have no way of proving it, but I think the two presenters just stayed in the room and continued bickering.
It seemed like it should have been a lot more fun watching an unstoppable force meet an immovable object, but the discourse got mired in repetition and minutia. Toward the end, I was hoping for another emergency alarm to go off.
Quotes: “If you can get your cat to play the piano and you can make money from it, great.” — Cuban; “The fight is over, the Internet is coming big time. I don’t think there is a question of where the future is headed.” — Ronen
Takeaways: Depending on whose side you took (and the tech-savvy crowd seemed to side with Ronen) the Internet either will or will not become a major distribution channel for video. No winner was declared and neither argument was particularly persuasive.
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SXSW panel: How Your Brand Can Succeed in the New Web
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Friday
Speaker: Brian Solis (Future Works)
The gist: A panel doubling as a promotional event for marketer and social analyst Solis’s new book “Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web,” the talk also featured surprise speakers; web strategist Jeremiah Owyang, Frank Eliason of Comcast Cares and FourSquare creator Dennis Crowley. After Solis’ opening barrage of motivational speech-heavy platitudes - “Social media feels like the Summer of Love right now, which I guess makes Twitter and South By (Southwest) our Woodstock” among them - the four got into a fairly substantive discussion about the importance to talking with customers instead of at them, and how to use social media as a way to monitor response to products and services companies offer.
Quotes: From Solis: “My online reputation precedes me now, and we’re at a place where how you contribute on the Web defines you’re persona and how you’re judged before someone ever meets you.”
“Control ends when we put things up outside of the company but social media lets you monitor how people react to what you do and the story you’re trying to tell. The people own social media and when they use it they expect their problems to be heard and solved.”
Takeaways: A company’s social media strategy must extend beyond a FaceBook fan page and a Twitter account, and look at available technology as a way to gather feedback and opinions on what a company does while increasing communication in all forms with customers.
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SXSW panel: In Code We Trust: Open Government Awesomeness
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Friday
Speakers: Noel Hidalgo (New York State Senate), Dmitry Kachaev (OCTO Labs/Washington D.C. government), Alissa Black (City and County of San Francisco )
The gist: Governments’ use of Web technology to aid citizens has entered into a new phase, going from offering services online in the early 2000s to making entire sets of data and records available for searching, sorting and analysis. To make that valuable, governments need to find a way to provide context to data and encourage users to interact and help develop new applications for managing data sets using open source technology.
Quotes: “You need to give people some context to understand what they’re looking at, and means things like showing how departments perform using the numbers, or finding out how money is really moving without looking through an entire 300 to 500-page budget,” Kachaev said.
Takeaways: It’s easy for governments to simply push data and information into the public realm and be done with it, but to truly be open in the digital age they have to constantly search for new ways to make information relevant and available to the public in as many forms/channels as possible.
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SXSW Panel: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future Of Video Games
Date/Time: 5 p.m. Friday
Speaker: James Bower (Numedeon Inc.), Lucy Bradshaw (Electronic Arts/Maxis), Amos Zeeberg (Discover Magazine), Anne McLaughlin (North Carolina State University), Tiffany Barnes (University of North Carolina Charlotte)
The gist: Video games are here to stay, and with more and more groups of people playing them, thanks to social media networks like Facebook, they are set to branch out in a number of directions. Preciously, games were written and consumed by males, but more and more women are getting into the development side of the industry, Bradshaw said. Plus, millions of children are playing social games like Whyville, which is like a Second Life for kids. Researchers are also doing studies into how games affect cognitive abilities, especially in older people. And in the classroom, games might even replace longstanding teaching methods. Barnes, an associate professor of computer science, uses an game to teach some in-class concepts to her students. Panelists noted that we already see fitness games like Wii Fitt and in the future , Barnes said people will start to manage their lives more and more in a game-like structure.
Quotes: “I’m seeing games as being more ubiquitous, used as a communication mechanism, used as a framework for interaction, a framework for how we do all kinds of things.” - Barnes
Takeaways: An interesting look into how games have evolved from entertainment vehicles to learning devices. Bower also said that another front in the industry is children — 8, 9 and 10 years old — learning how to create their own games. When creating a game becomes as easy as uploading a video to YouTube — watch out, he said.
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SXSW panel: Time + Social + Location. What’s Next in Mobile Experiences?
Date/Time: 5 p.m. Friday
Speakers: Naveen Selvadurai (Foursquare), Josh Babetski (MapQuest), Greg Cypes (AIM)
The gist: Location-based mobile applications are big, but the technology is still in nascent stages of development. It’s a popular field because humans are social creatures. Privacy is a concern, but worries that revealing location will encourage crime are overblown. There is a lot more to this field that hasn’t been developed yet, including a financial value in attendance data for restaurants and other venues.
Quotes: “We started Foursquare to encourage people…to be really good at life,” Selvadurai said. “At the end of the year place check-in will ubiquitous,” Babetski said.
Takeaways: None of the panelists said much that hasn’t already been said recently, but the crowd on hand for the panel and the line out the door were evidence that conference attendees are buying into the hype about location-based technology.
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SXSW Panel: Social Media Marketing For Your Business
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Friday
Speaker: Chris Winfield (10e20), Tony Adam (VisibleFactors)
The gist: Facebook and Twitter are great, but there are a lot of other ways for businesses to get noticed through social media. Winfield advised businesses to find their customers by locating which sites they use. For instance, create Google alerts to find out which Web sites are talking about your business, he said. And besides the big social networks, there are lots of niche social networks (Winfield mentioned “Myartspace.com” as an example from the art world). Forums are also a huge area that get overlooked, possibly because they’ve been around for a long time. But through them, a business can tap into a huge and passionate fan base. For example, one of the most popular forums is about paintball, he said. Adam said that social media news sites, such as Digg and Reddit, can drive huge traffic numbers.
Quotes: “It’s never been this easy to get your name out… with what could be very little effort.” - Winfield
Takeaways: Both Winfield and Adam know their stuff, but most of the advice seemed like pretty common-sense stuff. Still, it’s worth a reminder. If your customers are into tattoos, guess what? You should probably find some popular tattoo forums and engage them.
— Brian Gaar
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SXSW Panel: Cooking for Geeks: Science, Hacks and Good Food
Date/Time: 5 p.m. on Friday, March 12
Panelist: Jeff Potter, author of “Cooking for Geeks,” which comes out in June
Takeaways: In a presentation that felt more like an academic introduction to food safety for culinary students rather than an energetic, engaging SXSW Interactive panel, Potter gave a preview of his upcoming book.
Attendees got a small packet that contained strips of paper coated in a chemical that supertasters can detect, but so-called non-tasters cannot, as well as a peppermint. In the most exciting moment in the panel, we all tasted our strips to find out whether we are supertasters, medium-tasters or non-tasters. Potter explained that white females are three times as likely as white males to be supertasters, who generally have higher rates of cancer and eat fewer green vegetables than non-supertasters.
Potter also talked about the five most important temperatures for food, such as 122 degrees, when myosin, a protein in muscle meat, denatures, which is when it starts to taste better, and 310 degrees, when the Maillard Reaction begins.
— Addie Broyles
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Fire alarm at convention center a malfunction
Austin fire officials said a fire alarm activated about 5 this afternoon at the Austin Convention Center was a system malfunction and that there is no fire.
The alarm sent hundreds of people attending the South by Southwest Interactive festival into the downtown streets, in what Statesman tech writer Omar L. Gallaga called an “impromptu block party.”
People began moving back into the convention center shortly after officials announced that there was no fire.
Photo: Omar L. Gallaga/American-Statesman
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SXSW panel: ‘The Happiness Project’
Time: 4:30 p.m., Day Stage
Panelist: Gretchen Rubin
The gist: Rubin, author of the book “The Happiness Project,” spent a year test-driving different theories and research on how to be happy.
Quotes: “The wonderful thing about a blog is that it can grow with you.”
Takeaways: She had never blogged before creating the blog her book is based on. Learning to blog showed her that novelty and challenge bring happiness.
If you want to start your own Happiness Project, getting enough sleep is the first thing to think about. Also, adding even a little exercise will help your mood. Controlling clutter is another thing that might seem trivial but that can boost your happiness. Know who your spiritual master is: “It might be Gandhi; it might be Warren Buffett.” Translate the master’s teachings into your own life. This is something that can bring a sense of transcendence into everyday life. Keeping a one-sentence-a-day journal can help you savor moments more and recall happy memories.
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SXSW panel: Google in China: Context and Consequences
Date/Time: 3:30 p.m. Friday
Speaker: Kaiser Kuo (Youku.com)
The gist: Google announced in January it would stop censoring search results in China after a publicized but unclear breach of its data. So far, they haven’t lifted the censorship, and the Chinese government hasn’t taken any steps to punish Google, as they said they would. Though many people outside of China tend to express outrage at the level of online censorship in the country, the reality is more complicated and the outcome of the conflict could have far-reaching implications, even impacting U.S. relations with China.
Quotes: “Internet censorship in China is a lot worse than you think, and at the same time it’s not as bad as you think.”
Takeaways: Censorship in China has shifted in recent years from a focus on traditional media, i.e. the BBC and Time Magazine, to social media such as blogs, Twitter and other sites. This reinforces the idea that social media has made a lasting impact on the world in recent years.
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SXSW Panel: Is Technology Weakening Interpersonal Relationships?
Date/Time: 3:30 on Friday, March 12
Panelists: Corinne Weisgerber of St. Edward University, Ashley Brown of Jones-Dilworth, Jenn Deering-Davis of the University of Texas, Matthew Weber of University of Southern California
Quotes:
Brown: “Technology is degrading the way we develop romantic relationship. We’ve lost private moments with our loved ones.”
Weisgerber: “My husband has said that he’s a social media widower….Time spent maintaining online relationships is time we don’t spend nurturing our real life relationships.”
Weber: “You can only put so many relationships in your network before you start to lose effectiveness….We can only maintain roughly 150 social relationships. The more we and our friends become connected, the fewer overall relationships we can maintain.”
Takeaways: How we define friends has forever changes, and our ability to communicate and develop relationships without having met someone has evolved, but that doesn’t completely replace face-to-face interaction.
The amount of time and energy spend on maintaining our online relationships can threaten our real-life relationships in a number of ways. An extreme example: Weisgerber cited a couple in Korea whose baby died of starvation because they spent so many hours a day raising a virtual child online. On a smaller scale, the more time we spend online, the less time we give to our real life friends and family members, which can weaken the bond.
Our relationship with work has changed: Almost universally, people are working more, but because of the flexibility, they are reporting that they like it. The problem is, this can lead to addictive behavior, Jeering-Davis says.
In a romantic relationship, technology is a third party that can suck enough time and mental energy that it has the same effect as cheating. Facebook is cited in one out of every five new divorce cases. In new relationships, you often have access to a person’s online identities before you meet them in real life, which either can create problems because of unrealistic expectatioms or cause a relationship to progress much more quickly.
Deering-Davis was the lone member of the panel to believe that it’s possible to have a quality relationship built entirely online. We prioritize face-to-face interaction because that’s what we’ve had for the longest time, but technology can provide the same results, she said.
— Addie Broyles
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SXSW Panel: Chasing Virtual Good in the Real World
Panel: Chasing Virtual Good in the Real World (Twitter hashtag: #chasingvirtualgood)
Date/time: 3:30 p.m. Friday
Panelists: Josh Williams, CEO and co-founder of Gowalla.
Quotes: “My vision is let’s get people out and have them explore life.” “I really want people to take a deep breath and experience the greatness of the world we have as they use this app.” “People made fun of me for eating at Nordstrom Bistro. But it’s really good!” — Williams
Takeaways: “Life is a game. We spend our lives leveling up.” — (from a panel slide). It’s taken a lot of tweaking, experimentation and shifting of ideas to create Gowalla. The company is working on a native BlackBerry version of Gowalla, but it sounds like it’s not as easy task, based on Williams’ answer. “It hasn’t been the most friendly developer environment,” he told a BlackBerry user in the audience who asked about the platform.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: ‘Successful Networking for Introverts, Rebels and Misfits’
Time: 3:30 p.m. Friday
Panelists: Julie Gomoll of Launchpad Coworking, Jan Triplett of Business Success Center
The gist: Networking is about giving and receiving something of value. There are things that you can offer that play to your strengths.
