The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

BREAKING NEWS: Whitney Houston, superstar of records, films, dies at 48 
Web Search by YAHOO!

Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > Austin category

Austin

February 10, 2012

A map of all the SXSW Interactive 2012 campuses

WEBsxswinteractivelocations.jpg

One of the biggest challenges of navigating South by Southwest Interactive last year was actual navigation: knowing where panels were being held and planning ahead to give yourself enough time to walk, bike or shuttle there.

Though the official SXSW site offers a list of the venues, you’ll find above a map the American-Statesman created. Click on it for a larger version and use it for reference this year. We’ll be linking to it often as the festival approaches and it will run in print as well the week of the festival.

How will you be getting around SXSWi? Let us know in the comments. We could really use the tips.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012

TEDxAustin to stream live online Saturday


Above: one of the best talks from TEDxAustin 2011, featuring Gilbert Tuhabonye.

TEDxAustin, a licensed conference of TED, returns for its third year on Saturday. The Austin Music Hall event is closed for registration, but if you want to see the programming, it’ll be available as a free live stream on Saturday on the TEDxAustin website. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. You can read more about the live stream here.

Last year’s event was held before an audience of about 550 and most of the talks were pretty inspiring. This year’s theme is “Beyond Measure” and as is TEDxAustin tradition, the speaker’s list is secret until the event happens.

We’ll be writing our thoughts on the event in a blog post Monday. If you attend, feel free to share your own thoughts (or links to your own blog post) in the comments.

Edited to add, Saturday morning: A full list of speakers has been posted.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet

February 9, 2012

10 conversation starters you can have handy for SXSW Interactive

jwj SXSW Interactive 0001.jpeg
Attendees at SXSW Interactive 2011. Photo by Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

South by Southwest Interactive — the gigantic tech culture festival that has gone from spring break for geeks to spring break for anyone who uses a smart phone or Twitter — is a month away.

Starting March 9, downtown will be transformed into the epicenter of Wi-Fi-draining devices with screens, entrepreneurs hoping to strike it Facebook-rich and old-school hippie-techies complaining about everyone else.

It’ll be fun!

If you plan to attend the fest or at least lurk around the edges of it, you may be wondering what people will be talking about. Contrary to pop-culture portrayals, the tech-savvy are pretty social, especially when there’s lots of alcohol and karaoke around. We’ve come up with a list of 10 conversation-starters.

1. “So, when do you think this whole tech bubble’s gonna burst?” Perhaps you’re not afraid to be blunt or spoil the party. A tech crash reminiscent of the dot-com bust is one of the greatest fears of many attendees. It’s also the topic of the panel “Internet Bubble the Sequel: 1999 All Over Again?” And there are panels about “The Power of Fear in Networked Publics” and whether social media is ruining the way we communicate. It turns out terror can be a real motivator for tech innovation!

2. “My mind is getting a great workout, but boy, could I go for some yoga and a 10k run after all this is over!” The myth of the sedentary, unhealthy geek is due for a Jillian Michaels-style working over. An abundance of panels focus on health and fitness, from “Fit Together: How Fitness Goes High Tech + Social” to a panel featuring rapper Paul Wall and Quincy Jones III called “Feel Rich: Health is the New Wealth.” Popular speaker Jane McGonigal will talk about her new fitness game “SuperBetter,” created as the result of a brain injury she suffered. And there’ll be daily yoga sessions at the fest. Namaste!

3. “After SOPA, geeks can change anything with a good web protest!” The battle over piracy legislation between tech companies and online advocates that erupted recently will be much-discussed, with panels such as “American Copyright: Will Government Go Too Far?,” “Why Doesn’t Congress Grok the Internet?” and “Content As a Means for Social Change.” featuring Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

4. “We need to get involved with some real-world protests, too!” One of the best panels I saw at 2011’s fest was about social media’s impact on the Arab Spring movement. There’ll be lots more panels on that topic, as well as sessions about stateside hot-button issues like, “Occupying Media: 24 Hour Protest People,” “Internet Power: After Cyber-Optimism and Pessimism” and the very timely “Stand with Planned Parenthood: A Crisis Response.”

5. “You know what’s gonna be big this year? Second-screen TV watching.” It’s never easy to predict what technology will have the most buzz at the fest, but there are enough panels around the trend of second, third, even fifth screens, that it’s worth keeping an eye on. “Second screen” could mean using a device with a screen (like an iPad or smart phone) while watching TV or having a screen in your car. Panels like “Integrating Brands into Social Television,” “3 Screen Minimum: Convergence of TV & Social Media” and “Why Your Car Will Be the 5th Screen in Your Life” will explore the trend.

6. “Did you see (name of celebrity) on that panel today?” It won’t be hard to spot stars at Interactive. Look for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon, Tom Colicchio and Andy Cohen on a panel about TV’s “Top Chef,” actor Rainn Wilson, filmmaker and podcaster Kevin Smith, Segway inventor Dean Kamen, director Morgan Spurlock, actress Lisa Kudrow, Gawker’s Nick Denton and food celebrity Anthony Bourdain.

7. “I sure am hungry. Any food events going on at this thing?” In addition to lots of panels related to food trucks, food quality and regional cuisine, there’s also a Bacon Takedown cooking contest, a Taco Experiment competition and food blogger meetups. Food writer Addie Broyles has the details on her blog Relish Austin.

8. “Hey, nice canvas bag! Who designed it?” This year’s SXSW Interactive goodie bag, given to all registrants, was designed by Yiying Lu, who created Twitter’s iconic “Fail Whale” graphic. It features a cartoon mouse holding a tablet and it’s absolutely adorable.

9. “So many emails and status updates! I am so overloaded and could use a break!” It’s not just you. Lots of people feel overwhelmed by the amount of data we’re exposed to every day. Panels like “The Cloud as Skynet: Conquering Digital Overload,” “Digital Detox: Revealing Life Unplugged” and “Tech Detox: Can You Survive a Day Without Technology?” will offer tips and commiseration.

10. “I wonder if techies will affect in the 2012 elections.” Politics isn’t always a huge topic at SXSW, but this year it’s everywhere, from panels about tech in government (“Do People Really Want Participatory Government?,” “The Human Cost of Failed Government Technology,” “Sunspots: The Promise and Pitfalls of Gov 2.0”) to panels addressing the presidential race (“How Social Media Imperils Political Parties,” “Big Data: Powering the Race for the White House” and “Socializing the Presidency: Digital Politics 2012,” among others).

Other things to talk about: The Interactive Hall of Fame award, presented to web design pioneer Jeffrey Zeldman, is new this year. The Interactive Awards will be hosted by comics Jenny Slate (“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On”) and Gabe Liedman. There’s a proliferation of panels about sports and sportswriting. The ScreenBurn video-gaming track of the conference has been rebooted and relocated to Palmer Events Center. You can job hunt at the official SXSW Tech Career Expo, watch start-ups compete at the Accelerator event and hang out at the new Startup Village area. If all else fails, you can whine about how many campuses there are for the fest (14) and how much walking you’ve doing to get from place to place.

Let’s hope the real-world conversations are as lively and interesting as the ones that’ll surely be happening online during SXSW Interactive.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012, Videogames

February 7, 2012

Microsoft Store coming to Austin, finally


Image via Microsoft Store site

As reported in today’s American-Statesman, Microsoft is finally bringing its retail store experience to Austin with a location at The Domain to be opened at some point in the future (most likely after South by Southwest).

It’s the second Texas location after the one in Houston at The Galleria.

We’ve been talking about what these stores might be like since 2009 when we wrote a (slightly snarky) piece on what the experience at these stores may be like. Bear in mind, this was in the Windows Vista era; things have improved considerably since Windows 7 came to be.

Will you be visiting the store once it opens?

Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Applications, Austin, Computers, Shopping

February 6, 2012

The Linkdown for Monday, Feb. 6

alt-bag-image.JPG
The new SXSW Interactive swag bag, designed by Yiying Lu (of Twitter Fail Whale fame). Photo by Shawn O’Keefe, courtesy SXSW Inc.

The Linkdown engaged in some rare business travel last week, but is now caught up enough to provide you with a carefully curated list of events, links and SXSW Interactive news. Hey, wait a minute… this is that list! What a coincidence!

Events:

Internet goodness:

SXSW-related

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2012, Videogames

A Force-ful recommendation for 'Old Republic'

Screenshot_2012-01-31_21_17_17_961910.jpg

In this week’s Digital Savant column (appearing in Monday’s Austin American-Statesman), I take a closer look at the gigantic, Austin-developed “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” a game that we’ve written about before a lot in this space.

In my review/impressions piece, I talk about my relative inexperience as a player of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMOs), but how much I’m enjoying the game anyway. (That’s a picture of my character, Maumouchowchow, a Jedi Consular, up at the top of this blog entry.) It’s been a while since I’ve been hooked on a game like this, and I give full credit to BioWare’s ability to make me care about this virtual world and the characters within it.

Have you been playing the game, too? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Videogames

January 31, 2012

Austin-developed 'Zynga Bingo,' still in closed beta, is already controversial

Zynga Bingo Friend Boost.jpg

“Zynga Bingo,” the first game to be released by the social gaming powerhouse’s Austin studio, has a lot riding on it. It will join the company’s long running “Zynga Poker” as part of a new franchise called “Zynga Casino.”

Members of the Austin team traveled to California to be at the company’s San Francisco’s headquarters for the launch of the game last week, when the game was released in closed beta to invitees for testing before it goes wide to the rest of the gaming world.

Like most of Zynga’s game, this Facebook title will allow players to interact with their online friends, boost up the game with power-ups and kill time in an easy-to-play, tough-to-master format.

But before the game has even gone into public release, it’s already attracting attention in ways Zynga can’t be enjoying. It has been accused by a company called Buffalo Studios of plagiarizing the design of a game called “Bingo Blitz.”

It’s the second time the company has been accused of aping someone else’s game design recently; another company called NimbleBit said that Zynga’s game “Tower Heights” bears quite a resemblance to that company’s “Tiny Tower.”

On Venturebeat today, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus fired back about the copycat accusations, saying that gaming companies like his typically build upon the successes of existing games, improving the formula to make better gaming experiences. Venturebeat also printed an email Pincus sent to Zynga employees about the controversy.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Videogames

January 27, 2012

The Linkdown for Friday, Jan. 27

The Linkdown was amused, but mostly disturbed, by the “Simpsons” episode where everybody crashed their cars because they were posting on SpringFace, a social network created by Lisa Simpsons (with help from Nelson and some computer geeks).

Watch that and then check out these important events, links and SXSW Interactive news:

Events:

Internet goodness:

SXSW-related

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2012, Videogames

January 23, 2012

Keeping your info secure in the wake of the Zappos.com breach

This week’s Digital Savant column in the Austin American-Statesman is about protecting your identity and knowing your options if your personal data is ever breached on a website or service you with which you do business. (And, in all likelihood, it’ll happen sooner or later.)

A recent hacking attack on Zappos.com brought the topic up again after a large number of attacks last year on a variety of entertainment, banking and government websites.

Austin has quite a few Internet security and ID theft-related companies and we spoke to two of them for the column.

You can read the full column, which ran in Monday’s newspaper, here.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

January 20, 2012

SOPA officially shelved... but what comes next?

So, this happened and in large part caused this to happen today. There’s nothing like a chorus of all the people with the loudest megaphones telling you you’re wrong to change your mind about something (or at least cause you to see the writing on the wall and retreat).

But, while technologists have flexed their muscle in proving they can block political change they find repugnant, the underlying issues haven’t been fixed. Media companies still are at their wits’ end over piracy, there are those in the government who want more control over the unruly Internet (they can’t imagine something more horrifying than a homegrown Wikileaks) and apart from the protests, which were more organized than is typical in the tech industry, no one has really set forth a reasonable solution that’s going to fix anything long-term.

The last thing I want is a more restrictive Internet, but let’s not pretend that piracy doesn’t exist and that many copyright holders (small content companies and independent artists, not just the major labels and studios) aren’t being robbed blind by those who feel entitled enough to take what they want, when they want, from the generous Internet. I wonder how many protesters this week looked around at scorched-earth hackers and other allies who appear to be in favor of no piracy restrictions (or copyright enforcement for that matter) and wondered, “Wait, do I really want those people on my side?”

Too often this week, I saw people fighting against SOPA without really understanding what SOPA and PIPA were about and refusing to acknowledge that perhaps, in some small way, there’s a problem that needs to be addressed somehow.

Being against the anti-piracy bills doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge that things aren’t quite right the way they are now and that a victory today won’t prevent more measures to come down the pike (perhaps in more subtle, harder to fight legislation).

The failure of SOPA, I think, has more to do with the almost cartoonish overreaching of organizations like the RIAA and of certain lawmakers than the underlying principles. SOPA and PIPA were very easy to paint as villainous because the MPAA and RIAA, as crusaders, have been historically tone-deaf as to the realities of the way people consume media in the digital age.

But it doesn’t mean they’re completely wrong or that they won’t gain some ground on these issues in the end. For the tech companies and pundits who preached so loudly in the fight this week, it’s not enough to win today. You’re going to have to help fix the problem, too.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

Richard Garriott space documentary opens in Austin today


Image credit: TMS

The documentary about Austin game developer and space traveler Richard Garriott is finally touching down. “Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott’s Road to the Stars” opens today at the Alamo South and there’ll be a special screening at 7 p.m. tonight with Garriott, director Mike Woolf and producer Brady DIal. (They’ll stick around for more screenings after that since the 7 p.m. show is sold out.)

The film will also play at Alamo Village starting Feb. 1 and Alamo Lake Creek starting Feb. 9.

The documentary follows Garriott’s $30 million guest to be a commercial space traveler.

Our film writer Matthew Odam has written an excellent piece for today’s American-Statesman about the film. You can check it out here.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Movies & DVDs, Videogames

January 19, 2012

The Linkdown for Thursday, Jan. 19

The Linkdown is enjoying the unseasonably warm weather by staying inside and keeping the air conditioner company. If you’re indoors, too, you should know about these events and web things:

Events:

Internet goodness:

SXSW-related

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012

January 10, 2012

Dell goes ultrabook with slim XPS 13 at Consumer Electronics Show

xpsside.jpg
Image courtesy Dell Inc.

Dell Inc. says that at the Consumer Electronics Show, being held now in Las Vegas, it really only has one major product it’s pushing.

That product is the XPS 13, a slim, nice-to-touch “Ultrabook” that weighs about three pounds and starts at $999.

So-called “Ultrabooks” which combine more computing power than netbooks, but in a slim profile, are hot items at CES this year, with at least 75 models based on Intel silicon expected to be introduced by various manufacturers.

Rather than bring out a slew of them, Dell said, in a pre-briefing with the American-Statesman last week, that it’s debuting just one, the XPS 13, which is aimed at creatives and professionals who still want some of the work-friendly features found in the company’s more business-centric laptops.

The laptop with the 13-inch screen (which the company says if stuffed into the kind of frame you’d find on a 12-inch laptop) is responsive, light and, based on a few minutes we played with it, attractive.

Is it as jaw-droppingly thin as Apple’s MacBook Air or as radical to the eye as Dell’s previous Adamo machines? It’s not.

But for a Dell laptop, it shows some real design smarts, from its attractive keyboard (which looks like something you’d find on a gaming laptop), to its carbon base, which the company says aids in cooling more than a full-aluminum body would.

It uses a solid-state drive, which is speedier than a traditional hard drive (but also limits you to 128 or 256 gigabytes of space. Dell says it’s got a battery life that lasts just under nine hours. The XPS 13 comes in several configurations starting at $999. You can get it with Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 processors. Unfortunately, the machine relies on integrated graphics (hard-core gamers need not apply) and memory appears to be limited to 4 gigabytes of RAM across the board.) On the plus side, it has a USB 3.0 port and a Mini Displayport jack, two features you don’t see on every laptop this size.

It also includes Intel’s Smart Connect technology, which allows it to sniff out Wi-Fi connections and automatically update information on the machine (say work calendars or email) even when the laptop is closed and asleep. And, Dell says, it includes IT-friendly security features that make it useful for employees who want a laptop that’s work-friendly.

Dell is introducing the laptop as this blog post goes up in a presentation with Intel.

Another image from Dell:

XPS 13 back.jpg

And two images I shot myself:

xps-131.jpeg

xps13-2.jpeg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Gadgets

January 5, 2012

The Linkdown for Thursday, Jan. 5

buffet.jpg

The Linkdown had a long, restful holiday vacation, but was haunted by visions of web pages unshared to the public, great links unseen, an apocalyptic vision of readers suffering from lack of entertaining reading material. It was horrible. There may have been three visiting ghosts and a turkey purchased by a diminutive child… a tiny… Tim Tebow? That’s where things get fuzzy. Anyhoo! Here are some things you should know about:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

January 2, 2012

Three new Austin tech items for 2012

In this week’s Digital Savant column, appearing in Monday’s Austin American-Statesman, we take a look at three new tech things coming out of Austin that are worth checking out in the New Year.

A new gadget called BiKN (pronounced “beacon”), produced by Austin’s Treehouse Labs, will be introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show next week.

The City of Austin has been beta testing the new design of its website and is still welcoming feedback from the public.

And Make Pixel Art is a website and apps that allow you to unleash your inner pixel artist and to share your creations with others.

The Digital Savant blog returns officially from vacation on Tuesday and the column continues in the paper next Monday.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Gadgets, Internet

December 26, 2011

A few tech predictions for 2012

This week’s Digital Savant column in the Austin American-Statesman is a look ahead to what we should expect in 2012. It’s just my best guesses, but I think we’ll see the importance of video game consoles diminish, Netflix make another pass at getting rid of its DVD-by-mail business (in favor of streaming), big TV moves from Apple (but perhaps not an actual TV set yet) and more.

Got your own predictions or thoughts? Post them here in the comments.

The Digital Savant blog will be on vacation until next week, but there’ll still be a new column in the paper on Monday, Jan. 2, in which we’ll be looking at three Austin-centric technology bits to get excited about in the new year.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

December 21, 2011

The Linkdown for Wednesday, Dec. 21

faceswap.jpg

The Linkdown is on vacation starting Friday and won’t be back until the scary apocalyptic year 2012. Have a safe and wonderful holiday. The following links are best viewed while soused on eggnog:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Gadgets, Internet, SXSW 2012, Videogames

Grande pushing impressive new TiVo box

TiVoGrande_front2_wremote_150dpi_rgb.jpg

Grande Communications, which serves areas including parts of Austin, parts of Dallas, San Marcos, Midland/Odessa, Corpus Christi and Waco, is dangling a tempting treat for TV fans who sign up with the service.

The company is offering a TiVo Premiere DVR capable of recording about 48 hours of HD programming for about an additional $3 a month for existing customers. Depending on the bundle customers opt for (they start at $69.99 a month for TV and Internet service and go up to $129 for TV, Internet and phone). Customers who don’t already have a DVR would pay an additional $12.95 a month. There’s no up-front cost for the box (typically, TiVo customers buy the box on their own and add it to their existing cable set-up) and some of the bundles for new service include the box and premiere service in the cost of the monthly “Double play” or “Triple play” package.

TiVo’s been around a long time and those of us who’ve used it and no longer have it have fond memories of the service. I purchased a DirecTV TiVo box ages ago until it was no longer supported by the satellite service. A new DirecTV TiVo box has just been introduced, but it apparently has some major limitations and lacks many of the connectivity features found in the TiVo Premiere. (This is me with a sad face.)

Grande’s version of TiVo lacks Netflix, Hulu and Blockbuster streaming, but it does include Pandora, Amazon video on demand and Live365.com in addition to Grande’s own video-on-demand programming, which is integrated into the TiVo software.

In fact, that’s one of the major selling points: searches for content on the Grande TiVo Premiere bring up not only regular cable programs, but web videos and VOD as well.

It includes TiVo features like remote recording (setting programs to record from a cell phone or website). It can export programs to an iPad, PC, Mac, iPhone or Sony PSP and makes suggestions based on your viewing habits, as TiVos have from the dawn of (DVR) time.

It’s impossible to judge what early glitches or quirks the box might have long-term, but in a 20-minute demo at Grande’s East Austin offices, it was clear that the TiVo box has sleek, beautiful menus and responded quickly to searches and recording requests. A “Discovery Bar” at the top of the main menu gives you a visual set of recommendations.

For those of us who either can’t get a proper restriction-free TiVo (if you’re on satellite) or who balk at buying a box and then paying $20 a month for TiVo’s service (on top of regular cable service), this deal might be enough to make a TiVo admirer jealous.

The company says it’s gotten strong response to the TiVo offer for the month that it’s been offered so far and that it sees the TiVo Premiere as a way to draw customers to its bundled offerings.

Is it enough to tempt you? TV lovers, let us know what you think in the comments.

grande_search_150dpi.jpg

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Austin, Internet, TV

December 20, 2011

'Star Wars: The Old Republic' launches

zabrak-004.jpg

New video games this week:

“Star Wars: The Old Republic.” — This long-in-development game from BioWare Austin finally launches as the biggest title ever developed locally. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game set thousands of years before the George Lucas films, but a few centuries after the well-received “Knights of the Old Republic” games. Players can choose to play as one of eight classes within the Galactic Republic or the Sith Empire. The game boasts more than 1,600 hours of voice-over dialogue that was cast and recorded by LucasArts and big plans for future expansions and new missions. The beta test of the game attracted good buzz and lots of players: about 750,000 people played. See austin360.com for an article about the game that ran in Saturday’s Life & Arts section. Rated T for Teen. $60-$150 for Standard, Digital Deluxe and Collector’s Editions, for Windows PCs.

Also out this week: “Trine 2” (downloadable for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), “Satazius” (PC), “Heavy Fire: Afghanistan: The Chosen Few 3D” (Nintendo 3DS), “Soccer Up!” (Nintendo Wii).

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

December 19, 2011

'Star Wars: The Old Republic' article: The Special Edition!


Character sketches for BioWare Austin’s massive online game “Star Wars: The Old Republic” which officially launches on Tuesday. Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez / AMERICAN-STATESMAN.

In every saga, there is some fat that needs to be trimmed.

Such was the case in Saturday’s lengthy Austin American-Statesman profile I wrote about the Austin development of “Star Wars: The Old Republic” the biggest game ever created in town. After visiting the studio, speaking to some of the creative team members, fans and players of the game and even a G4TV celebrity about the game, I had a good 20 pages of notes, most of which couldn’t make the final cut.

Here’s some of what was left out, a set of deleted scenes with tidbits that didn’t make it into the final piece:

  • There’ll be a launch event tonight (Monday) at Best Buy on 4970 U.S. Hwy 290 from 10 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Members of the creative team will be there signing limited edition prints.
  • One of the ideas for an MMO that was being tossed around by Electronic Arts back when “Old Republic” was conceived was for a game based on George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” books. Of course, this was long before the HBO series made that fantasy world a household name.
  • How much story is in “Old Republic?” Says John Posavatz, senior director of BioWare Austin’s business and studio operations, “40 man-years” worth of writing, about the equivalent of 60 novels.
  • BioWare Austin has its own set of servers for its internal work (which is backed up remotely), but the actual game servers are located in places including Virginia, California and overseas. There’s a significant support team based in Ireland.
  • The team is a big believe in practices like heat mapping and data mining, making changes to the game based not just on player feedback, but on trends they see in the game itself. (For instance: if people are having trouble navigating a certain area, BioWare can see that movement and track whether things need to be fixed or rebuilt.
  • A lot of the talent recruited for “Old Republic” came from Austin teams that had MMO experience (from companies like Sony Online Entertainment, NCSoft as well as from Southern Methodist University, which has a strong game development program called The Guildhall.
  • Creative director James Olen says you can’t look TOO far ahead in a game that hasn’t yet officially launched, but that there are plans about 2-3 years ahead for expansion packs and future content for the game.
  • Olen says that one of the challenges to recruiting programmers for such an ambitious piece of code is that some top talent doesn’t want to be a “Cog” in a large machine. “For a programmer, it’s a gigantic process. It’s a little bit scary,” he said, “But at least you own a piece of the product. You might own half an entire world that would be as big as an entire other game.”
  • Olen got a chance to stay at Skywalker Ranch and get a personal tour of a warehouse with props from the original “Star Wars” trilogy. George Lucas and Robert Redford happened to be having dinner there at the time. “We didn’t get to go near them, but it was cool to stay at a place where George was hanging out,” he said.
  • Rich Vogel of BioWare says that it took about nine months to work up concepts before deciding on a game in the “Knights of the Old Republic” universe. it took another year of negotiations with LucasArts to get the game moving. One of the central challenges, he said, was, “How are we going to put story in an MMO?”
  • The rise of this game means the end of “Star Wars: Galaxies,” the first attempt at a “Star Wars” MMO.

I hopped into the early access for the game last night and there were lots of full servers, which means the game so far is off to a good start (if waiting in a queue to get in doesn’t hurt your feelings too badly). Expect a big surge of players when the game officially goes live tomorrow and another big surge after Christmas.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

Does posting location info online lead to burglaries? Watch out


Dennis Farris, senior police officer at the Austin Police Department. Photo by Deborah Cannon / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

This week’s Digital Savant column is about whether it’s really true that posting your whereabouts (or your holiday travel plans) online can really put you at risk for crime. The short answer is: yes. Very much so.

But let’s not all freak out and go into complete radio silence. Though police suggest you knock it off with that nonsense, there are some precautions you can take to minimize your risk a bit.

You can read the full column here. Let us know in the comments if you’ve ever experienced crime you think was due to social network activity or if you’re worried it could happen to you or your loved ones.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

December 16, 2011

Preview: Behind the scenes of Austin-made 'Star Wars: The Old Republic'


Creative director James Olen and co-studio director Rich Vogel of BioWare Austin. Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Here’s an early peek at a story running in Saturday’s Austin American-Statesman. In the piece I wrote, we take a look at the making of “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” considered to be the biggest video game (in terms of budget and staff) ever produced in Austin.

The MMO had an early launch on Tuesday for those who pre-ordered the game and will launch officially next Tuesday the 20th.

I played the beta version of the game for a few weekends (probably no more than a few hours in total; I topped out as a Level 7 Sith Inquisitor) and was impressed with what I saw. I’ve only fully invested into a few MMOs (“World of Warcraft,” “Lord of the Rings Online”) and I found the game to be easy to grasp and full of lots of eye candy and very well-produced mini stories.

I’ll probably have more to say about it after the holidays once I’ve spent enough time with the full game. Let us know what you think of it or whether you plan to check it out in the comments.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

December 15, 2011

'Alamo Drafthouse' tops Google's Austin-area searches for 2011

Google today said it has launched its Zeitgeist site for 2011, revealing what some of the top searches were globally and by country.

Not surprisingly, searches like “Japan,” “Rebecca Black,” “Steve Jobs” and “Casey Anthony” ranked highly. More surprising: surges of searches for “Google +” (are you sure people weren’t just trying to do math?) and “Battlefield 3,” a video game that didn’t even draw as many players as “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.”

For Austin, Google let us know in an email that the top local searches for 2011 were as follows:

  1. 1. alamo drafthouse
  2. 2. kvue
  3. 3. kxan
  4. 4. austin community college
  5. 5. schlitterbahn

We imagine the Drafthouse searches may have had a little something to do with a viral video that got a lot of exposure this year. But what about “Schlitterbahn?” Speaking as a New Braunfels resident, I can only guess that somehow word got out that it’s the most awesome place in the world.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Austin, Internet

December 12, 2011

SXSW Interactive releases last set of panels for 2012

South by Southwest Interactive today released its final large-scale list of programming for the 2012 festival. About 295 panels are included in the blog post on the official site, including 14 new featured sessions with notables like Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, author and researcher Jane McGonigal, writer Steven Levy and Flickr founder Caterina Fake.

The festival typically adds a few last-minute sessions in the months leading up to the fest (including panels geared to world events), but this’ll be the last big set of panel announcements.

Separately, the festival also announced the long list of judges for its Accelerator event and last week announced the winners of the SXSW Interactive Scholarship.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012

Column: Austin's Vivogig helps pool concert photos

We get pitched a lot of local start-ups in the tech realm, some with ideas that are simply too inside-baseball (or business-to-business), others where the idea seems good, but the execution isn’t there and some that just don’t stand out from the crowd.

For this week’s Digital Savant column, we feature Vivogig, which is aimed at concertgoers, approaches the problem of “Photoscatter” in an interesting way, and which, at least in its early form, shows a nice design style. It’s a site and app that allows people to share photos (as well as emotions and tags) from a live event, primarily music concerts. The iOS app, which has been in testing for a few months, launches publicly in January, but you can participate on their site now. We like what we see so far.

We also talk a bit about the recent Gowalla news in the column and make mention of next week’s launch of “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” a massive Austin-developed game that I’m currently writing about for a piece that’ll run in the Statesman on Saturday.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

December 8, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, Dec. 8

UC1.jpg
“Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale,” a new game announced from Richard Garriott’s Portalarium game studio.

The Linkdown is trying to get some sort of holiday card thing going, but it seems like an awful lot of work. Can’t we just drink eggnog and throw out a few celebratory Tweets? No? All right, then. Here’s what you should be checking out (or attending):

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012, Videogames

December 5, 2011

Final SXSWi keynote speaker chosen: Code for America's Jennifer Pahlka

jenpahlka-courtesy-code-for-america.jpg

South by Southwest Interactive today announced its final keynote speaker for the 2012 festival: Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, will speak at 2 p.m., Tuesday March 13.

Code for America is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that “enlists the talent of the web industry into public service to use their skills to solve core problems facing our communities,” according to the organization’s website.

Pahlka definitely falls into SXSW Interactive’s ongoing interest in using technology for the greater good.

Pahlka joins previously announced keynote speakers Ray Kurzweil, cyber anthropologist Amber Case and humorist/writer Baratunde Thurston for the festival.

(Image courtesy SXSW and Code for America.)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012

Etiquette: how do you give the gift of a digital file?

AnnaPost_150.jpg
This week’s Digital Savant column in the Austin American-Statesman is about the art of gifting an intangible digital object like an MP3 music album, an ebook or a movie download. How exactly do you wrap such a thing and is it worth sending a paper card or is an email enough?

We asked a few people, I gave it some thought myself and we had an assist from etiquette expert Anna Post from the Emily Post Institute. You can read the entire column here. Leave a comment and let me know what you think is most appropriate for digital gift giving.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

It's official: Gowalla staffers going to Facebook

As Gary Dinges is reporting on statesman.com today and as confirmed by CEO Josh Williams in a blog post, Gowalla is being purchased by Facebook.

On Friday evening, a CNNMoney story citing an unnamed source broke the news.

It’s unclear how many staffers will move to California to join Facebook, but Gowalla as a stand-alone service will shut down sometime in January, according to Williams.

There’ll be more updates on this story on statesman.com an in tomorrow’s edition of the Austin American-Statesman.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

December 2, 2011

Reports: Facebook buying Austin's Gowalla

UPDATE 7:40 p.m. Friday — a spokeperson for Gowalla who works for the PR agency Allison & Partners replied by email to an information request: “Thanks for reaching out, however, we do not comment on rumors or speculation.”

Earlier story: CNNMoney is reporting that Austin-based Gowalla, which provides a location-based social media service, primarily on mobile devices, is being acquired by Facebook.

According to the article, most of Gowalla’s staff will move to Palo Alto, Calif., to help Facebook bolster its Timeline feature.

In September, Gowalla moved away from its focus on location check-ins (and endless comparisons to Foursquare) to emphasize social guides and its partnerships with companies like Disney, where it provided location services at Disney parks.

More details will we posted as we get them. The company has not yet confirmed the reports and has not yet responded to inquiries from the Austin American-Statesman.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

New Austin donation service Snoball wants you to, you know, make snowballs

snoballscreengrab.jpg

One thing Austin doesn’t lack is well-connected, tech-savvy do-gooders who want to user their technology skills to help others.

In social media, several startups have locally tried to tie philanthrophy with new platforms to make charitable giving easier. (It was even the subject of a South by Southwest Interactive panel this year.)

Joining Austin companies like Rally (formerly known as Piryx) and HelpAttack! is a new company launched Tuesday called Snoball.

john_ishot_final.jpg
What Snoball attempts to do is tie actions — both online and offline — to donations in an easy, mostly automated way. For instance, if you use the Foursquare or MapMyRun, you can set up so-called “Snoballs,” mini donation campaigns, based on how many times you check in to a location or how many miles you run.

Ideally, users would post about these Snoballs on Twitter, Facebook and other places and get others to help donate too, creating a snowball effect (hey, I just now got that! Clever!).

John Ludlow, chief strategy officer of Snoball, says that the company, which employs 14 workers, has been working hard to incorporate a large database of nonprofits and to use APIs (a way to connect to services like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare) to make Snoball offer a variety of ways to tie donations to actions.

Ludlow worked with the company’s chief executive Jeremy Kelley at the app company Phodder. He says the idea for Snoball came when his daughter was born six week premature and he saw the power of a non-profit like March of Dimes, which assisted his family.

“Money can do an awful lot,” Ludlow said, “we’re trying to get something that could be repeatable, fun, allow everyone to make donations.”

When a user starts a Snoball account, they’re given the option to choose from a database of 1.6 million non-profits and then to decide what action will trigger a donation. It could be a restaurant check-in, it could be activities that the Snoball creator keeps track of (like how many donuts they ate and felt guilty about) or easily trackable stats like, to use an example from Ludlow, the number of times Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo throws a touchdown pass.

A Snoball can be deleted (in case it turns into a financial avalanche) and can be made public or private. There’s no way currently to search for specific Snoballs, but you can search by user names if you know the person who created one.

The list of charities is large, but doesn’t really screen, rank or vet them; if you want to investigate how the charity uses donations or whether they’re a worthy cause, you’ll have to do that elsewhere. Charity Navigator, for instance, does this. Ludlow says the team has talked about this extensively and decided not to limit the options of entities available. “We’re in talks with other third parties to see what we can do. It’s very difficult to say what is vetted,” he said.

On the other hand, the site may add groups beyond nonprofits in the future, he said.

One other thing that seemed troubling at the outset is that the company is declining to name specific nonprofits it’s working with, even locally. Ludlow says the company is already getting lots of calls and that, “You’ll see some Austin action very soon.”

Looking at the site itself, some of charities featured most prominently (or as most popular) include Knowbility, Lake Conroe Lighthouse and Texas A&M Foundation. The company optimistically projects it will have 400,000 and 500,000 subscribers by the middle of 2012. According to an interview with the Austin Business Journal, the company says it currently has about 400.

(Photo of John Ludlow courtesy Snoball).

snoballarmynavy.jpg

snowballhomepage2.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

December 1, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, Dec. 1

DSCF0223.jpg
Photo by Brantley Essary, courtesy Bohemian Innovation studio.

The Linkdown refrained from blowing the entire bank account on Cyber Monday, but just barely. Yes, the economy is in the tank, but we love a good sale. Here’s some tech-related events and news stories you should know about:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

November 30, 2011

Get your gripe on: city looking for website feedback

Hey, remember back in the day when the City of Austin decided it was going to redesign its website and people kind of lost their mind?

How far we’ve come! Now the city is ready to preview its redesigned website in public so that people can lose their minds in person, instead of behind the relative anonymity of the Internet. This is progress!

As reported on the City and County Beat blog by Marty Toohey, the city has scheduled several meetings to show off the new design to the public. The next one happens Thursday, 6 p.m., at 811 Barton Springs Road.

There are two more sessions after that, Monday at 6 p.m. and Wednesday at 9 a.m.

According to the city’s announcement, this will be a chance for people to see and offer feedback on the website before anybody else can see it. As such, we don’t even get so much as a screen grab on the website.

The webpage says:

The AustinGO team and more than 30 City departments have worked hard for the last six months, creating a cutting edge open source content management system and recreating and reimagining the Website resources Austinites use to access City services and initiatives. Participants will be given a list of tasks to complete on the site and data will be gathered on how they use the site. They will have free time to explore the site and participate in the debugging process. They can also share ideas for improvements and expansions for the site in the future… Austin’s new website is cool - but you can help make it even cooler.

A few nagging questions:

  • Given that this is, you know, a website meant for the Internet, why not do an online preview/testing session? Is there an experience that sounds less inviting than a room full of people complaining that they can’t find that thing on the webpage that was there before but now it’s not there and WHY ISN’T IT THERE ANYMORE, SOMEBODY HELP ME FIND THIS THING!
  • Perhaps they could even do a webinar? I mean, come on. Believe it or not, we have the technology.
  • Doesn’t two and a half years seem like way too long for a website redesign? I know this is par for the course for government work, but still.

