SXSW: Bizness, brews, and bonding

Sunday at SXSW in Pictures

Just few shots from today, incuding the ScreenBurn at SXSW Arcade and the Women Love Tech Meetup.

Creativity Through Play

Presenter: Sara Summers, User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft

Play is important, particularly in the workplace.  Science (lead by Dr. Stuart Brown at The Institute of Play) has proven that a life without play leads to depression, rigidity, and dissocial activities.  It’s critical, not just to our well being, but for adaptation and idea generation.  It’s proven that play drives us to seek novelty and newness.

Play elicits our best qualities – it inspires empathy, helpfulness, hopefulness, and betters emotions.  It’s crucial to visual thinking and processing.  Dr. Robert Epstein’s “Shifting” suggests a period of individual ideation, followed by group building and generation produces significantly better ideas.

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” -Thomas Edison

It’s a short blog post, but most of this workshop involved hands on play and brainstorming to illustrate the points made.

SXSW: Missed opportunity

Privacy, publicity, and micro-blogging in the dark.

One of the world’s foremost authorities on social networks, Boyd works at Microsoft Research New England and also serves as a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.

In a very large, very dark ballroom at the Austin Convention Center, I micro-blogged keynote highlights on Twitter. Here’s a link to posts from the event:

South by Southwest Interactive Keynote: Privacy and Publicity with Danah Boyd.

Saturday at SXSW in Photos

Here’s the Saturday photo gallery…

The Rise of Mobile, Web Run-Times, and APIs

DISCLAIMER: Despite my average tech knowledge, this session was WAY over my head.  I’ve tried to capture it as best I can and hopefully you get it.

Daniel Appelquist, Tech Strategist at Vodaphone in UK

It’s the Web, but not as we know it.

Interactivity and graphics

Both Canvas and SVG are integrated into HTML5

W3C Widgets

Widgets and HTML5

• Widgets can use HTML5
• Widgets is a different take on offline apps from HTML5 Appcache
• HTML5 Apps Web Apps written in HTML5 packaged up as Widgets
• Use Phonegap to package these as iPhone apps (for legacy purposes)

APIs

Web Location: the W3C Geo API – Browser using location information

Used by Google maps, local search, Gowalla

Why is location sexy?

• Find what you’re looking for
• Refine search
• Add location to any Web App
• Apps like Gowalla are already on the web – http://m.gowalla.com

W3C Device APIs – working on:

• Contact book, calendar, filesystem, capture audio/video, messaging, device interface, etc.

Mobile: Agency, Carrier & Manufacturer

Presenter: David Hewitt, Sapient

There are key challenges for mobile stakeholders and there are opportunities for agencies to assist.  Here are the challenges and opportunities:

Network operators business challanges

• Reduce costs, churn
• Driving quality, consistency, and experience

Opportunity for agencies

• Position carriers for differentiation
• Bring in the big ideas – that can actually be implimented
• Ability to facilitate dependencies between client groups
• Ability to craft user experiences across multiple devices and help bring specific devices up to carrier standards

Agencies challenges

• New, rapidly changing,
• Competitive, need right ideas and empowering them with tec, need right capabilitys
• Death by estimation – pick the ones that make sense and chart the path

Agency Opportunities

• Educate clients about mobile
• Leverage social media to drive sales
• Include mobile in both media planning and campaign creation
• Work with/hire people with mobile experience

Booze and Blogging

Presenters: @livethelushlife, @bebellanti, @johnwise, @titosvodka, @thrillist

It’s 5 pm on Saturday, so I’m “off the clock.”  That’s why my last SXSW session was this one.  BONUS: This one involved trying booze while I was blogging this (see the picture here).

First, I learned that the first “viral drink” is the “Pickelback” (seen here) which involves taking a shot of Jamison Whisky and then a shot of pickel juice.  The pickel juice completely eliminates the whisky flavor and leaves a little warm spot in your belly.  It became a “viral drink” after it was reported that Pickles were more popular than Canadian rockers Nickelback on Facebook.

Tito’s Vodka has become a “word of mouth” brand here in Austin and has spread.  It started to spread locally, but took off with the introduction of Twitter.  Now they’ve moved to Facebook and try to enable others to “share the Tito’s love.”  They’ve started doing a newsletter and videos on Twitter.   There’s more to it than just vodka, Tito has a real story and according to the presenter, he’s a “love bomb.”  His video outakes are “YouTube gold.”  There is a man behind the brand and their marketing team makes efforts to be personable and show that there are real people behind the brand.

It’s not all fun and drinking.  Bloggers/marketers in this area have to follow liquor laws and regulations and are held to the same marketing measurement standards as any other group.  However, social media is social and it is particularly effective in this industry.

Mobile – The Great Channel Equalizer

David Gill – Neilsen

Mobile is growing, but in what ways and what audience?  Mobile is growing, but one of the largest areas of mobile growth is mobile video.  This area experienced 57% growth last year as people viewed an average of 3 hours of mobile video each month.  This isn’t cutting down on TV viewing though – 59% of Americans with home internet access use TV and the Internet simultaneously at least once a month.  Subscription video content and downloaded video content are the areas of largest mobile video growth over the last year.  Teens overindex in the area of time spent with mobile video, with 36% of them spending 30 minutes to an hour on mobile video each month.

What’s driving this growth – better hardware, a better user experience, apps, sharing and discover, and expanded access to both devices and networks.

How big is it getting – There are currently 30 million people with smart phones, which is expected to nearly double by the end of 2010.  Neilsen is predicting that smart phones will be the majority of mobile phones by Q3 2011.  This is evident by the fact that year-after-year, people who get new phones are choosing smart phones.  Last year hit the highest marks ever in this area – 28.4% of people who got a new phone last year chose a smart phone.

Apps are obviously a growing area.  They have not been very successful on Blackberries since most of these are “enterprise controlled” and downloading apps on them are restricted or frowned upon.  However, the area of most growth is among young kids who are downloading free apps.  Neilsen predicts this area will only continue to grow further.  Texting is a huge area for teens, but particularly among 13-17 year olds.  They text nearly twice as much as any other group (see the photo of the chart.

Overall, Neilsen is keeping a sharp eye on how teens are using mobile – video, texting, apps – because they believe this will drive the future of mobile.

Is WordPress Killing Web Design?

Panel: Dan Oliver, Jina Bolton, Brendan Dawes, Dan Mall, Shane Mielke

Problem is designing within a pre-set structure – structure and sitemap take priority over content and goals of site.  It is a tool that comes in behind the design to see if it fits.  The panel agrees that it creates bad habits if you start thinking that it is the right process to develop sites. It creates a lot of focus on things that are easily changeable like fun headers and footers.  There also get to be issues when people start seeing sites that all look the same.  Some on the panel felt that CMS tools like WordPress are creating a “standard” web design which can be dangerous.

These are customizable, but there’s a heavy reliance on themes.  A well-trained web designer can become lazy by relying on themes, but if you don’t know much, it’s an easy way to learn, get up to speed, and customize your site for your needs.

Scenes from Day 1 @ SXSW

See pictures here…