Quotes: “The extroverts that are out there really hope that we will find you (introverts).” — Triplett
Takeaways: Introverts don’t have to become extroverts to be successful networkers. Introverts have strengths like deep knowledge about subjects and greater intuition that can make others want to see them out. Introverts may feel more comfortable with online networking. At parties, have something that you’ve heard or read in mind as a conversation starter.
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SXSW panel: ‘How Sci-Fi Shapes the Internet’
Date/Time: 2:00 Friday
Panelist: Adria Richards (butyoureagirl.com)
The gist: Science fiction shaped the minds of influential genre creators including Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock who, in turn, have influenced generations of inventors. Fantastic technologies created for science fiction stories have inspired actual inventions, including cell phones, headsets, eBooks and the Internet. The creator of the Dyson vacuum went through 5,000 prototypes and countless rejections but, after he succeeded, other vacuum manufacturers copied his designs. He said that anyone creating new products needed hope, and that’s another tenet of science fiction. Aside from practical applications, sci-fi also furthers social causes and humanitarian events including respect for the environment and animals as well as equality, integrity and disdain for war and mankind’s aggressive tendencies (often in science fiction, man kills the alien and then discovers that what we thought to be aggression was the alien’s form of a handshake). Finally, our wired world affords us all kinds of opportunity for expression, exposure and fame in film, writing, etc.
Quotes: (all from speaker Adria Richards) “If you tie up a baby elephant with a chain, later on you only have to tie it up with a rope because it doesn’t think it can escape.” “If Rod Serling had a blog today, he’d write about politics, anti-war efforts and equality.” “If we all just become consumers we’re going to hit a dead-end.” “As we dream, we work out the problems of the day.” “Science fiction is weird, but so is the Internet.”
Takeaways: It’s our responsibility to inspire the children of tomorrow. How can we inspire future generations to be innovators, as we have been inspired? Fi you want to become successful in the Internet age as Serling and Hitchcock did in the video age, follow these three steps: 1. Perfect an “elevator pitch” that you can deliver in 30 seconds or less that tells who you are, what you do and what problem your company, product or service solves or fixes. 2. Always have access to three great work samples. 3. Attend in-person events such as SXSW for networking opportunities. Finish the following sentence: “I want to change the world by …” and look at it one a week; successful people focus on their ideas and goals to the point that they are labeled fanatics.
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SXSW panel: The History of the Button
The History of the Button
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Friday
Speaker: Bill DeRouchey (Ziba Design)
The gist: Despite radical technological change over the last 100 years, the button has remained a constant. The change in the way we view and use the button represents larger shifts in the way we live. Throughout the 20th century, the button variously represented convenience, leisure and fear. The arrival of the internet age signaled a radical transition in the idea of the button and consequently how we think. The touch technology in smart phones seems so distant from the first mouse, but we taught ourselves how to use both technologies.
Quotes: “We now think about objects with depth and time, instead of just static things,” “The button represents how we interact with objects we create.”
Takeaways: This talk was an entertaining and unconventional way to start the conference. DeRouchey offered eye-opening perspective on an integral part of our lives that is taken for granted.
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SXSW panel: ‘Content Strategy, What’s in It for You?’
Time: 2 p.m. Friday
Panelist: Margot Bloomstein, principal of Appropriate Inc.
The gist: Content strategy saves money and time and makes for happier clients and users.
Quotes: “People don’t really crave carrots. Kill the carrots with cookies.” “Good conversation demands good content strategy.”
Takeaways: Content and design that are built on the same priorities create a better user experience. Search engine marketers can help establish a site’s tone early. Content strategy can make communication more consistent in social media. A strategist can help set up an editorial calendar of what to emphasize on social media throughout the year.
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SXSW Panel: The Broke Diaries: Using Blogs And Twitter To Live Cheaply
Panel: The Broke Diaries: Using Blogs And Twitter To Live Cheaply (Twitter hashtag: #brokediaries)
Date/time: 2 p.m. Friday
Panelists: Larry Chiang (duck9.com), Hayes Davis (CheapTweet), Emily Farris (KCFreePress.com), Faye Penn (Brokelyn.com), Nichelle Stephens (Keeping Nickels), moderator.
The gist: There’s seems to be a disconnect between those who are seeking deals online and the companies that could be providing them. Deal hunters use tools like Groupon, CheapTweet and promo codes and disseminating that information is becoming increasingly social and home-grown. Clothing swaps, for instance, are one kind of event that can be facilitated by Facebook or some other venue for online invites. Not all local business are good at advertising. But there are plenty of companies that are willing to give freebies to influential bloggers and there’s always a market for readers who want free stuff from bloggers.
Quotes: “The best way I have found to get anything is to ask for it.” — Farris. “Local business do want to be a part of Twitter, they just don’t know how to use it.” — Penn. “Whether it’s free or not, it’s gotta be something people want.” — Hayes. “Complaining about how much something costs sometimes gets you something for free.” — Stephens.
Takeaways: Always search for a coupon code before you buy something online. A good strategy for good deals is to get your friends together, start a group about a specific topic (say, sushi, Penn advises) and watch as local businesses respond to the demand. Stephens suggests one way to get into conferences (like SXSW Interactive) for free is to get a press pass as a blogger. Penn suggests that Facebook is more personal than Twitter and she’d be less likely to post deals on Facebook.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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Hey, what’s in that SXSW Interactive swag bag?
This year’s SXSW Interactive bag is quite a departure from last year’s design.
In fact, I think if I had to describe this year’s bag, it would be, “Ménage á Mindmeld.”
Look for yourself:
Huh. Yeah. I’m not sure that I like that, with apologies to Dr. Manhattan from “Watchmen.”
Anyhoo, what’s on the front of the bag is never as important as what’s in side. Here’s what you will find inside this year’s SXSW Interactive bag ‘o plenty:
In addition to the obligatory paper stuff that almost immediately goes into the recycle bin (last week’s Austin Chronicle about the fest, coupons you don’t plan to use, an invitation to Austin Comic Con with a photo of James Marsters [all right, maybe I’ll keep THAT]), you will also find:
- A fortune cookie. I don’t know what’s inside. Saving it for when I get hungry later.
- Post-Its from eDoorways.com inside a big plastic badge/lanyard set.
- A small bag of salted peanuts from Southwest Airlines.
- Classic Zone Perfect chocolate peanut butter bar (tiny).
- An AOL screen wipe cloth inside a heavy piece of plastic inside a drawstring bag. If you wonder why AOL is always broke, this might be your answer.
- Stickers, postcards. No big whoop.
- A crepe-thin mouse pad from Newegg.com. Like it’s so thin you can see through it.
- Useless buttons nobody else will recognize.
- Two pens.
- More damn stickers.
- Monster Energy drink (small).
- Big Tag of Awesomeness luggage tag.
- Electronic Consumers Association one-year membership card.
- Tito’s Vodka T-shirt and sticker.
- Small Crumpler camera bag, which apparently pro photographers love.
- Stickybits barcode stickers.
- $5 Groupon key (with an actual key attached).
- Pocket guide from the fest.
- Big, heavy, thick festival program. This is so heavy, I think it’s impractical to carry it around for the entire fest, especially if you have a smartphone and can access the same info online.
- Microsoft Silverlight Essentials CD-ROM. Wow, we probably shouldn’t have ended with that one.
So, there you go! Your swag lineup for SXSW Interactive 2010!
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Video: SXSW Interactive early badge pick-up
A video from Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon from yesterday’s badge pick-up:
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SXSW panel preview: ‘How Sci-Fi Shapes the Internet’
“How Sci-Fi Shapes the Internet”
Friday, March 12 at 02:00 PM
9ABC, Austin Convention Center
Adria Richards is a self-described tree-hugging IT consultant. Crunchy, but wired. “I buy most of my food at the co-op. I’ve been doing yoga for several years,” she says, “and I’m really passionate about technology because it empowers people to change their lives.”
Her brain has been picked by The Rachel Maddow Show, The Associated Press and ComputerWorld, and her presentation today will focus on the influence the science fiction genre has had on the world of technology, including the Internet.
“I guess what I see now is that we have so much cool stuff, you know? We have these smart phones which are great. People are interacting on the Internet and they’re creating authentic relationships and connections,” she says.
Richards likens the creation of the Internet to the initial space launches, which she was too young to see.
“Imagine if you were a contractor — let’s say you made airplanes. And this new organization called NASA came to you and said, ‘We’re going to need you to build a spaceship. It’s going to need to go into the sky, with people, and come back down. Could you build that for us?’ and you said yes and you made it happen,” she says. “It blows my mind. And it’s the same thing with the Arpanet and all the geeks and they’re like, ‘We tried it.’ And so I think that a lot of the inspiration for our technology — and hopefully our future technology — will continue to come from not only the space program but from stories people are exposed to.”
Richards talks about the tellers of those stories — visionaries such as Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchock and Welles and Wells (Orson and H.G.) whom she calls “big picture thinkers.”
“And I see that by thinking ‘big picture,’ we have been able to take leaps and bounds,” she says. Richards has a list of devices and technologies that were inspired by, among other things, the technology of Star Trek: wireless headsets, communicators, big-screen video …
“One thing that I always liked about it was that it seemed like it was very believable technology,” she explains. “I could see people looking at it, thinking about it, wondering how they could make that work.”
But just when you think to yourself, ‘Imagine that — a geek who enjoys science fiction’ — Richards’ crunchy side emerges. Science fiction’s sway goes far beyond such practical applications as technology, she contends, noting the genre’s humanitarian themes and talking about how the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise’s missions were those of peace and understanding. She indicate, the genre’s embrace of the themes of acceptance and tolerance. “There are all these really great messages about how people can and should interact with other folks,” she explains.th
One senses there will be more of a vulcan mind-meld than a potential Kirk vs. alien smackdown between Richards’ two sides but, either way, her panel should be enlightening and entertaining.
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SXSW Interactive: It’s Finally Here!
… and SXSW Interactive has finally arrived!
Yesterday, many braved the long line at 3 p.m. to get their badges and while there certainly do seem to be more people in town (I’m hearing estimates of anywhere from 12,000 attendees based on bag stuffing to 40 percent more attendees as we heard in a live chat with organizers), the line moved quickly. By 4 p.m., when I got my stuff, things were already dying down from the frenzy of early badge/bag collection.
Here are some tips we ran in Thursday’s Austin 360 print section. If you’re a SXSWi veteran, some of this may be new, other stuff may be old hat, but we hope you’ll find some of it useful. We plan to cover panels, parties, readings and anything else we see on this blog and on our main Twitter account for Interactive, @360sxswi.
Some of the American-Statesman staffers who’ll be covering the fest and are on Twitter include me (@omarg), Sarah Beckham (@sarahlbeckham), Peter Mongillo (@pmongillo), Addie Broyles (@broylesa), Lori Hawkins (@lorichawkins), Chad Swiatecki (@theechad), Deborah Sengupta Stith (@360dss), Dale Roe (@djroe), Christian McDonald (@crit), Jenni Jones (@jennijones_tx) and Brian Gaar (@bgaar).
The basics South by Southwest Interactive runs today (Friday, March 12) through Tuesday (March 16) and features speeches, panels, book readings, discussions, workshops, design competitions and more. This year’s keynote speakers include Twitter CEO Evan Williams, social networking expert Danah Boyd, Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord and Daniel Ek, CEO of the music service Spotify. The walk-up registration rate is $550.
Why it matters Last year’s SXSW Interactive grew about 25 percent to 11,200 attendees while the Music and Film fests stayed flat from the previous years. Organizers of this year’s festival say Interactive is poised for even more growth as subjects such as location-aware apps, mobile marketing and the shadow of Apple’s upcoming iPad attract even more attendees.
SXSW Interactive is frequently the launching pad for new technologies and services like Blogger and Twitter, and companies including Facebook and Dell Inc. have used the fest to roll out announcements and new products.
The fest is a gathering of hard-core techies, social media gadflies, digital creatives, design experts, Twittering celebrities, bloggers and more.
What’s new this year ScreenBurn at SXSW Arcade, the video-game expo that is free and open to the public, has expanded to three days. It runs 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and noon to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday on the first floor of the Austin Convention Center (500 E. Cesar Chavez St.).