Was this brave experiment in open source a success, or will there need to be more effort devoted to cleaning up new problems? If you go to one of the sessions, let us know what you think in the comments.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

November 28, 2011

The year in Austin gaming and how studios deal with trolls

M5X226_03DC_9.jpg
Artist Kale Menges works on concept art at Spacetime Studios, the company behind “Pocket Legends” and “Star Legends: The Blackstar Chronicles.” Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / Austin American-Statesman

In today’s Austin American-Statesman, you’ll find a new Digital Savant column recounting the year of Austin game development. There are a lot of big games on the horizon (none bigger than EA/BioWare’s “Star Wars: The Old Republic”), but there’s also been lots of movement in mobile gaming, social gaming and smaller-scale online role playing.

There’s also a Tech Monday column in today’s paper about how local game studios who produce online games deal with trolls and griefers. You might recall last month we published a story about trolling. This is an offshoot of that story and we were lucky enough to get some insight from Sony Online Entertainment, KingsIsle Entertainment and Spacetime for the piece.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Videogames

November 21, 2011

SXSWi announces Ray Kurzweil as 2012 keynote speaker

SIN_headshot_highres.jpg

South by Southwest Interactive has added another keynote speaker to its March 2012 festival lineup. This time, it’s Ray Kurzweil, inventor and author of “The Singularity is Near,” a book about the future of artificial intelligence.

The talk, called, “Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit: A Keynote Conversation with Ray Kurzweil and Lev Grossman” will be an interview conducted by grossman, a senior writer for TIME. The keynote news was broken this morning by that publication in an online story at Techland.

The keynote happens 2 p.m. Monday, March 12.

Kurzweil joins other SXSW Interactive keynote speakers previously announced including cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and humorist Baratunde Thurston.

(Photo by Helene DeLillo. Courtesy of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. and SXSW Interactive.)

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012

Holiday tech gift guide keeps it local this year

Dell-XPS14z.jpg
Dell’s XPS 14z laptop, part of our holiday tech gift guide. Image courtesy Dell, Inc.

This year’s American-Statesman holiday tech gift guide ran in yesterday’s edition and for this installment, we chose to focus on gifts appropriate for Central Texans. Among the list of gift ideas we present you’ll find a set of custom studio earbuds for musicians and audiophiles, Dell’s latest sleek laptop, a few fitness gadgets and much more.

There was no Digital Savant column in print this week; the column returns next week.

Got other ideas for tech gifts that locals would love? Post them in the comments.

(Below: the Jawbone Up fitness wristband and FanVision, a device that gives you real-time stats and replays at sporting events.)

jawbone-up.jpg

fanvision2.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Gadgets

November 18, 2011

Trey Ratcliff's 'Stuck on Earth' iPad travel app goes live

stuckonearth.jpg
From the “Stuck on Earth” iPad app. Photo by Jim Nix.

A few months ago, I interviewed world-famous HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff for a story about how artists manage their fan bases online. During our chat, he showed me an in-development version of an iPad app he was working on that would combine crowdsourced photograhy with a location-aware travel app. Even at that stage, the app, called “Stuck on Earth,” looked gorgeous and unique, something that combines Ratcliff’s style of hyper-real visuals with the utility of a device as an iPad as your travel buddy.

M5X125_6616_9.jpg
The app went live this week and it’s free in the app store. Ratcliff only asks that people pass the word along about it. (He’s generous with his art as long as people give proper credit where it’s due.)

The extremely user-friendly app starts out asking your name and whether you’re a “Dreamer,” “Explorer,” “Photographer” or all three. You are then presented with a world map you can zoom into to find photos shot around the world. Given Ratcliff lives in Austin, it should be no surprise that there’s a lot of local content.

We spoke to Ratcliff over email about the app, which includes among its features a list of 50 secret Austin spots.

American-Statesman: You’re a frequent world traveler, but for people who perhaps aren’t as worldly or who don’t have a large community of friends around the world, what does this app offer?
Trey Ratcliff: “Stuck on Earth” is a great resource, whether you travel to distant lands or not. Chances are there are tons of great places just within a short drive of your home — and those would be fun to discover with the app. And just maybe, you might like to plan that “someday” trip to Italy or even to the northeast to see the leaves turn in Autumn. This app will help you figure out the best places to go.

Also, you don’t need to have a large network of friends around the world — the app pulls from millions of photographers around the world and shows you the best of the best for each location.

How long did it take to develop and what were the biggest challenges getting it up and running?
This took about four months after we re-started development. We made a mistake with another local development company here that did a lousy job. Since this app was so important to me, we took it in house and started over again to make it perfect. So, this is one of the biggest challenges — finding a good team to get the thing built!

Are there emerging tablet features you hope to incorporate in future versions of “Stuck on Earth?” Will there be a smartphone version as well as the Android one you have planned?
Since tablets and smartphones all have built-in GPS, we can add all sorts of clever ways for people to interact with their devices and their environment at the same time. Our plans are to take this technology to all devices — Android, iPhone, and the web.

You can find more info on the app at stuckonearthapp.com.

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin

November 17, 2011

Updates: SXSW Interactive continues slow roll toward March 2012 gigantitude


Jeffrey Zeldman. Photo by Tony Quartarolo, via SXSW.com

South by Southwest Interactive 2012 news continues to trickle out like chocolate from a … chocolate fountain? Here are some of the highlights:

Got all that? See you in March.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012

November 16, 2011

Two cat videos: copyright cat-astrophe, coincidence or feline flattery?

As reported today in the Austin Movie Blog by Matthew Odam, a video from a Canadian ad firm is raising question because of its similarity to an Austin-produced viral video called “Kittywood Studios.”

Check out the blog entry to see the two videos and decide for yourself whether there’s some shenanigans going on here or if it’s merely a case of a idea too good not to happen twice.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

Steve Jobs documentary 'The Lost Interview' playing Austin this weekend

SteveJobs_Screenshot.jpg
A still from “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview.”

If you’d like to check out the short documentary “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” on the big screen, you’ll have a chance this weekend. Violet Crown Cinema will be running the 70-minute film at 11 a.m. Friday through Sunday. The limited run happens in about two dozen cities.

Written and directed by tech journalist Robert X. Cringely, the interview was done in 1995 for Cringely’s TV show “Triumph of the Nerds” and resurfaced after Steve Jobs’s death. It took place when Jobs was at NeXT and before he returned to take charge at Apple, Inc.

You can check out the trailer for the documentary below.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Movies & DVDs

November 15, 2011

The Linkdown for Tuesday, Nov. 15

The Linkdown already has pre-hunger-pangs for next week’s Thanksgiving feast. It’s not too early, right?

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

November 9, 2011

The Linkdown for Wednesday, Nov. 9

legouniverse.jpg

The Linkdown has returned from vacation with a bounty of pre-Thanksgiving tasty treats. Sure, you can’t eat them, but they’re still nourishing if you like news and local tech events.

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012, Videogames

November 7, 2011

A plumbing of Marios invading Austin today

2781197.jpg
Marios in San Diego, Calif., on Friday, Nov. 4. Photo by Casey Rogers / Associated Press for Nintendo of America.

Hide your mushrooms! (No, seriously, hide them. The police might be watching.)

A group of people dressed as Nintendo’s famous plumber, Mario, are running loose in downtown Austin today and are converging upon Republic Square Park right now (Monday mid-day), according to Nintendo.

The event is to promote a new Nintendo 3DS game, “Super Mario 3D Land.”

Seen any Marios today? Let us know in the comments and post a link to any photos you took. We’ll post some here later as well.

Edited to add: in addition to the ones in the comments, here’s two Twitter photos posted of the Marios:

From @David7118

From @luria.

Edited to add: Here’s a photo from American-Statesman photographer Laura Skelding. In the photo below, dozens of Marios dressed in Tanooki ears and tails convened in Republic Square Park on Monday afternoon to advertise for the upcoming launch of “Super Mario 3D Land.” Ivan McCormick, 6, came out with his mother, Debbie McCormick, to witness the spectacle. And he was prepared with his own Mario costume. “He’s a little obsessed, he wears it every day,” Debbie McCormick said.

1.jpg

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Videogames

Product reviews and online infidelity counseling


Rick Reynolds, founder and president of Austin-based Affair Recovery. Photo by Omar L. Gallaga / American-Statesman

Thanks for your patience, Digital Savant readers. I’m back from vacation and, while there were still blog posts running last week in my absence, here’s two other stories you might have missed.

In today’s American-Statesman Digital Savant column, we rounded up three tech product reviews that have previously appeared on the blog. You can read the column, which includes reviews of “Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster,” the Austin-developed MiCommand Control It All Remote and the ThinkGeek iCade Arcade Cabinet for iPad right here.

You can also find the original reviews for “Monster,” “Control It All” and iCade in these blog entries.

Also running recently was a “Coffee With…” feature from Thursday’s newspaper about Affair Recovery, an Austin-based service that counsels couples online who are dealing with infidelity in their relationship.

The Linkdown, the video games release list and other regular blog coverage will continue this week on Digital Savant.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

November 2, 2011

Review: MiCommand Control It All Remote

M5X207_3EEA_9.jpeg

Back in June, we wrote about Austin-based MiCommand Inc.’s Control It All Remote an app and transceiver that turn your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a remote control. The app is free to download, but the hardware, which is required, costs $99. Over the last few months, the app has been revised multiple times as I’ve been testing it out.

The good news is that when it’s working, “Control It All Remote” is a neat bit of engineering. It communicates wirelessly via Bluetooth with your iOS device (an Android version is said to be in the works). It can control your TV, Roku streaming video box, A/V receiver and pretty much whatever other electronics you throw at it. It’s got a deep catalog of remote control codes. While the app favors simplicity and clean design over complex macros and programming options like some universal remotes, it adds to the mix touch gestures. Instead of looking for volume buttons, you can rotate your fingers like a knob. Instead of tapping buttons to change channels, you can swipe across the screen without taking eyes off the TV.

And a recent update added Bluetooth music streaming called “AIrDoc”; if the transceiver is connected to some speakers or an A/V receiver, you can send your mobile audio to it.

It’s quite good… when everything’s working right. In practice, though, I had issues getting the transceiver we tested to work even once with a new iPhone 4S, even with the latest version of the app software.

With an iPad, however, things worked fine most of the time, but there were a few times when the app mysteriously lost its connection to the transceiver and wouldn’t do anything.

And there’s the issue of those wires: the transceiver, which is about the size of a once-inch-tall coaster, must be plugged in to a power outlet at all times; there’s no option to use batteries. And the music streaming wiring makes a pretty unconvincing case for “wireless” streaming. That makes for some difficulty deciding where to put the thing. It has to be far enough from the home theater devices to be able to send an IR signal (like a regular line-of-sight remote control), but must be close enough to be plugged in and for the music wire to reach the stereo. I was never able to find a comfortable place to put the transceiver that met all the requirements without making mess of wires across my living room.

MiCommand’s creation has slick software built for the masses, but the hardware still seems stuck in early-adopter purgatory.

M5X208_2832_9.jpeg

micommand.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Gadgets, TV

November 1, 2011

Huffington out for SXSW 2012, Lorre still a possibility

The South by Southwest Interactive festival say it’s no longer expecting to host Arianna Huffington, who had been listed as a participant in a Featured Session on the SXSW website.

The Huffington Post founder had been expected to speak on the topic of “Content as a Means for Social Change,” but fest organizers now say that Huffington has cancelled.

Also missing from the original list is “Two and a Half Men” creator Chuck Lorre, who was scheduled to do a book reading. The fest says it’s still working to secure Lorre as a speaker for the festival.

Other participants who are still listed in featured presentations include Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, Stephen Wolfram and Anthony Bourdain in addition to previously announced keynote speakers Baratunde Thurston and Amber Case.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012

October 31, 2011

Are we all just online trolls?


Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

This week’s Digital Savant column is actually a lead article in the Life & Arts section of today’s American-Statesman, part of our continuing series about online identity.

In the article, I wonder whether the online trolls, bullies and griefers out there aren’t so much “out there” as they might be parts of our own personalities on the Internet. We’ve all probably said or done things online we regret and certainly being online gives us a protective layer against dealing with people as we might in “real life.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story or the series. Drop a line in the comments and let us know if you’ve ever been an Internet troll (or if you’ve been the victim of online harassment or just bad vibes).

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

October 27, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, October 27

M5X085_1B83_9.jpg
In this March 7, 1974 photo provided by the Stanford news Service, John McCarthy, professor of computer science, works at the artificial intelligence lab in Stanford, Calif. Associated Press / Stanford News Service, by Chuck Painter

The Linkdown will be on vacation next week, so blog posts around here will be sporadic. Luckily, we’ve spoken to the Internet to make sure there will be no tech news or new events you need to know about until the week of Nov. 8. We’ve got connections.

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

October 24, 2011

Huffington, Lorre, Bourdain Denton among SXSW Interactive speakers announced Monday

M5X173_3306_9.jpg
Internet blogging titans Arianna Huffington and Nick Denton, traveling food personality Anthony Bourdain and “Two and a Half Men” creator Chuck Lorre were among the big names announced Monday in a massive info dump of about 600 panels and speaker sessions posted by South by Southwest Interactive for the 2012 festival.

In addition to previously announced keynote speakers Amber Case and Baratunde Thurston, the festival has now posted the majority of the programming for next year’s fest, with some room to add a few more before its self-imposed deadline of Dec. 19.

M5X161_5CA6_9.jpg
Huffington, Denton and Lorre will all be part of featured sessions at the Austin Convention Center. Lorre’s will be a book reading and Q&A while Huffington of the Huffington Post will speak on “Content as a Means for Social Change.” Gawker Media’s Nick Denton will talk about “The Mediocrity of Comment” in an on-stage interview. Bourdain will discuss “Digital Debauchery,” according to the SXSW website.

Other notable featured speakers include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former TV producer Ben Silverman (now with Electus), breakout keynote speaker from 2011 Seth Priebatsch of the location-based gaming company SCVNGR, Frank Warren of PostSecret.com, author Bruce Sterling, Ken Park of Spotify and Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram | Alpha.

The festival says there’ll be 13 hotels and meeting spaces as part of the campuses where programming will take place. New for this year is a “Startup Village” area at the Downtown Hilton Austin. Also reflecting the start-up emphasis at the whole festival this year, SXSWedu announced separately last week that there’ll be a LAUNCHedu event similar to SXSW’s Accelerator program to highlight entrepreneurism in education. SXSWedu takes place March 6-8, before the main Interactive festival.

SXSW Interactive runs March 9-13.

The sessions are categorized by the following topics and locations:

Keynotes and Featured Sessions (at the Austin Convention Center)
Better Tomorrow (Convention Center)
Book Readings (Convention Center)
Branding and Marketing (at the Stephen F. Austin hotel)
Convergence (Convention Center)
Design and Development (Convention Center)
Emerging (Downtown Hilton Austin)
Future of Work (Courtyard by Marriott)
Government and Global Issues (AT&T Conference Center)
Health and Education (AT&T Conference Center)
Journalism and Online Content (Sheraton)
Latin America (Hilton Garden Inn)
Lifestyles and Sports (location TBA)
ScreenBurn and Gaming (location TBA)
Social Networks (Omni)
Startup Village (Downtown Hilton Austin)
Workshops (Radisson)

Last year, the festival had tremendous growth and the spread-apart campus format proved to be a logistical challenge for the fest and for attendees.

Edited at 3 p.m. to add programming topics and locations.

Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012

October 20, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, Oct. 20


Above: the Lytro light-sensing camera. Photo via Lytro.com.

The Linkdown is dropping knowledge like a bad habit. Except that sort of thing is a good habit! Think about it.

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

October 17, 2011

'Cyborg anthropologist' Amber Case announced as second SXSWi keynote speaker

amber-case-kris-krug_OG.jpg

Amber Case, a frequent speaker at South by Southwest Interactive in past years, has been named a keynote speaker for the 2012 event.

Case, a Portland, Ore.-based anthropologist and user interface designer, is the co-founder of Geoloqi, a location-based platform company, and founder of CyborgCamp, which deals with humans and technology.

She’s also been named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Tech.

What’s “Cyborg Anthropology?” “A way of understanding how we live as technosocially connected citizens in the modern era. Our cell phones, cars and laptops have turned us into cyborgs. What does it mean to extend the body into hyperspace? What are the implications to privacy, information and the formation of identity? Now that we have a second self, how do we protect it?” she says on her website.

In July, the festival announced the first SXSWi keynote for 2012, humorist and writer Baratunde Thurston.

Interactive runs March 9-13.

(Photo by Kris Krug, provided by SXSW)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2012

Aunt Bertha offers easier way to find need-based services

This week’s Digital Savant column in the Austin American-Statesman is about Aunt Bertha, an Austin-created website that helps people in Texas find need-based assistance services like food pantries, government assistance and educational programs.

Founded by Erine Gray, a programmer and former government worker, it aims to make finding these services — which are often spread across the web on sites that aren’t always too easy to navigate — easier and also making it easier to apply for different services at the same time, or to at least see which ones you can apply for.

This morning, I got an email from a representative of a state service, complaining that Aunt Bertha is duplicating efforts on the web that already exist. After taking a look at that government-funded site, I’m even more convinced there’s a need for something like Aunt Bertha. I found the state site difficult to navigate with all kinds of web errors happening when I did even the most basic searches. That site also didn’t offer the friendly vibe or the meat-and-potatoes “how much do I qualify for?” features of Aunt Bertha.

As Gray says in the article, the site seems even more relevant given the Occupy Wall Street / Occupy Austin movements.

(Photo by Ralph Barrera / Austin American-Statesman)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

October 13, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, Oct. 13

blackberry.jpg
BlackBerry outage! But it’s probably over by now! Maybe! Don’t panic!

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

(Photo by Paul Sakuma, Associated Press.)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

'Wizard 101' and 'DC Universe Online' among GDC Online award winners

Wednesday night, video games including Austin-developed “Wizard 101” and “DC Universe Online” were among the winners of the second-annual Game Developers Choice Awards at the GDC Online conference, held at the Austin Convention Center.

“Rift” and “Minecraft’ were also big winners at the awards, as was “Everquest,” which was honored with an induction to the GDC Online Hall of Fame. Austin game designer Richard Garriott introduced the award for the long-running online multiplayer franchise.

“DC Universe Online,” developed by Sony Online Entertainment won for Best Online Visual Arts and “Wizard 101,” from KingsIsle Entertainment, was the Audience Award winner.

Other winners included Playdom’s “Gardens of Time” for Best Social Network Game and “Spiral Knights” from Three Rings Design and Sega for Best Online Game Design. “Minecraft,” one of the most popular current indie games, won for Best Community Relations and Best Live Game.

You can watch the one-hour ceremony here (it was live-streamed online) and check out a complete write-up of the awards from Gamasutra, including a list of all the winners.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Videogames

October 12, 2011

Austin's Twisted Pixel acquired by Microsoft Studios

MicrosoftStudios - Phil Spencer.jpg
In case you missed it this morning in the Austin American-Statesman, Austin’s video game studio Twisted Pixel has been acquired by Microsoft Studios.

Twisted Pixel, known for games like “The Gunstringer” (above) and ” ‘Splosion Man” has been making well-received games for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service. “Gunstringer” was its first game for the Xbox 360 Kinect and it received good reviews and praise from Microsoft.

Some info that didn’t make it into the story by press time:

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who was briefed in advance on the deal said that Twisted Pixel’s games aren’t the top sellers on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service, but that they probably pull in $10 to $15 million in sales on budgets of about $1 million, making them highly profitable.

TPG - Mike Wilford.jpg
“These guys are creative,” Pachter said, “I know (Spencer) and he is really stoked about this acquisition. He wants something that really differentiates (Xbox Live Arcade) from (Sony’s PlayStation Network).”

“Gunstringer,” Pachter said, may have been the biggest factor in attracting Microsoft’s attention. “I think that really won Microsoft over that these guys can take any piece of technology and work it into a good game.”

Pachter said he doubts Microsoft will exert any creative restraints on the team. “Nothing will change for them except they’re going to be getting paychecks from Microsoft,” he said.

(Mug shots above: Microsoft Studios corporate vice president Phil Spencer and Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford.)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

October 11, 2011

Author Neal Stephenson talks 'REAMDE,' elliptical gaming

Neal Stephenson.jpg
Author Neal Stephenson, whose globetrotting new novel “REAMDE” deals in part with online gaming gold farmers and game developers, spoke in a keynote interview at the Game Developers Conference Online in Austin. He spoke about his video gaming habits (he’s a casual gamer who plays pretty mainstream stuff) and the narrative challenges that game designers and writers working in the industry face.

Stephenson has a fascinating and the topic seems ripe given that he’s the author of cyberpunk mainstays like “Crytonomicon” and “Snow Crash.” But the conversation, led by games journalist Geoff Keighley, was bone-dry and more than half of it was spent in a fruitless discussion about games that Stephenson plays or admires.

The packed ballroom full of game industry professionals couldn’t have been too enthralled by Stephenson’s middle-of-the-road gaming tastes. He plays a lot of “Halo 3” while exercising on an elliptical machine for 45 minutes at a time and plays games like “Left 4 Dead” and “Portal 2” in part because he lives in Seattle and has access to local gaming heroes Valve Software.

A discussion about the open-ended customization of a game like “Fallout 3” and the more rigid storyline of “Red Dead Redemption” was discussed, but Stephenson seemed out of his element talking about the latest and greatest games that developers regularly reference.

The talk picked up energy when Stephenson discussed his writing projects, including “The Mongoliad,” an online serialized work with seven authors that, it was announced Tuesday, will be published in paper form by Amazon.com. Stephenson said there’s also a demo version of a game he and his collaborators are trying to develop that ties in with that story. “It’s in its embryonic form so far,” he said.

He says he’s been interested in how traditional writers are working in the games industry and dealing with narrative challenges. For his part, he says working as an embedded games writer doesn’t really suit his lifestyle. “It’s hard to get me to do anything that causes me to leave my house and deal with other human beings,” he joked.

When the subject turned to his new novel “REAMDE” (the title is a play on computer documentation “README” files), he said he combine the phenomenon of gold farming with the idea of a writer of computer viruses. For the gold farming bits, he traveled to China and had online conversations with gold farmers, but he said they often wanted to talk about NBA basketball instead.

Of gold farming, he said, “It’s one of those things that makes you want to give up writing science fiction because you could never come up with something that weird.”

Stephenson is optimistic about the future of gaming and narrative. He believes that the audience for good games will get more demanding, forcing game developers to make better content. “(The audience knows) when they’re being respected and when they’re being disrespected. The audience is going to force the industry to respect them,” he said.

When asked about the Metaverse and many aspects of the Internet (and, seemingly, Facebook) that he foretold in “Snow Crash,” Stephenson was more reticent.

“I feel oddly detached from the Metaverse and ‘Snow Crash.’ I’m aware that I wrote about it a long time ago,” Stephenson said, “I get asked questions in this vein all the time and I never know what to say about it.”

The real Internet, it seems, is intruding on his work. Stephenson said he wrote “REAMDE” on a laptop and found himself constantly distracted by email and websites. He said he plans to try to find ways of being more focused when he writes his next book.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

October 10, 2011

Atari founder details future of video games, discusses former employee Steve Jobs

Nolan_Bushnell.jpg
The founder of Atari Corp. spoke Monday not only about video games past, but about where the industry will be far in the future… 2065, to be exact.

As part of a packed morning session at the Game Developers Conference Online, Bushnell pointed to existing trends in games and, while it’s admirable to look so far ahead, he acknowledged that some of these ideas will probably be in gamers hands (and pockets) in the next two to five years.

For instance, he doesn’t believe that there’ll be a high-profile new generation of game consoles after the current Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have run their course because of high costs and plateauing graphics technology.

What about Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U?

“Nintendo’s pretty crappy,” he joked, adding that the company’s next home console offering doesn’t count.

Did we mention that Bushnell, a game industry veteran, is pretty loose and off the cuff in front of an audience?

Some of the future trends Bushnell pointed out include a further move to gaming on mobile devices like iPhones and Android handsets with improved network performance and more elaborate location data available to games via vector space aided by gyroscopes. Once the X, Y and Z vectors for a player’s location are available, especially indoors, he said, game designers will be able to create more virtual reality-like games.

He also pointed to “Near-Field Communication,” more gesture-based controls and haptics as other emerging gaming trends. He also believes that content is getting better; he predicted we’d see the gaming equivalent of “Seinfeld” in the next five years.

The presentation may have been an offshoot of a novel he’s been working on that he hopes to release by December. He promises it’ll feature cool gaming ideas and “Hot chicks.” The novel writing, he said, was a way to challenge himself to try something new, which he said is vital for creative people.

“I couldn’t wait to wake up every morning to see what happened,” he said of writing the book.

He also advised up-and-coming game designers to attend conferences for subjects they’re unfamiliar with (a carpeting expo in Vegas, for instance) to expose themselves to new ideas. He says the idea for Chuck E. Cheese’s came when he attended a manufacturing convention. Even then, an idea won’t get you all the way to fame and riches.

“Everybody who’s had a shower has had a good idea,” Bushnell said, “the question is what do you do when you get out of the shower.”

Bushnell still works with Atari to update vintage games for a new generation of gamers (he joked that the company’s reputation is still “Even better than EA, ha ha ha”) and is also working in education with Speed To Learn.

During the question-and-answer portion of the presentation, Bushnell was asked about former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died last week. Jobs worked for Bushnell when he was 19.

“Steve was a very, very smart and difficult person,” Bushnell said. “Steve has always been a good friend. A great visionary. Actually a really nice man.”

Bushnell brought on Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak to program the video game “Breakout,” which ended up being a huge hit. When there was a company problem in Germany, Jobs offered to fly there and asked if he could then fly to India, where he would end up spending several months. “Steve wanted to go to India to spend some time with an Indian swami of some sort,” Bushnell said. “Atari actually paid his way to India,” he said.

When Jobs returned, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer and offered Bushnell the change to buy into a third of the company for $50,000.

“To which I brilliantly said no,” Bushnell laughed, “I’ve actually regretted that a few times.”

(Photo via Creative Commons by “pescatello” / Mike Lewis.)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Videogames

Retro computers on film; GDC Online starts today

M5X010_4ACA_9.jpg
Still from the upcoming film “Computer Chess.” Photo provided by Computer Chess LLC.

Two things you might want to check out from today’s Austin American-Statesman. The first is this week’s Digital Savant column, which actually expanded into a Life & Arts centerpiece. The story is about an upcoming Austin-shot film called “Computer Chess,” which used vintage early-’80s-era computers from local hobbyists and from the great Austin Goodwill Computer Works Museum.

If you’ve never been to the Museum, now would be a great time to check it out. If you want to remember Steve Jobs, there’s even an exhibit of old Apple systems on display.

M5X009_084C_9.jpg
Photo by Laura Skelding / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Also in today’s paper is a Tech Monday column I wrote about the Game Developers Conference Online, which starts today and runs through Thursday. I’ll be posting a few blog entries from the event over the next few days.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Videogames

October 7, 2011

The Linkdown for Friday, Oct. 7

jobsmemorial.jpg
Photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press

The Linkdown is still thinking about the legacy of Steve Jobs and trying avoid people online using his death as a way to gripe about an error they once got on their iPod or to praise their Android or PC products.

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Steve Jobs related

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Internet

October 3, 2011

Upcoming symposium on children's books to bring the digital

Snuggle_Mountain_A_1148483c.jpg
Above: “Snuggle Mountain” an app developed by Austin children’s author Lindsey Lane, illustrator Melissa Iwai and PicPocket Books

This week’s Digital Savant column in the Austin American-Statesman is about an upcoming symposium, “Storytelling in the Digital Age,” an all-day event Saturday at St. Edward’s University.

One major topic of conversation at the symposium, which is being put on by the Austin chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, will be ways for authors, illustrators and publishers to turn new and existing works into ebooks and apps.

I’ve spent the last year looking intensively at iPad apps aimed at children in reviews I’ve done for Kirkus Reviews and there’s been an incredible amount of innovation (also, some disappointing efforts) on this front. But my belief that this is the future of publishing, or at least a significant par of it, remains unchanged. There’s lots of potential here and the more creative artists and publishers are already pushing the envelope.

You can read the full column here.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

September 30, 2011

BlogathonATX returns for round three on Saturday

Jacqueline.jpg
Photos provided by Ilene Haddad

For the third time, Austin bloggers and web tech experts will gather to write, learn and share at BlogathonATX.

Graphic designer Ilene Haddad organized the first one last August and held a second one in January.

This time out, the event has doubled in size. 100 tickets have been sold and the 12-hour event, to be held Saturday, will focus on creating and improving blogs. It’ll be a mix of discussion sessions, tech support, food and a dinner/happy hour in the evening.

While the event is sold out, it’s still possible to participate by reading blog entries posted on the Blogathon site or to check out the live stream (see info below).

Haddad, who again expects not to get much writing done herself (she jokes that she continues to defeat the event’s original purpose, which was to produce blog entries), she’s excited that the blog event’s success hasn’t been a fluke and that it continues to grow.

This Blogathon is being held at Link Coworking on W. Anderson Lane to accommodate more people.

Four discussion leaders will be on hand to answer questions and get attendees talking: Talmadge Boyd will discuss video blogging, Amanda Quraishi will talk about content development, Summer Huggins will lead a talk on business versus personal blogging and another talk will be led by a tech support crew to answer questions about web design, development and mobile apps.

Austin Free-Net is a partner on the event.

And good news for anyone interested who didn’t get tickets: the event will be live-streamed on Ustream. You can check out the stream there or just view it in the embedded video below when it airs.

IMG_9122.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

September 29, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, Sept. 29

TiVo_Austin_9-29-11.jpg

The Linkdown was having some Internet publishing problems earlier today, which explains why this is up so late in the day. Enjoy!

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Gadgets, Internet, Videogames

September 28, 2011

Digital wallets, big touch screens and more fiber: the future of vending machines

klw-vending.jpg
Photo by Kelly West, AMERICAN-STATESMAN

I have seen the future of vending machines.

Don’t worry. They still have Famous Amos cookies and Mountain Dew.

On Tuesday, a large contingent from the National Automatic Merchandising Association (NAMA) set up shop, literally, on 2nd Street and Congress Ave with about a dozen displays of vending machines, automated snack shops and payment centers they say will be deployed in the next few years wherever you go for snacks.

Among the innovations were large, touch-screen Coca-Cola machines that allow you to play games, rotate images of beverages to see the calorie count and other details, automated employee-less snack markets similar to self-checkout stations at grocery store, a cotton candy vending machine that spins for you as you wait and new ways to pay with a digital wallet (namely, your cell phone).

“The Gratitude Tour” gave passersby free drinks, candy bars and other snacks and other goods available in all the machines.

LyNae Schleyer, senior director of education at NAMA, said that federal regulations to go into effect next year and new technology are changing the way vending machines will operate. They’ll offer new ways to advertise to customers while also making more nutrition and calorie information available.

A few of the innovations on display included:

avanti-markets-unattended-retail-display.jpeg

  • Unattended kiosks — Two vendors, Avanti Markets and Company Kitchen showed off mini marketplaces that companies could offer a wide variety of fresh fruit, snacks, drinks and meals without a clerk. Each has a kiosk where you’d pay for your items and, since these would typically be placed in workplaces, security would be handled with video cameras or employee IDs. The kiosks look like ATM machines and work like a grocery store self check-out allowing you to scan the UPC codes of the items to make your purchases.
  • REALLY fresh coffee — Seattle’s Best showed off a “Hot Drink Center” that contains coffee beans and grinds them in the machine for a variety of coffee drinks.
  • Big screen bottles — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Kraft Foods all showed off vending machines with large touch screens. They allow ads to be blasted at customers, unfortunately, but also offer games, product information, rewards, promotions that can be changed throughout a day (like buy-one-get-one-free breakfast item in the morning, for instance). They are also online, allowing inventory, buying trends and other information to go back to the company.
  • Cotton candy from a machine — Vend Ever’s Cotton Candy Factory spins fresh cotton candy at $3 a pop. Unfortunately, power generators at the tour were causing the machine to keep rebooting when we tried it.
  • More nutritional information and healthy choices — Vending machines aren’t associated with good health, but NAMA members say they’re doing more labeling of “Fit Pick” products. Canteen’s 2bU machine will offer local, organic, vegan, bluten-free and kosher products with information on those items available on an LCD screen.
  • Recycling — PepsiCo’s Dream Machine allows for smart recycling by scanning UPC codes and in states where deposits are available can print out a slip for a customer for that or can apply deposit money to a card they can use later to purchase other items.
  • More payment options — A large chunk of the future of vending machines is going from coins and crinkly dollars to digital wallets and credit. On display were machines that can allow you to pay with large bills and give you back bills as change (instead of just coins). There were also credit/debit card-capable machines, machines that can accept payment from key fobs, ID cards or other microchip-carrying items and, of course, mobile wallets. Google’s big push into this area is part of a movement to allow customers to pay with their phone. NFC (near-field communication) and radio frequency payments were shown off and are expected to be huge in the vending machine market.

More photos of what to expect:

coca-cola-interactive-vender.jpeg

cokemachine.jpg

Canteen-2bU-machine-e1309966983471.jpeg

pepsi-dream-machine.jpeg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Shopping

September 26, 2011

Fantastic Arcade honors indie games with Starcade awards

arcadeaward.jpg
Photo provided by Fantastic Arcade

Last night, the folks at Fantastic Fest’s Fantastic Arcade awarded eight games at a Starcade awards ceremony.

The games awarded represent some of the best indie games presented at this year’s Arcade event, culled from about 100 submissions.

The winners were:

Best in Show: “Faraway” by Little—Eyes.

Audience Choice Award: “Fez” by Polytron.

Most Punished for Lack of Ninjas Award: “Radical Fishing” by Vlambeer.

The Bionic Commando Award for Grappling Hook Excellence Award: “Capsized” by AlienTrap.

The “You got 2D in my 3D, or maybe 3D in my 2D” Award: “Fez” by Polytron.

The Mandlebrot Award: “Fract” by Phosfiend Systems.

The Most Recent Use of Japanese Tradition by Westerners Award: “Skulls of the Shogun” by Haunted Temple Studios.

The Implied Cephalopod Intercourse Award: “Octodad” by Team Octodad

The Teach the Controversy Award: “Jesus vs. Dinosaurs” by Martin Jonasson, Petri Purho

You can check out more info and videos of all the Spotlight games here. And the gaming blog Joystiq has posted a photo gallery of images from Fantastic Arcade. We’ve got our own gallery of party pics from the opening night party at Fantastic Fest.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

September 24, 2011

Online identity: who are you online?

In Saturday’s edition of the Austin American-Statesman, you’ll find this story, a slice-of-life on whether people believe they act the same online as they do offline. (The video footage edited into the piece above was the source of many of the quotes used in the story.)

This is part of a continuing series of articles dealing with online identity.

Here are a few of the others we’ve run in the last few months:

In July, we wrote about online reputation and the many places online where pieces of our identity can be found.

It was followed by a piece about CLOUD, Inc., an Austin-based nonprofit trying to create a framework for transmitting identity information online.

Last month, we wrote about how being online is shaping the identity of teenagers and how many middle school-aged children experiment with their sense of self on the web or using social media.

Got ideas or feedback? Post it in the comments or email me.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

September 22, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, Sept. 22

The Linkdown is busy and overwhelmed today, but never too busy to feed you the nurturing IV drip of Internet reading material.

Here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012

September 20, 2011

Digital Savant Podcast #6: Michelle Greer

This week on the Digital Savant podcast, we talk to Michelle Greer, who was the first winner of the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards in 2009 and who, sadly, is leaving the Austin area to work for a San Francisco tech company.

In the podcast, we discuss her new gig working for a cloud computing company, her thoughts on leaving the Austin tech scene (which sometimes can seem a little boosterish) and the role of women in tech.

M5X00205_9.jpgOn this subject in particular, Michelle Greer has written and spoken eloquently about the things she’s seen and heard and in the podcast, she says that companies like IBM are making the right moves by dealing with sexual harassment and removing barriers allowing women to advance in their fields.

“These stories are complicated… there’s a lot of things that come into this,” Greer said. She said she believes that a key way to get more women in tech, particularly in computer science, is to make STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields more attractive to middle school-aged girls and to stop living in denial about the way women are treated in some tech circles.

Even being one or only one or two women at a tech company where the corporate culture is skewed toward the interests of men can be uncomfortable. “I don’t think a lot of times men realize what it feels like to be kind of an outsider in this boys’ club even though you feel like you worked really hard to get here. I don’t know the answer. I really wish I knew the answer,” she said.

You can now subscribe to the Digital Savant podcast on iTunes, or click below for MP3 or AAC (podcast-formatted) versions of this week’s episode.