The festival’s programming has spread beyond the Convention Center and the Hilton Austin (fourth and sixth floors, 500 E. Fourth St.) to include the Radisson (second floor, 111 Cesar Chavez St.) and the Courtyard Marriott (second floor, 300 E. Fourth St.). Themes like “Greater Good,” “Convergence,” “Emerging” and “Business” loosely organize the fest’s panels into specific locations. Registration and the Trade Show hall are now on the first floor of the Convention Center.
Attendees will be able to exchange contact information with a smart phone by scanning 2-D QR Codes embedded on Interactive badges (more info on this at www.sxsw.com/qrcodes). The my.SXSW.com Web site and two iPhone apps -= “my.SXSW” and “SXSW Play” will help you navigate the fest, change your profile and view content from the Music and Film fests.
More highlights The Statesman Texas Social Media Awards happen at 6 p.m. Sunday at the Cedar Door, 201 Brazos St. (Sold out.)
The 13th-Annual SXSW Interactive Web Awards, hosted by comedian Doug Benson (“Best Week Ever”), take place at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Hilton.
The Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator, a kind of “American Idol” for tech startups that debuted last year, will be Monday and Tuesday at the Hilton, with 32 companies will battle for bragging rights.
How to attend without attending Many unofficial parties, lounges and events have sprung up around the fest for those who are badge-less. The official SXSW Interactive site (sxsw.com/interactive) posts videos (also found at youtube.com/sxsw), podcasts, photos and other content during and after the festival.
The American-Statesman will be covering the fest heavily on the Digital Savant blog (austin360.com/digitalsavant), on Twitter (twitter.com/360sxswi), with videos (austin360.com/sxsw) and with panel previews and other features in print.
We’ll be posting daily panel picks and reviews here and you can check out our Thursday live chat for more advice and picks.
Whew, that was a lot! See you at the fest.
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SXSW panel preview: ‘Perfectly Irrational: Who Put the Monkey in the Driver’s Seat?’
‘Perfectly Irrational: Who Put the Monkey in the Driver’s Seat?’
12:30 p.m. Sunday
Ballroom D, Austin Convention Center
Dan Ariely will never run out of material to research and write about.
“Well, you know I have a usual shtick,” he jokes when asked about what he’ll discuss during his South by Southwest Interactive appearance Sunday. “I talk about the mistakes people make when they make decisions. Thankfully, there are lots of mistakes to talk about.”
Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, as well as the author of “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions” and the upcoming “Perfectly Irrational: The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Work and at Home,” due out in June. In his books and on his Web site (predictablyirrational.com, where you can occasionally sign up for his studies), he writes about his work in a way that entertains and illuminates. Some of his insights might come in especially handy during SXSW. Appropriately, given Interactive’s musical sister conference, he’s considering some music-related topics for his first visit to SXSW.
“We did this one funny study on music,” Ariely says. The study compared how attractive audience members rated musicians before they started playing compared with at intermission.
“And what we found was that everybody got a big boost, aside from the drummer.” (Drummers did get some boost in their attractiveness ratings, but not as much as the rest of the band members.)
Why does this happen? Ariely thinks it might have something to do with “misattribution of emotions”: “Sometimes we have an emotion and we don’t know where it’s coming from, so we kind of stick it on something that seems sensible.” In other words, your strong feelings about the music might make you think you’re having strong feelings about the lead singer.
Ariely’s insights on willpower might be useful if you’re prone to overindulging, whether on cocktails or barbecue, at SXSW.
He argues that the you who’s reading this story now doesn’t have much understanding of the you who’ll be facing temptation later.
“Fighting temptation when temptation occurs is often beyond us,” he says. “Therefore, what we need to do is to not put ourselves into situations of temptation.” You’ll be more successful if you take steps ahead of time instead of relying on your own willpower to resist temptation when it comes.
That could even apply to a vice that’s probably lured its share of SXSW Interactive attendees: texting and driving. Instead of resolving to not pick up your phone when you’re bored and in traffic, don’t put yourself through that trial, Ariely says. Instead, turn the phone off or put it in airplane mode ahead of time.
Ariely’s work might even help you attract the attentions of your SXSW crush. On his Web site, he says that he used all his knowledge about decision-making to win the heart of his future wife. What were his secrets?
“I tried to put myself in situations where I looked good in comparison,” he says. He’s only partly joking: Ariely has actually researched who makes the perfect wing man (or wing woman) when you’re on the prowl.
“It turns out it’s someone similar to you, but slightly less attractive,” he says. It also helps to keep showing up around your crush. “The more you see something, the more you get used to it and like it more.
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Panel preview: ‘Real-Time Everything: The Era of Communication Ubiquity’
“Real-Time Everything: The Era of Communication Ubiquity”
12:30 p.m., Saturday, March 13
Hilton H
American-Statesman: As smartphones have gotten more popular, we’ve been hearing more and more about augmented reality. Can you explain to us what it actually is and how it’s being used?
Rob Gonda: Augmented Reality (AR) is the ability of combining digital and real-world aspects to provide a greater or enhanced experience. Traditionally, it’s layering a digital overlay on top of a video stream, think NFL first-down marker, or NASCAR car information. It is not new, but due to the recent penetration of web and mobile it has been getting greater buzz. It was originally coined in 1992, used in PCs in 1999, by Sony PS3 in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2009 when adopted by Flash and made available for the masses that it began to gain momentum.
NFL and NASCAR are basic examples of mainstream media using AR, but the true reach is when it’s more personal: enhance computer or phone video streams with digital layers triggered by either some market or symbol in the video, or GPS and compass information, or any data source that can be translated into personalized visualization that adds and provides value to the user. Traditional uses range from recognizing trading cards, to real-size mailing boxes, to visualizing how would your new TV look in your living room.
As smartphones have gotten more popular, mobile augmented reality still has not, but they’re setting the base bricks and platform to allow greater penetration in the future. Location awareness, compass, maps, user generated content, all contribute to greater and richer data sources that will allow for great digital and real world mashups. The best mobile apps right now are TwittARound, Layar, Nearest Tube, TAT Augmented ID, SREngine, and Wikitude AR Travel Guide.
What does the future of mobile marketing/advertising look like to you? Will we find it as intrusive as it sounds now or do you think most people will welcome more targeted location-based/personalized marketing?
The entire advertising arena is shifting to brand actively focusing on providing value, enabling actions or behaviors, or building connections, as opposed to traditional mass-media push advertising. More specifically on the mobile arena, there will be three types of advertising: branded applications, opt-in branded benefits, or ad networks that operate on top of free-mium applications … in all cases the user has to perceive value in order to engage.
In the more traditional scenario which is already happening, application developers opt not to charge for the application and distribute it for free, for exchange of placing an ad from a network into their app. Users do not have to pay, thus providing value or benefit, and advertisers get more eye balls due to the free application popularity. The degree of intrusion is solely determined by the developer, but it has not hit any blocks thus far; at the end, the success of the application will depend on the experience, which is a combination of usability, entertainment, and toleration of advertising.
In the new emerging space, some users will gladly opt-in to location based advertising if it’s targeted to their likes, needs, location, they can opt out at any point, and by opting in the advertiser actually helps them find what they want and provides discounts, rewards, or any loyalty incentive. Services such as foursquare are already proving this, but that’s only the beginning.
We already seem to be drowning in information from all directions — in what ways will companies cut through clutter to get their message out?
More information will be generated in 2010 than the history of human kind until 2009. The more user generated content is out there, the less brand generated content can be found. Brands will have to learn to relinquish control and that they can’t impose messages anymore. It’s not about getting the message out, it’s understanding digital behaviors, environments, and connections. Content and context strategy are more important than ever; it’s all about knowing who to target, when, how, why, providing relevant value, leveraging social circles and influence so spread that message.
Companies that understand social influence and leverage it properly, exponentially augment any of their advertising efforts. There are many tools to understand the digital conversation space, perform user research, benchmark online and offline activities, follow trends and patterns, and once brands understand what the conversations are, where do they take place, what’s the visibility, expectations, then they can decide how to leverage that chatter — not advertise — and get their message across.
Will social networks lose their effectiveness in connecting people with companies once the novelty wears off or will they evolve in new directions?
Social networks were never effective in connecting brands and consumers; no one wants to be friends with their butter, and even the cool brands that have millions of fans, have very little engagement. Brands are still learning how to provide value to online consumers; it’s not just setting up a Facebook page, it’s not just having a Twitter account; those social presences are being used as PR extensions, which does not even begin to leverage their true potential.
Social networks play a huge role into identifying the consumer cross-sites, cross-brands, even cross-channels. Players like Facebook will massively influence the eCRM capabilities for brands, fully integrate, and ease tracking online behavior to better understand the digital ecosystem of properties, apps, sites, networks, widgets, locations, and more.
When it comes to the future of augmented reality, what should we be most excited about?
Augmented Reality is currently pretty limited, mainly by technology: the processing power to superimpose digital elements on top of real time video captures by a webcam or mobile camera is not powerful enough to make it seamless and as integrated as we would wish. The need of the black and white symbol to activate the experience is intentionally designed due to its simplicity for the computer to recognize it and calculate the coordinates many times per second to achieve maximum digital integration. Any other object such as logos, faces, and complex real objects will be able to trigger AR in the future and that’s when AR will totally take off.
The future of AR will seamlessly integrate with the real world, and it all translates into better experience and better data sources. Depending on how far in the future, expect object, logos, and face recognition, environment based experiences, integration with video, sound, even odor. Transition from screens or glasses into projected displays or holograms if we look far enough.
Digital technology is advancing fast, integrating in every traditional aspect of our lives. Augmented reality will cease to be called that way once digital and analog are so seamlessly integrated that non-digital experiences will not make sense anymore. Same applies for social media by the way, and lots of terms we use today. Everything is social, everything is digital, why do we have to restate the obvious?
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SXSW Friday picks
“History of the Button.” “What I’m fascinated by is how our relationship with the world has changed over the last hundred years in terms of what we can do with the simplest of motions and how that changes our psychology, how we view the world and even relate to each other as people,” presenter Bill Bill DeRouchey said when we interviewed him last month about this session. 2 p.m., Ballroom C.
“SXSW SARS.” Do you always get sick after SXSW? This session offers some ideas on staying well this year. 2 p.m., 7.
[“The Broke Diaries: Using Blogs and Twitter to Live Cheaply.”] Hayes Davis of Austin’s Cheap Tweet (a Texas Social Media Awards winner is among the panelists. 2 p.m., Hilton A/B.
“The Happiness Project.” Gretchen Rubin reads from her best-selling book about test-driving strategies for being happier. 4:30 p.m., Day Stage.
“Networking at a Multiday Conference.” Local author and speaker Thom Singer knows this subject inside and out. 5 p.m., Hilton E.
“Using Social Media to Score … a Job (Obviously).” Co-presenter Dave Peck had lots of good ideas when we interviewed him about this Core Conversation last month. 5 p.m., Courtyard Brazos 2/3.
“PayTV vs. Internet - The Battle For Your TV” pairs Avner Ronen of Boxee and Mark Cuban of HD Net. 5 p.m., Ballroom D. Television writer Dale Roe interviewed Ronen for a recent column.
Parties: Girls in Tech Happy Hour, Blacks in Technology Meetup, TechSet Party, Visions
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Building the perfect SXSW Interactive panel
This graphic ran in today’s Austin360 print section. Hope you enjoy!
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1 p.m. Live chat: Are you ready for SXSW Interactive?
Today at 1 p.m., American-Statesman staffers will be talking about our panel picks, tips for the festival and anything else related to South by Southwest Interactive.
Bring your own tips, questions and discussion and join us!
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SXSW panel preview: ‘The Happiness Project’
Gretchen Rubin reads from ‘The Happiness Project’
4:30 p.m. Friday
Day Stage
Gretchen Rubin has heard the complaint that the Internet is no good for any of us, that it’s causing us to just sit tap-tapping at our computers instead of making real connections with real people.
Rubin doesn’t buy that. And her opinion is worth noting, because she wrote the book on happiness. Well, at least a very popular book on happiness. Rubin’s “The Happiness Project,” is the No. 3 book on the New York Times’ Hardcover Advice best-seller list. It’s based on her blog of the same name. In both, Rubin writes about test-driving various strategies for happiness. She’ll be reading from her book Friday afternoon South by Southwest Interactive.