Listen to Digital Savant Podcast #6 (AAC/iTunes format)

Listen to Digital Savant Podcast #6 (MP3 format)

Show notes:

What’s in the podcast:

0:06 — Introduction.
0:25 — Introducing Michelle Greer.
1:30 — Leaving for San Francisco.
2:15 — What’s Heroku?
8:25 — Thoughts on the Austin tech scene.
18:15 — Women in tech discussion.
27:22 — Wrapping things up.

Michelle Greer photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, American-Statesman.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Podcasts, SXSW, SXSW 2011

September 19, 2011

Fantastic Arcade's second year to bring free indie gaming to the masses

arcade2010.jpg
Organizers prepare for 2010’s Fantastic Arcade in this file photo. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman.

The organizers of Fantastic Arcade, a four-day Austin event focused on independent video games, say that this year’s edition won’t stray too far from the formula that made last year’s debut a success.

Running alongside the successful film festival Fantastic Fest, the 2010 Arcade was an ambitious gathering that mixed live game demos, panels, karaoke events, video-game tournaments and even a raucous screening of “machinima” short films created with video game graphics tools.

The venues didn’t hurt. A cavernlike room at The Highball filled with game stations that felt like any gamer’s dream den, and screening rooms at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar next door gave the fest an electric party vibe. For the 2011 fest, which starts on Thursday, there’ll be a whole new set of carefully curated games to play and a few new events to attract gamers as well as walk-through traffic from the film fest. It’ll also be free this year, compared with $60 for a four-day pass at the 2010 event.

Mike Plante, a veteran of film festivals like Sundance who is lead curator, says last year’s Arcade attracted about 1,500 attendees. “For a brand-new event, the audience was strong and excited, which made it even more fun,” Plante said. “We want Fantastic Arcade to be a vibrant video-game experience in Austin that crosses over with genre film, and last year felt right.”

Last year, Microsoft’s Xbox Live service was featured prominently with lots of demo stations. This year, Sony and its PlayStation Network, which has suffered a rough year of hacking attacks, will be the presenting sponsor, providing game kiosks, prizes and special events. “Starhawk,” a high-profile PlayStation 3 game being developed by Austin’s LightBox Interactive, will be available to play in a tournament at the opening day happy hour, starting 5 p.m. Thursday evening.

As with the 2010 event, this year’s lineup of 20 games includes some that have already attracted great reviews and notoriety, including “Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP” and “Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.” But there are also games you’re unlikely to see at GameStop, like time-traveling theology twister “Jesus vs. Dinosaurs” and “Deep Sea,” an audio-only game that requires a sensory-deprivation mask to play. “Deep Sea” was called “the scariest game ever” earlier this year by the gaming blog Joystiq.

Monsters, aliens, sex and blood are featured prominently in some of the games, a reminder that Arcade has a sensibility and vibe similar to the film fest’s. “The games have some sort of genre element - sci-fi, horror, acid trips,” Plante says. “I’m still working to get more crossover between the film and game worlds. The video-game scene right now reminds me of all the excitement of the indie film scene in the early ’90s.”

In addition to industry panels featuring game designers presenting “Director’s Commentary” sessions on their work, there’ll be daily happy hours and game tournaments. New to this year’s fest: a Yearbook Nerd Photo Contest. Attendees are being asked to send in their most awkward photos from their childhood or teen years for prizes.

Fantastic Arcade

When: Opening event 6 p.m. Thursday with Sony-sponsored happy hour. Arcade games open Thursday through Sunday, starting 11 a.m. every day
Where: The Highball, 1142 S. Lamar Blvd., and Alamo South Lamar, 1120 S. Lamar Blvd.
Cost: Free, under 18 need to be accompanied by a parent
Info: fantasticfest.com/arcade, twitter.com/fantasticarcade, facebook.com/fantasticarcade

Below: images from Fantastic Arcade games “Octodad,” “Deep Sea” and “Capsized,” courtesy of the festival.

M5X216_0AFF_9.jpg

M5X217_2929_9.jpg

M5X219_0F87_9.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin

Austin-developed 'DC Universe' going free-to-play in October

dcunierse.jpg

“DC Universe Online,” the high-profile massively multiplayer game developed in Austin by Sony Online Entertainment, is going free-to-play. The game, which launched in January for Windows PCs and the Sony PlayStation 3. Sony did not give a specific date for when the switch will happen, announcing it would start in “late October.”

The game got mixed-to-good reviews from gaming press, but it suffered problems on the console gaming side when Sony’s PlayStation Network was down for about a month, keeping gamers locked out of the online game.

The company declined a request for information about how many subscribers the game currently has.

In addition to the free gameplay, the game will offer a “Premium” and “Legendary” paid monthly service for $5 and $15, respectively. Here’s how Sony describes the tiers:

Free: New players will now have access to the current gameplay in DC Universe Online (including Gotham City, Metropolis, and all current raids and alerts), with the ability to create two characters, join a league and many other benefits. Free level players will be able to purchase downloadable game packs/updates, additional character slots, powers and more through microtransactions.

Premium: Any player who has spent at least $5 (including former paid subscribers and new players who have purchased $5 of in-game items) will qualify for the Premium access level. Premium level players will have more benefits available to them than the Free level player, including additional character slots, additional inventory slots, and higher cash limits. Downloadable adventure packs, additional character slots, and more can be purchased in-game.

Legendary: Maximum features and benefits are included at this level. Loaded with enhanced additional features, Legendary access will be available for a $14.99 monthly fee and includes all DLC packs at no cost, more than 15 character slots, more than 80 inventory slots, the ability to form unrestricted-sized leagues, and many other benefits.

Updated 11:48 a.m. to add information about Sony declining to reveal the number of subscribers for the game.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

September 18, 2011

Tech at Austin City Limits Fest

In the above video, we take a look at some of the technology on display backstage and in the Dell Lounge from Dell Inc. and AMD at Austin City Limits Fest as well as the Phantom camera, which can shoot a crazy amount of frames per second, which can then be stretched out from a four-second video.

Thanks to the Statesman’s Tina Phan for the video edit.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Gadgets

September 16, 2011

ACL Fest to offer more live video streaming this year with Dell, AMD and YouTube


From left, Erik Horn of Arts+Labor, Daniel Gibbs of C3 Presents, and David Clifton and Jason DeVos of Dell look over the Dell workstations on Wednesday that will be used to power webcasts at the ACL Festival. Though some headliners are missing from the current online schedule, C3 said it will be trying until the very last minute to add them. Photo by Ralph Barrera / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

In case you missed the story in today’s Austin American-Statesman, Dell, AMD, YouTube and C3 Productions have partnered to bring more live video streaming than ever from this year’s Austin City Limits Festival.

Two channels will offer 8 hours of video per day with live performances as well as behind-the-scenes and other edited video, all produced on site by a crew of about 160. Five video editors will be working on Dell workstations powered by AMD silicon.

You can find the video stream at YouTube.com/ACLFestival as well as a schedule of acts who will be featured.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

September 15, 2011

SXSWedu site launches; Startup Village announced for Interactive

Two bits of news hit this week on the South by Southwester Interactive front.

First, the official site for the big education-themed conference SXSWedu has gone live. The event, which takes place March 6-8, will be at the Austin Hilton and has its own PanelPicker process, which is currently underway. The keynote speaker should excite even those who don’t plan to attend: It’s LeVar Burton. More info on SXSWedu here.

The other big news, especially for entrepreneurs, is that a six-day Startup Village will be held during the festival from March 9-15, with its own programming and, presumably, the Accelerator event. You can find out more about it here.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW 2012

September 13, 2011

Austin-developed 'Gunstringer' leads new video games this week

gunstringer3.jpg

New video games this week:

“The Gunstringer” — Austin game studio Twisted Pixel unleashed its latest blast — an Xbox Kinect game that mixes Old West gunplay with puppeteering and platforming. The game has been getting good buzz and looks different than anything that’s been put out so far for Microsoft’s motion-control device. Rated T for Teen. $40, for Xbox 360 Kinect.

Also out his week: “NHL 12” (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3), “God of War: Origins Collection” (PS3), “White Knight Chronicles II” (PS3), “Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad” (Windows PC), “Bit.Trip Saga” (Nintendo 3DS), “Bit.Trip Complete” (Nintendo Wii), “Nicktoons MLB” (Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS), “Supremacy MMA” (Xbox 360, PS3), “Call of Juarez: The Cartel” (PC), “Balloon POP 2” (3DS), “Hidden Expedition 5: The Uncharted Island” (PC), “Penguins of Madagascar: Dr. Blowhole Returns Again!” (Xbox 360 Kinect, PS3, DS, Wii uDraw), “Deca Sports Extreme” (3DS), “Treasures of Mystery Island 3 Pack” (PC), “Pucca Power Up” (DS), “Puzzler Mind Gym 3D” (3DS), “Thor: God of Thunder” (3DS), “Escape the Emerald Star” (PC, Mac), “Chuck E Cheese’s Party Games 2” (Wii, DS), “Girls Only” (DS), “Rise of Immortals” (PC), “Radiant Silvergun” (downloadable for Xbox 360), “Renegade Ops” (downloadable for PS3), “BloodRayne Betrayal” (downloadable for PS3), “Hard Reset” (PC).

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Shopping, Videogames

September 1, 2011

Statesman reader blogs no longer available

In one of two significant changes to the Statesman.com and Austin360 websites today, reader blogs, which allowed anyone to start their own blog on the Statesman site, have been permanently disabled.

The reason for the change is twofold: first, the Statesman, Austin360 and several of the larger newspapers owned by Cox Media Group are transitioning to a new content management system that will no longer support reader blogs.

The other reason is that the American-Statesman has ended its business relationship with Pluck (which is now owned by Demand Media), which for years has worked with the newspaper on features like reader blogs and commenting. That business arrangement ended Aug. 31 and also means that comments on stories on both sites (not including staff blogs) have also been disabled. Story comments are expected to come back under the new content system by late this year, at the earliest. A post about the site commenting change produced 174 reader comments.

The reader blogs, said Zach Ryall, the Statesman’s Internet Managing Editor, still had some active users who regularly posted, but the numbers were small and they received very little online traffic.

Staffers at Pluck/Demand Media I spoke to over email and by phone said that staff blogs aren’t generally the most active reader-submitted features on the sites of its newspaper clients — those are typically comments, reviews and photo submissions. However, “It wouldn’t be accurate to characterize blogs as less popular than these other forms of participation. Blog posts do occur less frequently than the other three, but that is a reflection of the level of effort involved, not popularity per se,” said Don Roedner, marketing manager of Demand Media Social Solutions, in an email.

There are still newspapers (San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate and Boston Globe’s Boston.com were two places they specifically cited) that are doing well by reader blogs and have done a good job nurturing a small, but highly active group of bloggers.

Based on its own data, Roedner wrote, “We see no overall, industry-wide decline in reader blog participation.”

Joy Mayer, Director of Community Outreach at the Columbia Missourian, who just spent a year doing research as a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on how newspapers reach out to their communities, said that maintaining reader blogs is not an easy task. (Disclosure: Mayer is a friend and former college classmate of mine.)

“The short answer is that blog networks take a heckuva lot of work. The more time staff put into them, the most robust they tend to be,” she wrote in an email. “When blog posts also have a content connection to the site (like with TBD), they tend to be more robust because there’s more incentive and attention paid. There are other interesting experience, like in Seattle, of newsrooms partnering with existing blogs on specific coverage. (A big project on homelessness comes to mind from the last year.)”

Ryall said that in the case of the Statesman reader blogs, traffic was low and the number of active reader-bloggers was lower than it had been several years ago. For some time, the blogs were prominently displayed on the Statesman home page.

According to Statesman blog data from Demand Media, about 25 reader blogs contributed an average about about five posts a month over the last few months. Statesman social media editor Maira Garcia said in a note to readers that anyone with a reader blog who has moved on to another blogging service can have a link added to an index when that part of the new website is built out by emailing the information to readerblogs@statesman.com.

Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Austin, Internet

Review: Time Warner Cable's Road Runner Wideband service

twcaustinspeedtest-blogversion.jpg

Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test.jpg
Time Warner’s own speed test and the one at speedtest.net had different ideas of the speed of Road Runner Wideband.

Before we get to the review, a bit of breaking news we just got from Time Warner Cable. Road Runner Extreme and Standard customers are about to get a speed boost. The company says Internet service speeds are being raised from 7 Mbps download / 512 Kbps upload to 10 Mbps download / 1 Mbps for Standard customers and from 20 Mbps download / 2 Mbps upload to 30 Mbps download / 5 Mbps upload for Road Runner Extreme customers at no additional cost. The changes have already gone into effect.

The company says that there’s no capping catch: the new speeds are still provided with no usage capping/broadband metering. Wideband service also has no usage limits.

Something to think about as you read our Wideband review below:

I’ve been a customer of Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Internet service since the late ’90s and, even on the mid-tier Standard service I’ve been on, one complaint I’ve rarely had is speed. Downloads have typically been solid, video games and even HD video streaming has worked fine for me and the price has stayed consistent (about $50 a month without any other TWC services bundled in).

In July, Time Warner introduced “Wideband” Internet in the Austin area, which promises speeds of up to 50 Mbps, more than twice as fast as the service I was getting. Time Warner installed the service in my New Braunfels home for a trial, and while the installation was quick and professional, the first week with Wideband was rocky. The new cable modem that was installed, a Ubee DDW3611, doubles as a wireless router, creating its own WiFi network. What the technicians didn’t tell me during the installation was that the router creates its own settings for the network. They did give me a network password that allowed me to use the new WiFi, which was actually faster than my single-band WiFi-N router’s network.

One of those settings, “Enable flood control,” was turned on. Until I figured out what was going on, I spent a week wondering why the network would suddenly slow to a crawl or become unavailable when I tried to multitask on the web, streaming music and opening up RSS feeds at the same time. The router thought that flurry of Internet activity was a hacking attack and began cutting off outside connections, a problem I never had with my previous service.

Once that option was disabled, things got back to normal. Download speeds, according to several speed tests I did were consistently on the 35-50 Mbps range, according to Time Warner’s speed test website and other independent speed test sites I used. (Not surprisingly, TWC’s speedtest reported consistently higher speeds than other speed tests did.)

To be honest, I only noticed the speed difference when downloading large files or with multiple people in the house streaming movies or music. Slow web sites are still slow if the logjam is on the other end of that connection and your computer’s processing power, memory and place in the network are still going to be big factors in the speeds you get, no matter the download speeds. In a home with an older WiFi network, devices that aren’t connected by wires aren’t going to see huge advantages in the increased Internet speeds.

Even in those instances, there were still hiccups. My wife’s more sensitive secure line to work was sometimes interrupted when we were both online at the same time. Calling the support line at Time Warner revealed that both times it happened, there were network interruptions happening in our area. (One of those times, we were told there were “Packet loss issues” in our hood). On at least a half dozen occasions in a month and a half, the modem had to be completely restarted for us to continue using the Internet.

These instances were infrequent but troubling given that I rarely had problems with the regular Road Runner service.

Where I did notice a huge difference, though, was in upload speeds. My previous upload speeds were about .5 Mbps, so slow that uploading large files frequently bogged down the entire home network. With Wideband, I got upload speeds that were a significant improvement. A set of three 50-megabyte files that used to take about 25 minutes to upload to Dropbox.com now took less than five minutes. I don’t know if that’s a testament to Wideband’s great upload speeds or an indictment of the ridiculously slow upload speeds on Road Runner’s lower-speed tiers.

Wideband costs $99 a month (or $4 more if you don’t have other Time Warner Cable services). For artists and video producers who need to upload large files or small businesses with several employees online at the same time, it may be worth the expense. But for home users with typical Internet needs, it may be overkill. Upgrading your WiFi network, making sure your computers aren’t too slow to take advantage of Internet speeds and looking into a less pricey tier of service (somewhere in the $40-$60 range) might better fit your needs, especially given the new Road Runner speeds for Extreme and Standard tiers we listed at the top of this review.

Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Austin, Internet

August 31, 2011

The Linkdown for Wednesday, Aug. 31

evernote-meetup.jpg
Evernote will host a meet-up Wednesday night. Here, Rich Warwick, who’ll head up the Austin office, shows off their software. Photo by Laura Skelding / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Linkdown will be on vacation next week, but is confident that you can handle yourself and be a good Internet citizen for a four-day Labor Day week.

In the meantime, here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Shopping, Videogames

August 29, 2011

'Stocking is the New Planking': made in Austin (as if you couldn't tell)

stocking1.jpg

About a week and a half ago, we linked to a new Tumblr blog, Stocking is the New Planking, which at the time only had one image (the one above), but the idea, even then, was rock-solid for meme glory. Take stock photos from services like iStockphoto and recreate them in real life, demystifying the sometimes bizarre (and often creepy) lack of humanity in these photo libraries that many designers and artists rely on for their work.

It turns out that the site was actually created by two Austin user-interface designers at Projekt202, an Austin interactive studio.

What’s surprising is that those creators, Dennis Van Huffel and Jamie Graham, had the idea, started the Tumblr and started spreading across the Internet all on that Thursday.

Van Huffel says he was standing behind Graham as she was hunting through stock photo catalogs for a project. When Graham complained, “They’re not believable. They’re all so cheesy,” Van Huffel said, “Maybe we should do our own.”

The photo they spotted featured a man with brown hair a woman with black hair. “None of this was thought through very much,” Van Huffel said, “Someone snapped a picture with the iPhone and we send it around to our colleagues.”

Co-workers requested their own “stocking” photos and soon the Tumblr began to gain traction as staffers sent the site out to their friends and posting it on social media sites. (I believe I first saw it on Google+, posted by one of their friends.)

Van Huffel says that they wouldn’t have gotten as much work done on the site if the founders of Projekt202 hadn’t gotten behind the project and encouraged the designers to pursue the idea. “It’s been fun. It reflects our company culture,” he said.

Graham says that they’ve been able to balance the photo shoots with their regular client work. “Our employer’s been generous,” she aid, “we don’t have to be sneaky about it.”

The pair say that since they’ve opened up the site for submissions from readers, they’ve gotten dozens of submissions (they had gotten 40 on Friday, the day we spoke by phone) and Stocking is the New Planking has been mentioned on Gizmodo, Buzzfeed and on the blog for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” among other places.

The designers have been careful with user submissions, refusing to post anything offensive and asking submitters to use stock photos that are inexpensive enough for the site to foot the bill on usage rights.

Visually, the site provides gags with the juxtaposition of airbrushed, carefully composed images for sale and the real-life equivalents. Without belaboring the point, though, Van Huffel and Graham say there are some deeper ideas at work, from post modernism to notions of identity, even if that wasn’t the original intent.

“We’ve heard people saying things like it’s the difference between expectations and reality, what people ideally look like and what they really look like,” Graham said.

Below: Vah Huffel and Graham get “Stocked” (all photos courtesy Stocking is the New Planking):

stocking2.jpg

stocking3.jpg

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

Evernote, on a hiring spree, is coming to Austin

evernote.jpg
Rich Warwick, Evernote vice president and general manager, Austin products, stands at a Rudy’s Country Store & Bar-B-Q where he and CEO Phil Libin used to eat when they both worked at Austin’s Vignette Corp. in the early 2000s. He’ll be heading up the Austin Evernote office. Photo by Laura Skelding / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

News we broke in today’s Austin American-Statesman: Mountain View, Calif.,-based Evernote Corp. is opening its first studio office, choosing Austin as the first site for what looks like a big hiring spree. Evernote is hiring at least a dozen employees by the end of year; the company has plans to hire 500 new employees worldwide in the next few years and as many as half of those could be the Austin studio, the company’s chief executive officer Phil Libin said in an interview with the American-Statesman.

The company’s popular software (they have about 11 million users) allows users to store jotted-down notes, audio, photos, web clips and other data into notebooks that can be accessed from practically any desktop or mobile Internet device. The company just acquired photo editing/sharing software Skitch two weeks ago and will be working on new versions of that at the Austin studio, among other Software projects.

They’ll be holding a meet-up 7 to 10 p.m. Wednesday at the W. Austin Hotel for users and developers. CEO Phil Libin plans to attend. Libin blogged about the Austin office opening today on the Evernote website.

evernote2.jpg

Also in today’s Statesman is an expanded, more detailed version of a Digital Savant column about beekeeper and YouTube sensation McCartney Taylor. There’s also a photo gallery that we had a really fun time shooting (it helps when you get to taste fresh honey off the comb).

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet

August 26, 2011

Beekeeping, YouTube videos and you

bee2.jpeg
Photo by Omar L. Gallaga / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

(Note: a more detailed version of this story will run as a Digital Savant column in Monday’s Austin American-Statesman. We’ll also be running a photo gallery online. Edited to add: the story and photo gallery are live!)

Amateur beekeepers have swarmed to YouTube looking for information on trapping their own hives and being good apiary stewards, and many of them have found the videos that Austin engineer McCartney Taylor shoots and edits himself, often as he wears the beekeeping suit he says makes him look like “White Darth Vader.”

Taylor, the youthful-looking 41-year-old who is owner of Blackbeard Data Service, LLC, got interested in beekeeping after a meteorite expedition to East Africa. He came back home determined to apply his electrical and petroleum engineering degrees to the ancient art of beekeeping. It turns out it’s tough to improve on thousands of years of practice.

“I keep thinking I can improve things and then (the bees) punish me. All the things they put in the books are there for a reason. You can’t really do anything new,” Taylor said.

Taylor’s instructional videos, like the amusing, introductory “Want to be a beekeeper?” and more advanced lessons on pest removal and swarm trapping, are shot on a cheap Kodak Zi8 video camera with a tripod and external microphone and edited later on free, open-source Linux software. He’s modified the camera to add lenses, muffle wind noise and to make the camera suitable for travel.

Taylor’s videos have earned thousands of views from beekeepers (and fans of bees) starved for good online video content. In addition to how-to videos, Taylor has also found a large audience for videos detailing hive removals, from, say, abandoned homes or basements. While he tries to keep his videos short, hive-removal fans want lots of footage, especially when the combs are large as 6 or 8 feet tall.

bee.JPG
Photo by Laura Skelding /
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
The beekeeping videos have gotten the attention of YouTube itself, which in April nominated Taylor as one of its “On the Rise” online filmmakers. There’s also now a book version of some of the YouTube videos: “Swarm Traps and Bait Hives.”

For anyone else who has a hobby or passion that doesn’t involve winged worker insects, Taylor has plenty of YouTube advice. If you want to share videos you shoot with an audience and even make a little money with YouTube’s Partner Program (in which the company shares revenue from ads that play with videos), there’s plenty you can do to improve what you upload:

Use a tripod — Sure, a lot of what’s on YouTube is shaky cell-phone-shot footage, but good videos keep it still. Even a cheap $20 tripod will vastly improve your video quality. “You can’t have it be shaky. Tripod is everything,” Taylor said.

Pay attention to your sound quality — If your video camera supports it, use an external microphone. Even a cheap one will vastly improve the audio. “Sound is more important than video,” Taylor said, “Sounds is three-fourths of a good video. People will accept a bad video if it has good sound.”

Get to the point, fast — “In the first eight seconds, people are going to go see if you’re worth watching,” Taylor said. Don’t waste time introducing yourself up front. Instead show your viewers quickly that you’ve got something interesting to share. And keep videos short. Two to three minutes is plenty. “Cut to the point, show them a lot of bees, show them something useful, then end it.”

Have a theme — Your YouTube channel should focus on a single subject or kind of video, at least until you’ve built a large enough audience to branch out. “If there’s no focus, people won’t want to subscribe,” Taylor said.

Learn from the pros — If you’re really serious about producing good videos, there are plenty of books, classes and online tutorials. There are also free events like VideoCamp Austin, which Taylor has attended several times. It’s one of the places he learned a lot when he started, he says: “They had a great amount of information for people at my level.”

Listen to feedback — Some YouTube comments are abusive, others can be useful. Especially if you’re running a business, “Comments on your videos will tell you what your audience wants to hear,” Taylor said.

(Edited 10:40 a.m. Monday to add links to the print version of this article and the photo gallery.)

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

August 22, 2011

Verizon expanding LTE high-speed wireless to Austin starting Sept. 15

Verizon Wireless said in an announcement today that Austin will be part of its next wave of cities to carry its 4G LTE service. The service will begin here on Sept. 15 and will cover, “Austin, Round Rock, Pflugerville, Anderson Mill, McNeil, Wells Branch, Cedar Park, Brushy Creek, Bee Cave, Lakeway, Oak Hill and Hutto.”

Verizon devices that can take advantage of LTE include the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the LG Droid, the HTC Thunderbolt, the Samsung Droid Charge and several modem/hotspot devices, the company said.

Don’t get too excited: Austin had to stand in line behind 117 cities that got the service before it came here. The company says LTE customers should expect to get real-world data speeds of “average data rates of 5 to 12 megabits per second (Mbps) on the downlink and 2 to 5 Mbps on the uplink.” Verizon says that’s about 10 times the speed of its 3G network.

Austin is one of 15 cities getting LTE on the 15th. The company is also expanding its network in 10 cities.

More info on Verizon LTE is here.

Edited to fix, 12:19 p.m.: Verizon is expanding its network to 10 cities, not 15. It is rolling out LTE in 15, however.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

Teens and online identity, plus Facebook phonebook shenanigans

WEBfeaturespersona_1069940e.jpg
Illustration by Don Tate II / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

In case you missed these stories over the weekend in the American-Statesman, here’s a quick roundup. In Sunday’s Life & Arts section, we ran another story in my ongoing series about online identity. This story is about the ways that being online and using social networking is helping shape the identities of junior-high-aged kids (for better or for worse) and the ways those online interactions also translate to offline behavior and influence. Quite a mouthful, I know, but we were blessed with some great sources who are doing research in this field and gave us some great information. (And, as you can see above, our illustrator Don Tate II again did a wonderful piece to go with the article.)

In Monday’s paper, the Digital Savant column was about Facebook’s habitual overstepping, which you might have read in this space last week. Interesting comments on the piece so far and the feedback I’ve gotten in email has been from people asking how to find this information on Facebook. Here’s what I told them:

To get to contacts in the first place, click on “Account” on the top right of Facebook, then “Edit Friends.” On the left side of the screen, click “Contacts” and you should see if those phone numbers appear.

If you want to remove contacts you didn’t mean to share, you can click the “x” next to each contact name/phone number, or click on the link to “Remove all your imported contacts.” This might not work on mobile/app versions of Facebook.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

August 19, 2011

The Linkdown for Friday, Aug. 19

hptouchpad.jpg

The school year is starting and that HP TouchPad tablet that we half-heartedly recommended in our recent back-to-school guide is already being discontinued! So much change! Keep your head on straight and let The Linkdown guide you through this tumultuous time of transition with these events and links:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Gadgets, Internet, Phones, SXSW 2012

August 15, 2011

Behind the behind the scenes at Kittywood Studios

Last week in The Linkdown, we mentioned “Kittywood Studios: Cat Videos Incorporated,” an Austin-shot video (shown above) suggesting that all the world’s “kitteh” videos were actually made by one big production company.

The Austin-based director of the short, Joe Nicolosi, has become a hit with the video in at least one area: it’s being featured by sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, Cute Overload and Laughing Squid, exactly the kinds of sites the video lovingly tweaks. It’s also been featured on CBSNews.com and Huffington Post Comedy.

Nicolosi, who might have previously been best known as the director of several bumper videos for the South by Southwest Film festival including “Mario,” says the “Kittywood Studios” short only cost a few hundred self-financed dollars to shoot and took just a few days to cast, rehearse and shoot.

“It was extremely low budget. It was pretty much all spent on food for the crew,” Nicolosi said.

Burnie Burns of Austin’s Rooster Teeth Productions offered studio space and appears in the video along with other Austin actors.

In just five days the video has earned more than 153,000 hits on YouTube and is spreading quickly.

Nicolosi, who has worked in freelance motion graphics and animation out of the Arts + Labor offices in town, has been spending the last year trying to work as a full-time filmmaker. He says the idea for the short came from his sadness over how many things in our lives is owned by corporations. “I was trying to think of something not part of a corporate machine. The only thing I could come up with was cat videos.”

“Kittywood” is one of three original videos he plans to release over the next month aimed at the Funny or Die and CollegeHumor.com crowd.

“I’m making films I think are hilarious and making shorts I think will have an audience online,” Nicolosi said.

Below: Director Joe Nicolosi. Photo by Isaac Solomon.

joeNicolosi.jpg

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

Back to school with e-books and SXSW PanelPicker voting

Two stories you might have missed from the print edition of the American-Statesman this weekend: first off, a Sunday back-to-school tech gift guide for college students.

This year, we focused on tablets and e-book readers, devices that allow university students to access a wide range of course work and e-textbooks, often at a discount. There’s been a flurry of activity in this space the last couple of weeks as Amazon and Barnes & Noble have sweetened their deals and, of course, the iPad is still white hot in the tablet space. In the feature, we discuss options for e-book readers, tablets and accessories.

And in the Monday edition, the Digital Savant column is focused on the South by Southwest PanelPicker. At 2 p.m. Monday afternoon, voting is scheduled to open up to the public for panels that have been submitted.

About 3,800 panels will be available for voting, a big jump from last year’s 2,400, which has prompted some changes in the vetting process. You can read fest director Hugh Forrest’s rundown of what’s new with the PanelPicker this year and learn about a Facebook group devoted to discussing the process and promoting individual sessions.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW 2012, Shopping

August 12, 2011

The Linkdown for Friday, Aug. 12


A Facebook profile for one of the characters in “You Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives in Texas,” which is being presented in Austin and in Scotland simultaneously.

Internet links for you on a slow, humid Friday:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Videogames

August 9, 2011

'Fruit Ninja Kinect' and 'Spy Kids' to be released this week

fnkscreen1.jpg

New video game releases this week:

“Fruit Ninja Kinect.” — The popular finger-swiping game, which on phones and tablets has been a hit, comes to the Xbox 360 Kinect, allowing you to use your whole body to cut up flying watermelons and apples (trust us, it’s more fun than it sounds). This version also includes side-by-side two-player modes, Xbox Achievements and online leaderboards. Rated E for Everyone. $10, downloadable for Xbox 360 Kinect.

“Spy Kids: All the Time in the World.” — Based on the upcoming Robert Rodriguez movie, opening Aug. 19, this Nintendo DS game features eight levels of action featuring two playable Spy Kids, Rebecca and Cecil. Each has special attacks and gadgets. Use them to defeat bosses including Super Goon, The Clock Guardian and Tick-Tock. Rated E for Everyone. $40, for Nintendo DS.

Also out this week: “155,000 Games” (Windows PC), “World of Mahjongg: Deluxe Edition” (PC), “Railway Simulator” (PC), “Snark Busters: Double Pack” (PC), “Airline Tycoon Deluxe” (PC), “Kids Learn Math: A+ Edition” (DS), “Kids Learn Music: A+ Edition” (DS), “Supermarket Mania Bonus 4 Pack” (PC), “Chloe’s Dream Resort” (Mac), “Picture Puzzle Collection” (DS), “Edge” (PC), “The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (DS), “Pucca Power Up” (DS), “Puzzler World 2” (DS).

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Shopping, Videogames

August 3, 2011

Your A-List: Best Place to Play Arcade Games

davenbusters.jpg
Photo by Thomas Terry / Special to the American-Statesman

Sure, a lot of us have Xbox 360s or Nintendo DS devices we do a lot of our gaming on, but there’s still nothing like walking into a video game arcade. Whether you’re plunking tokens or quarters into those upright arcade console, the noise and visual din at an arcade still makes your pulse quicken and causes any long-time gamer to instinctively reach into their pocket for some coinage. In an A-List poll, Austin360 readers chose Dave & Buster’s as their favorite arcade. The arcade, on Research Blvd. off IH-35 offers food and adult beverages in addition to Skee ball, racing games and your “Dance Dance Revolution” exercise for the day. D&B’s carried 51.52 percent of the vote.

Others receiving votes:

  • Main Event, 15.15 percent
  • Kung Fu Saloon, 12.12 percent
  • Pinballz Arcade, 9.09 percent
  • Arcade UFO, 6.06 percent
  • La Tasca, 3.03 percent
  • Blazer Tag Adventure Center, 3.03 percent

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

August 2, 2011

UT Tower goes 3-D (temporarily for filming)

ut-tower.jpg
The UT Tower (minus 3-D projections). Photo by Ralph Barrera / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

If you have a few beers too many tonight near the University of Texas at Austin campus and think you’re suddenly hallucinating, relax: it’s probably just a special effect.

On Tuesday and Wednesday night, filming for the Longhorn Network will include 3-D projections on the UT Tower. A video production crew will be working on a public service announcement and three-dimensional images will be projected onto the tower starting around 8 p.m.and through the night, UT said in a press release. Tests will be done Tuesday night with filming scheduled to happen Wednesday after dark. The projections will be on the east and south sides of the Tower.

The tower clock has been stopped and will resume telling time in large fashion on Thursday. Expect parking to be a potential issue near the tower as well, the university said.

Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Austin

July 29, 2011

SXSW Interactive registration prices spike again for 2012

sxswrates.jpg
Click for a larger version of this graph.

For the second year in a row, South by Southwest Interactive registration prices have increased sharply in comparison to the rest of the festival. For 2012, early-bird registration, which ends on Sept. 23, went up from $450 to $595, an increase of about 32 percent. Walk-up rates for Interactive again rose $200, from $750 to $950, a nearly 27 percent increase over 2011 rates. For the first time, Interactive and music early-bird registration cost the same and this year, Interactive walk-up rates outpace Music by $200.

Music registration for 2012 stayed flat, $595 for early-bird registration and $750 for walk-up. Film registration rates rose slightly from $375 to $395 for early-bird registration and $550 to $595 over 2011.

The Interactive rate increase apparently affects Gold and Platinum badge registration. Gold early-bird goes from $650 to $795, but walk-up increases from $950 to $1,150. Platinum increases from $900 to $995 for early-bird and from $1,250 to $1,395 for walk-up, a nearly 12 percent increase.

Director of the festival Hugh Forrest explained the rate increases in an interview with the American-Statesman on Friday, saying that they reflect Interactive’s place in relation to other high-profile tech festivals.

The SXSW site was on Friday in “soft launch” and was already showing off a new design as well as registration rates. It’s also accepting Interactive Awards nominations. On Thursday, SXSW announced its first Interactive keynote speaker, Baratunde Thurston. The site officially goes live on Monday.

Last year, the festival said the rate hikes were in part an attempt to get people to register early and to avoid a surge of late registration, which made for crowded conditions at the 2010 festival. 2011 was no less busy, with record registration and talk of possibly capping attendance at the festival even before it started. That may come again for 2012.

Edited at 10:30 p.m. Sunday to add link to new story on SXSW pricing and to edit information about fest director Hugh Forrest, who spoke to the American-Statesman about this story on Friday. A correction has been added to the original story.

Past registration prices:

2009
Interactive: $375 early-bird, $495 walk-up
Film: $300 early-bird, $450 walk-up
Music: $550 early-bird, $695 walk-up
Gold: $550 early-bird, $695 walk-up
Platinum: $850 early-bird, $1,145 walk-up

2010
Interactive: $395 early-bird, $550 walk-up
Film: $325 early-bird, $475 walk-up
Music: $595 early-bird, $750 walk-up
Gold: $595 early-bird, $750 walk-up
Platinum: $920 early-bird, $1,225 walk-up

2011
Interactive: $450 early-bird, $750 walk-up
Film: $375 early-bird, $550 walk-up
Music: $595 early-bird, $750 walk-up
Gold: $650 early-bird, $950 walk-up
Platinum: $900 early-bird, $1,250 walk-up

2012
Interactive: $595 early-bird, $950 walk-up
Film: $395 early-bird, $595 walk-up
Music: $595 early-bird, $750 walk-up
Gold: $795 early-bird, $1,150 walk-up
Platinum: $995 early-bird, $1,395 walk-up

Edited 10:30 a.m. Saturday to fix Gold early-bird pricing for 2012 in blog entry and in the chart.

Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2012

July 28, 2011

Baratunde Thurston named first 2012 SXSW Interactive keynote speaker

thurston.jpg
Photo by Mindy Tucker

Baratunde Thurston, a hilarious, frequent panelist and presenter at past South by Southwest Interactive events, has been named the opening keynote for the 2012 festival, the fest said on Thursday.

Thurston, who hosted the 2009 SXSW Interactive Web Awards, is Director of Digital for The Onion and co-founded the blog Jack and Jill Politics.

The keynote is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, March 10, 2012.

Thurston, a comedian, political pundit and frequent speaker at tech conferences, is also scheduled to have his first book, “How To Be Black,” published in February by Harper Collins. In a blog post on Thursday, Thurston called SXSW Interactive his “Home conference” and said the topic of his talk has yet to be decided.

“Might I just sit on stage, project my laptop screen to the audience and force them to watch me place contacts into my Google+ circles? Definitely,” he wrote.