Visiting SXSW (it’s her second year at the fest) makes her quite happy, and it’s part of the reason she doesn’t think the Internet is a joy-sapper. She relishes the opportunity the conference gives her to meet her virtual friends in person.
“I’m meeting people that I’ve never met before, but whom I feel like I know quite well,” she says. “I love that.”
While she loves the energy and innovation at the tech conference, Rubin is also a student of history. In her work, she often explores what writers and thinkers have said about happiness through the ages. She says that when she started the Happiness Project she expected to focus more on emerging research about happiness. She’s still fascinated by that science, but finds that the historical advice is more useful as a guide to living a happy life.
One of her blog’s most popular posts is a list of ideas for cheering up that writer Sydney Smith sent to a depressed friend in 1820. Most of its suggestions still feel relevant: “Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.” “Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.”
In fact, keeping your surroundings pleasant and orderly is one of the first subjects she talks about in her book, and it’s a subject that seems to particularly appeal to readers, she says.
“One of the things that’s been most striking is how much people mention that to me,” she says. “Physical, environmental order is huge for people.”
A messy coat closet might not seem like that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but clutter and disorder weigh on us to a surprising degree, Rubin says.
“I think for most people outer order translates to inner calm,” Rubin says.
Of course, with the success of her book, Rubin is experiencing something a lot of people dream of us a source of happiness. So how does it really feel?
“There’s something in happiness called the arrival fallacy,” she says. It’s the belief that once you arrive at a certain destination — whether it’s marriage, a certain income level or a book publication — that you’ll be happy. “Usually, that arrival doesn’t make you as happy as you think it will. But I have to say, getting my book out there and have it resonate with a lot of people is really not disappointing me. It’s making me very happy. I’m not experiencing the arrival fallacy problem right now”
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SXSW panel preview: ‘Ten Strategies for Building Happy and High Performing Teams’
‘Ten Strategies for Building Happy and High Performing Teams’
3:30 p.m. Monday
Courtyard Rio Grande A
Could your workplace use an energy infusion? Beth Hallmark and Drew Scherz have ideas to try, whether you’re a supervisor of not. They’re presenting “Ten Strategies for Building Happy and High Performing Teams” on Monday. Hallmark is creative director for Public Outreach and Strategies at the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Scherz leads the Web team there. Their goal is to help you attract and keep good employees.
— Take a coffee break — together. Rounding up your co-workers for a trip to the coffeeshop across the street will do more than help you stay alert for the afternoon. It also strengthens your ties to each other, and that makes your team perform better, Scherz says. “Cohesion comes from knowing your other team members,” Hallmark says.
— Notice everyone. “Every person on your team matters,” Hallmark says. You know your quiet co-worker who does all the boring, day-to-day stuff without drawing much attention to himself? “That person deserves as much care and attention as anybody else on your team,” she says.
— Get to know your team. “Know what it is that people like most about a job,” Hallmark says. If someone has a particular interest, help her explore it by getting additional training. “As a leader, understanding what truly does make people happy in their job can make a critical difference,” she says.
— Don’t force people to fit a mold. “We celebrate differences; diversity is a strength,” Scherz says. “Everybody works his or her own way. We don’t try to make everybody the same.” That kind of acceptance takes a lot of stress out of your workplace and helps inspire great work, he adds.
— Set expectations high. “If you always expect little from somebody, that’s likely what you’re going to get,” Hallmark says. She and Scherz says most people want the chance to rise to the occasion. They find that the best employees like challenges and want to work hard — as long as they feel engaged. And you can help them feel engaged by offering the freedom they need to do the job and the feedback to help them see that they’re moving forward and doing something meaningful. It also helps to give people problems to solve, rather than just tasks to do, Hallmark says.
— Show a spirit of collaboration. Even if you’re not a manager, if you regularly do things like passing along praise or sharing knowledge you gained in a project that could also help your co-workers, you’ll be changing your workplace for the better, Hallmark and Scherz say.
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SXSW panel preview: ‘Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills’
“Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills”
3:30 p.m. March 16
8A, Austin Convention Center
What happens to your Web stuff when you die? Your blogs, your Tweets, your Flickr photos, your business documents that live in the cloud?
And, to ponder a slightly less ominous question, what happens to your Web stuff when services themselves die? What if the social media site that holds so many of your memories now goes the way of the floppy disk?
Corvida Raven has been thinking about and researching both of those aspects of Web mortality, and she’ll share what she’s found at SXSW Interactive on Tuesday during a Core Conversation called “Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills.”
“It’s an intense topic,” says Raven, who blogs about social media and Web technology at Shegeeks.net. Last year, Fast Company magazine named her to its list of The Most Influential Women in Technology.
Raven started exploring the topic as she thought about the long-term ramifications of working in the online world.
“This is where a lot of people are making money now,” she says, If you’re making a living from your blog, for example, you’ll probably want to protect it (and its associated e-mail account, Flickr pool, etc.) after you’re gone to make sure it keeps producing income for your family.
But doing business online is still a relatively new practice — and it’s a rapidly evolving one, Raven says.
“It’s such a new topic, and there’s really nothing concrete around it, so I’m looking forward to the discussion at South by Southwest,” she says.
Whether your Web presence is business, personal or both, just making sure that someone you trust knows where to find all your user names and passwords can make a huge difference for your survivors.
“You definitely want to make sure you have a record of your passwords that’s as up-to-date as possible,” Raven says. Also think about leaving your loved ones guidance on what you want to happen to your social media profiles and Web sites after your death: Do you want your blog deleted, or left as it was as a memorial to you?
Your survivors might run into a few more problems if they’re not able to log into your accounts, Raven says. Take e-mail. Providers have their own policies, Raven says, but for the most part they’ll give your family your e-mails after your passing (some may require proof of death). But they tend to be stricter about revealing passwords, Raven says.
“You can understand it,” Raven says. The companies’ concern comes because so many of us use the same passwords for everything from e-mail to credit-card Web sites. “It gives them access to a wider range of stuff that you may not have wanted them to have access to.”
If you want to take steps beyond leaving a list of user names and passwords for your loved ones, services like Legacy Locker (legacylocker.com) can help you set up beneficiaries to take over the accounts you specify, or you could even create your own document with a lawyer, Raven says.
Your memories “Death is also part of technology,” Raven says. Technologies change, with some services shutting down and new ones emerging to take their place. Raven says she was drawn to the question of how to make sure the memories we have stored with various sites survive, even if the sites themselves go away.
“My memories are not in photographs anymore,” she says “My memories are on Facebook, or my memories are being TwitPic’ed to the world. How will my kids be able to see this in the future? How will they be able to revisit my 20s the way I revisited my mom’s 20s through photo albums?”
The question led her to make some changes in her online habits.
“I’ve been a little more careful, and also more aware, of what I’m signing up for,” she says. Instead of service hopping, look for tools and sites that have a track record and should stick around for the long haul, she says.
Staying ahead of technological obsolescence is yet one more reason to back up the things that are most important to you, Raven says. She backs up her photos to CDs — she figures they’ll be around at least five more years and that there will be a good conversion option to whatever storage form comes next. “This is my own legacy that I want to make sure I have intact for my kids in the future,” she says.
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SXSW panel preview: ‘How I Lost My Job Through Twitter … Again’
‘How I Lost My Job Through Twitter … Again’
5 p.m. Monday
8A, Convention Center
Jeff Moriarty says he and co-presenter Austin Baker (both are with Sitewire in Tempe, Ariz.) have had their share of social-media controversies at work (if you go to this session, ask Moriarty about his infamous “Lord of the Rings” parody blog), and Moriarty says there’s a good chance you’ll follow in their footsteps someday.
It’s no secret that things we share on social media can get us into trouble. Maybe you call in sick for work — forgetting that your boss is your Facebook friend and saw your status update that you were downing beers at a concert.
Why do we keep making these social media slipups?
“I think it comes from social barriers we build up in our lives,” Moriarty says. We’re a different person with our spouse than we are with our co-workers, and a different person still with our parents. It’s not like we’re making these shifts consciously; they’re just an automatic part of life.
“It’s so natural that we don’t realize those walls aren’t there anymore,” Moriarty says. They’re dissolved by social media.
When we post on Facebook, for example, we’re in the mindset of sharing with friends. After all, we clicked a button that said each person we connect with there is a “friend.”
But, Moriarty says, we probably didn’t choose them very carefully.
“Not everybody on your friends list is someone you’d go hang out with for beers or tell your deepest, darkest secrets to,” he says. Maybe some of your “friends” are co-workers you don’t know well, or someone you just met at a conference. But they end up being privy to information about you that you might not share so readily in office conversation.
You can restore some of those social divisions by using Facebook’s group settings to control see who can see your posts. Maybe you meet people at networking events you don’t know well, but you want to stay in touch with them. You can alter your settings so that they only see limited amounts of information about you. You can even block work-related friends from seeing photos you’re tagged in — this is especially important because you don’t have control over when others tag you.
Moriarty thinks all companies need a social media policy to protect employees, and themselves.
“More companies are doing it, but (even) more should,” he says. Social media issues will come up in almost all companies, and they’re easier to handle when guidelines exist.
Addressing social media through a policy also gives companies a chance to train employees how to handle certain situations: Say you work at a coffeeshop and you see someone bashing your employer on social media. Is it OK to jump into the dispute? And do you have to ID yourself as an employee of the company if you do?
By the way, if your company doesn’t have a clear social media policy, Moriary advises staying out of situations like this. If you see your product getting flamed in social media, pass the word on to someone in the PR department.
“If they’re not being proactive, they’re going to be reactive” he says. “You don’t know what the trigger points are, and it’s really not worth it.”
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Google Maps bike routes to debut tomorrow
Google will announce Wednesday morning that it is adding bike routes to its Google Maps service. They’ll be making the announcement at the National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C. Austin is one of about 150 cities (10 in Texas) that will be included in the launch.
You can read the full story, including reaction from Austin bicyclists and the city of Austin here.
Employees from Google will be demonstrating bike routes at South by Southwest Interactive, Friday though Monday in the expo hall in the Austin Convention Center. Google will also participate in a Mobile Social with Bikehugger.com starting 2 p.m. Saturday. Bikers will meet at Brush Square Park.
Below is an image of what the service will look like and a demonstration video (click on the image for a larger version):
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SXSW panel preview: ‘PayTV vs. Internet - The Battle For Your TV’
‘PayTV vs. Internet - The Battle For Your TV’
5 p.m. March 12
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom D
In this corner … Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HDNet, a U.S.television channel broadcast exclusively in high definition and available via satellite and cable. In this corner … Avner Ronen, CEO of Boxee, maker of software that allows you to play videos, music and pictures from your PC or from the Internet on your television.
A year ago, the pair participated in a spirited online debate on content delivery after a digital media blogger posted an interview with Ronen in which the CEO claimed that the shift to online content delivery — allowing consumers to pick and choose what they wanted to view — could spell trouble for cable programmers’ business model of selling content packages. Cuban responded on his own blog with a post entitled, “Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid ?”
Oh, it’s on.
The tussle continues in a 2010 SXSW Interactive panel Ronen unofficially calls “Big Mouths Clash in the South.”
“Mark and I have different views of the world when it comes to Internet TV,” Ronen told me. “He believes that the Internet is not designed for video consumption, from a technology standpoint, and that the way people watch TV today — using the cable networks — is the way of the future. So he is skeptical about the technology, that’s one thing. Another thing that he’s skeptical about, I think, is the business model. I think he believes the existing business model is the winning business model and that’s how it should remain moving forward.
“I think that there are going to be multiple business models, and while bundled subscriptions may remain or have a share, there are going to be other models as well that are going to work to the benefit of content owners and the creative people. And I think that’s another thing you can learn from history: I think there’s always opposition to a new medium and sometimes it takes a short time and sometimes it takes a long time, but eventually the new medium also represents new opportunities and, in many cases, great opportunities for the media business.
“Whether it was VHS or DVD or even cable networks … you know, every time there is a new medium or a new technology, the knee jerk reaction is very defensive and skeptical about that new technology. But then I think later on they see that it opens up a whole new world of opportunity for them, and I think very much the same about the Internet.”