You can check out his monologue from the 2009 Web Awards below (warning - adult language ahead):

Edited at 5:30 p.m. to add more details and link to blog post.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW 2012

July 25, 2011

Rackspace shuttles to San Antonio, CLOUD Inc. and Digital Savant goes to print

rackspace.jpg
Photo by Alberto Martinez, AMERICAN-STATESMAN

In case you missed it over the weekend, a story in Saturday’s Life & Arts section of the American-Statesman featured a story I wrote about San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting, Inc. and its employee shuttle from Austin. The Internet company, which is experiencing big growth in San Antonio and in Austin, where it has about 311 employees, offers a WiFi-enabled shuttle for employees who have to travel from Austin to the North San Antonio headquarters.

I live halfway, in New Braunfels, so I’m always interested in how people make a commute like that. I think it’s pretty clear that this whole area from San Antonio to Austin will be a major megalopolis sometime down the road.

In Tech Monday, a column I wrote about Austin-based non-profit CLOUD, Inc., continues a series we started this month about online identity. The organization is trying to create an identity layer for the web that would give us all more control over our ID information online.

And finally, Monday also marks the debut of Digital Savant as a print column in the Austin American-Statesman. The debut column, about Craigslist, is similar to what we ran here on the blog last week. In the future, posts from this blog will find their way into print, but other pieces may differ substantially from what runs online.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Shopping

July 22, 2011

My Craigslist adventure: Part 2 - Scam City

fakepaypal.JPG
Above: the fake payment confirmation email I got from “King.” Note the weird grammar and the “ymail.com” email address for Paypal. The email turned out to be part of a scam, Paypal later confirmed.

Yesterday, I told you about my experiences selling a computer on Craigslist. When we left off, an emailer named “King” sent what seemed like an innocent query about my goods. Little did I know that King would act less than courtly when it came to our transaction. And now, for the conclusion!

King said he was interested in buying the computer for his daughter. King asked me to send a photo of the computer (even though there were three in the ad). King sent a link to a website asking whether it was the same product (it wasn’t). The red flags started flying when he asked me to ship the laptop to England. He offered to pay extra for shipping and claimed the payment had gone through. The payment confirmation emails went straight to my spam folder, and with good reason. They were riddled with misspellings, and a closer read revealed they were fake. No money ever showed up in my Paypal.com account. Just to confirm, I emailed all the messages to Paypal’s fraud email address (spoof@paypal.com). They confirmed that the whole thing was a scam.

But King was persistent. When I emailed to say I was canceling the transaction, he wrote back, “what? scam? i dont understand.”

After spending several hours trying to sell a $150 laptop, including one late, exhausting night where I was convinced King was somehow stealing my identity, I began to wonder whether I should have just donated the machine from the start. Was the money really worth all the aggravation?

Gabriel Perales, trade practices manager for the local Better Business Bureau, says Craigslist and other online classified services present a unique challenge for the group when it comes to scams and complaints. Many buyers and sellers are anonymous individuals, not established businesses.

Perales says that healthy skepticism is the best strategy for buying or selling on Craigslist. “You’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to exercise caution. You really should not be paying for anything up front,” he said. “Until you see the product or can pick up the product, our advice is never to wire any money.”

Avoiding too-good-to-be-true offers and making sure not to ship a product you’re selling until money has shown up in your account (or you have cash in hand) are good rules to follow in case things don’t go as planned.

Before a face-to-face transaction, do basic research on the person (get a full name, phone number and address and then doing a Google search).

Perales says that a common scam during the summer is offerings rental properties that turn out to occupied or are on the market for sale, not for rent. “Some of these scammers take (home sale information) and list it for rent. Some people have fallen victim to wiring money and then showing up and realizing somebody’s living in that residence.”

If someone doesn’t want to meet in person and gives excuses as to why he’s making you jump through hoops to ship or get paid for something, take those signs as warnings.

I’m convinced after my experience trying to sell a 7-year-old laptop (it remains boxed up, unsold) that Craigslist is a portal to a place of weirdness and a way to meet… um… interesting people?

If you are the kind of person who spent your late 20s and early 30s weeding out people in your life who mainline on drama and who always have a complicated backstory for every defeat, Craigslist is a good way to reconnect to that missing part of your life.

On the other hand, the benefits might outweigh the risks if you happen upon an item you’ve desperately tried to find for a decent price or you’re able to unload otherwise unsellable items and clear up your garage.

Just watch out for those energy-sucking vampires, the ones who’ll waste your time, take your money and leave you more cynical than you started.

Note: A version of this piece will run Monday in the Austin American-Statesman’s Life & Arts section, kicking off a weekly Digital Savant column.

Edited to add, 1:24 p.m. Friday: Cageyness of the blog This Is The Edge has posted a thoughtful response about her experiences using Craigslist (which are much more extensive than mine). Check it out.

Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Austin, Computers, Internet, Shopping

July 21, 2011

My Craigslist adventure: Part 1 - The Hellmouth

It’s been some years, but “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans might remember the Hellmouth, the portal to Hell underneath Sunnydale High School that frequently released ghouls, demons and all manner of evil from the depths.

I can commiserate a little with whoever might have opened such a portal because I recently placed a listing to sell an old laptop on Craigslist. Soon, I found myself in what felt like an alternate dimension of bad vibes and broken promises.

Mostly I’ve avoided Craigslist. We clear out clutter by donating it to Goodwill. I’ve heard from friends about the strange and surreal visits they’ve gotten from bargain hunters when they’ve tried to sell furniture or appliances.

And there’s the whole matter of online services like Craigslist having decimated print classified ads. Not that I’m holding a grudge.

ibook3.jpg
But I was in need. After splurging on a too-expensive laptop, I figured I’d recoup some of my cost by selling one of the old notebook computers that was being replaced. It seemed like such a great idea.

I wrote up a detailed description of the laptop, including its flaws: It’s missing an F12 key and the battery won’t hold a charge. I did a fashion shoot, carefully photographing the laptop and its myriad accessories and even the keyboard gap where that F12 key should be. The ad made it clear I’d accept the “best offer.”

The responses began to trickle in, each one stranger than the next. One guy wanted me to hand off the laptop to his brother at a car dealership. His brother was going to pay for the laptop and then the buyer would pay his brother back down the line. Amazingly, this transaction never went down.

A few sincere looky-loos crossed my inbox. One woman set a time to meet me to buy the laptop, but backed out at the last minute, saying that she had an unexpected expense come up.

Less promising: the person who emailed me, asking if I’d “trade ur ibook for hp desktop, collectible comic books from the 80s have a peek email sender, also have some star wars collectors figurines with box.” What was this, “Sanford and Son”?

But the worst experience began with an email from someone called “King,” who turned out to be a real-life, honest-to-goodness online scammer.

Read about how King tried to take old Omar for a ride and learn some scam-avoidance tips when we publish the thrilling conclusion tomorrow!

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Austin, Computers, Internet, Shopping

Pre-orders start for Austin-made 'Star Wars' game

starwarsoldrepublic.JPG

After years of waiting and wondering, fans got more evidence today that Austin-developed “Star Wars: the Old Republic” is a real, going-to-happen, big-budget thing you’ll be able to hold in your hands and hug at night (when you’re not playing it online).

On Thursday, BioWare and its parent company Electronic Arts unveiled a pre-order page for three editions of the game, a Standard ($60), Digital Deluxe ($80) and (OMG!) $150 Collector’s Edition, which includes:

  • Some things.
  • Some more things.
  • This other stuff.
  • A map (presumably to navigate the giant box).
  • A nice, intimidating box.
  • Whoah, would you look at that.
  • A (mini) statue of “Darth Malgus.”
  • A metal case for your disks and, oh yeah, some disks!
  • A music CD because this is 2002?
  • Seven digital items (invisible to the naked eye without a computer).
  • Some space dude’s journal.
  • Small amount of oxygen-rich air (no longer valid once package is opened).
  • Force.

That’s a lot of stuff! But you’re still going to pay a monthly fee once the free 30 days expire to play.

There’s no release date yet, but the game is due out this holiday season.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Videogames

July 20, 2011

The Linkdown for Wednesday, July 20

hdd.jpeg
Image courtesy MiMedia

The Linkdown has been having all kinds of Internet problems today, making it even more remarkable that the links below have arrived safely for you:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

July 18, 2011

Online identity and reputation: a new series


Illustration by Robert Calzada / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

In case you missed it in Sunday’s Austin American-Statesman, the first story in a series of pieces I’m working on about online identity ran. The story, which focuses on the importance of online reputation and what its significance might be in the future, has gotten some great feedback. I’m thrilled that it’s getting some readers thinking and talking about their online presence.

The reputation piece is the first in a series of stories about online identity that will run in the American-Statesman. Over the next few months, I’ll be working on stories about online anonymity and trolling; the differences between our behavior online and offline; and how children and teens see themselves online and how their virtual identities may be helping shape their offline sense of selves. If you have suggestions or thoughts on this series, please feel free to e-mail me.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

July 11, 2011

Perfect parking in Austin (but not really) and more Google+

IMG_0835.jpg

In case you missed it over the weekend, we ran a story in the Life & Arts section taking a look at “Parking in Motion” an app that promises to make parking downtown a little easier. While some features available in other cities are missing (most notably the ability to reserve a parking space in advance), it’s expected to improve in a future update.

We also ran an updated look at Google+, the new social networking service from Google, which we wrote about when it debuted. Over the weekend I saw lots of new people joining and an uptick in activity as more people are being invited to the service.

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet

July 7, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, July 7

gameover.jpg
David Kaelin, owner of Game Over Videogames. Photo by Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Linkdown is trying to cram five days of activity into a four-day workweek. It’s a little crazy! here’s what you should be checking out online:

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, Videogames

July 5, 2011

Digital Savant Podcast #5: GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham, who covers broadband, the FCC, infrastructure and more as an Austin-based senior reporter for GigaOm.com stopped in to chat with us this week for the Digital Savant Podcast.

In Episode 5, we talk about our impressions of Google+, the seeming inevitability of AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile, bandwidth caps and what happened to Stacey at South by Southwest Interactive (it involves food poisoning and a broken nose, in that order).

staceyhig-podcast.jpg
We also talked a little bit about GigaOm’s structure and about the frustrations of adding yet another social network to your work day (in this case, Google+).

You can now subscribe to the Digital Savant podcast on iTunes, or click below for MP3 or AAC (podcast-formatted) versions of this week’s episode.

Listen to Digital Savant Podcast #5 (AAC/iTunes format)

Listen to Digital Savant Podcast #5 (MP3 format)

Show notes:

What’s in the podcast:

0:06 — Introduction.
0:20 — Introducing Stacey Higginbotham.
2:50 — What’s a GigaOm?
3:26 — Google+.
6:05 — Google+ Circles and Hangouts.
10:58 — AT&T and T-Mobile get to mergin’.
14:53— AT&T bandwidth capping; will we see more of this?
20:25 — Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3/Wideband.
21:39 — Stacey’s SXSW 2011 story.
23:30 — Wrapping things up.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Phones, Podcasts, SXSW 2012

June 29, 2011

The Linkdown for Wednesday, June 29

Events:

Internet goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Videogames

June 24, 2011

Women in tech (and networking): the struggle continues

Four days ago, I attended the South by Southwest PanelPicker Mixer. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an evening event (I’ve dubbed it The Summer Where I Act Like a Real Dad and Come Home Every Night at a Decent Hour). But I was able to stop in for about an hour and a half and catch up with people I rarely get to see in person otherwise.

Three different women told me separately that they were interested in either organizing or being a part of a “Women in Tech”-style conference in town and complained that there’s not enough of that here. One of them is already in the planning stages for an event like that. (I’ll let you know about it when the details are firmed up).

There simply aren’t enough tech events in town geared toward women, they told me, and historically, panel-style events in town often exclude or underrepresent women entrepreneurs and tech workers as panelists.

Three days later, Carla Thompson at Sharp Skirts points out in a post called “Sausage Fest, Austin Style,” that an event on Tuesday, RISE Fast Pitch being held at the Alamo Drafthouse is yet another example of a high-profile public tech event with an all-male panel. She’s been seeking out comment on Twitter from the organizers since the item was posted.

And last night, Katrina Tolentino posted on her blog an embarrassing, frank list of things men at local networking events have said and done to her recently. Katrina is a fixture on the local social network scene and the blog post, “10 Things You Should Never Say Or Do To A Woman At A Networking Event” is alarming in that it makes you wonder the kinds of things men say and do to women who aren’t as high-profile as Katrina. It’s not hard to image that some women who go to networking events get turned off to the whole scene if that’s the way they’re approached.

It’s also not hard to imagine that boozed-up, grabassy social media douchebags are simply extending the boorish behavior they display on Twitter and Facebook and that the freewheeling social media scene has been lax in calling them out on such behavior.

So how about it? Does Austin’s tech scene have a problem with giving women fair representation on panels and basic respect at mixer? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Edited to add: Michelle Greer, a prior overall winner of the American-Statesman’s Texas Social Media Award, has posted a thoughtful response to Tolentino’s blog post.

Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2012

June 23, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, June 23

If the Linkdown is acting a little weird this week, it’s because he’s saying goodbye to some treasured colleagues this week.

The Internet, ever churning, keeps going. Here’s what you should be checking out:

Events:

Internet goodness:

firstbytes.jpeg

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, Videogames

June 21, 2011

New options for sharing Statesman stories

Update 06/24/2011: Today we are moving back to the Facebook “Share” button instead of the “Like” and “Send” buttons, as least for the time being.

The “Share” button offers all the same functionality as “Like,” including being able to post to your own wall, a group or in a private message to your friends. But it also allows you to choose which photo to use with your post; the “Like” button chooses a photo for you, and sometimes it is not related at all. Facebook’s API does have tools to help choose that photo, and we’ll be looking at those.

— Christian McDonald

From 06/21/2011: Have you come across a story that you just have to share with your friends? Obviously, there have been many ways to do that in the past, but there are some new options out there, including a new push by Google.

We have added the ubiquitous Facebook “like” button to all statesman.com and Austin360.com stories and blogs (we previously used Facebook’s “share” button). We’ve also added the new Facebook “send” button, which makes it easy to share stories through Facebook’s private messenger system and the new “Google +1” button.

When you “like” a story, it will give you the option of adding a comment to the link that posts on your Facebook page. When you “+1” a story, it stores your recommendation on your Google profile. You can share your choices with the world, your friends or just keep them to yourself as a bookmark list. The idea is for it to be easy to see what your friends recommend when you’re searching around for information on Google. Here’s more about Google +1.

The new buttons are at the top of all blog posts and on the right side of the page on other stories.

When we added these new buttons, we kept the other options for sharing, including Twitter, StumbleUpon and old-fashioned emailing. We definitely want to make it easy for you to share our content, so if you have any further suggestions on how to make this easier, let us know.

Quigley is the Statesman’s social media editor

Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Austin, Internet

'Cars 2' and Austin-made 'Gods & Heroes' top game releases this week

cars2-vidoegame.jpg

New video games this week:

“Cars 2: The Video Game.” — Most movie studios hand off their licensed games to a game developer and try to stay out of the way. As with “Toy Story 3,” however, Pixar worked directly with the developers at Disney Interactive to maintain the look, personalities of the characters and globe-trotting sense of the movie for this multi-platform title. Rated E-10+ for Everyone 10 and Older. $30-$50 for Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows PCs, Mac and Linux.

“Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising.” — This online multiplayer game from Austin’s Heatwave Interactive goes mythical and features some unique features including squads of player-controllable minions, customizable estates and immortal powers (like those of the Gods). Rated T for Teen. $50-$300 for Standard, Collector’s and Collector’s Helmet editions for PC.

“Dungeon Seige III” — The new action role-playing game from Square Enix is the first “Dungeon Seige” game to his the current generation of consoles. It features cooperative multiplayer, lots of character customization and, we hope, some fast-paced hack-and-slash gameplay and tons of loot. Rated T for Teen. $50-$60 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Also out this week: “F.E.A.R. 3” (Xbox 360, PS3, PC), “Shadows of the Damned” (Xbox 360, PS3), “Ferrari: The Race Experience” (Wii), “Petz Fantasy 3D” (Nintendo 3DS), “Maximum Racing: Super Karts” (Wii), “ArmA 2: Reinforcements” (PC), “Hidden Expedition 5: The Uncharted Island” (PC), “DualPenSports” (3DS), “Buccaneer” (PC), “Gummy Bears Magic Medallion” (Wii), “Trenched” (downloadable for Xbox 360), “Back to the Future: The Game Episode V” (PC, Mac), “Reel Fishing Paradise 3D” (3DS), “Alien Zombie Mega Death” (downloadable for PS3).

Video Games

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Shopping, Videogames

June 20, 2011

SXSW PanelPicker 2012 is live, getting feted tonight

panelpicker.JPG

The South by Southwest PanelPicker, the process by which roughly eleventy billion panels are chosen each year for Music, Film and Interactive festivals, has launched today for the 2012 events.

July 15 is the deadline for idea submissions (although submission deadlines are frequently extended by the fest) and voting is expected to begin in August. By October, we should start seeing an initial list of chosen programming.

SXSW Interactive runs March 9-13 next year.

Tonight, 6 to 8 p.m., the fest is hosting a PanelPicker party (if you want to be really cool, you should walk around calling it “3 to the P” but don’t tell anyone I suggested you do that) at Hangar Lounge. You can RSVP to the party, where staffers will be on hand to answer questions about PanelPicker.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2012

Revisiting smartphones as remote controls

micommand.jpg
It’s been about a year since I predicted big things for smartphones as remote controls.

Based on my experience with a device from ThinkFlood called RedEye. I had some issues with the setup and thought the customization features were a little too difficult, but overall, it worked fine and pointed to a future where our phones and tablets become our main remote controls.

Fast forward a year later and while these apps have their fans (I actually prefer the “DVPRemote” app to Roku’s crappy little pack-in remote), the market hasn’t exactly been upturned yet.

Enter MiCommand, an Austin start-up that has launched its own remote app for iOS devices, “Control It All Remote” and a $99 transceiver (on sale today) that can beam IR signals to your home theater. I wrote a Tech Monday column for today’s American-Statesman about the company and the challenges it’ll face in an increasingly crowded market. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Do you use your phone, tablet or other touch-screen devices as a universal remote?

(Photo: Jeff Roane, chief executive and co-founder of MiCommand, Inc. Photo by Zach Ornitz, American-Statesman.)

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Phones, TV

June 17, 2011

Heatwave launches two high-profile games amid heatwave

platinumcountry1.JPG

It’s been a hot, busy month for Heatwave Interactive. The company is releasing two high-profile games in June, one of them a massively multiplayer online fantasy game, the other a country-themed Facebook game featuring celebrities like Dolly Parton, Trace Adkins and Kristin Chenoweth.

The company prides itself on its diversity, not just in its staffing (which, the company’s chief executive Anthony Castoro is quick to point out sets it apart from most game companies) but in its subject matter. The studio behind the popular Samuel L. Jackson “ISamJackson” app and the hip hop game “Platinum Life” is now hoping to capture an MMO audience with “Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising” and “Platinum Life: Country,” which it created in partnership with CMT, the country music channel.

The latter includes original voice work from the country music stars it features and allows players to create a virtual performer, tour the country and try to become a superstar with the help of their celebrity mentor.

The game is in beta with a few rough edges, but its presentation feels pretty polished and has an impressive amount of star power. Other country stars in the game include Big & Rich, Rascal Flatts and Dierks Bentley.

godsheroes.jpg

“Gods & Heroes,” on the other hand, is a game that the company acquired from PlayGrid last year and completed. It launches Tuesday and is set in a world of familiar gods and myths.

I visited the studio, whose funky, laid-back offices are located in the basement of a North Austin office building, a few weeks ago as employees were crunching on the two projects and trying to eliminate last-minute bugs.

Especially in the case of “Country,” the studio is really pushing to bridge the gap between movies, TV, music and social gaming. It has expanded it staff from 15 to about 40 employees and says it has more games in the works with recognizable celebrity names attached.

It’s not currently working on console games, instead choosing to focus on PC, mobile and online titles.

platinumcountry2.JPG

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, Videogames

June 15, 2011

The Linkdown for Wednesday, June 15

cocreate.jpg
CoCreate coworking space. Photo by Thomas Jack Hilton

The Linkdown is extra-packed this week and is not separating events into their own section. Strap in, folks, it’s about to get linky in here!

Events:

Web goodness:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

June 14, 2011

Austinites with lots of fans try to manage their connections

gabriellefaust.jpg
Zach Ornitz AMERICAN-STATESMAN

In case you missed it in today’s American-Statesman Life & Arts section, here’s a link to a story I wrote about how artists with lots of followers and fans handle the social media time demands and correspondence.

We spoke to Austin horror writer Gabrielle Faust (pictured about), popular HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff and Los Lonely Boys bassist Jojo Garza about the time they spend interacting with fans online.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

June 10, 2011

Tablet transition tips #3: Flash and good apps

Update, 6/13: you can read the American-Statesman version of the story here.

Yesterday, in part one of this preview of a story running in Sunday’s Statesman Life & Arts section, we began talking about the challenges of moving from a desktop or laptop computer to a tablet like the iPad 2 or a Galaxy Tab.

We covered the issue of typing on a virtual keyboard and this morning posted part 2, on accessories and data storage:

We conclude with this piece on dealing with Flash (or the lack of it on a tablet) and some app recommendations:

Flash and app fixes

Ask any Android tablet user what the iPad is missing and he’ll tell you it’s the ability to play Flash video or games. It’s true: The iPad doesn’t do Flash and probably never will. iPad users may find they need to run to a computer to view certain Flash-based content (or to a competing tablet).

The Skyfire ($2.99) app for iPad will convert a web page’s Flash video so that it can be viewed on the iPad. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s like a tiny miracle. (It’s also available for iPhone and Android.)

Tablets also are typically missing Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.), but Apple’s suite of apps, Pages, Keynote and Numbers can open files from Word, PowerPoint and Excel and export documents to them as well. They cost $10 each.

Documents to Go ($15) is a good office documents app for Apple’s devices as well as Android. OfficeSuite Pro for Android ($15) is another powerful option.

For those who use photo editing applications like Picasa or iPhoto, Photoshop Express (free) for iPad and Android tablets and Photogene for iPad ($2.99) are both excellent; you might even prefer editing pictures on a tablet with its easy-to-use touch-screen sliders and effects.

Other apps Muehlbauer suggests for new tablet users include the popular game “Angry Birds” ($4.99, but that price can vary), GarageBand for iPad ($4.99) for music creation and Austin-developed Gowalla (free) for using the tablet’s location features.

Eventually, you might run into a problem that requires a computer, but John Muehlbauer says that happens to him less and less as things shift toward mobile devices. “It does about 75 percent of what I need it to do,” he says of his iPad 2. “The other 25 percent is stuff I probably would never use on this anyway.”

User interface researcher Dave Yeats says that tablets are getting more adept at letting users create stuff (documents, videos, photos) and that e-book reading and easy Web surfing have made the current tablets seem ever more useful, even to skeptics.

“I don’t underestimate that, especially as Apple and some other (tablet makers) tend to not only anticipate what users need, but take a step beyond what people are asking for,” Yeats said. “We anticipate people are going to want to use this full-time. People adapt quickly.”

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Computers, Gadgets, Internet

Tablet transition tips #2: accessories and data storage

Update, 6/13: you can read the American-Statesman version of the story here.

Yesterday, in part one of this preview of a story running in Sunday’s Statesman Life & Arts section, we began talking about the challenges of moving from a desktop or laptop computer to a tablet like the iPad 2 or a Galaxy Tab.

We covered the issue of typing on a virtual keyboard and today we’ll discuss accessories and data storage:

Accessories

Tablets generally feature Corning’s Gorilla Glass, a durable glass that protects the screen. But if you’re traveling or taking your tablet around town, you’ll still want some kind of cover or protector in case the device gets dropped.

Cases come in a variety of shapes, colors, sizes and prices. Try to find one that doubles as a stand.

ipad-hdmi.jpg
If you’re worried about staring at a tiny screen so long that you get eyestrain, you can plug a tablet in to a larger screen (like, say, your HDTV) with an HDMI adapter. Many newer tablets already have an HDMI port and a cable allowing you to plug your tablet directly into a TV. Apple’s iPad 2 accessory, which also passes audio to the TV, is $39.

Data storage dilemmas

Even the most modest laptops sold today have a spacious hard drive capable of storing plenty of music, movies and more data than you might possibly need.

Tablets, however, use flash memory, which is a lot more expensive and comes in much smaller quantities. Apple’s largest-capacity iPad holds less than 64 gigabytes of data. Most competing tablets have 16 or 32 gigabytes built in, and many don’t allow you to pop in external storage.

You also can’t watch DVDs on a tablet. You’ll have to either convert DVDs to a digital format and transfer them or download movies and TV shows from the Android Market or iTunes. That means you might not be able to carry around your entire music, digital movie and document libraries on a tablet the way you might on a laptop. You might have to be more selective about what stays on the tablet, especially as you download apps, which can also take up lots of space.

And if you take photos or video with your tablet’s built-in camera, that data will also add up and lead to a space crunch.

On the iPad side, iTunes offers ways to sync only certain music playlists, videos and apps rather than your entire iTunes library. For Android devices, apps like DoubleTwist and the recently released Miro 4 allow similar ways to manage your digital stuff.

Some users, like John Muehlbauer, email big files to themselves to keep them stored in online services like Gmail. That also serves as a good backup in case the tablet is lost or the data becomes corrupted. Muehlbauer recently lost videos, photos and lots of iPad app data when an iTunes error erased all the content in his device.

“I got too used to trusting it,” Muehlbauer said. “It had never failed before.”

Apple engineers weren’t able to help him retrieve the data, and he lost hours of video he shot at SXSW Interactive.

Now, Muehlbauer double-checks his backups and offloads new content he produces with the iPad 2 to his home computer as often as possible. He’s also started using Internet file storage apps like Dropbox, which allows you to keep up to 2 gigabytes of data online for free.

dropbox.jpg

As for music, Google and Amazon recently introduced online services that allow you to keep your music files online to stream wherever you’ve got Internet access. Those services work with practically any tablet. Apple this week announced a cloud-based data and music service due in the fall that likely will ease the storage crunch for some. It will allow music to be streamed to an iPad, meaning those files won’t have to be stored on the device itself.

Later today: good apps you’ll need for your tablet transition in Part 3.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Gadgets, Internet

June 9, 2011

Tablet transition tips #1: typing

Update, 6/13: you can read the American-Statesman version of the story here.

On Sunday, we’re running a piece I wrote for the Statesman’s Life & Arts section that contains advice on how to move from a desktop PC or laptop/netbook to a tablet device like an iPad 2 or a Motorola Xoom.

If feels like we’re just starting to see people ditch their computers for tablets full time and I spoke to John Muehlbauer, who has been using iPads as his main computing device for more than a year, and usability expert Dave Yeats at Sentier Strategic Resources, LLC for the piece. Here’s a condensed preview of some of what’s in the story.

John Muehlbauer used to own a bulky, heavy Toshiba tablet computer back when a tablet was basically a laptop with a touch screen. But the latest tablets, including the iPad 2, Motorola’s Xoom, the BlackBerry PlayBook and dozens of others appearing this year, have made it possible for early adopters like Muehlbauer to do most of their computing on a slim, light device.

Muehlbauer is part of a shift that hasn’t quite hit the mainstream yet, but that probably will very soon. About 230 million laptops will be sold worldwide this year, according to the research company Gartner Inc. But sales of tablets are expected to reach 50 million this year, and sometime soon those sales are expected to surpass laptop sales, at least in the U.S.

Already, netbooks — small notebook computers that were hot among casual web surfers and college students in recent years — have taken a huge hit from tablets, which typically cost $400-$700 and can download powerful touch-screen apps and do many of the tasks that PCs do (and sometimes even do them better).

But those who plan to give up a laptop, or even a home desktop PC, to spend more time with a new tablet should realize that there are still some roadblocks involved in this transition.

“I think that the portability and the novelty of it has a lot of appeal,” said Dave Yeats, an Austin-based partner and researcher with Sentier Strategic Resources, LLC, where he studies user experience. “But there are some brakes on there that will keep people from moving in that direction all the way. I still think we’re in the phase that people have to recognize there’s barriers to use.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to making a tablet your main PC is that touch screen. It’s great for watching movies and browsing the Web, but, as Yeats says, “if you wanted to write a report on a tablet, I think you’d jump off a bridge.”

Touch typists aren’t likely to keep up a fast word count on a tablet, but hunt-and-peck typists may find there’s not much difference between a physical keyboard and a virtual one.

And depending on the size of the tablet, it might not be easy to thumb-type (as you would when texting on a smart phone) and hold the tablet from each side at the same time.

Muehlbauer said typing was the hardest part of migrating to an iPad. “Anything over a paragraph was tedious at first,” he said. “It was hours and hours of practice. After a year, I’m faster than on a keyboard because I do so much on an iPad.”

Another challenge is finding the right way to position a tablet for typing. Muehlbauer says he prefers to keep the device on a desk, tilted up using the iPad 2’s Smart Cover (which doubles as a stand) or to prop it up on a tilted knee.

He refuses to buy an external wireless keyboard.

“I wanted to use it as it was,” he said. “If I was buying an external keyboard, it was defeating the purpose of buying something thinner and lighter; I’d be carrying all this junk around.”

If you’re a writer or student with a need to type documents, long emails or reports, however, an external keyboard might be a good fit. They’re typically small and light enough that, combined with a tablet, they still weigh less than most netbooks or laptops.

You can read Part 2 and Part 3 of this series of posts.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Gadgets, Internet

June 8, 2011

Digital Savant Podcast #4: CEA's Jim Barry

On this week’s Digital Savant Podcast (#4), we speak with Jim Barry, spokesperson and “Digital Answer Man” for the Consumer Electronics Association, who was kind enough to stop by the American-Statesman on his national tour and speak to us.

Barry has been in the electronics trade publishing industry for more than 30 years and is a frequent answerer of the question, “What should I get my dad for Father’s Day?” in his numerous media appearances.

dspodcast4-1.jpg
He’s also incredibly friendly and knowledgeable about what’s out there in the world of consumer tech.

In this podcast, we discuss this week’s announcements from Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony and get special peek inside Jim Barry’s totebag of digital goodies, including tablets, a portable speaker, e-book readers and more.

You can now subscribe to the Digital Savant podcast on iTunes, or click below for MP3 or AAC (podcast-formatted) versions of this week’s episode.

Listen to Digital Savant Podcast #4 (AAC/iTunes format)

Listen to Digital Savant Podcast #4 (MP3 format)

Show notes:

What’s in the podcast:

0:06 — Introduction. Hey, we’re on iTunes!
0:24 — Introducing Jim Barry.
1:20 — Apple’s Monday keynote, including iCloud, iOS5 and Mac OS X Lion.
5:30 — iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match.
9:35 — E3 coverage, including Nintendo’s Wii U.
15:40 — Father’s Day and graduation tech gifts.
22:05 — Wrapping things up.

dspodcast4-2.jpg

dspodcast4-3.jpg

dspodcast4-4.jpg>

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Gadgets, Podcasts, Shopping, Videogames

June 7, 2011

Cinematic trailer for 'Star Wars: The Old Republic' is Jedi-packed

starwars3.jpg

There have been a few surprises from the Electronic Entertainment Expo, but this one might be my favorite.

Austin-developed “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” from BioWare/EA, a long-in-gestation massively multiplayer online game that could be released this year (fingers crossed!), has a new cinematic intro trailer called “The Return” that is really just stunning. Watch it for yourself.

Want to see a larger version? You can check it out here on the official site.

Like it? There’s an older one called “Deceived” that’s also available. Here’s “The Return”:

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Videogames

June 3, 2011

The Linkdown for Friday, June 3

w-hotel.jpg
W Hotel Austin. Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Linkdown would never defame anyone on this blog because he might be forced to write 100 blog entries to make up for it, a similar punishment to that of a Malaysian man who must Tweet again and again.

Other online stuff you should know about:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, Shopping, Videogames

June 2, 2011

Programming note: Digital Savant Podcast is now on iTunes!

Just a short note to let you know that the Digital Savant podcast is now available on iTunes! You can subscribe there or just keep watching this space for when they’re posted as blog entries.

The whole iTunes podcast submission process is a brutal, time-consuming one (thanks to Christian McDonald for his expertise) and I’ve been holding off on new episodes until that was all sorted out. Now that we’re live, I hope to be doing these more often.

They’re typically under 20 minutes with a single guest speaking about one topic or event.

You can see the first three episodes of the Digital Savant podcast here.

If there are topics or guests you’d like to see included in future podcasts, just let us know.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Podcasts

May 31, 2011

More local Pokémon masters discovered

pokemonchamps.JPG
Photo courtesy The Pokémon Company International

Last August, we wrote about Aaron Grubbs, a Marble Falls student who competed in Hawaii at the PokémonVideo Game World Championships.

Now, two Austin brothers have proven their chops in regional competition. Kobe Minchey, age 7, and Casey Minchey, age 11, both competed in the Dallas-Fort Worth South Regional Championship in Arlington over the weekend. Kobe placed first in his division and Casey placed second in his, but both of them earned a spot in the National Championships, to be held July 8-10 in Indianapolis.

In addition to the trip, they also each won a Nintendo 3DS game console. They’ll be competing for a spot in the World Championship, to be held in August in San Diego.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

Kids and Facebook

In case you missed it on Saturday, we ran a piece in the Life & Arts section for “Raising Austin” about kids who use Facebook and the parents who worry about what they’re doing there. There are quite a few software solutions that allow parents to monitor that activity, but of course that brings up a lot of questions about how parents should deal with this and what age it’s appropriate for children (or teens) to join the social network.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

May 26, 2011

Samsung releases SXSW Interactive stats graphic

South by Southwest Interactive was so sizable this year that some people are still poring over all the information and statistics generated by the event.

Samsung, which had a daily “social media hub” at the festival (back in the day, they just called that a “booth” or a “tent”), has posted an infographic compiling information like popular Foursquare check-ins, Tweets and hashtags from the fest. Click on the image below for a larger, more readable version and read more about it here. It was put together by interactive agency JESS3.

samsunginfo-sxsw.jpg

Edited at 2:45 p.m. to swap in a larger version of the Samsung graphic.

Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

May 25, 2011

First impressions: BlackBerry PlayBook

blackberry1.JPG

I’m made it very clear in the past that “BlackBerry” is not a language I speak fluently, if at all. I’ve never owned a BlackBerry phone and except for the unfortunate Storm touch-screen phone, they all look identical to me. I might have a BlackBerry problem.

But given how much improvement I’ve seen on the Android side of the tablet race lately, I was hoping that BlackBerry/Research in Motion might add its own unique touches to make the competition against Apple’s iPad even more interesting with its new PlayBook.

Unfortunately, the tiny 7-inch tablet feels underbaked and overwrought. It’s hard to see why anyone who isn’t firmly entrenched in BlackBerry (and who has a BB phone in their hand at the time) would buy it (it costs $499-$699 in various sizes, the same as the WiFi-only versions of the iPad 2).

To be clear, I didn’t get a loaner unit to pore over for several days. This was a short, hands-on demo that lasted a little less than an hour. So don’t consider this a final review, just a list of impressions I had upon first meeting the PlayBook.

Let’s start with the positive: great, bright, lovely screen that plays video like a champ. The HD-video demo that I viewed on the PlayBook was stunning, with great color and sharp detail. Switching apps is responsive and the hardware in general seems speedy. Finger swipes extend past the edges of the screen to the bevel. If you want to exit to the main applications menu, you can swipe off the screen instead of touching a button.

blackberry2.JPG

After that, the problems begin. At the current time, the only way you can use BlackBerry e-mail, contacts, calender and the bridge secure web browser is to connect wirelessly to a BlackBerry phone and use its Internet connection. This isn’t the most elegant solution. It’s also a little sluggish. On the positive side, if your phone and tablet should get separated by theft or some other calamity, all that personal data is no longer available on the tablet; it’s securely on the phone.

But that’s the only real upside I can see to that kind of application scheme. Future updates should make the tablet more independent of owning or having to carry a BlackBerry phone around with it.

At the current time, the PlayBook’s ability to use Android-based apps is not yet available. There aren’t nearly as many BlackBerry apps as there are for Android or through Apple’s App Store. And in just a few minutes of using the PlayBook, several apps crashed, froze or were unresponsive.

While it can play Flash videos, it does so inconsistently. Pulling up YouTube videos sometimes generated a big question mark where a video should have been. Closing open applications and coming back made the video play. It seems like the PlayBook has some multitasking issues that still need fixing.