On his blog, Ronen slyly positions Cuban as the favorite, because:
- He is Mark Cuban.
- He owns the Dallas Mavericks. I get excited when I get bleacher seats for a Knicks game.
- He was on “Dancing with the Stars.” I can’t even get slow dancing right.
“Though if things get physical,” Ronen wrote, “I think I can take him out.”
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Trouble with my.SXSW app? Read this
Over the weekend, I saw a few Tweets about people having trouble with the latest update of the South by Southwest Interactive app for iPhone (the naughty one).
An e-mail from the fest suggests the following if you have the issue (which in my case caused the app to fail to load when I clicked on it):
1. Delete the existing my.SXSW app from your phone
2. Download and install the new my.SXSW app again from iTunes or the AppStore
3. Open the app and login with your my.SXSW credentials.
If you do the fix, you might be required to log in twice — once to SXSW, once to the “Dub” service, which seems like one too many hoops to jump through, but then I’m not an app developer.
This seemed to work for me — but as I looked at the app, I noticed that the list of panels doesn’t even have the names of panelists and some panels are missing basic information that’s on the Interactive Web site — a total deal-breaker for me for actually using the app to look up information during the fest.
I’m hoping this gets fixed in the meantime. I’m getting e-mails about other apps (including one from sched.org) that should be available by Friday.. ‘
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SXSW Interactive updates from us (and you) via Twitter
Before, during and after South by Southwest, follow us on Twitter to get updates aplenty from the Austin360.com team, as well as fellow attendees. Just follow @360sxswi, or bookmark this page.
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Panel preview: ‘Customer Support in a 140 Character World’
‘Customer Support in a 140 Character World’
5 p.m., Monday, March 15
It’s just one illustration of the way social media has changed the game for companies that are expected to stay on top of consumer problems and complaints. (Here’s another: the guy who took United Airlines to task for breaking his guitar.)
Lois Townsend, HP’s global manager of social media strategy, will speak on a panel sponsored by her company about customer service with social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, Microsoft community and online support manager Toby Richards and Frank Eliason, the man behind the @ComcastCares Twitter account.
Townsend says that at her company, social media for customer support is a continually evolving effort. She manages a team of about 11 people and a larger group of about 80 that directly responds to complaints and comments over Twitter, Facebook and HP’s own Web site communities.
“If Facebook is how (our customers) want to engage, we want to be there,” she said. “It’s like we’re at a virtual reception desk — there’s this customer outside of the building screaming and yelling. We go outside, shake their hand and bring them inside. We get them whatever help they may need.”
One sea shift that’s happened in the last 10 years in which HP has been experimenting with social media, Townsend said, is that customers now not only expect to find technical support on the Web, the in fact prefer to find it there. So, while HP is trying not to ignore the massive numbers of people reaching out on Twitter and Facebook, “Social media avenues are growing very fast, but are still much smaller in total as compared with the rest of the more traditional methods (of providing support).”
About 30 million customers a month got to HP’s Web site seeking product support, she said.
Her team, she says, knows that the worst feeling a customer online can have is to feel ignored. But in some cases, a person seeking support falls away from simply wanting help into a category she calls, “Abusive.” While an immediate response is usually best, she said, sometimes a support representative might wait until, say, a Twitter poster has calmed down.
“They’re not easy to talk to,” Townsend said, “they may calm down in a couple of days. We may reach out to them after they calm down.”
She says she had her own experience with challenging customer support situation: she lost an earring on a connecting flight in Chicago and tried to get the airline to send someone to find it.
“They told me when I got back I should send an e-mail,” Townsend said. “Well, that’s not very effective; right now is the time to take action.” She didn’t have a smartphone or laptop with her, but if she had, “I think I probably would have Tweeted about it. I think I would have gotten a real-time response.”
Kevin Smith would totally understand.
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Texas Social Media Awards 2009: Where are they now?
While only a few of the winners from last year’s Texas Social Media Awards received a second award this year, that doesn’t mean they haven’t continued to excel at the work for which they were originally recognized. Below are updates on a few winners from 2009. For a complete list of last year’s winners, click here.
-Benn and Lani Rosales have expanded their social media presence at New Media Lab, having acquired Every Dot Connects. They also organize a monthly happy hour for Twitter users that packs the Gingerman.
-Matt Glazer, editor-in-chief for the Burnt Orange Report, is also a partner at political consulting firm GNI Strategies.
-Lisa Goddard continues her work as Advocacy and Online Marketing for the Capital Area Food Bank
-In addition to judging this year’s competition, last year’s overall winner Michelle Greer was named senior manager at Rackspace Hosting in October.
-David Neff, who helped raise the American Cancer Society’s online profile, is a digital strategist for the PR firm Ridgewood Associates as he works to develop his nonprofit organization Lights Camera Help, which is dedicated to supporting the films-for-a-cause genre.
-Connie Reece, founder of the social media group Every Dot Connects, is working on a social media training course for entrepreneurs.
-Web developer Paul Terry Walhus founded Texas Coworking, a collaborative workspace that caters to people that do most of their work from home.
-Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams continues to maintain a high profile as pursues the Republican Party’s nomination for United States Senate (www.williamsfortexas.com) .
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Pamela Price
http://www.pamelapriceportfolio.com
http://www.redwhiteandgrew.com
http://www.dailyyonder.com/author/-pamela-price
Self-submitted bio: Pamela Price is a UT Austin graduate and San Antonio-based freelance writer with a long-standing commitment to cultural reporting and community engagement.
An award-winning former managing editor for two regional monthly lifestyle magazines, Price has dedicated much of the last two years to chronicling and promoting the resurgent home gardening movement through blogs and social media sites like Twitter (@redwhiteandgrew) and Facebook. Her victory-garden-themed website, RedWhiteandGrew.com, has received mention in several traditional and online media outlets, including CNN. Moreover, Price was an early and active supporter of EatTheView.org, a non-partisan initiative led by Roger Doiron that persuaded Michelle Obama to plant the now high-profile White House kitchen garden in 2009. Also of special topical interest to Price, who grew up in a small Texas town, is the role of social media in contemporary American rural life, evidenced by her recent contributions to the Center for Rural Strategies’ DailyYonder.com.
Judges’ comments: There are lots of gardeners in San Antonio, but none of them are as active in blogging and developing the online community as Pamela Price. In addition to her two garden blogs, Price also freelances stories about sustainability, the environment and technology in rural communities.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Stephen Torrence
http://youtube.com/captainvalor
http://facebook.com/aslstephen
Self-submitted bio: Stephen is a full-time Senior at Texas Tech University. He is originally from Georgetown, TX. Stephen uses social media to connect with his growing fan base for his ASL songsigning productions on YouTube, as well as to keep a finger on the pulse of the Internet.
Judges’ comments: Stephen is about to finish a philosophy degree from Texas Tech, but for the past few years, he’s been using his knowledge of sign language and social media to makes videos that translate popular songs. (He also has a video blog about philosophy.) His YouTube videos have been watched more than a million times, and he also keeps a video blog about philosophy. We love the way Stephen has used YouTube to share his knowledge and surely make countless people smile.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Evan Jenkins
http://www.twitter.com/tiffstreats
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tiffs-Treats/10510512683
Self-submitted bio: Evan Jenkins recently graduated from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Business Administration in May of 2009. He has been with Tiff’s Treats for more than three years, starting as a part-time delivery driver during school and now works as the coordinator for social media, campus marketing, and special events & weddings as well as the Assistant Store Manager for the Tiff’s Treats North Austin location.
What started off as a humble project to update the Tiff’s Treats social networking presence has turned into an active and vibrant conversation with our fans and followers. Several staff members and Leon Chen, co-founder of Tiff’s Treats, have helped foster Tiff’s growth in the Facebook and Twitter realms. Ultimately, by establishing an interactive connection with fans, followers, and consumers, Tiff’s will be better able to build brand awareness, drive consumer growth, and strive to become the “top of the mind” cookie delivery company in the Tiff’s Treats areas of influence!
Judge’s comment: Everybody loves cookies, and people who love the cookie delivery company Tiff’s Treats flock to them online. With more than 7,600 fans on Facebook and close to 3,000 followers, Tiff’s Treats is a good example of building a thriving online community through social media without just spamming the latest discounts.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Alan Graham
Self-submitted bio: Alan Graham is the president and founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a social profit enterprise that delivers meals to homeless and working poor people on the streets of Austin and San Antonio, Texas, New Orleans, Louisiana and Nashville, Tennessee, Providence, Rhode Island and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Additionally, Mobile Loaves & Fishes is involved in providing housing to the homeless through its Habitat on Wheels program by purchasing gently used recreational vehicles and placing them in RV parks around town and most recently engaged in first responder disaster relief. Founded in 1998 by Graham and five friends, MLF has served over 2,000,000 meals; more than 517,000 in 2009 alone. With more than 13,000 volunteers, MLF is the largest prepared feeding program to the homeless and working poor in Austin. Social Media has been a tremendous branding tool for Mobile Loaves & Fishes. Through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and our blog we have been able to put a face on the issue of homelessness.
Judge’s comment: Alan hits the street and uses his phone and a Flip camera to share the stories of triumph and hope of the people his group feeds and befriends. He sheds light on their lives, reminding us all that the homeless are human beings. We can’t think of a better use of new media.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Tolly Moseley
http://thataustingirl.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/tolly.moseley
Self-submitted bio: Tolly Moseley likes to blog, but she likes hugging other bloggers more. So last summer, she decided to put together the first “Austin Bleet-Up” to get bloggers away from their computer monitors, and in each other’s presence for old-school, face-to-face interaction. And so that she could hug them. The first Bleet-Up attracted 150 people; the second, 900. Both events offered her a crash course in event planning, and since then, she’s used that knowledge to help fellow Austinites throw blogger-friendly parties of their own, many benefiting environmental causes.
She is the voice behind local lifestyle blog Austin Eavesdropper, a publicist for authors, musicians, and artists, and a freelance writer for Austin Woman magazine, Discovery Channel’s two green sites, Planetgreen.com and TreeHugger.com, and for Village Voice’s feminist/pop culture blog, HeartlessDoll.com. She also keeps an erratic cocktail column on Austinist.com called The Informed Drinker. Tolly believes without a doubt that the source of her ninja blogging prowess lies with her fellow Austinites, who have taught her how to be a better networker, writer, and social media user. She has benefitted tremendously from the communal nature of the Austin blogging scene, and hopes she can continue to foster local bloggers’ support of one another. Ideally through blow-out parties.
Judge’s comment: Tolly knows that there’s little fun in social media if there’s no “in real life” component. Last year, she started organizing hugely successful blogger meet-ups (or bleet-ups) to connect the blogging community with each other and its readers, and has recently organized other events, like “Rock n Swap,” which was as much party as clothing swap. “Tolly is the little magnet that brings together all the different colored paperclips of Austin,” as one commenter put it.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Shawn P. Williams
http://www.dallassouthnews.org
http://twitter.com/shawnpwilliams
http://www.youtube.com/shawnpwilliams
Self-submitted bio: Shawn P. Williams launched the nationally acclaimed and highly recognized DallasSouthBlog.com, now known as Dallas South, in June of 2006. He serves as publisher and editor. In 2008, Dallas South was one of a selected number of blogs nationwide to be awarded credentials for the Democratic National Convention. Last year, Williams helped to organize Dallas South News, a nonprofit news organization that utilizes technology, social media, and journalistic principles to empower and inform underserved communities.
He serves as President and Editor-in-chief of the hyperlocal news website that was born of his participation in a Poytner Institute seminar studying the future of media and journalism. Williams mixes new media and old media daily. He uses Twitter as his personal news wire and Facebook as an alternative distribution source, while continuing to write as a guest columnist for the Dallas Morning News. Williams also serves on the Blogging While Brown staff and is an officer of the DFW Association of Black Journalists.
Judges’ comments: South Dallas doesn’t have the best reputation, so Shawn set out to do something about it. As the editor of the nonprofit DallasSouthNews.org, he leads a team that provides a “fresh perspective to news stories important to Southern Dallas communities.”
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winners Kevin Tuerff and Valerie Davis
http://twitter.com/enviromedia
Self-submitted bio: Kevin Tuerff and Valerie Davis formed EnviroMedia in 1997 as the nation’s first full-service marketing firm focused solely on environment and public health. Today, full-service includes using social media to change consumer behaviors on behalf of clients. As a public service, they also educate the general population about climate change policy and promote authentic green marketing. Tuerff and Davis are the only American advertising industry executives who have blogged from climate talks for three consecutive years (Indonesia, Poland, Denmark). They were originally dubbed the “Green Detectives” in a 2008 Washington Times article, and in 2009 launched greendetectives.net to demystify complex climate terms. In 2007, EnviroMedia collaborated with the University of Oregon to launch GreenwashingIndex.com — the world’s first online forum that allows consumers to post real “green” ads and rate their authenticity. In 2008, Brandweek named the Greenwashing Index one of “10 Bright Ideas” for marketing innovations.
Judges’ comments: Austinites love to be green. Kevin and Valerie are using social media to educate people on current events within the green scene. Their blog posts from environmental conferences around the world are a must-read.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Jennie Y. Chen
http://www.austindogfriendly.com
http://www.austindriveclean.com
http://www.misohungrynow.blogspot.com
Self-submitted bio: As a doctorate candidate in social psychology researching hormonal correlates to social behavior, I view social media as live-streamed social interaction. Given my research area, I believe that social interaction and relationships are fundamental in everything we do. In all my activities, I use social media to nurture existing relationships and to make new relationships. For Austin’s Cupcake Smackdown 1.0, I asked the food community via social media to help, and I was overwhelmed with eager volunteers. This is just one example of how powerful having a strong social network online and offline enabled me to put on the smackdown. In addition to blogging about food, beer, wine, and spirit events, I’ve also been using social media to run Keep Austin Dog Friendly. As a website that started in 2002, many of the relationships I built with businesses were via email or in person. Now I use social media to connect with dog friendly businesses while simultaneously involving the larger dog community.
Judge’s comment: Jennie loves cupcakes, beer, dogs, cars and research. The University of Texas graduate student channels her energies into a handful of blogs to reach these distinct communities, but she puts just as much energy into putting on (and helping others put on) events, such as last year’s cupcake throwdown.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Sheila Scarborough
http://www.tourismcurrents.com
http://www.familytravellogue.com
Self-submitted bio: Sheila Scarborough is a writer, speaker, trainer and consultant specializing in travel, tourism and the social Web (with a little NHRA drag racing coverage thrown into the mix). She writes for three different blogs, tweets from three different accounts and is also a certified Navy Master Training Specialist with many years of experience as an instructor.
Sheila trains and speaks regularly about social media to a variety of audiences, including journalists, public relations and marketing professionals, tourism and economic development experts and Web developers. She is the co-founder of Tourism Currents, an online learning community and membership site where tourism professionals learn how to use social media tools for their destination marketing.
Judges’ comments: If you’ve never heard Sheila speak about social media, be sure to find her at our awards show. Her energy and enthusiasm for using new tools is incredible and infectious. Sheila has pulled the tourism industry into the 21st century with her sharp ideas and her love for new forms of communication.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Jennifer Navarrete
Self-submitted bio: Jennifer Navarrete is the Media Mixologist at Brewing Media. She teaches entrepreneurs, groups, organizations and non-profits how they can utilize the online social tools to augment their existing marketing campaigns. From one-on-one training, webinars, camp sessions, workshops and conferences her extensive knowledge of social media, online tools and technologies keep Jennifer’s schedule jam-packed. Jennifer has been a tech entrepreneur since 2001 and is active in a number of social media communities. She founded the San Antonio Podcasters Group and is Co-Founder of the San Antonio Chapters of both Social Media Club and Social Media Breakfast. Jennifer has been involved in the Camp Community since 2007 and has organized PodCamp, Startup Weekend, BarCamp and TweetCamp in San Antonio. An early adopter, Jennifer has been podcasting since 2005 and is the co-host of Tech in Twenty and the Morning BrewCast.
Judge’s comment: Jennifer is driving the social media space in San Antonio. It’s rare that you find an event in the city that hasn’t been organized or touched by her in some way.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Cindy Royal
Self-submitted bio: Cindy Royal, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, established her online presence in 1997 with the concert review Web site OnThatNote.com. An avid music fan, she posts photos, videos, interviews and performances spotlighting local musicians, bringing the magic of Austin’s thriving scene to the world. Royal earned a Ph.D. from The University of Texas in 2005 and teaches digital media skills and concepts. Her students are employed across the region, and their projects have received national awards, including SXTXState.com, a blog covering SXSW Interactive. She developed the blog and supervised the video coverage for Texas State’s Mass Communication Week (txstatemcweek.com), which has quickly grown to one of the premier communication events in the region. She hosts a technology blog (cindytech.wordpress.com), as well as a social network (webpubnet.ning.com) and Facebook group to foster communication amongst former students. She writes for Texas Music Magazine and is the editor of their online newsletter. On March 14, she will host the Core Conversation “Influence and Innovate: Transforming Media Education” at SXSW.
Note: Cindy won the award as a co-winner with Texas State’s Dara Quackenbush.
Judges’ comments: Cindy and Dara have raised the profile of Texas State University-San Marcos through their enthusiasm and hard work. They are proof that a few enthusiastic people can push an entire organization onto the leading edge. Their students are everywhere on social media, and they all speak highly of both of the professors.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Cali Lewis
Self-submitted bio: Cali Lewis is the host and producer of GeekBrief.TV, an online news show about technology and consumer electronics. Known as “Shiny, Happy Tech News”, GeekBrief.TV bridges the gap between hard core geeks and people with a casual interest in technology. The show is downloaded millions of times each month by viewers from around the world. She knows from experience how to build, grow and maintain a successful online brand. Cali makes regular appearances on TV (MSNBC, NBC, ABC, FOX and G4 Canada) to talk about new and exciting gadgets. As a public speaker, Cali talks about the impact of technology we experience today, amazing research that will become the technology we’ll use in the future, the importance of social media, and video production tips and tricks. She is also quite fond of bacon.
Judge’s comments: If you don’t watch the video podcasts on Geekbrief.TV, you’re missing out. Cali’s take on all things tech is fun, innovative and informative. Cali is a tech celebrity, and Texas is lucky to have her. We’re excited to give her a second Texas Social Media Award.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Ashley Cass
http://www.twitter.com/birdsbarbershop
http://www.facebook.com/birdsbarbershop
http://www.birdsbarbershop.tumblr.com
Self-submitted bio: Originally from border town Laredo, Texas, I moved to San Marcos to attend Texas State University. I graduated with a degree in Electronic Media in December 2008 and began an internship with Birds Barbershop in April of 2009. I quickly found my niche as their social media guru and in late December was promoted and given the title event coordinator.
Best advice? Be interactive and available to the brand’s followers and fans. Make your posts meaningful and sparse… Don’t overload and become “noise.” I often joke that I’m the “face behind the feed,” but I take this role beyond the interwebs. Aside from my use of Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, Twitter and recently Google Buzz to promote Birds, a brand I love and believe in, I take advantage of my innate networking abilities to further spread the word.
Judge’s comment: Ashley has burst onto the scene in a short period of time, bringing Bird’s Barbershop with her. Who knew that social media could be used so well with hair-styling? Ashley uses all the social media tools extremely effectively to make a small business a hip success.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Trey Ratcliff
http://www.google.com/profiles/tratcliff
http://Twitter.com/TreyRatcliff
Self-submitted bio: Trey publishes StuckInCustoms.com, which is a site for unique photography from around the world. He loves social media. On Twitter, he has 8,502 followers; 8,500 of them are bots and two are his mom. His social media strategy is simple. He calls it 33/33/33.
Thirty-three percent of his tweets are meant to inspire people with art that he has found from around the Web, 33 percent are used to connect people with others that they should know, and the last 33 percent are used to share his own latest photographic works and the stories that go with them. The final one percent? WILDCARD.
Judges’ comments: Trey has brought together a global community of HDR photographers on his blog stuckincustoms.com. Readers can escape through his vivid imagery and amusing tales of his voyages around the world. Plus, he’s funny.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner J.R. Cohen
http://www.facebook.com/WeSLGT
Self-submitted bio: J.R. Cohen has been “setting the bar” for businesses worldwide through his example and successful use of Social Media. His dedication to his customers and the local Houston community have organically grown his Twitter followers @CoffeeGroundz to more than over 9,000. Cohen is credited with being the first to take orders via Twitter; and for his mobilization of the online community to meet IRL for social events and charity fundraisers, J.R. Cohen and the CoffeeGroundz story have been covered in Forbes, NYT, WSJ, and in books (notably Twitterville by Shel Israel).
He is most appreciated for the way he leverages his attention in the media to help promote others. J.R. Cohen’s new venture is “Support Local/Grow Together,” (#SLGT), a movement he founded in 2009 in response to the economic downturn.
Judge’s comment: Everyone in Houston seems to know J.R., and for good reason. He’s very effective at using social media tools, not just to boost his business at CoffeeGroundz, but also to help others. His Support Local movement is a brilliant idea that encourages people to support local busineses and promote sustainability. We’re proud to give J.R. another award.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Hugh MacLeod
Self-submitted bio: Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist, blogger and entrepreneur best known for his “Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. His bestselling book, “Ignore Everybody” came out in June, 2009. An early champion of blog marketing, he sells his art exclusive via his blog and his gallery website. He lives in Alpine, Texas.
Judge’s comment: Cartoonist Blogger extraordinaire. Hugh is at the forefront of what is called “the personal brand”. His cartoons dubbed “cube grenades”, which are messages that challenge us to find gratification in our work, are challenging what people see as their purpose in the workplace.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner: Livestrong
http://livestrongblog.org/2009/06/01/doug-twitter-and-the-25000-challenge/
http://twitter.com/LIVESTRONG/status/6465822161
Self-submitted bio: At LIVESTRONG, we fight for the 28 million people around the world living with cancer today. We kick in at the moment of diagnosis, giving people the resources and support they need to fight cancer head-on. We are actively using social media to build the LIVESTRONG community and raise awareness of the foundations efforts. Through online engagement, we are finding innovative ways to raise awareness, fund research and end the stigma about cancer that many survivors face. We are connecting people and communities digitally to drive social change, and call for state, national and world leaders to help fight cancer. By empowering survivors online, LIVESTRONG is building a social movement that is pushing for transformational change. With more than 50,000 followers on Twitter and almost 700,000 fans on Facebook, we have built an impressive social network, which we use to recruit and motivate even more supporters, assist community leaders, educate on cancer policy, offer cancer support services and build a community around the LIVESTRONG mission to make cancer a global priority.
Judge’s comment: Three people connected with the Lance Armstrong Foundation were nominated for awards this year: Lance Armstrong, Doug Ulman and Brooke McMillan. All three are worthy of winning this award, so we’re proud to give a group award to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which uses social media with incredible effectiveness to spread the foundation’s message of hope and empowerment.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Josh Williams
Self-submitted bio: Josh Williams is a co-founder and CEO of Gowalla, a locative social network inspiring people to share their favorite places and experiences with friends. With an ever growing collection of game-like rewards, the beautifully designed service has connected people in 150 countries with over 450,000 places around the world. Josh and his team also created the landmark cult-hit social game PackRat on Facebook. Prior to Gowalla, he was Principal at Firewheel Design, a boutique user-interface consultancy, where his clients included Microsoft, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, Thompson Reuters and Causes. At Firewheel, he was also responsible for the launch of IconBuffet and invoicing service Blinksale. Josh never went to school. He loves mid-century modern design, architecture, snowboarding and longboarding. He lives in Austin with his wife, Rachel, and two effervescent daughters. In a future life, he’d like to be an accomplished woodworker.
Judges’ comments: We couldn’t be more excited to have Gowalla based in Austin. The location-based social network is rising fast and going toe-to-toe with Foursquare and Yelp for what many are calling the “next Twitter.” Gowalla is elegantly designed and addicting and fun to use.
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Gowalla Goes to Torchy’s from Josh Williams on Vimeo.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Joshua Baer
Self-submitted bio: Joshua Baer is a widely recognized email marketing pioneer and currently the Founder and CEO of OtherInbox - the cure for email overload. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Joshua serves on the Board of Directors of Greenling and is an advisor to Datran Media. Joshua blogs at Austinpreneur.com and Deliverability.com. Joshua was a 2009 recipient of a Texas Social Media Award and was recognized as the Austin Information Technologist of the Year in 2009. He holds Computer Science and Information Decision Systems degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Austin, TX with his wife and daughter.