I’m sure the BlackBerry PlayBook will improve with some major software updates and a lot more apps, but in its current form, even with video chat (which only works with other PlayBooks) and a great, responsive screen, this isn’t a device I can recommend to anyone right now. Even BlackBerry owners should proceed with caution.

On its website, RIM calls the PlayBook, “The world’s first professional-grade tablet.” Eh, no. Not even close.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Gadgets

May 24, 2011

Austin airport's WiFi situation just got a little less sad

Last month, I flew out of the San Antonio airport instead of my usual departure at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and was stunned: they had free WiFi! You didn’t even have to sign up for a day pass or sell your blood or know a guy. It was just there. Free. Plentiful. Delicious.

In Austin, though, it’s always been a pay-your-way thing with WiFi. Typically, I just go without and eat a gigantic pork sandwich at Salt Lick to drown my connectivity sorrows in sweet BBQ sauce.

But good news has arrived. Now you can get a half hour of WiFi at the airport before the financial hammer comes down and you have to pay $4.95 an hour (or $7.95 for the “day,” which usually amounts to a few hours unless some terrible traveling tragedy has befallen you).

What I’m unclear about is whether that’s a half hour per device or a half hour per logged-in account. Couldn’t you just create multiple accounts and ride that free WiFi for several hours? Has anybody tried this? Post in the comments if you’ve already experienced this airport WiFi change yourself.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Austin, Internet

Video game live music show Sunday at Parish

5.29.11Flier.jpg
This will be in Sunday’s Life & Arts Best Bets, but it wouldn’t hurt to buy tickets in advance if you’re interested in going. This show of video game music (performed live) should be a fun time.

“Video Games Rock!” — Hosted by local game emporium Game Over Videogames, this lineup of classic video game soundtrack music, performed by several bands, features headliner The OneUps. The OneUps, from Fayetteville, Ark., are a veteran jazz/funk/hip hop group whose latest effort is called, “Super Mario Kart Album.” They’ll be joined by brentalfloss and The Cartridge Family, a comedy/music act featuring members of Austin’s Descendants of Erdrick, who will also be performing separately. For the Most Part and Man Factory fill out the rest of the bill. Of course, there’ll also be video game stations to play during the show. The Parish, 214-C East 6th St. All ages, doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets $10 in advance, $12 at the door, www.theparishaustin.com, 473-8381.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

Austin-developed 'Faxion' and 'Dirt 3' video games out this week

fax4.jpg

New video games this week:

“Faxion Online.” — (Launching Thursday) This Austin-developed massively multiplayer online game from UTV True Games is a free-to-play fantasty adventure with an emphasis on player-versus-player combat. It’s set within the world of Limbo where the forces of Heaven and Hell duke it out for control over territories. Not yet rated. Downloadable for Windows PC.

“Dirt 3” — The latest edition of this rally racing series includes more locations, routes (over 100) and motorsports events than its 2009 predecessor. You can also race on snow in the game and engage in “Gymkhana,” a specialized kind of racing that requires precision control. Rated E for Everyone. $60-$300 for Standard or RC Car Bundle for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Also out this week: “Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale” (downloadable for Windows PC, Xbox 360. PlayStation network version due out next week), “NASCAR The Game 2011” (Nintendo Wii, PS3, Xbox 360), “LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean” (PC, Mac), “Dead or Alive: Dimensions” (Nintendo 3DS), “Kung Fu Panda 2” (Nintendo DS, Xbox 360 Kinect, PS3, Wii uDraw), “Emily the Strange: Strangerous” (DS), “Top Gun (Game + Movie)” (PS3), “Days of Thunder (Game + Movie)” (PS3), “Naughty Bear Gold Edition” (Xbox 360, PS3), “Paws and Claws Pampered Pets 2” (DS), “Disciples Undead Horses” (PC), “ThinkSmart Crazy Machines” (DS), “ThinkSmart Labyrinth” (DS), “Kaptain Brawe” (PC), “King Arthur Collection” (PC), “Aion 2.5: Empyrean Calling” (PC), “Crazy Machines” (Wii).

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Shopping, Videogames

May 23, 2011

The Linkdown for Monday, May 23


Photo by Deborah Cannon / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Linkdown didn’t post last week because sometimes you have to let a stew marinate just a little longer to get the flavor right. In related news: The Linkdown is now hungry for stew.

Here are some links you need to know about:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

Love your workplace? Nominate it for our Statesman list

If you love where you work and aren’t under a non-disclosure agreement limiting discuss of your happiness, why not share your thoughts with us?

Every year, the American-Statesman puts together a list of the 75 best places to work, the so-called Statesman Top Workplaces of Greater Austin. We’re accepting nominations through June 15. Here are the rules:

  • Any employer is eligible, even government agencies, schools and nonprofits, so long as they have 50 or more workers in Central Texas. These workers don’t have to be in a single location.
  • The ranking are determined by anonymous surveys of employees, conducted by Workplace Dynamics LLC.
  • The listings will be out in November in a special section of the American-Statesman; that content will also appear online.

You can see last year’s top workplaces or go directly to the nomination form here.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

May 19, 2011

Text your ex? It could appear on new Austin website

textsfromex.JPG

As if you need another reason to think twice before sending a desperate, snarky text message to a former significant other: there’s a new website that publishes post-breakup messages.

“Texts From My Ex,” a website created by two MBA students at St. Edward’s University and the former roommate of one of them, launched two weeks ago. With only word-of-mouth promotion, there are already about five pages of texts from various area codes. All of them are screened by the site creators and filtered: you won’t see names, phone number or other identifying information. But the bite is still there in posts like, “Have fun with your bald spot!” and “I thought that dress looked great on you. Turns out sobriety looks awful on me.”

(Warning: many of the messages contain profanity and sexually explicit text. The site is probably not safe to view at work.)

AdrianBretado.jpg
Adrian Bretado, who’s in the Digital Media Management MBA program at St. Edward’s, said the site started as a class project for an interactive technology and e-commerce class. His former roomate at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Chris Gelabert, who is now a physician in New York City, had a bad experience with an ex that culminated in a barrage of messages.

“Things didn’t go so well; he received about 50 nasty messages in 15 minutes,” Bretado said.

Partnering with web developer and St. Ed’s MBA student Monica Goetz, Bretado created the site for the class. It draws inspiration from the popular Texts From Last Night.

In approaching the subject as a humor and satire site, Texts From My Ex also resembles Austin-based Lamebook, which reposts messages from people’s Facebook status updates and comments.

Readers can submit their own texts on the site, via Twitter or through e-mail. The only identifying characteristic in the posts are the area codes from which the texts were sent. Eventually, Bretado said, they hope to offer a way for readers to submit via texts from their phones. The site does receive submissions that it doesn’t publish.

“Some don’t necessarily have the comedic effect that we’re intending,” he said, “some are just kind of depressing.”

Bretado said the site hopes to grow large enough to attract advertising, but that it’s ultimately just a place he hopes people will find a laugh or two.

“Sometimes if people feel they’re in a crazy relationship or involved with someone they’re not sure about, they can go to our website and see if someone is having a similar experience,” he said, “It might make people appreciate the relationship they’re in now.”

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

May 17, 2011

Winner (and new funding) announced for UT/Dell Social Innovation Competition

A few months ago, I got to have lunch with several past winners of the Dell Social Innovation Competition. The contest, which allows university students to compete for seed money to fund a company that will create positive social change, is housed at the University of Texas’ RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service in the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

The students I spoke to were bright and committed to their global ideas; far from seeking charity, they wanted to create sustainable businesses that help communities in far-flung parts of the world. True to that, this year’s winner, announced last night at the annual competition, was TakaTaka Solutions (“TakaTaka” means “waste” in Swahili), a start-up out of the London School of Economics. It was one of almost 1,500 applicants from 85 countries. It was awarded $50,000.

In the video above, you can see that the venture seeks to make better use of waste in Nairobi by providing more efficient recycling and composting.

Libraries Across Africa won a $10,000 technology award from Dell.

Separately, Dell announced yesterday it is giving $5 million to the program to expand the competition.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

May 16, 2011

Sony's networks coming back online; Austin studio loses chief to Zynga

Over the weekend, Sony began bringing its beleaguered PlayStation Network back online in a phased rollout that started Saturday. In a press release, the company said:

The phased restoration will include the return of nearly all of SOE’s portfolio of online games, the reinstatement of SOE’s game forums and websites, and added functionality to require players to reset their passwords.

The PlayStation Blog has more details on the service restoration.

I was able to login yesterday to my account for the first time and changed my password. I haven’t given new credit card information to the company, nor do I plan to anytime soon.

Today, the company is expected to bring back Sony Online Entertainment games like “Free Realms” and “EverQuest 2.”

Separately, Sony Online recently lost the head of its Austin studio. John Blakely, who spoke to us in January about the launch of “DC Universe Online” and who was also vice president of development for SOE, has departed for Zynga to become that red-hot social gaming company’s general manager. Blakely’s been succeeded by Lorin Jameson at SOE, who is now in charge of Austin operations.

Here’s Sony’s official statement on the matter:

After nearly nine years of service, John Blakely has resigned from Sony Online Entertainment to pursue new opportunities. From successfully launching EverQuest II to the recent DC Universe Online, Blakely has proven to be an invaluable member of the SOE team and has made significant contributions to the company’s success. We are grateful for the passion and leadership he brought to work every day and fully support him in his future endeavors. Blakely will be replaced by Lorin Jameson, executive director of development at SOE, who has been responsible for the oversight of all development teams at SOE’s Austin studio for the past five years. In his new role, Jameson will oversee the day-to-day operations of SOE’s Austin studio, including providing executive oversight on DC Universe Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and future games under development at the studio.

For Blakely, it may have been a timely exit: he left for Zynga shortly before Sony’s online security meltdown, according to his LinkedIn page.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

May 13, 2011

Austin's LightBox Interactive working on 'Starhawk' for Sony

Starhawk2.jpg

In case you missed it today’s Austin American-Statesman, the veil has lifted on a new game being worked on by Austin’s LightBox Interactive studio. The game, “Starhawk,” is being called a “spiritual successor” to “Warhawk,” a combat game that was released in 2007 for the PlayStation 3.

About 45 team members in Austin are working on the project, which is due for release in early 2012. It’s an action third-person shooter with some light real-time-strategy elements (which the developers call “Build & Battle” and even aerial dogfighting. I played the first level of the game as a demo and was impressed by how polished and playable the game was for being so early. It will be a single- and multi-player game, exclusive for the PS3.

Here are a few more screenshots from the game:

Starhawk5.jpg

Starhawk_ss11_720.jpg

Starhawk1.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

May 11, 2011

Nick Jonas revealed as 'Wizard 101' Mystery Composer

nickjonas.jpg
Nick Jonas, the singer and actor from the Jonas Brothers, has been revealed as the Mystery Composer who created music for a new level of “Wizard 101,” a popular massively multiplayer online game that is designed in Austin.

Jonas, who met with game designers and musicians at KingsIsle Entertainment in March during South by Southwest, composed original music for “Wintertusk,” a new icy world in “Wizard 101” that goes live this week. The game, a family-friendly fantasy game, has had 15 million registered users since it launched in 2008.

Fred Howard, vice president of marketing for the company, said Jonas was “awesome” to work with. “He sees this as a great opportunity to come in and demonstrate his musical talents outside the pop world. He’s a huge artist in our space and extremely musically talented,” Howard said.

In September, KingsIsle landed another pop star, Selena Gomez, who appeared in “Wizard 101” in virtual form and who was featured in a song played in the game.

(Below: the “Wizard 101” version of Nick Jonas. Image courtesy KingsIsle Entertainment.)

mystery composer.jpg

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

May 9, 2011

PlayStation Network update: still catastrophic


A T-shirt design referencing the PlayStation Network failures that’s sold by the popular online comic Penny-Arcade.

You’d think that there would be better news by now, some ray of light at the end of a long, endless night that is Sony’s PlayStation Network failure, a horror show that continues to sideline online gamers offline for what could end up being more than a month and which put some 77 million user accounts at risk. (There’s some debate as to whether a May 31 relaunch date is accurate.)

It would be a bummer in any sense, but what makes it even more maddening even for supporters of Sony’s epic fight against hackers is that the ridiculous, hubristic, altogether inappropriate ads for Sony’s games (including those primarily played online) continue to air on TV and all over the web.

Sure, the company has its hands full trying to contain the what is basically the BP oil spill of online entertainment calamities, but when I saw an ad for “SOCOM 4” during a recent episode of “South Park,” one that touted how amazing and awesome this piece of entertainment from Sony is (and which, at the moment, you couldn’t play online if you tried), I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There’s tone-deaf and then there’s insulting.

If it were simply about video games, a lot of people might not care, but Sony has from the beginning sold the PlayStation 3 as a mighty living room device for next-generation entertainment. Disastrously, users who bought the PlayStation 3 for the purposes of downloading music or movies or accessing Hulu and Netflix are out of luck for the time being, even if you’re paying a premium for Hulu Plus.

Sony’s not the only one who’s suffering. Collateral damage for the outage includes game companies like Capcom, who are losing out on downloadable content and game sales to the tune of millions. Of course, also suffering are the Austin developers of online games like “DC Universe Online” and “Free Realms.”

If you thought the worst was over, it’s beginning to feel like for Sony, the hurting ($1 billion and counting, some estimates say) has only begun. The company’s reputation is damaged perhaps beyond repair, gamers will be hard pressed to give their credit card information to the PlayStation Network again and the PlayStation 3, which has lagged in third place this generation behind the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360, has never looked less like a contender.

Can Sony find its way out of this? I’m trying and trying to think of one, but can’t see a happy ending here.

Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Austin, Internet, Movies & DVDs, Videogames

May 5, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, May 5


Photo by Mike Sutter / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Happy Cinco de Mayo! If you live near Austin, you probably don’t need The Linkdown to tell you where to find some decent fajitas and queso. However, if you want more suggestions, Mike Sutter has got your hook-up.

Here are some other things you should be checking out online today:

Got a Linkdown item we should include in a future update? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Gadgets, Internet, Phones

April 27, 2011

Reminder: AT&T home broadband caps start next week

This got lost in the shuffle a bit when it was announced in the middle of South by Southwest Interactive, but starting Monday, AT&T will begin limiting the amount of data home DSL and U-verse Internet customers use before they are charged overage fees.

The limits, 150 gigabytes for slower DSL users and 250 GB for U-Verse customers, will mean that if a customer goes over that amount of bandwidth per month, they’ll receive two notifications from AT&T, then be charged $10 for 50 GB of extra data.

To put that in context, a single HD-quality movie download from iTunes can typically be as large as one gigabyte. E-mail, light web surfing and music downloading doesn’t use lots of bandwidth, but movie streaming, video chatting using applications like Skype and transferring large files do. AT&T says that it expects 98 percent of its users won’t be impacted by the bandwidth caps and has offered a tool at myusage.att.com to monitor how much data is being used.

Of course, this might remind you of Time Warner Cable’s attempt to put bandwidth caps on its Road Runner service in 2009. That effort was eventually shelved when customers protested the move and said they would take their business elsewhere. The Road Runner bandwidth limits were much smaller, but of course use of online video services like Netflix and Hulu have exploded since then. Time Warner Cable has said it has no plans to reintroduce the capping idea.

We’ll have more on this in a piece I’m working on for the May 2 edition of Tech Monday. If you’re an AT&T customer and are concerned, let us know in the comments. One novel idea I’ve seen from the watchdog website Stop the Cap: switching to a comparably priced business DSL plan, which doesn’t appear to have the same bandwidth caps as home accounts will.

Update: 10 a.m., May 2: the Tech Monday column which elaborates on this issue has been posted and ran in today’s newspaper.

Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: Austin, Internet, Movies & DVDs

April 26, 2011

Facebook enters deals fray in Austin as foretold in couponing prophesies

ACLDeal.jpg

As expected, Facebook has launched an initiative to expand into the daily deals online business currently dominated by services like Groupon and Amazon-backed Living Social. Austin is one of five cities — including Dallas, San Francisco, Atlanta and San Diego — that’ll get the service first. Deals will be incorporated into Facebook pages, a much deeper integration of Facebook deals than the check-in deals that it announced back in November with partners including the Alamo Drafthouse.

One of the first major deals, detailed on a Facebook blog (and pictured above) is all-access passes for ACL Live at The Moody Theater.

An interesting bit about this: Facebook looks to be offering deals from other deal brokers like Austin-based aDealio in addition to its own.

So how about it? Are deals that appear on Facebook more likely to catch your attention than those that land in your inbox?

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Shopping

April 22, 2011

Don't panic! It's an Internet outage

ec2.JPG

As we come to rely more and more on cloud-based services (a fancy way of saying we put our digital treasures and junk online) it becomes more of a problem when those services become unreachable.

Just as Amazon, whose EC2 web-hosting service, which powers many popular websites, has been struggling to keep things together since yesterday. Add to that a two-day outage on the PlayStation Network (which might be caused by hackers with a beef against Sony), preventing gamers from downloading movies and accessing game updates (or playing certain games online).

So what should you do if you’re trying to reach a site that appears to be broken? First, check out this list of sites affected by the Amazon outage.

You can also visit Down for Everyone Or Just Me?, a website that tells you whether the outage you’re seeing is on your end or if a website is indeed down for the count.

If you’re an Austin company experiencing problems, let our business reporter Kirk Ladendorf know for a story he’s working on. You can e-mail him at kladendorf@statesman.com or call 445-3622.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

April 20, 2011

Ten other things your iPhone knows about you


Image via O’Reilly Radar

Today, iPhone owners are getting a queasy feeling in their stomach as they learn that their device (or 3G-enabled iPad) is tracking their movements, writing that information to a file and uploading that file to their computer when they sync. (More information about it in this informative YouTube video.)

I know it’s a huge privacy faux pas on the part of Apple (and one I’m sure they’ll be forced to respond to soon), but for me, honestly, I can’t imagine a situation where this affects me. I’m a parent of two tiny children. I don’t go anywhere remotely interesting. I go home. I go to work. I go buy diapers and baby butt paste and sometimes, if I’m having a great week, I get to go eat BBQ at a nearby restaurant. The location data that my iPhone might track would bore Steve Jobs to tears.

Much more damning is other non-location related data on my phone and yours. Here are 10 other things your iPhone knows about you that would be worse for you if exposed:

  • How many fart-related apps you’ve downloaded.
  • How many times you’ve listened to songs by the 80s group Starship all the way through.
  • The total number of Angry Birds you’ve carelessly killed.
  • Number of phone contacts you have where you only remember the person’s first name and are afraid to ask for a last name to go with it.
  • Total Justin Bieber YouTube video viewings.
  • Multiple waxing appointments in the same week listed in your Calendar app.
  • That private home movie you shot that is NEVER EVER EVER supposed to get out on the Internet EVER or you will be dumped by your significant other.
  • Self-help iBooks you’ve downloaded that do not seem to have helped.
  • Google Map routes that have ended at donut or cupcake shops.
  • That time you got every single question wrong in “Qrank.”

What else are you worried your phone might reveal about you? Post it in the comments.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Applications, Austin, Gadgets, Internet, Phones, Videogames

April 19, 2011

Digital Savant Podcast #3: David J. Neff on video and nonprofits

On the third Digital Savant Podcast, we speak to David J. Neff, a high-profile person in Austin’s social media and nonprofit scenes.

David is the president of Social Media Club Austin, the chief operating officer at the start-up HelpAttack! and is one of the founders of VideoCamp Texas III, which is being held Saturday. He’s also got a book out next month on the future of nonprofits. (It’s called, surprisingly, “The Future of Nonprofits.”)

Headshot_New.jpg
In the podcast we talk about online video, specifically the recently announced death of the Flip camcorder, how nonprofits need to think beyond a good hire or a social media campaign to be relevant in the future and about the various projects David is involved with.

Download it in MP3 format.

Download it in podcast-enhanced AAC format (includes images and links).

Show notes:

What’s in the podcast:

0:05 — Introducing David Neff.
0:50 — VideoCamp Texas III.
2:50 — RIP The Flip camera.
7:15 — Lights. Camera. Help. and HelpAttack!
10:25 — “The Future of Nonprofits”
13:30 — Why some nonprofits aren’t approaching social media the right way.
16:12 — Social Media Club Austin.
18:48 — Wrapping things up.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Podcasts

Monsters of YouTube hitting Emo's on Saturday

On Saturday, a music show called “The DigiTour 2011” will play Emo’s promising some of the brightest (or at least most subscribed-to) musical stars of YouTube.

Featuring MysteryGuitarMan, The Gregory Bros. (formerly “AutoTune The News”; they performed at South by Southwest this year), DeStorm, Dave Days, David Choi, Wheeze Waiter, Nice Peter and Ricky Ficarelli, the show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $13 and doors open at 6.

It’s the first musical tour I’m aware of hitting Austin that’s completely focused on YouTube stars. Will their online videos translate to the stage? I’ve only seen Gregory Bros. live and I can say that they put on a fantastic show that incorporates video with great musicianship and stage presence.

Here are a few videos from those who’ll be performing:

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

April 13, 2011

Gamification at AMD's Game On! Texas 2011

DSC_7311_3769.JPG
Evan Smith and Sandra Day O’Connor. Photo by Jason Walker, provided by AMD

On Tuesday, an eclectic collection of educators, video game designers and marketers, politicians, nonprofit staffers and a former Supreme Court Justice gathered on the AMD campus to talk about the so-called “Gamification” of education and how the power of gaming can be harnessed by schools and businesses.

What’s “gamification?” A buzzword at South by Southwest Interactive, it was explained succinctly in a slide by Rodney Gibbs of Austin’s Ricochet Labs, the maker of the popular quiz game “Qrank”: “Gamification is a process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audience and solve problems.”

[Let’s not quibble about the spelling; I’ve also seen it as “Gameification.” We should make a game out of figuring out whether the “e” belongs in there.]

The day began with an upbeat, often hilarious keynote presentation featuring Texas Tribune CEO and editor-in-chief Evan Smith interviewing former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In 2009, O’Connor helped launch iCivics (originally called “Our Courts”), a gaming-oriented website meant to teach the kind of information that the nation’s disappearing middle and high school civics courses used to impart. “Half the states have stopped teaching it,” she said.

O’Connor said that there’s a general lack of understanding about the way the courts work that led to its creation, but since then iCivics has expanded to also tackle the legislative and executive branches as well.

The free site has been enthusiastically received by students and educators, she said, but it’s been a struggle to get schools to adopt it. O’Connor said she was planning to focus on Texas because of its size and influence in the education industry. She said she hopes “It will have a widespread, contagious effect” if Texas schools begin using iCivics.

A separate keynote presentation in the afternoon featured Disney Interactive executive producer Starr Long interviewed by a witty and handsome American-Statesman reporter named Omar L. Gallaga.

In the presentation, Long, who is working on a major Disney project that he’s not yet able to discuss publicly, hinted that Disney is looking to create more online-originated properties and that they will likely have strong social and online elements, like “Club Penguin,” which the company acquired in 2007.

Long said that what he’s been working on has strong educational elements, but he stopped short of saying that Disney would be creating products meant directly for schools.

Long, who is not based on Los Angeles with the company, was a longtime fixture in the Austin gaming community. He worked on many projects at Origin System including the long-running “Ultima Online” (which is still active) and later worked with Richard Garriott at NCSoft on the ill-fated online game “Tabula Rasa.”

Disney Interactive recently restructured some of its business and laying off employees. Long said that despite the shuffling and the shift in the industry to so-called social gaming (like “Farmville”), the company doesn’t plan to abandon console game like last year’s Austin-developed “Epic Mickey.”

Other sessions through the day focused on ways that the state of Texas can work to spur more educational game development on the state, how schools are using game design courses, how to use games to train and inform and whether the state is educating enough game development talent to feed the industry. A set of sessions explored principles, rules and mechanics of game design as a group exercise.

At the start of the day, it was announced that Austin’s Girlstart was receiving a grant from the AMD Foundation to fund game design education programs for this year’s Girlstart Summer Camps. The camps, for 4th through 10th graders, are being expanded nationwide near AMD sites in Silicon Valley, Bellevue, Ft. Collins, Orlando and Boston.

A few common threads I heard throughout the day included frustration with the state’s education bureaucracy in adopting new technologies (which could include gaming-focused online tools or new kinds of e-textbooks), worry about whether making everything gaming-centric might be detrimental to helping kids learn for learning’s sake and, not surprisingly, concern over costs in a brutal budget environment.

The day concluded on a more positive note with a video showing off a National STEM video game design challenge that was sponsored by AMD, Microsoft, the Electronic Software Association and others. It featured kids winningly talking about their game design projects. You can see it below. Warning: it will fill your heart with hope. Curmudgeons beware.

One of the finalists, Manor 5th-grader Rhys Wynn Wilkinson (pictured above right) was awarded a laptop and will be receiving a letter from the White House.

On stage, Wilkinson revealed that the previously untitled game he designed now has a name. He’s calling it “Dinosaur Sustainability.”

Edited at 5:45 p.m. to add information about Girlstart.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Videogames

April 11, 2011

The Linkdown for Monday, April 11 (Catch-up edition)

C64_05.jpg

The Linkdown, and this blog for that matter, were on vacation last week but you may not have even noticed because Brian Gaar pitched in a video game review and we had our regularly scheduled new games roundup on Tuesday. We’re sneaky like that and The Linkdown’s titanium work ethic fills with rusty shame at the thought of not keeping you informed.

So here’s where we catch up! Some links for you:

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

April 2, 2011

Day 2 at UT's International Online Journalism Symposium

isojday2.jpg

If the first day of the International Symposium on Online Journalism was about optimism about the future of news, Twitter and paywalls, Day 2 was about taking a look at global news trends, learning how even the biggest news organizations in the world are learning to engage with readers and viewers one-on-one. It was also about the goals and business models of nonprofit news operations like Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen and upstart community ventures like Patch.com and Examiner.com.

The day started off with an energetic, fast-paced keynote presentation by Madanmohan Rao, editor of The Asia Pacific Internet Handbook. Rao discussed emerging news trends in emerging markets, the classifications of online news environments in Asia (from “Restrictive” to “Advanced”), categories of connectivity and more. It was a whirlwind with lots of information to absorb for a wide swath of the world. Rao concluded by proposing that attendees join him in helping create online news chronology/timelines for Asian countries, to help create benchmarking for news organization social media policies and to work on books and ebooks on global online journalism.

Next up was a panel on news nonprofits. Lisa Frazier of The Bay Citizen said partnerships have been critical for her organization and that running it has required time, money and experimentation. “It takes guts and stamina every day,” she told the audience. One of the most interesting items she presented was a crowdsourced bike accident tracker. Has the effort paid off? She said one of the best compliments she’s gotten from a reader was, “You’re the least irritating news source in the Bay Area.”

John Thornton, chairman of the board at the Texas Tribune, talked about the organization’s desire to wean itself from rich donors and to break even in 2012. Thornton said the Tribune’s goal is to help Texans make better decisions about their civic lives.

Later in the day, representatives from hyper-local news site Patch.com (owned by AOL) and Examiner.com spoke on a keynote and in a panel on neighborhood news about raising an army of journalists (or “editors” in the case of Patch) to cover their communities. “Is it really journalism?” asked Patch.com president Warren Webster, addressing a question asked by former NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller on Friday. “I say yes.” He detailed the company’s hiring of 1,000 journalists last year.

To no one’s surprise, the first question he was asked in the Q&A was how much they pay. Webster declined to give specific numbers, but said many of them are being paid more than they had been at community newspapers and other jobs in their markets. Patch is currently in 800 towns. To the amusement of audience members, Webster said Patch has also been responsible for helping find six lost dogs through its sites.

In the case of Examiner.com, the site posts 3,000 stories a day and sees itself as a supplement to mainstream news. “We’re not aiming to be the watchdogs or the conscience of the community,” said Examiner’s Mitch Gelman.

Amanda Zamora, a social media and engagement editor at the Washington Post (and former American-Statesman staffer) and Jennifer Preston, a New York Times reporter who was previously social media editor, both discussed strategies for more closely engaging with readers and doing real-time reporting and curation, often with the help of the audience. Zamora said that the Post has been learning to treat social data as narrative data.

The approach was reinforced by Jim Brady, a former editor at TBD.com, who likened the way news organizations engage with readers with giving them a speech in the backyard. Instead, he said, they need to invite the audience to come inside and more closely engage.

The Times and the Post have both had success with using meaningful content that the audience submits (for instance, 14,000 photo submissions the Times solicited in a “Moment of time” project).

The research projects presented included research on Egypt Internet use (which, interestingly, was a long-term project that was completed shortly before protests began in January), research on the “Newsfulness” of various news browsing devices, a study on reporting versus curation and how reporters directly engage with readers and sources, among others.

You can get more wrap-ups on the symposium on the official site and see research materials from many of the presentations on this page. You can also find the symposium’s new academic journal, “#ISOJ” in various formats here.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

April 1, 2011

Day 1 at UT's International Online Journalism Symposium

schiller.jpg
Photo by Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

On Friday at the 12th International Journalism Symposium on Online Journalism, National Public Radio’s former chief executive and president Vivian Schiller spoke about seven things that are making her optimistic about the future of the news business. She only said of her March departure, “I never even thought for a second I wouldn’t come. Now I actually have more time to be here.”

On March 9, Schiller resigned after the high-profile firing of an NPR contributor and a video scandal involving an NPR fundraising chief’s remarks about the tea party movement.

Glenn Frankel, the director of the University of Texas School of Journalism, who introduced Schiller, was not so circumspect. In his introduction, he said Schiller was “forced out” at NPR and called the video scandal a case of deceptive entrapment with a hidden camera. “It’s a disgrace that NPR’s board caved in the face of that kind of shenanigans by an ideological thug,” Frankel said.

Schiller’s keynote presentation, which launched a two-day event at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, set the tone for several presentations that sidestepped gloom and doom about the future of newspapers and journalism to present a rosier view of the future, one in which new technology tools merge with old-school journalism skills.

She cited data from the Pew Research Center to suggest that news paywalls, such as one just launched by the New York Times, are finally ready to be given “A fair shake” by readers. Schiller also said that Twitter has emerged as a serious news-gathering and fact-checking engine, that apps for smart phones and tablets are generating more interest in news (she called them “The holy grail of audience engagement”) and that local news coverage is “Up for grabs.”

She praised NPR member station KUT for partnering with the non-profit Texas Tribune and for expanding aggressively on digital platforms. She also said KUT should be supported for its fundraising, audience growth and journalistic efforts, she said, “We should all watch carefully and we should support it. Austin is a test-bed … everything that is happening in Austin right now is exactly right.”

Despite the timing of her resignation, Schiller said that recent events have proven the value of online news in the face of unrest in the Middle East and disasters in Japan. “I am really, really hopeful, never more so than in recent weeks. News consumers had access… and an understanding of events like never before.”

That sentiment was echoed by a second keynote presentation in the afternoon, by Meredith Artley, vice president and managing editor of CNN.com. She revealed that CNN generated 75 million average page views, 1 million app downloads and 15 million “video starts” per day following the tragedy in Japan. Traffic for these stories, she said, broke all previous records for CNN.com except for the 2008 election. She said the company expects to be on track for more than 200 million page views for March.

Artley presented “Open Story,” a new CNN.com article format that combines crowdsourced “iReports,” data and traditional reporting. The first of these was created last month at South by Southwest Interactive. A separate mock-up showed how such an approach might work with reports from the ground during a political protest like the ones in Egypt that began in January. CNN.com also plans to give online reader the option to record and upload video response comments to their site starting this summer.

(Disclosure: I’ve done work as a technology-reporting contributor for both National Public Radio and CNN.com.)

There was lots of talk about Twitter (in fact several research projects presented in the afternoon focused on how newsrooms are using it), about apps and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces that some news organizations are using to encourage app and tool development), and about the value of good journalism in an era of abundant, cheap tools to get information out to readers.

Other discussions on Friday also focused on paywalls, the effort by news organizations to begin charging for content that was previously accessed for free by readers. Mark Medici, a director of audience development at the Dallas Morning News, said that the company’s paywall, which went in March, helped generate 2,200 new Sunday subscriptions for the publication in the week it launched.

There was also talk about whether the future of news reading will be on the web, in splashy apps like News Corp.’s “The Daily” for the Apple iPad (which was developed by Austin’s Chaotic Moon Studios) or in some combination of the two. John Kilpatrick, vice president of design for “The Daily” and Filipe Fortes, CEO of the more cross-platform Treesaver project presented vastly different strategies for wrangling readers.

Fortes maintained that news organizations should focus on the web (“[HTML]” he showed in his presentation) instead of rushing to develop for the hottest new tablet or mobile platform. Kilpatrick, on the other hand, said “The Daily” is focused on providing the best possible presentation on the iPad, but hinted that his group will inevitably expand to other platforms and play to their strengths.

The journalism symposium, which began in 1999, this year is also presenting sessions on social media, hyper-local news coverage, non-profit journalism and international news trends. In his opening remarks, Rosental C. Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journal in the Americas at UT and organizer of the event, said an academic research journal called “#ISOJ” was launching. It can be found at online.journalism.utexas.edu/ebook.php.

Two research sessions, one on newsroom innovations and another on how news organizations are using Twitter (often not well enough), were also presented. You can find the research papers those presentations were based on at this page.

The event continues on Saturday and will be live-streamed starting at 9 a.m.. You can view it on the official site or in the embedded video below.

Watch live streaming video from isoj2011 at livestream.com

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet

March 31, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, March 31

The Linkdown would probably be normally be posting it tomorrow, but that’s April Fool’s Day and everyone knows you shouldn’t believe anything on the Internet on April 1.

Here’s what’s up online:

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Videogames

March 26, 2011

Pleasant surprise: Austin's Rooster Teeth releases 'Angry Birds: The Movie' trailer

It appears that our local machinima maestros Rooster Teeth have been busy filming a live-action mock teaser trailer for “Angry Birds: The Movie.” Fun!

Who knew that the war involving the avian Kamikazes of “Angry Birds” would take the fight to Congress Ave.?

(hat tip to Joystiq.com)

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, Videogames

March 25, 2011

UT School of Engineering receives $900,000 to unclog wireless video pipes

vawnwireless.jpg
Photo via University of Texas at Austin. University of Texas students (left to right) Cardan Samples, Jeffrey Cahak and Nina Jackson stream some video on a bus to campus.

We all like our mobile streaming video the way we like our smoothies, right? SMOOTH! Consistent! Perhaps with cherries.

Researchers at the University of Texas are working on a project to make video, photos and other visual data transmitted via our growing network of 3G and 4G wireless bandwidth pipes get stored and transmitted more efficiently. And they’ll have $900,000 to get moving on that assignment.

The Cockrell School of Engineering at UT has been awarded that sum for its Electrical and Computer Engineering Department so that five professors can study the issue. UT professors Robert W. Heath Jr., Alan Bovik, Gustavo de Veciana, Jeffrey G. Andrews and Constantine Caramanis are on the project; the money comes from Intel Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., who, of course, have a vested interested in getting good video to work on a multitude of networks and devices.

Other universities awarded money for the project are Cornell University, the University of California San Diego, the University of Southern California and Moscow State University.

You can read more about the project on UT’s page, “Solving the bandwidth bottleneck.”

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Phones, SXSW 2011

March 24, 2011

The Linkdown for Thursday, March 24

Now that we’ve got the sweet smell of South by Southwest Interactive washed off our bodies (OK, almost), it’s time to move forward and look at what’s been going on since we’ve been gone. Here’s what you should be checking out:

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

March 21, 2011

Five ways to fix SXSW Interactive (not that it's broken)

sxswinteractivecrowds.jpg
Photo by Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Since Tuesday, when I indulged in one last late night of South by Southwest Interactive partying, I’ve been struggling to figure out whether this year’s festival was a smashing success or a baffling bust. When I’m asked how it was my brain fires off a series of neurons against a brick wall and I end up mumbling something like, “It was big. Crazy. I need a nap.”

I know this much: it was the biggest, most crowded, most spread-out (both geographically and thematically) and full Interactive on record. I did lots of walking to get to far-flung panels when the official shuttle buses were scarce. I went to a lot of parties, wrote up lots of panels and had a few magical, serendipitous moments that I could never have predicted.

When I finally caught up with Hugh Forrest just before the Interactive Awards Tuesday night, we had a friendly, upbeat chat that belied the exhaustion and brain-buzz we were probably both feeling. He acknowledged the festival wasn’t perfect and that his crew would be looking at a lot of the feedback from attendees over the next few months. But overall, he said, “Things generally worked very well.”