Judge’s comment: The Capital Factory team brought much deserved attention and credibility to the Austin startup community. Their willingness to help future entrepreneurs will surely help drive the Austin economy in 2010 and beyond.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Mando Rayo
http://www.cultural-strategies.com
Self-submitted bio: Mando Rayo’s work spans multiple roles, and social media is a major instrument in this toolkit. As vice president of engagement at Cultural Strategies, Mando offers clients insights into the Hispanic community as well as strategic and effective ideas that enable clients to enlist more Hispanics to their cause. As director of community engagement at United Way Capital Area/Hands On Central Texas, Mando specializes in creating opportunities for community engagement, with a focus on leadership development and social innovations. In both these roles, he’s developed innovative cultural programming for a variety of clients, including MPower Foundation/RISE Conference, Tate Austin Hahn, Lance Armstrong Foundation, Goodwill Industries of Central Texas, CASA of Travis County, The Cipher-Austin’s Hip-Hop Project, ACTIVE Life and the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Social media allows exponential outreach for his mission by empowering like-minded community members with information they use to build this community together. His alter ego, as Austin’s resident taco ambassador for TacoJournalism.com, brings flavor and fun to his work.
Judges’ comments: Mando Rayo is all about doing good work and eating good tacos. His day job is to use technology to build support for the United Way, but he’s also a creator of TacoJournalism.com, a great site dedicated to finding Austin’s best food wrapped in a tortilla.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Leslie Nichols
http://twitter.com/TheOtherLeslie
http://www.austincitylimits.org
Self-submitted bio: I was born and reared a petrochemical brat moving up and down East Texas until entering the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. After obtaining a Radio / TV / Film degree in 1990, I worked for the Houston-based film production company that gave the world the ground-breaking martial arts comedy sequel They Still Call Me Bruce. In 1996, a 4 out of 6 number Lotto win brought me back to the Live Music Capital of the World and a KLRU-TV clerical job. In 2000, Austin City Limits executive producer Terry Lickona plucked me out of administrative obscurity and made me an associate producer. I¹ve been happily sweet-talking tour managers and coordinating talent for ACL ever since. I started using Twitter last year during Mardi Gras to keep my friends at home updated on my culinary and other adventures, but quickly discovered that it¹s a great way to connect with music fans in general and ACL fans in particular. Besides posting television schedule alerts, I live-tweet our concert tapings and share juicy behind-the-scenes tidbits.
Judge’s comment: Who in their right mind doesn’t like ACL? And who wouldn’t like someone using social media to take suggestions to make the conference even better? We are very excited to see what’s coming in 2010.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winners Jenn Deering Davis and Hayes Davis (Cheaptweet)
http://cheaptweet.com http://twitter.com/cheaptweet
Self-submitted bio: Jenn and Hayes are the driving force behind CheapTweet - a real-time social deals search engine that indexes coupons and discounts discussed on Twitter. Since its launch, Jenn and Hayes have established themselves as experts in and built a community around using social media for ecommerce and saving money. Widely regarded as the leading Twitter-based deals search engine, CheapTweet grew more than 1200% in 2009. Brands like Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, and Overstock have partnered with CheapTweet to further their social media commerce goals.
Judge’s comment: Many people try to put rules to what social media is for. CheapTweet shows us that Twitter is merely a communication tool capable of delivering messages faster than ever before. By building a robust platform for finding deals online, Jenn and Hayes are pushing the limits of how we use social media.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Grace Rodriguez
http://twitter.com/gracerodriguez
Self-submitted bio: Grace Rodriguez is only three apples high. It stems from her childhood, when she began reading big books, overindulging on ideas and information, and contemplating rich, dense thoughts that weighed heavily upon her stature, stunting her (physical) growth. A pragmatic optimist, Grace channels this vertical challenge into a childlike wonder, curiosity and playfulness she evinces throughout her endeavors. As Principal of AYN Brand, Grace elevates her clients with clean design and crackerjack interactive branding strategies. She blogs and writes, with Editor of Rice Addict (“Best New Magazine 2004,” Houston Press) to her credit. She produces film and video, garnering a Pegasus Award for Destination Houston. She’s crafty, currently crocheting pseudospheres and hyperbolic organisms that explore positive/negative space. Grace also loves a good cause: She’s a serial volunteer and Board Member for nonprofit organizations, and uses integrated online/offline techniques to raise awareness, funds, and community support for campaigns — like YouthVote, Twestival and Houston@SXSW — that benefit the greater good. She aims to educate, inspire and empower people, so they can do the same for others. That’s all.
Judges’ comments: Grace is the cornerstone of the Houston social media community. You don’t hear much about her, but you do end up hearing about her projects in the art, political, and tech scenes. She, along with the crew at Caroline Collective, has helped bring together many communities in Houston.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award winner Dara Quackenbush
http://txstateprwriting.blogspot.com
http://txstateprcampaigns.blogspot.com
http://www.daraquackenbush.com
Self-submitted bio: Dara Quackenbush is a senior lecturer in public relations at Texas State University. She began teaching in 2005 and strives to bring real-world experience to the classroom. Outside of the university, she works with clients to develop branding, positioning, social media strategies, messaging and strategic communications plans. Believing that social media should be incorporated into today’s public relations practice, Dara encourages students to use social media in their PR work and has students blog about PR and social media trends. Dara is active with Austin Social Media Club and Social Media Breakfast and was the emcee for Interactive Austin 2009. She is also on the board of the Austin professional chapter of the Association for Women in Communications (AWC Austin). For her work with students and communications professionals, Dara will be awarded the Mentor Award at the 2010 AWC Austin Banner Brunch. Dara earned a master’s degree in mass communication from Texas State University, where her research emphasis was blogging and opinion leadership, and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas.
Note: Dara won the award as a co-winner with Texas State’s Cindy Royal.
Judges’ comments: Cindy and Dara have raised the profile of Texas State University-San Marcos through their enthusiasm and hard work. They are proof that a few enthusiastic people can push an entire organization onto the leading edge. Their students are everywhere on social media, and they all speak highly of both of the professors.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Brian Brushwood
Self-submitted bio: Brian Brushwood tours the nation performing his “Bizarre Magic Show:” an award-winning mash-up of dangerous stunts, sleight of hand, comedy and mind-reading. He’s appeared on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” over 2 dozen national TV programs, and at thousands of live events worldwide. In 2008, he joined the Revision3 network to host “Scam School,” the only show “dedicated to social engineering at the bar and on the street,” and recently launched the weekly comedy talk show “NSFW” on Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. Social media (including Digg.com and Twitter) were instrumental in pulling off Brushwood’s “Operation iScam,” a successful attempt to “cheat” Scam School to the top of the iTunes podcast charts, and twitter remains an important part of promoting shows and scheduling spontaneous Scam School meetups as Brian continues to tour. Teller (of magicians Penn&Teller) says “Brian Brushwood just kills me. He’s funny, dangerous, and brilliantly original. He’s going to be really famous, very soon.”
Judge’s comments: Not everyone who uses social media has to be teaching us about business or marketing techniques … sometimes, they just entertain. Brian surely is entertaining and a load of fun. Just like Teller of Penn & Teller, we see stardom just around the corner for Brian.
Bang your Head: ep3 Scam School from Brian Brushwood on Vimeo.
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Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins
http://www.google.com/profiles/rizzn.dourden
Self-submitted bio: Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of SiliconANGLE, a publication featuring bleeding edge analysis and technology from social science to computer science. Previously, he served as Associate Editor at Mashable, with experience in the fields of journalism and computer science at WABC-NYC, Nokia, Apple, IBM, Cox Communications and a myriad of startups going back as far as the first dot com boom. His social media chops start with his twelve year old personal blog (rizzn.com), and continued into one of the first business ventures into the then nascent field of podcasting, and continue to this day as he helps organizations and individuals understand how to utilize online media production through talks, blogging and private consultation. Judge’s comment: The guy built Mashable, which is the blog you all read to figure out how to use this stuff. He’s now writing about bleeding edge tech at Silicon Angle. Nuff said.
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People to follow on Twitter during SXSW Interactive
South by Southwest Interactive has felt for the last three years tailor-made for the short bursts of information on Twitter — or maybe it’s Twitter that feels custom-sized for the fest.
The festival is always a good time to add new people, whether they’re local or visiting, during the fest. Here’s a good mix of people to follow from Austin and from elsewhere during SXSWi 2010:
From Austin:
- Michelle Greer (@michellegreer) — Last year’s Statesman Texas Social Media Award overall winner, now representing San Antonio-based Rackspace
- Kate Buck (@katebuckjr) — Social media “Fly Girl” and one of the hosts of the highly anticipated TechKaraoke party on March 15.
- Jon Lebkowsky (@jonl) — Frequent SXSWi panelist and organizer of the March 15 Plutopia party.
- Clay Spinuzzi (@spinuzzi) — University of Texas at Austin associate professor of rhetoric who will be on a coworking panel at the fest.
- Eve Richter (@erichter) — Emerging technologies coordinator for the City of Austin’s economic development division.
- Tracy Mueller (@tracymueller) — Freelance writer and Twitterer for the UT McCombs School of Business who will be covering the fest.
- Chris Byrd (@chrisbatdell) — Dell Inc. “Digital Life Evangelist” and member of the company’s social media team.
- Stephanie Klein (@stephanieklein) — “Greek Tragedy” blogger and author; she’s on a panel about balancing your blog and wrote some great blog entries about last year’s fest.
- Josh Williams (@jw) — Founder and CEO of Austin’s Gowalla, which is hosting a big Tiki Room party and might have big announcements at the fest.
- Stacey Higginbotham (@gigastacey) — GigaOm reporter who’ll likely be keeping an eye on AT&T’s 3G network during the fest.
From elsewhere:
- Evan Williams (@ev) — CEO of Twitter, who will deliver a March 15 keynote at the festival
- Gina Trapani (@ginatrapan) — Founding editor of Lifehacker, now an author and software developer.
- Pete Cashmore (@petecashmore) — Founder of popular social media trends blog Mashable and the person most likely to be hounded after to post for party pics.
- Susan Wu (@sw) — Frequent SXSWi panelist and now an angel investor and CEO of Web games company Ohai, Inc.
- Leo Laporte (@leolaporte) — Popular and friendly tech expert will be carrying around camera gear and broadcasting live from the fest.
- Anil Dash @anildash) — Tech blogger, head of the Expert Labs technology incubator and host of the SXSWi unofficial kickball game.
- Doug Benson (@dougbenson) — “Best Week Ever” comedian and host of the 13th-Annual SXSW Interactive Web Awards.
- Tom Merritt (@acedtect) — CNET podcaster who’ll be recording at the fest.
- Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) — Popular marketing speaker and co-author of “Trust Agents.”
- Clay Shirky (@cshirky) — Consultant, teacher at NYU and deep thinker on Internet issues who’ll be doing a presentation at the fest.
Some of the American-Statesman staffers who’ll be covering the fest and are on Twitter include me, Peter Mongillo, Addie Broyles, Lori Hawkins, Chad Swiatecki and Deborah Sengupta Stith. We’ll be covering the fest on its own Twitter account, @360SXSWi.
You can find more Statesman staffers and Austinites to follow on our Statesman Twitter page, too.
Got more suggestions? Post them in the comments.
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Panel preview: ‘Does My Sh*t-Talking Really Help Your Brand?’
“Does My Sh*t-Talking Really Help Your Brand?”
5 p.m., Saturday, March 13
Hilton D
Customer service (and how to provide it well online) is a topic that pops up in several panels, including the subject of this preview as well as another one we’ll be featuring soon, “Customer Support in a 140 Character World.”
For “Does My Sh*T-Talking Really Help Your Brand?” we spoke to Ivan Askwith, director of digital strategy for Big Spaceship, a New York-based firm where he “Helps clients havigate the digital landscape and understand emerging behavior.” He’s got a master’s degree from MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies and has been a media analyst for the school’s Convergence Culture Consortium.
American-Statesman: We’ve all heard examples of ways that social media has helped companies (Dell, Whole Foods, etc…) but have there been any instances where social media has damaged a brand irreparably? Is that even possible?
Ivan Askwith: In general, it’s hard to imagine a brand being damaged beyond repair, because brands can hold their breaths for a long time, and can invest a lot of thought and money in changing their meaning… so even if a brand took serious damage, it’s hard to imagine that would shut them down for good.
That said, I don’t think that “social media,” in general, is what can damage a brand. Despite what a lot of marketers and advertisers seem to think — that social media is just a new, interactive, engaged channel for messaging — the real impact of social media is that it turns brands into something akin to people. People don’t have slogans (most of the time), and they can’t stick to scripts and isolated tactical objectives. Relationships aren’t just about what we say, they’re about how we respond — or don’t respond — when other people talk to us. And the risk that brands face when using social platforms is looking self-centered, indifferent and disinterested, even when they’re not.
Being in social spaces inevitably makes brands more transparent, for better and for worse. That means that if your brand doesn’t have more to talk about than itself, it will look self-centered — or, even worse, it will just look boring. The question isn’t how brands can “use” social media, but how brands have to change, at a deeper level, to be authentic when engaging in public interactions. If you can’t get past thinking that social media is just a targeted space for messaging to brand loyalists, you’re pretty much going to look like an (expletive).
One other point: “brands” themselves can’t really, fully engage in social media. Unlike television ads and Web sites, which sometimes seem to just appear in the world fully-formed and beyond question, brand participation in social spaces most often comes down to individual choices that individual people make, and make publicly. And those people have faces, names and titles.
So even when an exceptionally bad decision is made, and consumes respond, there’s a fall-back solution: distance yourself from the person who made a bad call, apologize and demonstrate your commitment to making better choices in the future. It’s like high school: people might push you into lockers for a few weeks, or give you silent treatment, but eventually they’ll get over it.
To circle back to your question: I don’t think brands risk damaging themselves beyond repair when they use social media badly. They do risk becoming irrelevant, or revealing just how unaware they are of the social conventions and expectations that govern interactions in those spaces.
What do you hope audience members will be able to take away from the panel to help their own branding efforts?
Well, each of the people on our panel will probably have a different answer to this question, but there are a few things I hope the panel will accomplish.
For one, we need to get past the outdated idea that social media is about reach, awareness and impressions. If people are talking about your brand 24/7, but everything they’re saying is negative, you’re not necessarily winning. In fact, you’re probably losing.
What we really need when brands engage in social channels is a clear understanding of how people behave in those spaces, why, and what brands can do to make their experiences better. We all talk about how social media is great for “building relationships,” but relationships have to consist of more than subscribing to a newsletter. I’d hope that this panel helps people think more carefully about what their brands are doing in social channels, and leads us to ask more meaningful questions about what we’re accomplishing, and how it is — or isn’t — helping.
The Web’s inherent anonymity seems to foster negativity. Do sites like Facebook, where someone’s identity is more clear, make it easier to weed out those kinds of drive-by Internet attacks? Is that good news for companies who are nervous about social media?
To the first part of your question, the answer is “yes.” Sure. It’s more difficult to make anonymous comments on Facebook, so there tends to be less trolling.
But there’s a more important insight hidden in this question, and I hope that our panel will explore this as well: brands shouldn’t be thinking about how to prevent people from making negative comments about their brands. If someone cares enough to make a negative comment, they’ll find somewhere to do it — they don’t need the brand’s help. And if they really want to say something, odds are they’ll still say it, even on a brand’s Facebook page.
The question is, what should brands do when negative comments surface? Delete them? Ignore them? View them as opportunities to convert, or at least show respect toward, antagonists? There’s no single right answer, but the different options have different consequences, and the choices you make will be factored into how your brand is perceived.
So to answer your question head-on: if brands are nervous about social media, the solution isn’t to find safe spaces. It’s to address that anxiety, figure out what’s causing it, and make intelligent decisions about how and why to move into social channels at all. Again, the most common problem brands face in social media isn’t losing control — it’s retaining control and realizing that no one cares enough to hang out with them.
Are companies that do controversial campaigns (Burger King, Skittles), ultimately winning out with the attention they generate?
Depends on how you’re evaluating success. They’re certainly getting noticed, but is that actually helping their overall perception? Depends on what the campaigns demonstrate about the brand’s larger set of values and goals. To use a recent example, Southwest Airlines got noticed after the Kevin Smith fiasco, but probably would have been just as happy if no one was talking about them.
To their credit, though, Southwest — which has a great appreciation for the uses and abuses of social channels — benefited from the chance to respond to Smith’s complaints through social channels. They got caught making a mistake — something that used to be a lot less public — but in the aftermath, were able to apologize and make amends.
What kinds of expertise are the different panelists bringing to this discussion?
The thing that excites me most about this panel, actually, is the range of opinions and perspectives we have represented in the discussion.
My work at Big Spaceship — and before that, with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT — focuses on understanding behavior in digital spaces, and helping brands learn to participate in those spaces and add value, rather than dominating and interrupting them with traditional messaging. I don’t think of what I do as “advertising,” but a lot of my potential clients do — so I find myself discussing and debating these topics on a near-daily basis.
Sam Ford, from Peppercom — and an old colleague and friend from the Convergence Culture Consortium — tackles the same challenges in the world of public relations, another area that (like advertising and marketing) is transforming in the face of social media. Advertising gives us one way of thinking about the value of social media; PR gives us another, which I think is often more useful. Sam is also a leading academic voice in fan studies and anti-fan studies, which provide a useful angle for thinking about these questions.
Emily Yellin adds another critical perspective: a deep knowledge of customer service. A terrific journalist and author, her book — “Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us” — gives her first-hand insight into how companies are beginning to use (and misuse) social media to handle customer service. Which raises an interesting question: how does customer service differ when it’s conducted in public channels, rather than on private hotlines?
Michael Monello, from Campfire, also brings an interesting perspective to the discussion. As one of the original creators of the “Blair Witch Project” — which was more notable for its use of digital media to build and activate fan communities around the film — Mike has strong thoughts on how brands and the public can work together.
Finally, Amber Case — who, as a “cyborg anthropologist,” has one of my all-time favorite business cards — brings a range of perspectives. Until recently, she worked on digital strategy and PR for Wieden + Kennedy, which gave her a first-hand look at the challenges that global brands face in social media. Her broader background as an anthropologist gives her a unique approach in deciphering the possible meaning of social behaviors and relationships.
All in all, an incredible group of thinkers and experts. Combine that with the range of opinions and ideas that are always in the room at SXSW — since we’re hoping to open up the mics just a few minutes into the hour, to make it a full-on discussion — and I’m optimistic. I think it’s going to be a great conversation.
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Sony PlayStation 3 users weather the PlayStaypocalypse
Update, Monday evening: It looks like the PlayStation Network is back to normal and things are working again. It seems safe now to turn on your PlayStation 3 and the data-loss we feared didn’t come to pass.
Now, where’s that “Heavy Rain” disc?
Usually, companies send us video games to review, but in the case of the new PlayStation 3 game “Heavy Rain,” we didn’t receive a copy.
Based on some very positive reviews and the recommendation of my brother, who had already bought it and beat it, I took a trip on Saturday to a place of retail and paid $60 for the chance to play it myself. That night, I played the first hour or so and liked what I saw. It’s a solid game that does some very new things very well.
Imagine my surprise last night when I tried to play the game and couldn’t because something was wrong with the PlayStation Network, which the game connects to (even though it’s a wholly single-player experience). Imagine my further surprise when I found out that I was not alone. EVERY PlayStation 3 user whose console accessed the network was having the same problem. It started early evening yesterday and as of this writing, continues.
What did I do instead of playing “Heavy Rain?” I fired up the Xbox 360 and played “BioShock 2” instead.
A blog post on the official PlayStation Web site warns users of the older PlayStation 3 non-Slim systems (like mine, which I purchased the day the console launched) not to even turn their console on. That’s how serious the situation is — you could corrupt data on the console simply by trying to use it.
Truly, we are in a bold new chapter of the console wars where even turning on your system might ruin hours and hours of game saves.
My complaints with Sony over the years are too numerous to name here, but as a corporate entity, they are the Charlie Brown kicking the football of consumer electronics. Every time something good comes along to save the PlayStation 3 brand since its problematic launch (say, a game like “Heavy Rain”) some marketing faux pas or titanic network problem keeps the PS3 name mired in the thickets of pain for users. There’s a reason the console trails behind the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 in this generation of consoles after the PlayStation 2 dominated the last gen — screw ups like this one. Many of them. A $600 launch price of the PS3 didn’t help, either.
I’ll let you know when the situation is resolved, but as of right now (and possibly for as long as another day), PlayStation 3 systems across the world are now malevolent black bricks. Curvy, hulking, useless.
Oh, Sony.
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SXSW panel preview - ‘Austin: Latino Internet Capitol of the World!’
Austin: Latino Internet Capitol of the World!
12:30 p.m., Saturday, March 13
Courtyard Rio Grande A
The panel will also feature Paul Saucido of LatinoSlant! and Cindy Casares of Guanabee.com.
Digital Savant: What’s your job at Apple and how long have you been there?
Aldo Ramon: First off for clarification, I am not speaking on behalf of Apple Inc. in anyway in any of my replies, this is all straight from me personally. My job at Apple is to allocate and administrate all Apple products (CPUs, iPods, Software/Accessories) to all of Latina America and get our Great Product to Great People, and I’ve been doing so for almost give years. Got in when it was getting good, and haven’t looked back since!
Apple seems to keep a pretty low profile in Austin (apart from the Apple Stores) — are people surprised when you tell them you work for Apple? What kinds of questions do people ask you about your job?
Most people usually do get surprised and automatically think I work for the Apple Store. I usually tell ‘em I’m a custodian, so they don’t follow up with “hook me up with an iPod.” But I’m blessed to have a office job that allows me to work remotely if needed, because it goes hand in hand with my life, traveling all over the Latin Americas. Apple’s all about the music, and with what I’ve been doing for several years before I worked for Apple, I toured/recorded on bass with well known Latin acts such as Menudo/MDO and currently with Los Super Reyes and soon to tour these regions with my own group, Los Bad Apples.
I can say to myself at the end of each day, “Yep, I made thousands of people/crowds dance at all those shows, and with my job at Apple I feel as if I get to continue doing so, on a more personal level, with their iPods in their hands, etc…” I have an attitude of gratitude for what I do, almost like a Clark Kent/Superman life I seem to juggle.
Lots of people have been asking whether we might see some iPads at the festival. Any chance we may see some of them floating around, in the hands of reviewers or Apple employees?
Concerning the iPad… I can’t comment. Apologies!
Have you presented at/attended SXSW Interactive before?
I’ve attended and played some shows before; but don’t recall doing anything with SXSW Interactive, I’m really pumped and excited about it, to say the least!
Your Core Conversation is called “Austin, Texas: Latino Internet Capital of the World.” In 200 words or less, tell us why Austin is the Internet capital of the world for Latinos.
With my travels I know it is the Live Music Capital of the World, and the Cap City also has its finger on the pulse of technology and seems to have a high involvement of Latinos using the Internet and the virtual happenings of online communities. I believe Austin does have a pretty firm staple into the Internet when it comes to the arts/media,
What kinds of things do you plan to talk about in your Core Conversation?
I plan to talk about how there is a significant growth of Latinos using the Internet to stay connected, not just here in Austin, but worldwide, with my experience watching and monitoring market trends/growth in Latin Americas.
What are some things you’re most excited about seeing at the festival? Do you also plan to attend Music and/or Film?
I’m most excited about seeing the promotions and day-to-day hustles that are going to be done, be it from filmmakers, to bands, to artists to street musicians. I’ve set up shop on a street before and played for passersby and musicians from all around the world bust out their instruments to jam. I enjoy people watching and getting them to dance, and meeting folks that travel from other sides of the world to attend.
I also heard Esperanza Spalding is playing, so I’d like to check her out, along with Bomba Estereo from Colombia, and it’s always fun when my best friend Asdru Sierra of Ozomatli comes into town. We have hour long laugh sessions, while we post up in a studio and work on material.
As for films I’d like to go check out “Beyond Ipanema” by director Guto Barra, having to do with Brazilian music influencing the world, and of course, for me just people watching and seeing where and what the buzz is all about this year.
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