I think a lot of the good outweighed the bad — the energy in town significantly spiked with so many smart minds converging in town (adding to Austin’s already formidable talent pool). The keynote presentations, with one exception, were better this year. Badge pick-up and registration were surprisingly quick and ran smoothly. There were more parties to attend and, despite the annoying RSVP/VIP trend, more parties meant smaller crowds at the larger ones. There was more variety and quality in panels this year…

… if you could get to them. Spreading out the festival to 10 campuses was a bold experiment, but a dicey one for attendees. It meant lots of walking, lots of cab or pedicab fees if you weren’t lucky enough to catch a shuttle or a Chevy ride. And it led to overcrowded panels in some places and near-empty sessions in others.

And then there was that scary attendance number: 19,364, a nearly 36 percent jump in attendance over last year. More people, more panels, more, more, more. Maybe that’s appropriate for a tech festival that’s become about everything, as some suggest.

But could it improve? Undoubtedly. I’m no festival planner, but here are five suggestions for making SXSW Interactive 2012 better:

1. Cap attendance — This one’s a no-brainer. Though it was briefly considered for 2011, the reality is that the fest has gotten too big for our humble downtown and the lack of hotels are just one issue with that. If the festival insists on showing some growth, then let 20,000 be the magic number and cut it off there. The festival can’t sustain another 6,000 or 7,000 people without a significant change in the way it’s structured. Eliminate walk-up registration (if trends continue, the festival should sell out by February) and find a reasonable registration rate somewhere between early bird and walk-up. The walk-up attendance surge has become too unpredictable to just leave the festival open to a last-minute crush of attendees.

2. Get rid of Screenburn… or spin it off — Every year, we are promised a great, innovative game expo within SXSW Interactive, free and open to the public, and every year I hear from disappointed gamers that it was a complete bust. (I stopped going two years ago; it was a waste of my time every time I set foot over there.) The most positive comment I heard about Screenburn this year was somebody mumbling, “They had ‘Mortal Kombat.’ ” Gaming and the “Gamification” of everything have become such central themes of the fest that the Screenburn video game panels should be part of the proper schedule, not shunted off to an event that’s developed such a bad reputation. We already have two great game events in town: GDC Online (for game developers) and Fantastic Arcade, which in its debut year showed what a great game expo focused on indie games can be. SXSW doesn’t need Screenburn; if it must continue, make it a separate event some other time of the year (late October before the big crush of holiday games would be perfect). Ditto the Technology Summit — Great idea, bad timing. A business-centric tech summit focused on international tech is brilliant, but placing it after the end of SXSW Interactive made for a lot of confusion as to whether SXSW Interactive was actually over. A music + tech event would have been more appropriate given the timing. SXSW Technology Summit could be another great spinoff event for another time of year.

3. Consolidate the campuses — The reality, I am told by the fest, is that the Convention Center simply can’t contain all the programming for Interactive anymore. Given that there seemed to be a lot of unused space in the Convention Center (and you’d reclaim a large space by getting rid of Screenburn), that’s hard to believe, but let’s accept it as gospel. Why send people over to the Hyatt, the Sheraton and the AT&T Center when there are plenty of places on 5th and 6th Streets that could accommodate groups of 100-200 for panels? I’m talking about bars, people. A lot of the downtown bars aren’t doing a lot of business during the day. Many of them have stages and A/V equipment. Why not have panels scheduled at a venue like Maggie Mae’s or Esther’s Follies? (The comedy/TV/entertainment panels would be especially good there.) The businesses could even serve drinks and food. There were Shiner Bock beers being given out at educational panels at the Hilton Garden Inn, so don’t tell me that serving alcohol would be a problem at Interactive. It would be a more appropriate move for SXSWi than sending people across Lady Bird Lake Bridge to sit in a typical hotel conference room.

4. Panels: trim them by a third — There are too many panels. Hugh Forrest assures me that this is a feature, not a flaw, but I disagree. Do we really need 40-50 panels for each slot? It’s too many choices, too many logistics in organizing them, and for fest-goers, far too panels to go through when trying to figure out a good schedule. You’re left feeling that you missed at least three or four good panels for every one you go to. The fest needs to engage in more serious quality control for its programming. The Panel Picker is fantastic, but it’s led to a lot of pom-pom waving among popular Twitter users for people to vote for their sessions. The fest has ultimate say, but too often, it’s allowing a lot of panels with similar themes, not a lot of planning or preparation before the actual panel, and poor planning about which rooms are appropriate. We shouldn’t still be having a problem of overfull rooms in one venue and near-empty panels in another. Fewer panels would make it easier to plan for attendance at each. And one Twitter user, Katie Cook, has a great suggestion: require pre-registration for panels. That’ll give festival organizers a better idea of what the most popular panels will be and (we hope) the option of moving them to a larger room if it’s available.

5. Make Friday a newbie / orientation day — The first day of the festival typically features “How to Rawk SXSW”-type panels. Why not make the whole day customized for newcomers, people new to social media and tech festivals, and people who want to learn how to best navigate the festival? People who are veterans and don’t need these panels can travel to town on Friday; those who need the newcomer information can get here early. Better yet, produce some videos on using the official app, how to get to the campuses, how the shuttles work and festival highlights. Put those on the website in the weeks leading up to the fest. Play the videos on a loop in the registration/badge pick-up area. Make them mobile-friendly so people can watch them on their way to Austin.

And since I’m feeling generous, here are five more suggestions:

6. Release the official app sooner — You need more time to work out the bugs and get people used to using it. This year’s was a big improvement, but it was still pretty crashy. An earlier release would give people more time to pick out their schedule and get accustomed to using the app.

7. Pay your keynote speakers — We’ve had one too many keynote speakers wing it. Make them sign a contract. Hold them accountable if they give a lousy presentation. (Keynote presenters are not compensated, not even for travel and hotel expenses.)

8. Get rid of the swag bag — for real this time — The swag bag went away, then it came back. In it was a gigantic, thick book that nobody should have to carry around and a copy of the Austin Chronicle (which nobody should want to carry around). Get rid of everything but the pocket guide and make it small enough to carry inside the badge holder pocket.

9. More streaming — Streaming the keynotes and other sessions this year was a great idea. More of that, please. Also, allow for people watching at home to submit questions or comments during the presentations. Stream the Interactive Awards. They were fantastic and a lot of people missed them.

10. Make fundraising a yearly habit — It shouldn’t take a massive tragedy in Japan to mobilize the forces of good at SXSWi. Designate a worthy cause each year before the fest starts and encourage festgoers to donate via their phones, on the website and even in panels. Create a special live event (perhaps a concert as the closing party like this year’s Foo Fighters show?) to end the fest; charge $5 at the door and donate all those funds.

That’s it for my suggestions. Here are some from Twitter and Facebook friends:

  • “have real- time voting options to a)replace panelists b)have audience take over c)break into discussion groups,” says Anna Gonzalez.
  • “Too spread out. Too much redundancy in panels. Shuttles sucked. And for the panelists: http://bit.ly/hkXUYP,” says Joy Mayer.
  • “Cap attendance, eliminate the distant ‘campuses’ ,” says Marla Erwin.
  • ” limit attendance, guarantee admittance to sessions if you buy a badge, better vetting of sessions,” says Broad St. Interactive.
  • “cap attendance,” says Jon Lee.
  • “better sessions,” says Cris Valerio.
  • “Cap attendance, improve panel picks by selecting them closer to the event, not nine months out. All panels in one spot. Full, separate tracks for beginner/intermediate/advanced and design/dev/business/entrpreneur and web/mobile etc.,” says Alex Jones.
  • “cap registration, combat campus sprawl, fewer solo (aka pitch) panels, fewer panels all together. More tacos,” says Madison Craig.
  • “Two tracks: SXSWi 101 (which you can charge up the wazzoo for), and SXSWi Advanced, which would need to be cheaper. Ad execs, biz guys, etc need the digital training of an easy track. Geeks want to rub shoulders with other geeks (but don’t have $$),” says Kyle Monson.
  • “perhaps introducing multi level badge access for interactive. Creating individual tracks which are smaller than the whole,” says Ryan Rumsey.
  • “we were half-joking, maybe there should be a ‘Social Networking’ wristband that just gets you into parties/non-panel stuff,” says Jessica.
  • “panel topics/qualty haven’t kept pace w/audience experience—so it’s no longer a learn+grow event. It’s a party. Harder 2 justify that,” says Steve Stedman.
  • “it probably needs to be segmented more, sadly. but would probably improve focus,” says Brian Bittner.
  • “Hard to say SXSWi is broken from the $$. But the Geek - Social Media Manager ratio is waaay out of whack,” says Pat Ramsey.
  • ” Hold it at a different time than Music and Film. Yes, attendance will drop, but that’s a bonus. Fewer campuses, the track thing didn’t work logistically. More panels, less corporate pitches. Boost the wifi. The keynotes this year were great. The clever titles lend themselves well to the panel-picking process(popularity contest), but they don’t do much to help us determine whether it’s worth attending when the live and in-person event is staring us in the face with sooo many from which to choose. Level tracks might be better than topic tracks,” says Julia Gregory Poirier.
  • “More detail and description of the presentations… more accurate and emphasis on the level/depth of the sessions. It’s hard to pick them with so little information. — With a few exceptions, the “book readings” were worthless… why would I want to pay for someone to read me a book? They should outline it or show why it matters… then I’ll buy it for the detail,” says Charlie Browning.
  • “timing of panels was awful. example: there was a total of 3 visual design panels; all at the same time. many wanted to see all 3,” says Patric King.

More fixes? Post them in the comments.

Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

March 16, 2011

IBM's Watson tech trounces puny Austinites (and the audience) at SXSW

Well, it was a valiant effort, at least.

South by Southwest Interactive is over, but the new SXSWi Technology Summit is still going. At a presentation by IBM today, the company showed off the “Watson” natural language processing technology that became so well known recently when it was featured on “Jeopardy!”

IBM’s David Shepler hosted the presentation and explained the way Watson parses language and how it decides when to answer, but stressed that the tech is not just for quiz shows; it’ll have more practical applications in medicine, engineering and other areas.

Here’s a video we shot of a demo of the Watson technology (not the actual Watson computer itself; that’s back at IBM) competing against Austin game designer Richard Garriott and Nick Barbaro, founder of the Austin Chronicle:

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Computers, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

March 15, 2011

Arcade Fire, Conan O' Brien and Groupon take home big SXSW Interactive Awards

On the closing night of South by Southwest Interactive, the 14th Annual Interactive Awards bestowed honors on familiar names including Groupon, Conan O’ Brien, a web project from music group The Arcade Fire and Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man, Man” digital campaign.

The awards ceremony, at the Hilton Austin downtown, was hosted by comedian Chris Hardwick and honored 17 winners in categories like “Motion Graphics,” “Experimental” and “Mobile. In addition to Arcade Fire’s “Wilderness Downtown” for “Music” and “Best of Show,” “Conan O’ Brien Presents: Team Coco” for “Social Media” and Groupon.com for “People’s Choice Award,” The Onion won for “Classic” and “The Johnny Cash Project” took home an award in the “Art” category.

Hardwick provided to be a funny, profane host who deftly improvised, played around with winners as they gave their speeches and kept the show moving along swiftly. The Gregory Brothers of “Auto-Tune the News” performed their hit “Bedroom Intruder Song” as well as a newer “Winning” song about Charlie Sheen. Both were done as extended live versions with a full band. They were amazing.

As for the awards themselves, here’s the complete list of winners:

Activism: The Tiziano Project | 360¡ Kurdistan

Amusement: Most Awesomest Thing Ever

Art: The Johnny Cash Project

Business: Get Satisfaction

Classic: The Onion

Community: iFixit

Educational Resource: Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe

Experimental: Isle of Tune

Film/TV: Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy

Kiosk/Installation: Unilever - Smile Activated Vending Machine

Mobile: Airbnb

Motion Graphics: Record Tripping

Music: The Wilderness Downtown

Personal: JKVC Interactive & Print Design

Social Media: Conan O’Brien Presents: Team Coco

Student: FeedSpeaker

Technical Achievement: AP Timeline Reader

SPECIAL HONORS:

People’s Choice Award: Groupon

Breakout Digital Trend: GroupMe

Speaker of the Event: Jane McGonigal

Digital Campaign of the Year: Old Spice: Smell Like a Man, Man

Best of Show: The Wilderness Downtown

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Interactive grows to 19,364 attendees

South by Southwest Interactive is concluding, with a growth in attendance that mirrors last year’s significant jump. The festival said on Tuesday, the last day of the festival, that paid attendance for Interactive is officially 19,364, up from last year’s 14,251. That number includes Gold and Platinum badgeholders who had access to SXSW Interactive; it doesn’t necessarily equate to the number of people who attended SXSWi events.

That nearly 36-percent growth rate contributed to crowded conditions downtown, some over-full panels and talk about the future of the festival and its ability to manage continued growth.

Festival director Hugh Forrest said that despite reports of shuttle bus problems and logistical changes caused by the fest’s new format of 10 separate campuses, “Things generally worked very well.

“The campus program is still very rough and needs a lot of tweaking, and we need to improve our shuttle bus service,” he said. “But we had very crowded panel rooms 10 years ago. It was a good start.”

When asked if that format would continue into 2012, Forrest said, “Barring the city doubling the Convention Center in size, there’s no way it won’t continue.”

Even if the festival stays the same size next year - and there has been talk of capping registration for 2012 - Forrest said, the staff will spend the next few months looking at feedback and seeking ways to improve next year’s fest.

Another significant, unexpected event that impacted the festival was the earthquake in Japan and subsequent tsunami. During the festival, attendees started grassroots efforts like SXSW4Japan to raise money for victims. Some panels shifted their focus to talk about Japan and how to help. Forrest said, “Amidst a very dark cloud of the horrible tragedy in Japan, this was a small silver lining.

“It framed what’s really important and it showed how agile this community is and how agile the technology is for responding to a crisis like that,” he said. He said that several panels about social media and unrest in the Middle East also addressed the growing impact of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks and their real-world impact.

Forrest said that for next year, the festival crew will look at quality control for panels, although the abundance of content is not something that will likely go away. “Yes, there’s to much stuff, but it’s part of what we’re trying to do here. That’s a feature, not a flaw.”

Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: Merch - The Other White Meat of Monetization

Time/Date: 3:30 p.m., Tuesday (hashtag: #merch$)

Panelists: Mona Patel, Livestrong; Mikhail Ledvich, ixtens.com (formerly of BustedTees.com); Justin Sewell, Despair, Inc.; Burnie Burns, Rooster Teeth Productions; Joel Bush, Amplifier.

The gist: Whether you’re a gigantic non-profit, a web video production outfit with a rabid following or a new business, merchandise may be a better way to make your business profitable than relying on advertising. Livestrong had great success partnering with Nike. Rooster Teeth had a large audience and started selling t-shirts. Despair launched with a catalog of products when they started. But even if you’re successful, there are challenges in creating the right mix of products, finding good suppliers and working with partners who can offload some of the work if merchandise isn’t your core speciality.

Quotes: “Please don’t parody Livestrong.” - Patel. “… unless it’s really good.” - Ledvich. “The amount of resources customer service requires is something a lot of people underestimate.” - Ledvich.

Takeaways: The biggest misconception about racking up traffic is that an ad sponsor will magically appear when you get a lot of viewers. It’s better to build your own community than going all-in on social media sites that may go away or fade (like MySpace). Have your own place on the web. Avoid doing polls for new products - people who vote may not end up buying and people who didn’t vote for a product will feel like they missed out on something else. E-mail and direct mail to customers is old-school, but still effective. Look for quality in vendors over price. If your stuff gets popular, you’ll eventually have to deal with knock-offs and get legal help. A robust affiliate program can take some of the marketing off your hands.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011, Shopping

Snaps from SXSW trade show

This year, the SXSW Interactive trade show, combined with Film, moved back a bit in the fest - it continues through Thursday, 11-6 p.m.

Here’s a few photos I shot there today.

Lacie
Lacie’s products.

redlaser
Red Laser’s booth.

freeipad2
Lots of free iPad 2 give-away promotions at the fest.

hughmcleod
Cartoonist and “Evil Plans” author Hugh MacLeod.

evil plans
More art from Hugh MacLeod.

blondes
Wigs.

hockeycar
Hey, air hockey car!

ie9
Internet Explorer 9 demo..

toys
Schwag..

streamjam
This guy was indeed streaming and jamming.

bottleopener
Handy! iPhone case bottle opener..

opera
It was nice of them to so warmly welcome me.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Gadgets, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: The SXSW PanelPicker - Can It Predict the Future?

Time/Date: 11 a.m., Tuesday (hashtag: panelpicker)

Panelists: Jonathan Spillman, UT McCombs School of Business; Juan Moreno, University of Texas; Lindsey Simon, Google; Tony Wallace, University of Texas student.

The gist: Organizers who worked with South by Southwest Interactive to create the PanelPicker, which allows people to suggest and vote on panels for the festival, talked about its origins (it began as a McCombs School of Business MBA project at the University of Texas) and how it’s changed since it was introduced in 2007. The panelists spelled out a few trends, such as the clear rise of social-media related panels, a shortage of design panels, the re-emergence of web-related panels. They said that 8,000 ideas have been submitted since PanelPicker started. It has 105,000 registered users, has collected 87,000 comments and 405,000 votes. Top keywords in 2008 included “Users.” In 2009 it was “Phones, mobile and applications.” And in 2010, it was “People, web, interactive and apps.” Panelists say they’re looking at data from panel submissions to try to peek at emerging trends based on the panels start-ups are submitting, trends in what social trends are happening at the festival from year to year and other data that can be mined from so many PanelPicker submissions.

Quotes: “If you ever submit an idea to a conference, it goes into a black hole.” - Simon. “We need to work on the user experience through the whole process.” - Simon.

Takeaways: Poor grammer and misspellings are common in panel submissions, making it hard to collect data (since many keywords aren’t spelled right). Be careful. Specialize your content with PanelPicker and be specific; don’t just submit something about “Social media.” (Incidentally “social” is the top keyword for 2011’s festival in panel descriptions.) Don’t submit a panel description that’s funny but won’t make sense to someone who’s reading quickly or on the go. Opportunities for PanelPicker that people submitting should think about include “Automation,” “content/video,” “springboard effect,” “integration with music and film,” “case studies” and “white papers.”

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

Monday photos from SXSW Interactive

A few photos I shot around town on Monday at SXSW Interactive:

pedicab.JPG
A pedicab sign.

pepsi.JPG
PepsiCo’s downtown play area, including real-life foursquare and Ping-Pong.

hpoasis.JPG
The HP oasis, southeast of the Convention Center. Laid-back vibe.

jolene.JPG
Jolene Jang, the “Meeting Maximizer” who is also selling monopods and digital screen nametags at the fest. Her site is PersonalCameraCrew.com

costumes.JPG
Mammals on their way to a party at the W. Hotel.

ie9.JPG
Internet Explorer 9 launch party at ACL Live.

microsoft.JPG
At the ACL Live Microsoft IE9 party.

sculpture.JPG
Moving human sculpture at the Microsoft party.

sockpuppet.JPG
Microsoft sock puppet.

earplugs.JPG
These are not Cheez Doodles, they are earplugs. I learned the hard way.

gowallakangaroo.JPG
Me and the Gowalla kangaroo.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

March 14, 2011

SXSW Panel: Too Soon? Timing Topic Web Videos

Time/Date: 5 p.m., Monday (hashtag: #chtoosoon)

Panelists: Jeff Rubin, CollegeHumor.com; Patrick Cassels, CollegeHumor.com; Streeter Seidell, CollegeHumor.com; Michael Gregory, The Gregory Brothers / Auto-Tune The News; Sarah Gregory.

The gist: The panel, which included comedy writers, performers and video producers talked about the taboos of web video and what lines should and shouldn’t be crossed. Inevitably, talk about the recent disasters in Japan became a topic, with panelists concluding that Twitter might be the place now where would-be comedians with no taste might spout bad jokes about disasters. (For their part, The Gregory Brothers are often asked to Auto-Tune Hitler; they haven’t.) They pondered whether the topical comedy videos they make (say, recent videos about Charlie Sheen) will stand the test of time and the challenge in balancing taking a few days to make a video versus putting something up immediately. (The popular Auto-Tune the News “Bedroom Intruder” took two days because the producers were very inspired and worked fast.) Incidentally, the Gregory Bros. hinted that viral star Antoine Dodson will appear at their Wednesday show, 6 p.m. at Buffalo Billiards.

Quotes: “It was actually about a RESCUE.” - Sarah Gregory disputing that the “Bedroom Intruder” video was about attempted rape. “I don’t think there’s ever a way to make a tasteful pun.” - Rubin.

Takeaways: Not everything that’s high-quality in terms of comedy gets popular and not everything that’s popular will be your best work. But sometimes doing topical stuff you’re not too inspired by can pay for more ambitious web video projects. There’s no doubt, though, that on the web, faster is better. Panelists Sarah Gregory said that too soon is probably just about right when it comes to jumping on memes.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: Will News Apps Re-Invent Journalism?

Time/Date: 3:30 p.m., Monday (hashtag: #newsapps)

Panelists: Aron Pilhofer, The New York Times; Chris Tomlinson, formerly of The Texas Observer; Jon Lebkoswky, Plutopia Productions; Niran Babalola, The Texas Tribune; Katherine Jarmul, Loud3r.

The gist: For the Texas Observer, the average reader age is 63; it bet $15,000 on an iPad app it hoped would bring a younger audience. It was just one story from a strong, varied collection of mainstream journalists (Jarmul used to be with USA Today) and technologists on the challenges of creating apps for news (or deciding not to). Some proposed that HTML 5 may be the answer for sidestepping the decision-making of choosing an app platform. There’s also room for apps that don’t just deliver news stories. The Tribune has created a Texas prisoners database-driven app, for instance.

Quotes: “You are a hack.” - Jarmul. “Please don’t Tweet this… management should be prohibited from buying an iPad. iPad is not like the web… it’s its own thing.” - Pilhofer. “I am a staunch believer in journalism and I think we’ll make it through, no problem. There’s a need for real-time content greater than ever before.” - Jarmul. “We’re just at the beginning.” - Tomlinson.

Takeaways: Despite criticism from app designers, the “PDF-on-an-iPad” format might be the best approach for a small news organization. News organizations must decide how much of their budget to devote to apps, which platforms to adopt and whether these are the best ways to reach readers and to create an experience they’re willing to pay for. But the answer is not one-size-fits-all and news organizations, especially small ones, are balancing the need to innovate with keeping their staffs employed and their news content strong.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: An Open Internet - The Last, Best Hope for Independent Producers

alfranken2.jpg
Time/Date: 9:30 a.m. Monday (hashtag: #Franken)

Panelists: U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota

The gist:. Franken, who read from prepared remarks after expressing sympathy for the victims of Japan’s recent natural disasters and protesters in Libya, began by talking about the struggle artists (including Franken and his comedy partner Tom Davis) have always had making money and the history of South by Southwest. He explained that the Internet is a powerful medium for self promotion for artists, but that it’s in danger from companies that don’t want to leave money on the table (even big companies that might sponsor South by Southwest). Currently, we have net neutrality, he said, but are in danger of losing it as companies that control the pipelines want to begin charging for different kinds of content transmission (selectively throttling bandwidth). He cited examples including Comcast charging more for Netflix data transmission. Franken believes net neutrality would be bad for consumers, but disastrous for independent artists. Earning laughs, he said that large companies, who are the only ones who’d benefit from net neutrality restrictions, use a technique called “Making things up” to promote their cause. He cited examples like Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” and the music group The Decemberists as examples of artists finding their audience through direct distribution online.

Quotes: “Some of you may be aware that I used to be in comedy..” “The best part is no one has to sell out… unless they want to… but I am here to tell you that the party may be over.” “We have net neutrality right now and we don’t want to lose it. That’s all.” “I want artists to get paid for their work… for the work they want to do, not the work companies want them to do.” “You’re not just tech innovators, you’re job creators… you have enormous credibility right now.” “The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these enormous companies.” “I want this community to be engaged in this fight. Will you do it?” - all quote Franken.

Takeaways: The end of net neutrality would have a negative impact on pricing and options for consumers for their Internet entertainment, and it would be catastrophic for independent artists, musicians, filmmakers and tech developers who don’t want to sell out. Franken said he plans to introduce an anti-trust bill to take on telecom lobbyists directly; but he says he’s outnumbered and needs the support of artists, technologists and the public to fight for net neutrality. He asked SXSW attendees, whom he said have tremendous sway in this digital moment, to come out swinging to defend the current state of an open Internet.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

March 13, 2011

SXSW Core Conversation: Communicating on the Web During a Crisis

Time/Date: 5 p.m., Sunday (hashtag: #webcrisis)

Panelists: Chris Latham, The University of Texas at Austin; Nyleva Corley, The University of Texas at Austin

The gist: Latham and Corley, who both work on the web sites for the University of Texas, talked about how, for nine hours, they handled a shooting incident at UT that took place on Sept. 28. Latham said that the team, which has plans in place for emergency situations, was lucky to have the incident occur during a weekday when staff were already working; it tested their network and emergency response. Latham and Corley advised having different dynamic plans in place, to think about where people might be if a crisis happens (remote access versus being in-house) and how conditions like network outages, cell outages or other problems might affect communication. Latham and Corley said there are challenges to coordinating these efforts as well as crafting emergency messages on formats like Twitter.

Quotes: “It was coming more from ground-up than top-down in terms of taking advantage of what Twitter can do.” - Corley. “The important thing for me than getting information out quickly.” - Corley “It really felt like a test of our system.” - Latham.

Takeaways: It’s important to have am emergency plan and infrastructure in place for when the unthinkable happens. A text alert system can still be staggered in when the messages are actually delivered. A campus P.A. system can have similar problems - some people may hear it well while others not so well. If you’re relying on cell phones to connect with your team, there could be major problems.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Keynote: Christopher 'moot' Poole

Christopher %22moot%22 Poole of 4chan, on stage at #SXSW. Yes, he really exists.jpeg
(See our previous profile of Christopher Poole.)

Time/Date: 2 p.m, Sunday (hashtag: #sxswmoot)

The gist: The young founder of popular Internet message board 4chan and the image-board startup Canvas, spoke about the culture of 4chan and the influences that helped create his new venture. He’s very focused on play, interactive experiences and online collaboration. Poole didn’t go too deeply into the controversies that have surrounded 4chan (which he says is “Misunderstood”) and Anonymous, a group that originated there. Instead, he showed funny examples of memes that came out of 4chan and talked about the potential on Canvas to promote online play and meme creation. The keynote was very short. It started about 20 minutes late and ended about five minutes early. It was also apparently not a presentation that was extremely well received. When Poole started a Q&A, half the room noisily rushed out and didn’t bother to hear more. He did offer an invitation for SXSW attendees to try the new service. You can sign up at canv.as/sxsw.

Quotes: “I don’t recommend you go clicking around if you don’t know what you’re looking for on the front page.” - on 4chan’s adult content. “You have to allow for a culture and identity to form on a site.” - all quotes Poole.

Takeaways: Poole argues that anonymity doesn’t necessarily lack authenticity. On 4chan and Canvas, anonymity allows people to collaborate and create memes without fear of failure. It allows them to be more creative and to take bigger risks. It’s also a larger problem on, say, Facebook: “Mistakes and failure become associated with you.”

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: Strange Business: Corporate Creative That Doesn't Suck

Time/Date: Sunday, 12:30 p.m. (hashtag: #scqdk)

Panelists: Aaron With, Groupon (CEO Andrew Mason, who was scheduled, was not present)

The gist: Groupon’s quirky sales deal copy isn’t just generated to boost sales; With, who is a very funny man, made it clear that a lot of the behind-the-scenes that goes on at the company is just as silly. He showed photos, videos and more demonstrating the fairly elaborate pranks and humorous projects that have very little to do with the company’s astounding valuation (somewhere in the $15 billion valuation). But on second thought, maybe it has everything to do with the company’s business value. The games and humorous memes the employees engage in are a kind of team-building. With began the presentation by asking about office art at other people’s companies (he wondered aloud about Google’s rich art) and by engaging in geek humor, like showing a photo of the company’s six wall clocks, all set to Central Time. Not all the jokes went over well and the quirkiness seemed to wear thin after the first 15 minutes. With said the company is disciplined about its content production and wants to create its own humor, not rely on cultural references and use lame, played-out targets (Snuggies, Austin Powers, etc.). It wasn’t until nearly the end of the panel that With addressed the company’s badly received Super Bowl ads. He acknowledged that the ads just didn’t connect. He called them a “Fiasco” and said, “we alienated too many people.

Quotes: “That’s OK, I wasn’t saying anything important.” - With after an audience member said he couldn’t hear. “It helps weed out people we wouldn’t want anyway.” - With, on a kind of litmus test for hiring employees who don’t get their sense of humor or sensibility. “Groupon clone job.” - With, referring to rival site Gilt.com in explaining an April Fool’s joke his company did.

Takeaways: Groupon doesn’t just use humor for its marketing and sales copy, it tries to be creative and have a silly sensibility in every part of its corporate culture. Although With didn’t offer a lot of advice for other companies to do the same, it’s clear that, at least in terms of valuation, his company is doing something right. Insincere marketing-driven humor or viral marketing can backfire if it’s not really coming from a company’s wheelhouse and is demographically driven. It’s not easy to make copy sing. You have to invest in a process.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011, Shopping

Social Media 'Gurus?'

In case you missed it yesterday, we ran a story in print and online about the dubious phenomenon of self-described “Social Media Gurus.”

There are plenty of other colorful names for them, but we’ll let you fill in that blank.

There certainly seem to be a lot of them at SXSW Interactive this year, but that’s a surprise to no one.

Got any thoughts on these “Experts?” Do be sure to post them in the comments.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

March 12, 2011

Japanese TV personality Reika Miyazaki asks for help from SXSW Interactive

reiko.JPG

On Saturday, prompted by fundraising efforts started by attendees at South by Southwest Interactive, Reika Miyazaki began Tweeting, asking for them to do more.

Miyazaki, a TV personality and former Austinite, says she’s in Japan with only an iPhone to connect her to the online world. She wants SXSW attendees to continue with donations for Japan relief in the wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami. She plans to come back to Austin as soon as she can, but says that it’s difficult to get a flight out of the country.

We spoke to her via e-mail:

American-Statesman: You lived in Austin? When/for how long? Have you attended SXSW before?

Reika Miyazaki: Yes, I lived in Austin when I was 12-16ish (am currently 23). I attended West Ridge Middle School and Westlake High School. I went by my Korean name (I am 1/4 korean) Yeo-hyang Baek (nickname Yoyo). I’ve never had the opportunity to attend SXSW but I love music as I also DJ.

Where are you now? Where were you when the earthquake and tsunami hit and are you in a safe area?

I live in Tokyo so the earthquake and tsunami did not affect me too greatly. I was in the middle of getting ready for my Fox TV filming in my apt on the 31st floor. It shook so much. We are used to earthquakes here but this is nothing I have ever experienced. I was stuck in my room for hours as the elevators were not working and I was by myself. No way to contact anyone. Family. Nothing. A big shelf fell on my bed if I had been asleep I don’t know what would have happened.

Aftershocks have been really bad too. I haven’t slept for two days as there are alerts going off often about more earthquakes coming. My body is sea sick I guess? I still cannot stop swaying even though it’s not shaking.

The reason i left my house was because areas down south are experiencing less earthquakes as well as the scare we had about a possible nuclear meltdown although that has apparently been contained.

You asked people to set up a donation booth at SXSW. What else can people here do to help?

I really don’t know I’m still panicking but just been racking my brains of what I can do to help. But donations I think are the easiest way to help. That’s all we can do here in Japan as well as there is no way to reach areas up north

You’re a singer and actress, is that correct?

I’m more of a TV personality. I am a host of Fox Japan’s “Backstage “Pass” as well as being regular guests on other Tv shows. I’ve also been a guest to the “Crillon Debutante Ball” in Paris.

Has it been difficult staying in touch online? Are the cell networks holding up with your iPhone?

Thankfully in Tokyo the Internet’s been working constantly so the only way to contact our loved ones for a while was through Twitter, Skype and Viber as phone lines were completely down. Lines are up again but it’s still impossible to get in touch with those up north and it’s just been really unstable all around.

Other things I’d like to add is that I’ve been lucky but there are tens of thousands of people who are in a place really bad. There are a few friends that I still can’t get ahold of. Because ive been lucky so far i deeply feel that it is my duty to do whatever I can. Our nation is truly in a state of emergency and death tolls keep rising as its been difficult for officials to grasp the situation. We are all still living in constant fear of the aftershocks, more tsunamis, the Nucleur plant, power shortages, bad weather, fires, crimes. All tv stations have cut all their programs and all that’s on is live news about what’s happening. We haven’t seen a TV ad since it hit.

However we are thankful for the international support we are receiving as well as the fact that the nation truly is working as one. (cell phone companies are offering free Wi-Fi and texting, beverage companies have made the drink vendors free, major companies and stores have shut down to accommodate a looming power shortage, the metro in Tokyo ran 24 hours, lots of donations, etc)

But we are told to expect aftershocks for up to a month and I’m afraid the situation is just going to get worse.

As a lover of Austin and music, it would mean so much to see SXSW support Japan.

As we said yesterday, SXSW4Japan is continuing to raise money for release efforts (current total: $10,150). On Saturday, Austin start-up Hurricane Party announced it will be holding a fundraising party at Kenichi, 5 p.m. Sunday. You can find details for that here.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: The Great Paywall Experiment - Evolving Digital Subscription Models

Time/Date: 5 p.m., Saturday (hashtag: #SXSWpaywalls)

Panelists: Daniel Bernard, The Wall Street Journal; Heather Hollis; Electonic Arts; Daniel Mandell; Wenner Media; Donald Chestnut; SapientNitro.

The gist: Newspapers, magazines and other publishers are trying to find ways to make good experience for readers across new platforms like the iPad and mobile phones, but it’s a challenge to not only identify them but to figure out a good way to price that content. Many of the users who are willing to subscribe to an all-access pass for a news or gaming service are niche users and brand-oriented. It was a subdued panel in a big half-full room that many audience members didn’t stick around to watch through the end.

Takeaways: As is the case in 99 percent of journalism panels related to money, nobody seems to have any solid answers. The Wall Street Journal seems to have figured out how to monetize its content in a variety of ways, but it has a very loyal audience that’s much different than what typical magazines and newspapers are dealing with.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Keynote: Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR


New York Times photo

Time/Date: 2:15 p.m., Saturday (hashtag: #GameLayer)

Speaker: Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja (also founder and chief executive) of Boston-based SCVNGR

The gist: The incredibly energetic, fast-talking, supremely engaging Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old head of SCVNGR entertained with an opening keynote that touched on gaming in relation to education, social shopping and business. When you talk as fast as Priebatsch (seriously, he’s a machine), you can cover a lot of ground in an hour and he did. He began by talking about the ways that the grades/rewards system of schools is broken and actually is set up in a way that encourages cheating and does not do enough to provide rewards for their own sakes. (He compared it to offering points for tooth brushing; eventually kids will brush for the points and not because they need to brush.) He then examined how $15 billion Groupon works and segued into a discussion of location-based services, rewards and how everyone his industry (including Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrl and others) could be doing more to reward loyalty; none of them is making much money compared to the giant gorilla in the space, Facebook. Priebatsch introduced a game in which audience members traded colored cards to make rows show the same color. By “winning” the game (much sooner than the countdown he set up), the audience earned a $10,000 donation to the World Wildlife Foundation. It demonstrated communal gaming skills, he said. It was very well received, as was the entire keynote, which started late due to lines and crowded conditions.

Quotes: “The killer app at this year’s South by Southwest, as it always has been… is the community.” - Hugh Forrest, fest director. “The game layer is just now being built… unlike the social layer, the game layer traffics in influence.” - Priebatsch. “(School) grades are a game mechanic you can lose in a game where we don’t want ANYONE to lose.” - Priebatsch.

Takeaways: The game layer is coming, it’s going to be fun and it’s going to help solve real-world problem. Gameplay mechanics are going to influence location-based services, online shopping rewards in other areas of social transactions in ways that may not be readily apparent. Communal gameplay is a magical dynamic that can be applied to online business, schools and many, many other areas. The “Moral hazard” of gameplay - replacing real rewards with fake rewards, is a problem that can ruin a gaming dynamic. Games that rely more on social rules and self-enforced rewards and punishment can be more effective.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

SXSW Core Conversation: How Social Media Fueled Unrest in Middle East

socialfuelpic.jpg

Time/Date: 12:30 p.m., Saturday (hashtag: #socialfuel)

Panelists: Jennifer Preston, The New York Times; Brian Stetler, The New York Times, various audience members.

The gist: A packed Core Conversation with all seats filled and people sitting on the floor, expressing rapt interest. The social media presence that affected recent events in the Middle East didn’t just spring up in January. Many were fueled over time online. The tools of social media helped saved lives as people used social media to re-route protests and report sniper locations in Egypt. There is some worry about how secure these networks are (like, say, Facebook). And journalists must deal not only with the ethics of potentially exposing sources and putting them in danger but also making sure to apply the same standards of publication for social media (including Retweeting on Twitter). As the panel went on, it was announced that a photographer for Al Jezeera had just been killed in Libya.

Quotes: “It did. We all know it did.” - Stetler on whether social media indeed fueled unrest in the Middle East. “It’s not like they were trying to have a social media revolution. This is just the tools they had available to use.” - Andy Carvin of NPR. “I think all major news organizations were turning to YouTube.” - Preston. “While these are very powerful tools, they also represent tremendous risk for those involved.” - Preston. “Dictators are learning from each other as often as activists are learning from each other.” - Audience member.

Takeaways: Access to conversation was more important than access to information. Major news organizations who can’t be present for major events need to be adept at following the conversations online in places like YouTube, Global Voices, Twitter and Facebook. There’s still some question as to the ethics of whether journalists can even support the concept of peace in their reporting in covering these kinds of stories. There’s a need for news organizations to not only report big stories, but also to curate information when they can’t cover something themselves.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

A few photos from Friday SXSW Interactive

crowd.JPG
Early crowds at registration.

crowd.JPG
Who left this at an EDUCATION panel!?

crowd.JPG
Outside the Apple pop-up store on 6th and Congress.

crowd.JPG
Inside the Apple pop-up store on 6th and Congress.

crowd.JPG
Connie Reece with her Dewey Winburned Community Service Awards, given out at the Driskill Friday night.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW 2011

March 11, 2011

SXSW Panel: Group Chat App Attack - Who Will Rise?

Time/Date: 5 p.m., Friday (hashtag: #WhoWillRise)

Panelists: Caleb Elston, Yobongo Inc.; Leah Culver, Convore; Lucy Zhang, Facebook; Mike Melanson, ReadWriteWeb; Steve Martocci, GroupMe

The gist: Facebook recently acquired Beluga, a group chat app that allows you to create small private groups. Yobongo allows you to talk to people around you even if you don’t know them. Convore is a web-based group chat app modeled after IRC and forums. GroupMe allows you to share images and other info and to create private chat-room-like groups. All on the panel believe that the critical mass of smart phones out there has opened up avenues for their companies to provide compelling group chatting experiences even if we don’t know what topic or even whom we want to talk about. The apps are generally lightweight — they work well on spotty cell networks and don’t overload on features that take up a lot of bandwidth.

Quotes: “Group chat - I feel like I’ve been doing this since I was 8 years old. Why now?”- Melanson. “You haven’t been doing it on your phone. That’s the missing piece.” - Martocci. “It’s no longer just about texting. It’s about sharing group experiences.” - Zhang. “We have mute features.” Martocci, on the inevitable constant buzz of your phone from using these kinds of apps. “People WANT to talk to each other!” Culver, on the overwhelming response from her users. “I don’t really want that Zucked with.” - Martocci, on privacy. “The App Store submission process is definitely the hardest part. On the other hand, developing on Android has been really fun.” - Martocci.

Takeaways: These new apps go beyond texting to provide more options and different kinds of tools to open up chatting with friends, with strangers or with Facebook/phone book/Twitter contacts. The companies say they’ve planned to keep providing free texts as part of their costs.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Phones, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: David vs. Goliath - Lessons learned from Lamebook vs. Facebook

lamebook.JPG

Time/Date: 3:30 p.m., Friday (hashtag: #LameFace)

Panelists:Conor Civins, Bracewell & Giuliani; Edward Cavazos, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP; Jonathan Standefer, Lamebook; Matthew Genitempo, Austin Architectural Graphics/Public School; Joshua Huck, Lamebook.

The gist: The founders of Austin-based Lamebook.com (and their lawyers), spoke about how their site — which takes status updates and funny photos from Facebook (obscuring the names and avatars to protect identities) and posts them is waging a legal battle against Facebook, the giant social network, which has sued for trademark infringement. The Lamebook crew showed off examples of their site (which drew laughs even in a nearly empty large room at the Radisson) and insisted their site is a parody. The legal situation has not been resolved despite efforts to work with Facebook, they said. At one point, they say, Facebook shut down the ability to search for the word “Lamebook” on the site and shut down their personal accounts. (Standefer and Genitempo have Facebook accounts. Huck no longer does.) Huck revealed that the popular humor-focused Cheezburger Network offered to buy the site, but instead “Ripped us off.” “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that,” Civins said.

Quotes: “We’re defending ourselves with something we think is bigger than ourselves.” - Huck. “We made $30 our first month.” - Huck. “The rule of thumb we go by is if you wouldn’t say it on the dinner table with grandma, you shouldn’t put it online.” - Standefer. “…unless your grandma is really nasty.” - Givins. “It’s a parody of the kind of content you find on Facebook.” - Genitempo. “It’s not a site for vendettas.” - Huck. “If you don’t understand who the target is, you don’t get the joke.” - Civins, explaining the legalities of parody. “We like Facebook. We just don’t like what they’re doing to us. Kind of like a bi-polar ex.” - Huck. “It’s very clearly a joke.” - Civins.

Takeaways: Despite what Civins said is a very clear case of parody, Facebook continues to take the stand that the site violates its trademarks and has not backed off on its legal actions. It was probably logistically impossible, but this panel would have benefited greatly from having someone on Facebook to represent the other side of this disagreement. The panelists believe that if Facebook is allowed to shut down the site, it will put a chill on free speech.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW Panel: No Child Left Inside - Mobile Tech Meets Education

Time/Date: 2 p.m., Friday (hashtag: #MobNCLI)

Panelists: Drew Davidson, Carnegie Mellon University; Jared Lamenzo, The WildLab/Mediated Spaces Inc.; Rebecca Bray, Smithsonian Institution; Richard Scullin, MobileEd.org; S. Craig Watkins, The University of Texas at Austin

The gist: Educators on the panel believe that the mobile revolution in education is inevitable, despite criticism that the devices are toys or entertainment machines. Mobile technology is opening up opportunities for educators to enrich learning by getting kids out of the classroom, by providing them with Internet access in places where they might not already have it and enabling students to bring their own technology to the table. The debate about using mobile tech in classrooms or other educational settings mirrors the debate over computers in classrooms in the 1980s, and it will likely go in the same direction. But this equipment is much cheaper and will probably be even more ubiquitous than computers were much more quickly.

Quotes: “We’re really rethinking learning… this idea that learning can happen anywhere in time.” - Watkins. “There are real concerns about the issue of distraction… There are certain risks and opportunities.” - Watkins. “It’s no longer about one location for learning.” - Bray. “The world’s at their fingertips whenever they want it.” - Davidson

Takeaways: Despite the very real risks of digital distraction, educators need to look at these (perhaps inevitable) devices as potentially valuable tools that will profoundly change the way kids learn and the way they experience and use knowledge. The intersection of gaming (or the “gameification” of learning) and education may open up even more avenues and opportunities.

  • Omar L. Gallaga

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW

What's in the 2011 SXSWi swag bag (hint: not much)

swagbag.JPG

Remember last year when the SXSW Interactive was filled with about 100 semi-useless promotional items?

This year, despite news that the bags were going away (they came back), the bag is definitely slimmed down in the filler department. Inside you’ll only find a copy of this week’s Austin Chronicle (not last week’s Interactive issue?) an official program, a cheat-sheet pocket guide (which is so large it will only fit in your pocket if you’re a giant) and a Screenburn book guide.

It’s certainly less. Less is more, right?

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

The Linkdown: SXSW Interactive 2011 edition

swagbagcentral.jpg
Photo by Omar L. Gallaga / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Here we go!

South by Southwest Interactive begins today! After all the preparation, all the noise about how crowded it’ll be, it’s time to see this gargantuan tech/social machine do some laps.

But before you make that first beeline for the Convention Center, check out some of these links that could save you some trouble later on.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

And the winner is... Whole Foods

Last night, the winners of the Statesman’s Texas Social Media Awards were announced at a ceremony at the ACL Live at Moody Theater.

The overall winner was Whole Foods. You can read all about it in Brian Gaar’s story where you’ll find a video, and see a photo gallery from the event here.

I was one of the judges for the TSMA awards (which we call “The T’SMAckies” for short) along with the head of the event, social media editor Robert Quigley, food writer Addie Broyles and Mathilde Piard, social media manager in the digital division of the Statesman’s parent company Cox Media Group in Atlanta.

You can see the original list of nominees and comments here. The 25 winners and overall winners were chosen from more than 358 Texas individuals and organizations nominated by the public.

The A-List: Photos from the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards

(Photo by Alberto Martinez, AMERICAN-STATESMAN)

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet

March 10, 2011

Pre-SXSW Interactive live chat

We’ll be doing a live chat to discuss South by Southwest Interactive at 2 p.m. CST today (Thursday, March 10). Come join us! We’ll be answering questions you may have about fest logistics, sharing some of our panel picks and talking about the fest’s growth.

Join us!

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

SXSW keynote preview: playing with Seth Priebatsch

SethPriebatschheadshot.jpg
Would you like to play a game?

Seth Priebatsch, “Chief Ninja” at Cambridge, Mass.-based SCVNGR, has two of them in store for attendees of his South by Southwest Interactive Festival opening keynote presentation, which he’ll deliver 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Austin Convention Center. (It’ll be live-streamed to the public on sxsw.com as well.)

While most keynotes at SXSWi typically involve a single speaker and some slides (like Zappos.com chief executive Tony Hsieh’s talk on happiness in 2009) or an onstage interview (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s legendary train wreck with journalist Sarah Lacy in 2008), 22-year-old Priebatsch promises to break the format with a more participatory presentation.

“I do like to have a lot of fun, and I do like to have a lot of fun with the audience. It’s either going to work and be one of the coolest joint experiences that anyone in the audience will have had … or fail gloriously,” Priebatsch said. “It’ll be epic either way.”

From his “Chief Ninja” job title (he could also be called founder and CEO) to his company bio (“Seth Priebatsch was born in Boston, MA at the age of 7”) to his cheery, hyper, completely convincing banter by phone, Priebatsch is part of a wave of online companies and Web executives who work humor and games into the fabric of what they do.

It worked for Groupon Inc., the online deals service that by some estimates could be worth $15 billion.

For SCVNGR, which started off as a location-based business app that Priebatsch developed as part of a business competition at Princeton, the mix of quirky and forward-looking is paying off. The service announced in February that it has passed a million users and on Thursday introduced a feature called “LevelUp” in Philadelphia and Boston.

SCVNGR in some ways resembles a mix of location services like Gowalla and Foursquare, where users check in at specific locations, but is heavily focused on what Priebatsch called a “gaming layer” that introduces elements of, say, video games into real-world interactions. “This decade was the decade of social,” he said. “The next decade is the decade for gaming.”

With LevelUp, SCVNGR will work with merchants to reward repeat customers, cracking a problem that seems to affect daily deal and location-based sites that attract flocks of new customers to local businesses but doesn’t give them enough reason to come back.

“We’re trying to crack the science of loyalty for local business,” he said. “ We believe that (location-based services) and the local deals space are on a head-on collision course.” The potential on the business side for being one of the first companies to crack the code is huge, but Priebatsch is equally excited about the implications of video-game mechanics increasingly working their way into the real world. Points? Leveling up by completing challenges and earning achievements? Finding the (metaphoric) princess by completing a stage of a game that is spread out across your city?

The keynote will tie that in by example, he says: “It’ll force everyone to experience this in a visceral way,” Priebatsch said.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2009, SXSW 2010, SXSW 2011, Videogames

SXSW Interactive grows up, faces social backlash

In today’s austin360 print edition and online, we ran a piece I wrote about South by Southwest Interactive’s growing pains and how it’s addressing a backlash that brewed after last year’s festival.

As soon as last year’s festival was over, my editor and I talked a lot about what the surge in growth for the fest means and whether it would continue. We were amazed to hear that this year’s attendance will likely mirror last year’s growth, somewhere in the 30 to 40 percent range.

Is the fest growing up or growing out of control?

Here are some links that go with the piece:

At 2 p.m. today (Thursday, March 10) CST, we’ll be doing a live chat here to talk about the fest. Bring your questions, concerns, and advice for others on how to grapple with this growing event.

Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2009, SXSW 2010, SXSW 2011

March 9, 2011

Outgoing NPR CEO Schiller will still appear at April UT symposium

Despite her resignation on Wednesday morning, Vivian Schiller, the outgoing president and chief executive at NPR, will still appear at a University of Texas Online Journalism Symposium April 1, the event’s organizer said.

Schiller had been scheduled to be the keynote speaker. This morning, Rosental C. Alves, who organizes the symposium, said he spoke to Schiller by phone and she confirmed that she will still appear.

“I told her her invitation was because of her expertise… that goes beyond her experience at NPR,” Alves said. “She told me she would understand if I had to cancel. On the contrary, I told her she would be a very appropriate keynote speaker.”

Alves said that despite the political controversy NPR has been at the center of, most recently over a video tape containing remarks about the Tea Party while led to her resignation, Schiller will be talking about her vision of journalism. She became president and CEO of NPR in 2009 as the organization was facing a financial crisis.

Other guest speakers at the symposium include Meredith Artley, vice president and managing editor of CNN.com, author and consultant Madanmohan Rao and Warren Webster, president of Patch.com

Schiller will be the first speaker on April 1. The conference will be at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center and will cost $30 for students, $60 for general admission.

“It’s a very strong program. I’m delighted she’s coming,” Alves said.

Full disclosure: I’ve done work for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and for CNN.com.

(Photo: Kevin Wolf, Associated Press)

Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Austin, Internet

March 7, 2011

The Linkdown for Monday, March 7 (non-SXSW edition)

We’ve been writing a lot about South by Southwest Interactive and if you’re not attending (or have no plans to follow the fest), it must be getting a little exhausting. Well, we’re going to be doing a lot more, but here’s a respite for non-SXSWers, a Linkdown sans South by Southwest information.

Here’s what’s up:

  • The RISE Austin conference begins today, featuring keynote speaker Robert Johnson. Here’s a list of the multicultural series tech sessions and more info about the series. You can also read more about RISE in today’s Statesman.
  • Also on Thursday: a reception for an art exhibit of iPad-created artwork. Artist Kyle Lambert’s work (like the iPad-created image pictured here), among many others, will be part of the show.
  • Why is the iPad doing so well and why will it be so hard for competitors to catch up? It’s all about pricing.
  • Have you ever been burned by online concert ticketing that seemed to sell out too quickly? Here’s why that happens.
  • Three non-SXSW social media happenings on Thursday: Austin High Tech Happy Hour ($10) at Molotov, BASHH (free, but sold out) at Belmont and Statesman Texas Social Media Awards (free, waitlist) at ACL Live.
  • Something to look forward to: March 13 is World Poopin’ Day. (Calm down, it’s for charity!)
  • Gowalla 3.0 for Android devices is all the way live.
  • Austin’s Photodex has partnered with Smugmug for online HD slideshows.
  • Last week, Facebook acquired Beluga, a group messaging service that I’ve been trying out. It’s quite good.
  • The president and CEO of NPR Vivian Schiller and Meredith Artley, the managing editor of CNN.com (full disclosure: I write for both) will be featured speakers at the 12th Annual International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas.
  • The Online gaming service is giving away a microconsole and controller with pre-orders of “Homefront.”
  • The official DirecTV app for iPad is out. I’ve tried it. It’s hot. No video streaming, but streaming else about it is great.
  • The Austin Chamber of Commerce has an app!
  • A site for news and events related to Austin start-ups, appropriately called “Startup ATX.”
  • In addition to his Disney video game / “Epic Mickey” duties, Austin’s Warren Spector is also busy working on “DuckTales” comics. Might we see a video game based on it, too?

    Got a Linkdown suggestion? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011, Videogames

    March 4, 2011

    One week and counting... SXSWi updates

    South by Southwest Interactive is one week away! Panic!

    OK, don’t panic. Instead, find your calm center at the little soft spot in your core. Your core is above your belly. It’s a happy place.

    If you’re sick of hearing about the festival, I’ll be posting a non-SXSW-related Linkdown later today. But for now, here are some updates of news and other bits we’re hearing in advance of Interactive’s start next Friday:

    • Job hunting? Monster.com is partnering with the festival and Gowalla on a Hiring Hub that will be featured at the Trade Show. Monster says it’s diving whole hog into the festival; it’s also doing an interactive wall with “Augmented reality in Stereoscopic 3D,” holding a QR code scavenger hunt and sponsoring Tech Karaoke. And you thought they just helped you get a job to feed your family. More info here.
    • Speaking of Gowalla, they’re partnering with social media news site Mashable for the fest, too.
    • We’ll be doing a live chat here at 2 p.m. CST, Thursday, March 10 to prepare you for the fest, discuss our picks and tips for Interactive and to take your questions and discussion. Is the fest too big? Are you excited? Come tell us on Thursday.
    • The 2011 Dewey Winburne Interactive Community awards have been moved up this year. They’re usually late in the fest, but this year, they’ll be held Friday night at the Driskill, honoring 10 people and one overall winner. More information here.
    • Remember when we told you the festival was getting rid of the canvas swag bag and going digital. Well, it seems they spoke too soon. The magic power of Yoko Ono and designers Rob Jones and Molly Crabapple (who did the Interactive bag), and the reality of a festival book and pocket guide mean the canvas bag is still alive, reports our fashion writer Marques Harper, even if it’s got less paper clutter inside. I guess my poem was for nothing.
    • Austin start-up Hurricane Party gets some love from Robert Scoble and from Read Write Web. Will it be the hot party-finding app for the fest?
    • Here’s a list of panels happening at ScreenBurn, the video game-related track of the fest.
    • FanTrail, another Austin company with an app, gets written up in the New York Times.
    • Want to compete against IBM’s Watson? You can do that at the Technology Summit on March 16.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

    March 2, 2011

    South by South BEST

    Best video guide to South by Southwest Interactive I’ve seen so far, courtesy of Alex Blagg (aka @Bajillionhits) and IFC:

    Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

    March 1, 2011

    SXSWi considered capping registration, may do so for 2012

    RealHugh.jpg
    How big is the South by Southwest Interactive festival getting? So large that festival organizers had serious discussions about capping registration for the 2011 festival and may do so for next year’s festival if growth becomes unmanageable.

    In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman on Tuesday, Interactive festival director Hugh Forrest said that early registration soared, leading to discussions about setting a cut-off.

    “We’ve talked a lot about it,” Forrest said, “there are a lot of pros and cons to the idea of capping it. Had we continued to see the amount of growth in February we were seeing in December and January, we probably would have taken some steps in that direction.”

    He said that while the fest decided against the move for 2011, it’s “maybe something we do in 2012.”

    What slowed the growth in February? Lack of downtown hotels, Forrest said.

    “Definitely for Interactive, we were booked at most of the downtown hotels if not by Christmas, by early January. This is sooner than ever before,” Forrest said.

    Increasing the walk-up registration to $750 probably won’t have much impact on curbing growth and Forrest says it’s still competitive with other 5-day tech events. “We did increase the walk-up price a lot compared to previous years,” he said, “I don’t know if it’s enough to check growth that much.”

    Forrest projects that the festival could grow as much as 30 to 40 percent this year, a similar growth rate to what SXSW Interactive 2010 had when it surpassed paid registration for SXSW Music.

    Last year’s official SXSWi registration was 14,251, but that includes anyone who had access to the Interactive festival, including gold and platinum badgeholders.

    Forrest said that this year’s plethora of meet-ups (about 65-70 daytime events) and increase in campuses (10 this year) were added in an effort to make the fest feel more targeted. 10 shuttle buses will be employed to locations including the AT&T Conference Center and the Hyatt.

    “Certainly there’s a lot of interest in the growth of the event and that’s exciting, but I’ve never been a fan of growth for growth’s sake. The idea is to make a quality event, whether it’s 10 people or 10,000. We’ve made a lot of effort to improve that experience,” Forrest said.

    The festival was taken to task by popular Robert Scoble in a blog post calling for micro-events at the festival back in December. Forrest joked, “At the risk of sounding defensive, we were fully aware of it before he brought it up.”

    Growth has been a primary concern for fest organizers and social media has only accelerated the swarming and crowding that happens at parties and some panels. “It fundamentally changes some of the dynamics here,” Forrest said. “For (Scoble), if you don’t want to be where 500 people are, don’t Tweet that you’re there!”

    Another big change for the festival this year is that keynotes will be live-streamed this year, not just to campuses outside the Convention Center, but to the general public. It will be part of a block of sxsw.com live video that will also include presentations in the Ballroom D slot, 12:30 p.m. Including the keynotes, live video will run from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. during the fest.

    “We’re traditionally very protective of our content in that regard, but we’ve come to realize that this is something that attendees or virtual attendees expect and live streaming probably doesn’t weaken attendance to the event. In fact, it generates more buzz for future years,” Forrest said.

    Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

    February 28, 2011

    SXSW panel preview - "Group Deals" with LivingSocial's Aaron Batalion

    At this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, there are several panels about so-called “Social shopping,” which include not only Twitter- or Facebook-based deal-hunting services, but also daily deal sites like LivingSocial, Groupon and DealSwarm (which is owned by Cox Media Group, the American-Statesman’s parent company).

    Aaron Batalion, the co-founder and chief technical officer of LivingSocial will be on a panel called “Group Deals: Where Ads Become Content,” 9:30 a.m. Sunday, March 13 at Ballroom F of the Austin Convention Center. We spoke to Batalion over e-mail in advance of the panel:

    aaron.jpg
    American-Statesman: What does LivingSocial have planned for South by Southwest? Are attendees of the festival the kind of early adopters who are still fueling your company’s growth or has it gotten past that point and more toward the mainstream?

    Aaron Batalion: While we don’t have any products to announce right now, we believe this space is just getting started. We’re already innovating outside of the traditional model into new verticals (like Family Edition [which it just launched in Austin today] and LivingSocial Escapes), new mobile offerings, and more ways that our consumers can explore their city and the world. The early adopters are crucial to helping us get those new products off the ground. Stay tuned.

    It seems like LivingSocial and Groupon are leading the pack for online social shopping, but there are many, many smaller companies (they pitch us every day). Do you see things shaking out in the next year or two or consolidating? Is there a danger of too much Daily Deal overload as these services saturate the market?

    In our minds, the sky is the limit for LivingSocial and our aggressive growth over the last two years is a testament to that. If you look at the space as a whole, about eight months ago there were two players who, when combined, held more than 90 percent of the market, today the same two players hold that same market share. That said, we’ve been taking U.S. market share pretty much every month for quite some time now and are on track to pass our competition in the U.S. in 2011.

    Although it seems very easy to break into this industry, most people don’t realize the scale and technology it takes to be successful. At LivingSocial we have about 1,000 employees around the globe making sure that our nearly 200 markets are getting the best deals available — from sales people in every single market, to a clever editorial staff, to a great design team, an amazing development team and everyone who supports them.

    We’ve got our sights on doubling our markets by the end of the year and growing our staff as well. By keeping true to our mission of offering the best, most unique experiences at a value, we’ll meet — if not exceed — our goals.

    The recent Amazon/Living Social $20 for $10 deal got a lot of attention and seemed to do very well. Was that a turning point for LivingSocial?

    The Amazon deal was indeed recordbreaking. We believe no single product has had more sales in a single day on the web. Ever. We sold over 1.1 million vouchers and reached a rate of 80 purchases per second. Already over 85 percent have been redeemed.

    I think it was one in a series of turning points we’ve had over the past few months including: growing from 33 people to 1,000 in 12 months, increasing markets from six to nearly 200 in 12 months, doubling our global footprint in January 2011 and adding 5 million new subscribers in the month of January alone.

    Your SXSW panel is about how these kinds of services will affect local publishers and advertising. Do you think services like LivingSocial have done a good job complementing local advertising or should publishers consider you guys a threat? Will deal sites decimate display advertising the way Craigslist did to classifieds?

    LivingSocial offers local merchants a brand new way to market their businesses. It’s a no-money-down method to bring new and loyal customers through your doors. We’ve been so successful at delivering new customers that 97 percent of our merchants would run with us again so you can’t deny the success of the platform. That said, I think every business needs to find the marketing mix that is right for them.

    What kinds of things are you looking forward to at SXSW and do you have any tips for surviving or getting the most out of the fest?

    I’m most looking forward to meeting passionate people building amazing products. The sessions, hallway conversations, and happy hours of SXSW are amazing and incredibly energizing. And if you can make it out to Salt Lick BBQ, you won’t be let down!

    Updated at 12 p.m. to replace mug shot. LivingSocial sent us the wrong image of Aaron Batalion initially.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011, Shopping

    February 25, 2011

    Digital Savant Podcast #2: Stephanie Klein on SXSWi

    We have a second podcast!

    After our chat with Wesley Faulkner, we decided to record another Digital Savant podcast, this time with author, blogger and South by Southwest Interactive panelist Stephanie Klein.

    stephanieklein.jpg
    Stephanie talks about her experiences at the fest, her panel, “Tell & Sell Your Story,” and why you meet the best people at the festival in the bathroom. No, it’s true!

    This is probably the last podcast until after SXSW Interactive is over, but we definitely hope to continue.

    Download it in MP3 format.

    Download it in podcast-enhanced AAC format (includes images and links).

    Show notes:

    What’s in the podcast:

    0:30 — Introducing Stephanie Klein.
    1:15 — Stephanie’s SXSW panel, “Tell & Sell Your Story”
    3:45 — The festival is coming! Exciting!
    5:20 — Pro tip: start drinking now.
    7:40 — Stephanie doesn’t like wrist-band/VIP exclusivity.
    9:18 — Experiencing the fest to the fullest, especially in the bathroom.
    10:45 — Getting over social anxiety.
    11:58 — Why don’t we like social media gurus?
    13:35 — Knowing when to abandon the plan.
    15:50 — Being an attendee versus a panelist.
    16:35 — Is the fest too big? Do we need micro-events?
    17:30 — Wrapping things up.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Movies & DVDs, Podcasts, SXSW, SXSW 2009, SXSW 2010, SXSW 2011

    February 24, 2011

    Guest post: Art Fewell's "Soliloquy of a Technocrat"

    Omar here. The following is a guest blog post submitted by Art Fewell, a fabric specialist who works in enterprise technology at Dell Inc. He works in Las Vegas, but is a former Austinite. His employers have asked us to add this disclaimer: “The views and opinions represented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Dell.”

    You can read more of Art’s writing at his blog, The Innovation Generation.

    Take it away, Art:

    Me and Ryan.jpg
    Art Fewell and his son, Ryan. Photo provided by Art Fewell.

    Definitions (As used in this post):
    Technocracy: The synergy of technology and the ideology of democracy.
    Wealth: Any economic resource including the most basic: food, clothing water, etc.

    I have always loved technology. From my first color television, to my Commodore 64, to my new Kinect, I am amazed every day by the pure wonder that technology can bring to our lives. I remember before my family could afford a PC, I used to read all of the computer magazines and memorize details about the latest computer technologies, waiting and hoping for the day I could get my hands on them. My perspectives have matured, and though I am still like a kid in a candy store with new technologies, I have grown to understand why I love technology so much . I think somewhere deep inside I have always known that technological innovation is of key importance in helping to make the world a better place.

    A few years ago I completed a Master’s Degree program in Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas. When I first walked in the door, I was excited to learn about the latest in high-tech innovation, but I was surprised to learn that they had a completely different definition of what technological innovation is. They spoke of things that typically never came to mind as technological innovation; my definition was far too narrow. Technological innovation started with the beginning of mankind, from cavemen learning and creating new tools and techniques to hunt and gather, to the invention of the wheel and metallurgy, to Adam Smith creating specialized roles in early mills and factories; each of these new tools, methods and processes were crucial innovations no different from the latest robotics and supercomputers.

    Technology is about new and improved ways of doing anything; be it high-tech or low.

    While that was an important realization, I soon read something that drastically changed my entire perspective on technology: that all new wealth is created by technological innovation. This may sound strange at first, but it is one of the most crucial perspectives that I have learned in life. Keep in mind wealth here refers to economic resources as basic as running water and food. Our world is limited by scarce economic resources, it is full of people who suffer, starve and die every day. Our world has only so much production capacity, and unless there is a way to create new economic resources, there is little hope of increasing quality of life to the poor and suffering throughout the world.

    The idea that we can create new economic resources was new to me. I had never thought of the world in those terms but it is true. Without innovation, 1 plus 1 will always equal 2, but when we innovate, we make the miraculous happen: we can make 1 plus 1 equal to more than 2. That is to say we can take the same amount of input, and realize more output.

    So if an innovation can allow a factory worker to make two pairs of shoes with the same amount of time and energy that it would have taken to make one pair of shoes, then that innovation will help more people in more places to eventually have something as simple as a pair of shoes or clothing, shelter and food. And beyond economic resources, technological innovation transfers to political innovation. Technology has created an ever-increasing degree of transparency in government, and is what enables grassroots efforts that will reshape existing structures and create new forms of government. Technology has flattened the world, and every day the world grows smaller and different nations become increasingly economically intertwined, which is the most effective way to promote peace.

    In my job, I help businesses to use technology to become more efficient, to do more with less. And in doing so that organization will be able to repurpose that money. While some of it may be absorbed by greed, some of it may trickle down to new production, including offshoring and outsourcing which will help to develop a far less mature economy. And as those economies grow they will in turn help others to grow. As those economies grow, caste systems will be eliminated, the middle class will rise, more people will have the opportunity to become educated. Those who would become criminals today could be given the opportunity to have better jobs, and be able to find fulfillment in providing a better quality of life for their families and not turn to violence out of ignorance and desperation.

    A lot of people wonder how they can make a difference in the world, but I think we all do every day. Whether you create technology, manage it, or even just use it. Each of these roles is so important. The wheel would have no effect if nobody used it nor improved upon it . The same is true of the printing press, or any other innovation which we know has made the world a better place. That is why I believe each of us has the responsibility to learn, and become educated, and to make the most of the gifts we have been given. When I hear of a factory job being offshored, I feel deeply for anyone who loses a job, but I also realize that we here in the wealthier country have the opportunity to become educated and to re-apply ourselves and realize our unique potential, something that many in this world do not have. That factory job could mean that someone who wouldn’t even have basic food and running water now can.

    I believe humanity is evolving and that technology can be used for good or evil, and the more we make use of the time and opportunities that we have been given, the better the world will become. Humanity is evolving, and technological innovation is the fuel that powers the growth and evolution of humanity.

    And that is why I love technology. It is so much more than cool toys, it is a basis for who we are and who we can aspire to become. It is something we can utilize to make a difference in the world every day, and something tangible and real that we can see making the world better for all of humanity.

    “Science and technology are not just for the already affluent; they can offer so many fresh opportunities for small or very traditional underperforming economies to be transformed into new, shared, and sustained prosperity - and, most important, for enhancement in the quality of everyday life.” — George Kozmetsky

    Art Fewell started working with technology when he graduated from high school at the age of 15. Since that time he has worked for tech giants SBC Communications, Nortel, Cisco and is currently working as a Fabric Specialist at Dell, where he helps businesses to use technology to become more efficient. In his free time Art enjoys spending time with his wife Dez and his 6- and 8-year-old sons Benjamin and Ryan.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Computers, Internet

    February 23, 2011

    Obama at SXSW rumors unlikely to be true

    If you heard late Wednesday that President Barack Obama will be attending an event at South by Southwest Interactive, you should know it’s only a rumor.

    The Obama administration did announce a series of roundtables across the country called, “Startup America: Reducing Barriers.” In a press release, the White House said that the second stop on this tour will be March 12 at South by Southwest.

    It’s likely that a representative from the administration will attend to talk about emerging technology and entrepreneurship.

    However, an article on Portfolio.com appears to have fueled rumors on Twitter that Obama himself will be attending.

    Kelly Krause, a spokesperson for the SXSW Interactive festival said she’d heard no such thing.

    If we do hear about Obama coming to SXSW Interactive we will make sure you’re the first to know.

    Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011

    SXSW Town Hall: more growth, new app, "Auto-Tune the News"

    Organizers from SXSW Interactive, including festival director Hugh Forrest, addressed questions from future SXSWi attendees at a Town Hall and mixer Monday night at Ghost Room.

    The first question for the group was about the festival’s plan to spread out panels and events to 10 campuses, including the Austin Convention Center, the Hilton, Hilton Garden, Courtyard Austin, the Radisson, Driskill, Sheraton, Hyatt, AT&T Conference Center and Palm Door.

    sxswgo.JPG

    “I predict bicycle rentals,” said one person in the audience.

    “We have been fortunate to grow a lot,” Forrest said. He said that the keynote presentations will be live-streamed to the different campuses so that attendees won’t have to scramble back to the Convention Center to catch them.

    Splitting the conference content to the campuses and the addition of about 65-70 daytime meetups are meant to address the difficulty in finding your tribe at the fest, Forrest said. “As it’s grown, it’s more challenging to find the exact kind of people you want to find.” There will be meet-ups specifically for newcomers.

    Growth was very much on the minds of Town Hall attendees and it doesn’t look like the fest will be slowing this year. Forrest said that last year’s SXSWi estimated attendance was 14,251 (that’s not just paid Interactive registration; it includes anyone who had access to the fest, including Platinum badge-holders). When asked what the attendance will be this year, Forrest said it’s far too early to tell given last year’s surge of walk-up registration. But, he said, it could be as high as 30-40 percent growth as it was last year. Expect crowds.

    Other information from the Town Hall:

    • The festival has launched its official app for the fest. Called “SXSW GO,” it’s available for iPhone/iPod, iPad (in a special iPad format) and Android devices and will soon be available for BlackBerry and WIndows Phone 7 devices. The app was developed by Xomo, a different developer than last year.
    • The Gregory Brothers from “Auto-Tune the News” will be performing at the SXSW Interactive Awards in addition to being on a panel.
    • The SXSW Technology Summit, March 16-17 will include an IBM panel about its “Jeopardy” champ, Watson. That presentation will be on the 16th. It’s open to all Interactive badge-holders.
    • This year’s Trade Show will combine Music, Film and Interactive and will shift to 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., March 14-17, or the Monday-Thursday of the fest.
    • Forrest said Wi-Fi is being upgraded at all the campuses. The network name should be the same at all locations. He said they’ve very aware of cell phone problems that could arise from such a large number of people and that the Wi-Fi will be available to counter that.

    The Town Hall is an offshoot of a last-minute panel that was added last year when there was a cancellation in one of the larger meeting rooms. Thought it was sparsely attended, Forrest said, the crew got good questions in the session and decided to bring the Town Hall format out in the open for Monday’s event.

    Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011

    February 22, 2011

    SXSW panel preview: Groupon editor-in-chief Aaron With

    IMG_0144.JPG

    If you can’t tell from the image above, Groupon Inc. isn’t just about daily deals; it’s pushed itself into the mainstream with funny, quirky content and self-deprecating humor. Sometimes it works, like the part where the company went from being completely unknown to being worth billions. Sometimes, the creativity is lost on its audience, as was the case with its much-derided Super Bowl ads. (Eventually the company pulled the spots.)

    Aaron With, editor-in-chief at Groupon (pictured in the photo above) will speak, along with Groupon chief executive Andrew Mason, on a South by Southwest Interactive panel called, “Strange Business: Corporate Creativity that Doesn’t Suck,” 11 a.m. Sunday, March 13, in Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center.

    Here’s an e-mail conversation we had about the panel:

    American-Statesman: What are some things you hope to cover on the SXSW Interactive panel? Will this be more of a look at where Groupon’s been and how it operates or will there be broader discussion of the social shopping industry and online business creativity?

    Aaron With: I’ll be talking about Groupon’s creative voice in our editorial copy and marketing initiatives. With the help of a power pointer, I will present a mathematical formula for pre-determining ROI on creative campaigns with zero relevance to any revenue stream.

    Even the panel description for your SXSW panel features Groupon’s well-known sense of humor and self deprecation. Has that been tough to maintain lately given the Super Bowl ad aftermath?

    No. Our write-ups continue to use the same absurdist humor they always have, and once we develop new marketing initiatives, those will too. We know our creative is often risky, and we’re prepared to eat the consequences if we screw up. But we’ve been tying our brand to strange creative since we started, and more often than not it’s been far more effective than creatively campaigns could’ve been. Plus, making our brand weird has been a compulsion first and a strategy second. Even if we wanted to, we probably wouldn’t know how to stop.

    Are the people who attend SXSW Interactive — early adopters, smart phone owners, people who practically live online — your ideal audience or is the company past that point and trying harder to reach the mainstream?

    Our ideal audience people who want to get off their couch and try something new. We don’t care if you’re an early adopter or the last person to get on the internet, as long as you want to support local businesses and explore your city. We just hit 60 million subscribers worldwide and have definitely begun to reach people who may have just joined Facebook or don’t have a smartphone.

    It seems like there are two or three well known social/group shopping sites (with Groupon clearly being the leader), and then literally hundreds of services trying to do something similar. Does your particular industry feel overcrowded with imitators and also-rans, or is it just us?

    As someone who was a part of the company from its first days, watching people rip off Groupon down to the color, font, and FAQ copy used to be really frustrating. But now that hundreds of clones are doing it and it hasn’t really affected us, it’s just mildly amusing. At this point, we’re more focused on improving our own product rather than watching what the clones are up to…with the obvious exception of Nopuorg (http://www.nopuorg.com).

    We’ll continue to post panel previews, interviews, audio, tips and more from now until the Interactive festival, which runs March 11-15, and we’ll be doing extensive coverage at the conference.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011, Shopping, TV

    February 21, 2011

    TEDxAustin: carefully balancing a feeling

    tedxaustin2011.jpg
    TEDxAustin curator Nancy Giordano and speaker Dr. Lionel Tiger. Photo by Ryan Hayes, Fit to Tweet.

    Last year, I didn’t attend the inaugural TEDxAustin event. Instead, my colleagues and I watched the live video stream and blogged about it here. But what I kept hearing about it afterward and what I read in blog posts and Tweets that followed was that, unlike many other Austin conferences that at least touch on tech, there was a indefinable vibe, a mood and energy in the room that didn’t necessarily translate to watching from afar.

    After writing the piece about TEDxAustin that ran in Saturday’s American-Statesman and attending the second TEDxAustin event myself, I can confirm that it’s real. There was a sense of energy, a dynamic sense of possibility and openness in the Austin Music Hall that I don’t think could have possibly been conveyed through a streaming video window.

    That being said, the event itself was not perfect. You can expect, in a full day of short presentations, including videos, musical performances and even a TED talk done via Skype, that there would be a few technical glitches and some instances where things don’t come together perfectly. That indeed happened, especially toward the end of the day when the energy waned and some of the talks seemed to veer off track from the inspiring bits that made the first half so galvanizing.

    But TEDxAustin isn’t meant to be a perfect event, I don’t think, even if it feels much more controlled and of a piece than larger, more decentralized conferences like South by Southwest Interactive.

    The event began at 10 a.m., but a 9 a.m. registration and light grab-and-go breakfast was held. Parking and registration were smooth and despite an audience of more than 550, things moved smoothly. The interior Austin Music Hall itself was transformed into an almost unrecognizable “Black box,” as the organizers called it. There were black curtains everywhere, two “XLab” areas upstairs and several food and drink bars. The use of space was good and even when clumps of attendees crowded in for drinks or food, it never felt packed.

    Attendees were all given lanyards and badges containing their name, a QR code to exchange contact information (I saw few, if any, people using this; people were still exchanging business cards and Twitter handles instead of using the codes), a notepad and pencil, a nicely produced program booklet, two drink tickets and a list of three “People You Should Meet,” chosen seemingly at random. When organizers later asked the audience, about midway through the day, if anyone had found their three “People you should meet,” not a single person said they had. With more than 550 people attending, that’s not surprising.

    Unlike nearly every other conference I go to, it was refreshing to not be awash in a sea of laptops and lit cell phones. Attendees stuck to the request to leave laptops at home and to keep texting and Tweeting inside the “Black box” to a minimum. One person who sat near me played with an iPad during the opening musical performance, but put it away soon after.

    The programming began with a breathtaking musical performance by local group Mother Falcon, which I’d describe as Arcade Fire: the College Years. The 11-member collective definitely put down a magical vibe keeping in line with the organizers’ goals of making attendees feel “Plugged into the center of humanity.”

    But would it last? A video introducing from the TED mothership cut out midway through with an audio glitch, but organizers Nancy Giordano and Jen Spencer, came to the stage and introduced the event and its origins. Even though the speaker list had been revealed the night before (in deference to people watching online through the country and abroad, I was later told), they promised there would still be surprises and asked the audience to be present and open to the experience.

    The first speaker, Satori Capital managing partner Sunny Vanderbeck, spoke about a new model for businesses, a way of thinking about sustainability and purpose in entrepreneurship. He called it “Conscious capitalism,” a way of making sure that the elements of business (customers, investors, the public, etc.) are in check. It was a good, solid presentation, excellent food for thought for the many entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs in the audience.

    Dr. Ralf Wagner, founder and chief executive of Geneart spoke of the ways that synthetic biology will change biofuels, drugs, chemicals, energy and vaccines and how his company has been working toward the goal of an HIV vaccine for the last 12 years. It may have been that Wagner was getting over an illness, as the organizers said, or that the presentation itself seemed both vague, a little scary in its implications and a bit odd (the visuals contained numerous references to Michael Jackson) or that what followed seemed to blow it out of the water, but Wagner’s talk failed to resonate.

    A video featuring British Conservative Party leader David Cameron on tech, government and behavioral economics was well-received.

    But TEDxAustin transformed into something inspiring with Robyn O’Brien’s talk on food allergies, the U.S. food supply and how she used her background as a Wall Street food industry analyst to uncover some startling truths about what we eat in this country after her youngest child suffered a food allergy attack. It was unsentimental, clear-eyed and completely convincing, a far cry from an alarmist, irrational argument you might expect. It earned the day’s first standing ovation. It was also a strong counter-argument to Wagner’s talk about bioengineering. You got the feeling that Wagner and O’Brien should maybe have a long chat.

    Then, Gilbert Tuhabonye, a champion runner and survivor of a school massacre during a civil war in his native Burundi, spoke about running your life with joy. The founder of the Gilbert’s Gazelle’s sang, joked and inspired in a talk that was inspirational, haunting and mesmerizing. “You must be the force of change!” he told the audience. For once, the oft-told advice didn’t sound trite. It may have been the best talk of the day and it ended a strong block of morning programming.

    A strong, locally produced video from ">OneYearStudy followed, then it was time for lunch.

    Back from break, it was time for Osama Bedier’s talk on the future of money and payments. The former PayPal executive, who recently left to join Google, joined in via Skype video conferencing. A back injury kept him from the event, but he gamely persevered and the technology worked surprisingly well. He earned laughs with a photo-driven demonstration of how some standards evolve over centuries before explaining that secure digital payments will give small businesses the power of multinational corporations and change money as fundamentally as the shift from coins to paper and paper to plastic. He did fail to mention Near-Field Communication, the much-buzzed-about mechanism (which Google is pretty bullish about, incidentally), that may soon enable that, but maybe that’s the topic for a different talk.

    CommuniCard chief executive and engineer Sylvia Acevedo presented population trends in Texas that point to an alarming spike in children born between 2000 and 2008 in the state. Texas had 25 percent of the population growth in this age group for the entire country, which means there’s a bubble coming in education and business. Acevedo didn’t give many examples of what this means in practical terms, but it’s not hard to see how the current Texas budget crisis and shifts in language, culture and ethnicity in the state mean we’re in for some huge changes ahead. She urged businesses to recognize these shifts and use them as an opportunity to educate kids to be competent in more than one culture to make the country an international powerhouse.

    “Haynesville” documentary director Gregory Kallenberg spoke next. He’s a former colleague and friend, so I’m extremely biased, but the audience reaction to his talk on energy and our role in its future was strong. The talk itself was humorous and informative. Brief, but strong clips from his film were shown and attendees I spoke to later said his talk was one of their favorites of the day. Kallenberg has been showing the film at energy events, conservation conferences and film festivals.

    A brief performance of a scene from an upcoming Intergalactic Nemesis show was presented, combining comic book imagery with live acting and sound effects. It wasn’t clear what the scene, about robots and a transport machine, had to do with the rest of the day’s themes, but it was fun to watch.

    A comedic TED talk featuring Maz Jobrani of the Axis of Evil comedy tour didn’t quite tie in the current unrest in the Middle East as perhaps the organizers intended, but it was very funny and well-received.

    Next was an XLab presentation featuring Allyson Peerman of the AMD Foundation, which has helped 3,000 children with its Changing the Game program, Oliver Campbell who works in sustainable packaging at Dell, Inc., and Esther Havens, a humanitarian photographer. It was preceded by an unfortunate, accidental video showing of part of an Intel commercial on screen. The talk itself was good, with each presenter detailing the work they’ve been doing. Havens, emotional even as her portion began, showed some of her remarkable photos that reinforced her point, “Who we are is not our circumstance.”

    Spoken-word poet and teacher Joaquín Zihuatanejo spoke about salvation in words, but the bulk of his presentation was a performance of several poems about his students. They were wonderful and moving. I can’t do them justice, so I’ll instead just link to a video of his work.

    Flint Sparks, a Zen psychotherapist, brought the event to a full stop, but it was intentional. Soft-spoken, sedate and seemingly the calmest person in the room, Sparks sat and asked the members of the audience to take moments to “Pause, reflect and connect.” Given the dearth of digital devices being used in the room, it was advice that was taken for once.

    A musical performance, The Unfolding Song by Nina Singh, Jeff Botta and Suzanna Choffel, brought attendees back after a long break.

    It was time for Gary Thompson, co founder of local company Cloud, Inc who led a very mixed late afternoon of presentations. He spoke of the need for a contextual mark-up language online , a so-called “Who” tag for the Internet that could aid in emergencies and in medical records, such as his wife’s battle with cancer. He also used the opportunity to directly address an online viewer, Kethan, a boy who has also been battling cancer. While matters of security and privacy were not addressed in the talk, one person I spoke to afterward, a well-respected Austin techie who works in the field and asked not to be named, said they found the presentation to be disingenuous, a play for sympathy in a very competitive emerging business space. I found it to be informative, but problematic; the technology being discussed is not nearly as palatable to the public as Thompson might have been suggesting.

    Peter Hall, an engaging design critic and writer spoke about maps versus mapping, the ways data can be used visually and what makes a good map. Well-presented, to-the-point and smart.

    Next, the rails came off a bit. Dr. Lionel Tiger, who earned raves all day from people I spoke to all day in awe of his amazing name, was less universally liked when it came to his talk. Tiger, a Rutgers University professor who authored “The Decline of Males” wandered and ambled through a thicket or topics including rape, university policies, how primates behave before arriving at a fuzzy conclusion about letting boys be boys and not raising children with Ritalin. Several attendees told me later that they found his presentation to be at best an unfocused attack on feminism and at worst an offensive, unconvincing rant. I lean toward the former. Talks like this were the reason that the Teleprompter was invented.

    Next was a video about vulnerability from Brené Brown from TEDxHouston about her social work research and vulnerability that was so good I’m embedding it below. It was a stunner, a true highlight of the day:

    And then things went off the track again, so to speak. Tavo Hellmund, former race car driver and founder of Full Throttle Productions, talked about the future of Formula 1 racing in Austin. He unwisely decided to skip his prepared talk and “Wing it,” with disastrous results. Infomercional rather than inspirational, Hellmund gave the hard sell on how great F1 will be for the community and how his group is building a small city here. In trying to fit in with the day’s speakers, Hellmund grasped for platitudes like “Carpe Diem” and what his grandfather once told him about a man’s worth on a fishing boat when he was a kid. It was, frankly, embarrassing and clanged loudly without gelling with the rest of the day’s careful, well-crafted content. Organizer Giordano, perhaps trying to save the segment, asked Hellmund to come back on stage and asked him a few follow-up questions. A lesson for future TED speakers: don’t wing it.

    The last speaker, Dustin Haisler, had a tough act to follow after Hellmund and was also battling end-of-the-day fatigue in the audience, but the rising star in participatory government gave some good examples of how the City of Manor (where he served as city manager) embraced crowdsourcing and high-tech participatory government. While it was unclear how some of that might translate to larger local governments (witness the recent mess over naming the City of Austin’s Solid Waste Services), Haisler asked those in attendance to think about ways local government can be more transparent, offer more fun ways to interact with constituents and be more engaging.

    A reception followed and overall, the people I spoke to had a good day and spoke highly of most of the speakers. I think a huge challenge for next year, apart from finding a larger venue (perhaps ACL Live at the Moody Theater) will be balancing the in-person presentation with playing to the cameras for the online video audience. Leaking the speaker list early sounds to me like a concession to online viewers, but it makes me wonder if that decreased the value and the surprises a bit for people who were attending in-person.

    If you have blog entries or other thoughts, e-mail them to me and I’ll link to them in this post.

    Here, Joshua Duncan offers his 10 favorite quotes from TEDxAustin.

    Robyn O’Brien on the event.

    Esther Havens blogs about TEDxAustin.

    Peter Kim of DachisGroup writes it up.

    Brenda Coffee from BreastCancerSisterhood.com recaps her life lessons from the day.

    Jennie Chen says that after another great TED experience, she’s the richest person in Austin.

    Kat Mandelstein says she found the day rewarding as well.

    Twitter highlights curated by Tim Gasper..

    The Butler Bros: getting vulnerable at TEDxAustin.

    Samuel Yu wraps up his experiences at TEDxAustin.

    Nanette Labastida discusses her favorites speakers of the day.

    Roy Christopher’s thoughts on the event.

    Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Austin, Internet

    February 17, 2011

    Felicia Day debuts 'Dragon Age: Redemption' on 'Fallon'

    South by Southwest Interactive 2011 keynote speaker Felicia Day appeared on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” last night and spoke about her new project, a web video series based on BioWare’s “Dragon Age” video games.

    Day, an actress and writer who’s appeared on Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” and in her own web series “The Guild,” shot the new series, “Dragon Age: Redemption” in Los Angeles in January. It’s set to debut this summer alongside the single-player role-playing video game “Dragon Age 2.” Day says in the interview with Fallon that she got in fighting shape to throw daggers and portray an elf in the series. Then she showed off a short teaser for the series.

    It’s likely we’ll be seeing more footage from “Redemption” at her festival keynote.

    Then she was approached by rappers from Odd Future and asked to sing along in the middle of their musical performance:

    Day, who hails from Austin and is a University of Texas at Austin alumna, is expected to speak at the fest on the way geeks and technology are transforming the Hollywood entertainment model.

    If you missed it yesterday, you can catch the transcript of our live chat with SXSWi festival organizers here. Also upcoming is a SXSW Interactive Town Hall and mixer Monday night at the Ghost Room.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2011, TV, Videogames

    February 16, 2011

    Live chat: Shawn O' Keefe and Kelly Krause of SXSW Interactive

    We’ll be holding a live chat at 2 p.m. CST today (Wednesday, Feb. 16) with Shawn O’ Keefe and Kelly Krause, organizers at South by Southwest Interactive. We’ll be talking about what’s new this year and will be taking questions from our readers. Come join us!

    If you’re on a mobile device, you can still participate. Go to CoverItLive Mobile and do a search for “SXSW” under live events once the event has started.

    If you’d like to e-mail some questions in advance, E-mail it to me “LIVE CHAT” in the subject line or @reply them to me on Twitter.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW, SXSW 2011

    February 14, 2011

    The British invasion at SXSW Interactive

    british.jpg
    Associated Press photo

    The British are coming! To South by Southwest Interactive. Uh… “Guv’nah?”

    All right, let’s all be sure not to commit such a verbal faux pas when our friends from across the pond (the pond is the Atlantic Ocean. I know. These transatlantic things are confusing) come to town in March.

    SXSW Interactive has a rich history of late-night pub crawls and notable speakers from the U.K., but this year it feels like there’s even more going on. Last month, Guardian U.K. announced a “Guardian U.K. Hacks SXSW” event where developers from afar (those who won’t actually be at the fest) would be creating tools to help explore the fest. That took place over the weekend. (You can read a summary of what went down over on SXSW Baby!)

    Meanwhile, here in town, representatives from about 40 companies will be part of a series of events coordinated by UK Trade & Investment and the British Embassy in Houston. The group is posting about their events on Twitter and will be hosting a pre-event mixer in London this month, a networking reception on March 10 at Moonshine Grill and a half day of briefings and panels on Friday, March 11.

    They’ll cover topics like setting up a business in the U.S., funding and getting the most out of the SXSW conference.

    Speakers will include Rodney Gibbs of Ricochet Labs (“Qrank”), British ex-pat and Austin marketing/social media expert Simon Salt and representatives from DLA Piper, DFJ Mercury, Transmedia Capital, Liahona Ventures and Amadeus Capital Partners.

    There will also be a “Great British Breakfast” event later during the festival.

    “The goal is to introduce these U.K. companies to the U.S. market,” said Leah Mayo, who works with the British Consulate-General. Last year, she said, about $2 million in deals (or $1.25 million pounds, as the British weigh such things) were made at SXSW Interactive on a similar trade mission.

    It’s likely there’ll be even more U.K. talk at the Technology Summit that SXSW has added to the festival. It takes place on March 16-17.

    Updated at 4:15 p.m. to fix link to the list of the 40 companies.

    Updated at 11 a.m., Feb. 15 to add link to SXSW Baby! article.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, SXSW 2011

    February 11, 2011

    Google to raise its Austin profile with Places

    Today, Google is launching a marketing campaign in Austin to raise the profile of its Places and Hotpot services and to try to corral small area businesses to promote its online services to customers.

    places-sticker.jpg
    Austin will be the second city to be part of such a campaign; in December, the company targeted Portland, Ore., as the first “unique” metropolitan area and been doing giveaways and blogging about its efforts since.

    Bernardo Hernandez, director of consumer marketing for Google, will be in town as part of the effort, which is expected to last about eight weeks. It will be staffed by Google’s Austin-based employees as well and, if Google has its way, thousands of windows at Austin restaurants and shops will display a sticker (at right) that might point to the future of interactive marketing and advertising.

    The “Recommended on Google” sticker will be embedded with “near field communication” technology (NFC for short), a short-range wireless technology that is currently available on the Nexus S Google Android smart phone and that is rumored to be a feature in Apple’s next iterations of the iPhone and the iPad.

    NFC is expected by some to be the future of mobile payments. In Google’s case, it could be a way to pair advertising to information that businesses would want customers to know about: sales, hours, contact information and other data that could seamlessly be transmitted to someone’s phone or other mobile device.

    But the campaign isn’t just about window stickers. Google, which has found itself lagging behind Yelp and Facebook in restaurant ratings and location services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, is pushing its Hotpot service, which incorporates ratings and recommendations into search results and information on Google Places as well as other services like Google Maps. Hernandez says that it’s a move to make search results more personalized and to give Internet users looking for restaurants, stores and other businesses more relevant info, along with recommendations and ratings from friends.

    “About 20 percent of search queries are looking for local information. That’s out of about 2.5 billion queries a day,” Hernandez said, “Whether you’re looking for a plumber or a restaurant, they’ll be displayed in Google results in a much more prominent way.”

    Google’s personalized search would remember your past queries, as it has before, but it would also take into account ratings that you give local businesses, from 1-to-5 stars.

    The feature is currently enabled on the Android and iPhone Google Places apps.

    Google is also planning to raise its profile here from a monolithic, but largely faceless company, to one with a greater presence in communities, Hernandez said. To that end, street teams will be meeting in-person with businesses and will be holding meet-ups, giveways and other local events. The first of those will be at Austin Torchy’s Tacos locations at 9 a.m. Friday morning. Google and Torchy’s are holding a migas taco giveway.

    In Portland, the company has given away gift cards and dinners at restaurants as part of its campaign.

    For local businesses, Google plans to offer a starter kit including the NFC-enabled sticker and several promotional items that they can order like fortune cookies and coffee stirrers with their own branding (alongside Google’s) free of charge. The company also plans to pay for billboards and other kinds of advertising for Austin small businesses that wouldn’t typically be able to afford it on their own.

    kit.jpg

    Hernandez said that Google believes it has direct relationships with 10,000 local small businesses and that with its hotpot starter kits (which the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce will help distribute) it hopes to make those relationships stronger and create new ones.

    “Our intent is to help small businesses be found on the web and stand out more prominently against the competition,” he said.

    Hernandez said that like Portland, Austin has a young population profile and has a unique vibe that appeals to Google. Some of the factors the brought Google’s campaign to Austin were the city’s “Entrepreneurial drive, it’s attention to small businesses and the density of the city,” he said.

    Hotpot was launched in November and is available in 42 countries.

    Update, noon, Feb. 14: I got a few e-mails asking whether this effort applies to non-profits as well. Hernandez responded over e-mail that it does.

    Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Austin, Internet, Shopping

    February 10, 2011

    The Linkdown for Thursday, Feb. 10

    tp-front-cards.jpg
    The Linkdown is still recovering from Snowpocalypse 2011 and Icetastrophe 2011. Here’s hoping this summer’s Maximum Heat Wave Attack 2011 is less dramatic.

    Some links you should check out:

    Got a Linkdown suggestion? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

    Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Austin, Internet

    February 8, 2011

    Digital Savant Podcast #1: Wesley at SXSWi

    Here goes!

    This is my first attempt at a Digital Savant podcast. I have no idea if this will become a regular feature or what format it may take, but with the good graces of my editors, I’ve been allowed to give it a shot. Let me know what you think in the comments or e-mail me if you have tips, feedback or ideas for future audio segments. Be gentle: we did this in a single afternoon and tried to keep the editing and production very light and the length of the piece under 20 minutes.

    IMG_2023.JPG.jpg
    In the clip, I chat with Wesley Faulkner, an Austin techie who is on the South by Southwest Interactive advisory board, about his experiences at the festival, how he navigates it and the best ways to get the most out of the experience. Wesley’s a friend, but he’s also well-known at the fest for seemingly being everywhere at once, making lots of connections and having a great time every year.

    Other show notes from our chat:

    The best way to listen to the podcast is to download it in AAC format and play it in iTunes or Windows Media Player or on your podcast-compatible portable player to see images and embedded info. You can also download it in MP3 format. Both are about the same size, 8 MB.

    AAC podcast format (8 MB).

    MP3 format (8 MB).

    We’ll try to get this and hopefully future episodes up on iTunes at some point.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Podcasts, SXSW, SXSW 2010, SXSW 2011

    February 4, 2011

    The Linkdown for Friday, Feb. 4

    snowday.jpg
    Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

    Snow day! Once you’re tired of making very tiny snowmen, you should come back inside and look at these links:

    Got a Linkdown suggestion? E-mail it to us with “LINKDOWN:” in the subject line.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

    February 2, 2011

    Share your SXSWi survive-and-thrive tips

    survivesxsw.jpg
    Photo by Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

    We’re less than a month and a half out from South by Southwest Interactive 2011 and I’m gathering all the intel I can on ways to make it easier, more navigable and more useful to those of you attending or even everyone who’ll be watching from the sidelines.

    I’ve got my own list of ways I make the fest more manageable (comfy shoes, lots of alcohol), but since I approach the fest as a press person on constant deadline, I’d love to hear what attendees, entrepreneurs, panelists and everyone else does to get the most out of the fest.

    Last year’s incredible festival growth seems to have some registrants spooked. Will the fest be too big this year? How will those of attending avoid getting lost in the crowd?

    Well, I’ve always believed that you get as much or more out of the fest as you put into it and sitting on the sidelines complaining has never been a useful strategy. So instead of whining, let’s have a plan. Is the answer micro-events, as Robert Scoble suggests? Drinking more water? Walking out of boring panels instead of suffering through them?

    Post your tips to not just survive the fest, but thrive at SXSW Interactive. You can post them here in the comments or e-mail them directly to me. I’ll post the best ones as the festival approaches, March 11-15.

    Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, SXSW 2011

    Austin's Twisted Pixel unveils 'The Gunstringer' for Kinect

    Austin’s Twisted Pixel game studio, which was just in the news for being flattered by imitation by Capcom, has announced its first game for Microsoft’s hot-selling Xbox 360 Kinect device.

    “The Gunstringer” appears to combine motion-controlled puppetry, gunplay, side-scrolling 2-D levels (and 3-D levels) and the old west into one game that looks to have some nice animation going for it. The game is related to a recent video shoot the company held in Austin.

    Twisted Pixel is expected to show off a playable version of the game (along with “Ms. ‘Splosion Man”) at the Penny Arcade Expo East next month in Boston.

    What do you think of the game trailer? Post your thoughts in the comments.

    (Hat tip to Joystiq for the news.)

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

    February 1, 2011

    SXSW Interactive announces Interactive Awards finalists

    The South by Southwest Interactive Festival has posted the finalists for its 14th Annual SXSW Interactive Awards.

    Unlike many web awards that tend to honor familiar faces year after year, the SXSW Interactive Awards nominate sites or projects that launches or were completely redesigned in 2010. The exception is the “Classic” category, in which Groupon, Mint.com, the New Zealand International Arts Festival, The Onion and the PBS KIDS Video Player were named as finalists.

    Some of the better-known finalists on the list include “The Wilderness Downtown,” an interactive site based on an Arcade Fire (for Music), “Conan O’Brien Presents: Team Coco” for Social Media, the website for the Oscar-nominated film “The Social Network” (for Film / TV) and “The Johnny Cash Project” in Art.

    The ceremony to name the winners will be held Tuesday, March 15 at the Hilton Austin Downtown. It’ll be hosted by comedian Chris Hardwick, host of G4’s “Web Soup.”

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet, Movies & DVDs, SXSW 2011

    January 27, 2011

    Government 2.0 Camp tackles tech and democracy in Texas government

    On Friday and Saturday, community leaders in technology, media, education, government and public policy will gather on the ACC Eastview campus to talk about how tech can make government more accessible and transparent.

    The Texas Government 2.0 Camp is an offshoot of sorts to a 2009 government camp event that took place in Washington, D.C..

    This weekend’s event is more focused on state and local government in Texas and will be broken up into two days of events — a more traditional schedule of panels on Friday and an “Unconference” day on Saturday with more spontaneous programming put on by attendees.

    Julia Gregory, one of the event organizers who also works for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, said she expects many attendees to be state and local government workers who are exploring social media and other technology to help their agencies.

    “Some of them are calling (TPWD) and asking, ‘How do we do this, how do you overcome this obstacle? There are some obstacles when it comes to getting clearance from the top. If managers are not aware of (the tools of social media), there’s a sense of fear and sense of loss of control of the message.”

    A Friday panel featuring Gregory, Austin tech expert and blogger Jon Lebkowsky, the City of Austin’s Eve Richter, Loulia Miller of the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles and Lydia Saldana, also of TPWD, will address government and social media.

    Evan Smith, CEO and editor of the Texas Tribune, will be the keynote speaker. There’s also a tribute to Gary Chapman planned for Friday morning.

    Tickets are $10 for the even (plus a small service charge) for the conference. About 100 tickets have been sold so far; Gregory said that plenty of seats are still availlable and that there are also plans to stream the event on the txgov20.org website. It takes place 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Building 8000, Room 8500 at the ACC Eastview Campus (map).

    Edited, 1:10 p.m. 1/28 to add: Live streaming video link on the website.

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Internet

    January 25, 2011

    BlogathonATX Part Deux: You are not alone

    BlogathonATX_Blogroom02.jpg

    Last summer, graphic designer and entrepreneur Ilene Haddad asked her Twitter followers (who know her by the clever handle”@Ileenieweenie”) if they’d, you know, like to get together and blog for the day or something. No big whoop.

    To Haddad’s surprise, what she thought might be a small-scale potluck turned into a big blogging event called BlogathonATX she ended up organizing. “A few people responded. Then it kind of went nuts,” she said. “It got to be bigger than a coffee shop or my house could handle.”

    blogathon-bill.jpg
    The free event attracted 50 Austin bloggers (or people hoping to set up a new blog) to Conjunctured Coworking in East Austin. The all-day event (plus evening happy hour), held in August, produced volumes of web writing, offered technical help to those who needed a new blog template or software assistance and created new connections and friendships in the blogging community.

    Haddad, ironically, got everything she wanted out of the event even if she missed out on her initial goal. “That’s the funny part,” she laughs, “I didn’t write a single word the entire event. I just wanted to be a part of the conversation. I was mostly in the talking room, which isn’t surprising to anyone who knows me.”

    For the second BlogathonATX, to be held Saturday at Conjunctured, Haddad doesn’t have plans to blog this time, either. But she’s hoping to help continue to foster an active and very social Austin blogging community that has spread its web tentacles over the years toward social media, parenting advocacy, local business and even the fashion, food and crafting scenes.

    “This segment of the Austin community is an extremely community-based social crowd,” Haddad said. “I don’t know if it’s just Austin or if it’s just people who want to express themselves and connect with other people online would like to do it offline as well.”

    Although the daytime blogging event is sold out this year (it cost $10 to attend, or $20 with T-shirt, which includes food all day and access to the evening happy hour), those curious about the event can follow along with a group blog on Posterous, where many of the 60 attendees are introducing themselves.

    The happy hour event, which starts at 6 p.m., still has $5 tickets available.

    As to what kind of actual blogging will go on at the event on Saturday, Haddad says it varies from blogger to blogger. Some go to network and socialize, while others sit and write for most of the event’s 12 hours. “Some people just put out a ton of posts. They got a month’s worth of posts done,” Haddad said.

    In addition to the tech support room, there will also be four break-out discussion sessions featuring local experts. PR strategist LuAnn Glowacz and Texas State professor Dara Quackenbush will lead a discussion on search-engine optimization and building a following online.

    Productivity expert Maura Thomas will tackle time management while geek writer Tom Myer will address content creation. Entrepreneur Jen Wojcik will lead a discussion about online trolls and social media. The sessions will be more like moderated discussions than speeches, Haddad said.

    The event organizer says she’s so stressed out in the days leading up to the event that she’s in the “Feel like I’m vomiting stage,” but is assuring herself that the event will be fine and will provide the same laid-back social vibe as the more regular Central Austin Jelly events she co-founded.

    Like the Jelly, BlogathonATX will try to break through the silos that many who blog find themselves locked into. “I think technology… it can be really isolating. It’s something I love a lot but I also love to be around people,” Haddad said. “Part of being human is being part of a community. They’re not mutually exclusive.”

    Photos courtesy Lori Luza and Ilene Haddad. Top: some of the participants at the August BlogathonATX. At right: Haddad and her husband, Bill.

    Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Austin, Internet

    January 24, 2011

    Disney Interactive confirms layoffs at Austin's Junction Point

    Disney Interactive Studios confirmed Monday night that there have been layoffs at its Austin-based Junction Point Studios just short of two months after the release of its high-profile Nintendo Wii game, “Disney Epic Mickey.”

    A representative for Disney Interactive said that there were layoffs today at Junction Point, “But they were fairly minimal and it is pat of a larger restructuring at Disney Interactive Studios, which is part of Disney Interactive Media Group.”

    The company would not say how many employees were affected.

    Last week, Disney closed down a different studio, Propaganda Studios, which was based in Vancouver. The company declined to comment on other studios or on the status or future at the company for Warren Spector, the head of the studio, who founded Junction Point in 2005 and sold it to Disney in 2007. As of November, Junction Point had about 130 Austin employees.

    While it’s common for some companies in the video game industry to lay off some employees after a big-budget game has been released, Disney Interactive has also been shuffling its executive roster. In September, Steve Wadsworth, president of Disney Interactive Media Group, resigned. In November, Disney Interactive Studios general manager Graham Hopper followed suit.

    “Epic Mickey” was released on Nov. 30 and reportedly sold about 1.3 million copies in December. There have been reports that sales were below Disney’s expectations and reviews of the ambitious game varied widely.

    (Edited at 10:52 p.m. to specify attribution of information to Disney Interactive Studios.)

    Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames

    •  

    LATEST PHOTO GALLERIES »

    Click to view gallery
    Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, 12.18.11     Click to view gallery
    Zilker Holiday Tree, 12.05.11     Click to view gallery
    Capitol Tree Lighting and Downtown Stroll     Click to view gallery
    Blue Genie Art Bazaar, 11.29.11     Click to view gallery
    Out & About Rewind, 11.28.11     Click to view gallery
    Readers' Halloween costumes, 10.31.11     Click to view gallery
    Halloween on Sixth Street, 10.29.11     Click to view gallery
    Screams at the House of Torment     Click to view gallery
    Dia de los muertos makeup demonstration     Click to view gallery
    Zombie make-up how-to guide     Click to view gallery
    Old Pecan Street Festival     Click to view gallery
    Out and about rewind 090811     Click to view gallery
    Designs from Austin Fashion Week     Click to view gallery
    Austin Fashion Awards at ACL Live, 08.27.11     Click to view gallery
    Graffiti Art Show at Pine Street Stati     Click to view gallery
    Out & About Rewind, 08.23.11     Click to view gallery
    Out & About Rewind, 08.16.11     Click to view gallery
    Summer boat party, 07.27.11     Click to view gallery
    2011 Keep Austin Weird Festival     Click to view gallery
    A-List ROT Rally, Day 1

    Latest AP Entertainment Headlines »

    A-List
    Latest photos
    A-List archive
    Your A-List
    Your A-List winners
    Events
    Events search
    Artists search
    Suggest an event
    Holidays
    Comedy
    Visitors guide: This is Austin
    ACL
    SXSW
    Republic of Texas Biker Rally
    Music
    Upcoming shows
    Artists search
    Soundcheck360 music player
    Reviews
    ACL
    SXSW
    Concert series
    Latest AP music news
    Gary Dinges
    Austin Music Source Blog
    Movies
    Now playing
    Area theaters
    SXSW
    Latest AP movies news
    John DeFore
    Austin Movie Blog
    Television
    TV listings
    Latest AP TV news
    Dale Roe
    TV Blog
    Arts
    Arts events
    Reviews
    Out & About 500
    Austin Arts: Seeing Things Blog
    Food/Drink
    Restaurant inspections
    Restaurant reservations
    Dining guide
    Coupons
    Beer, Wine & Spirits
    Happy hours
    Cocktail recipes
    Dining At Home
    Recipes
    Addie Broyles
    Mike Sutter
    Pat Beach
    Folklore Blog
    Liquid Austin Blog
    Relish Austin Blog
    Recreation
    Recreation events
    Pam LeBlanc
    Brom Hoban
    Fit City Blog
    Spas/Salons
    Search for spas/salons
    Blogs
    Austin Arts: Seeing Things
    Austin Movie Blog
    Austin Music Source
    Digital Savant
    Fit City
    Forklore
    It's Always Funny in Austin
    Liquid Austin
    Out & About
    Relish Austin
    Road Rash
    Socially Awkward: My Life as Bobby Bones
    The M.O.
    TV Blog
    Your A-List
    All staff blogs
    Austin-area bloggers
    Photos/Video
    Photos
    Video
    Interactives
    Watercooler
    Horoscopes
    Find Five
    Lottery
    Crossword
    Sudoku
    Games
    Puzzles
    Comics
    Personals
    Biz directory
    Find/rate a business
    Auto repair in Austin, TX
    Carpet cleaners in Austin, TX
    Dentists in Austin, TX
    Doctors in Austin, TX
    Electricians in Austin, TX
    Employment in Austin, TX
    Event planners in Austin, TX
    General contractors in Austin, TX
    Health clubs in Austin, TX
    Home inspectors in Austin, TX
    House cleaning in Austin, TX
    Landscapers in Austin, TX
    Mortgage companies in Austin, TX
    Movers in Austin, TX
    Painters in Austin, TX
    Preschools in Austin, TX
    Plumbers in Austin, TX
    Real estate agents in Austin, TX
    Remodeling in Austin, TX
    Roofers in Austin, TX
    Travel agencies in Austin, TX
    Tree service in Austin, TX
    Vets in Austin, TX
    Mobile
    Austin360
    Statesman
    iPhone application
    News
    Local news
    Virtual Capitol
    Business
    Opinion
    Life
    Sports
    Longhorns
    High school football
    Weather
    Traffic
    Photos/Video
    Customer Service
    Site map
    Contact us
    Member center
    E-mail newsletters
    Subscribe to the Statesman
    Subscribe to the e-Edition
    Subscriber services
    Where to buy the Statesman
    Buy photos/pages
    Readers panel
    Reader rewards
    Careers at the Statesman
    Internships
    Newspapers in Education
    News tips
    Classifieds
    Cars
    Homes
    Jobs
    Find Austin Jobs
    Merchandise
    Advertise
    Print
    Online
    Classifieds (print/online)
    eTearsheets
    View newspaper ads
    Marketing
    Community Development
    Marketing
    Contests
    DoGood
    Events
    Glossy
    Concert series
    Readers panel
    Special sections
    Affiliated sites
    Ahora Si
    Hookem.com
    PolitiFact Texas
    Bastrop Advertiser
    Cedar Park Citizen
    Lake Travis View
    Leander Ledger
    Pflugerville Pflag
    Round Rock Leader
    Smithville Times
    Westlake Picayune

    Copyright © Sun Feb 12 12:45:44 EST 2012 All rights reserved. By using Austin360.com, you accept the terms of our visitor agreement. Please read it.
    Contact Austin360.com | Privacy Policy | About our ads