Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 on Saturday 12th March

Eric Ries (Co-founder of IMVU / Author & Founder of “The Lean Startup”) is sought after worldwide for the methodology he advocates for both startups and large companies. In this session, Eric explains why most startups fail, how The Lean Startup has revolutionized entrepreneurship, and what you can do TODAY to improve your odds of building a game-changing product. Then you’ll hear case studies on Lean Building from folks who’ve iterated the hell out of their products…and won.

What Is The Future of Nonprofits?

In the most important nonprofit book of 2011, Randal C. Moss and David J. Neff show how the future of innovation, internal entrepreneurship, fundraising and social media communications are going to radically reshape the landscape of nonprofits in the next five years.

With case studies, expert interviews, document samples and the world's first nonprofit themed graphic novel they are giving you the keys to go back and change the way your nonprofit works.

Surgery simulators let medical students experience the adrenaline rush of a real operating room in a way that practicing on a cadaver cannot. Blood and guts aren't new to gaming, and simulators aren't new to training. But when the game is played on the human body, it offers exciting new opportunities for medical students to perfect their hand skills before they ever see their first patient.

At the Center for Immersive and Simulation-based Learning at Stanford, the lowest-performing students in a surgery simulator outperformed the highest-ranked students trained by traditional means. In this panel, we will briefly look at the history of simulation training, explore some simulator interfaces, experience a demonstration of a surgery simulator, and allow (at least) one lucky audience member to put his or her hand on the virtual knife. Panelists will discuss how what we traditionally think of as a game environment can be used to dramatically improve the training surgeons receive, change how surgeons receive accreditation—and ultimately improve their performance in practice.

In the current environment, the way to raise capital has changed with greater numbers of angel investors and more competition among venture capitalists. Today, entrepreneurs are faced with more and more options, which means more decisions. Taking money is like getting married; your investors are your partners. Pick investors as carefully as you would a co-founder. Entrepreneurs should do diligence on their investors and find out if they will be there when times are tough. Understand how to differentiate between investors and determine the right number of investors for your seed round. Learn the difference between angels, super angels and venture capitalists. Ensure that your investor's incentives are aligned with yours so that they help make your company the next big thing. Understand the market and what is a “good” valuation and what are “standard” terms. Figure out how to create a syndicate that positions your company to succeed. Come armed with your questions on anything from basic investment and venture capital terminology to decisions you’re trying to make to help your company grow.

Latin America is still behind the U.S. in Internet technology, but cyber crime has become a big issue in the region. In this session I will explain the growth of cyber crime in Mexico, including what drug cartels are doing, and discuss the lack of resources available in Mexico on how to combat cyber crime. Finally, I will discuss the example of start-up Hacking México, the first online information security and expert community formed to combat cybercrime, using online communication tools promoting computer forensics, research, education, and the use of technology such as bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, cryptography, telecommunications and cryptovirology, as well as efforts to combat cyber-drug trafficking.

In an era of rapid internet development and innovation, banks have been described as technology laggards. This session will explore the future of innovation in banking and the payments industry. There are literally hundreds of large companies and startups in the payment space from Paypal to 1-person startups. The talk will also dive into “new currencies” and payments are emerging such as Facebook credits and other “alternative currencies”. Is there a future for the banking industry or are banks in danger of becoming relics. The session is not about Citigroup nor its business.

You are being watched, tracked, and analyzed right now. But what are they collecting and analyzing? Who’s selling it, who's buying it, and why? And who are “they” anyway?

The subject of personal data collection, analysis, and control has become increasingly covered in various media channels recently such as the Wall Street Journal series, “What They Know”, reporting that a new industry of tracking has arisen, and you better watch out.

Is this buzz fear mongering, or is it true that there’s a dark underbelly of the Internet where your information is traded by big corporations every day to the detriment of web citizens? Or, on the other hand, is there a benefit for keeping this information open?

This data is often used to improve user experiences, web sites, programs, etc. that some of us wouldn’t want to live without. As cloud technologies and database processing improve the ability to mine user data, analyzing and valuing that data will become an even more critical part of the Internet ecosystem.

But where do web citizens fit in this world? Shouldn’t they be free to own and control their data? If so, how can they derive value, and in that process of creating value can they also improve the data?

Can we achieve an information system beneficial to all participants? We will address these questions from two perspectives: individual and industry.

How are newsrooms adjusting to the changing digital news environment? How do they balance transparency and objectivity? How are news consumers responding to information published in new ways? What behaviors and skills are news consumers developing to help them negotiate and evaluate the validity and trustworthiness of the news? What mores and values are emerging from news producers and consumers?

Before New Orleans, Detroit, or Bradford PA, the symbol of Urban-American blight was Majora's hometown, the South Bronx in NY City. After spennding her early years trying to get away from the Bronx, she found herself back at her parents' house as a result of financial needs while attending graduate school at NYU. What seemed like a defeat at first, led to her rediscovery & healing of her community and herself. No matter what condition your hometown is in, the possibility for more happiness, equality, efficiency, and prosperity can be realized when "problems" are looked at in the context of Home(town) Security and what that means to communities everywhere.

LEVEL: Intermediate

The early days of social media were filled with hope - and even more hype. Social media gurus and experts started popping up everywhere, offering brands assistance based on shaky credentials. Catchphrases became commonplace: customers are in control! Focus on people, not technology! Listen first! You don't need a Facebook strategy!

Without a doubt, social "stuff" has the potential to change the way businesses engage with consumers, employees work together, and consumers communicate with each other. However, businesses that focus on the learnings of early social media will find themselves no better off than the early pioneers who found themselves with figurative consumer arrows in their backs.

This session will focus on what worked early on, why it doesn't work now, and what companies need to be thinking about now in order to create and capture value from social business.

LEVEL: Advanced

**This is a book reading**
In 2009 I presented my first book, "Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day." It was very well received (full room, Barnes & Noble sold out while I was speaking.) I've just released my second book, which covers social technology and collaboration at deeper levels in business. I'd love to present this on the Author's Stage at SXSW 2011.

See more about the new book here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obido...

LEVEL: Intermediate

A common assumption among startup entrepreneurs is that listening to potential customers is the best way to find out whether your product or idea will succeed in the market. Honestly - don't bother. In our ten years of user experience research for startups and big companies alike, one thing we've seen time and again is that it's behavior, not opinions, that tells you whether people want to use your product.

The main problem with opinions is self-reporting bias: Opinions are often inconsistent with behaviors or other attitudes, especially when discussing hypotheticals. Remember Clippy, the little character that appeared in Microsoft Word years ago? That little bastard arose, in part, from Microsoft asking users if they wanted help working on their documents - everyone said, "Sure, sounds great." But once people started actually using it in the real world, they hated it - it might be one of the most hated features in the history of computing. But Microsoft employs hundreds of researchers. So where did they go wrong, and how can you avoid making the same mistake?

It's simple. Never ask people what they think of your product or idea. Instead, I'll walk you through the world of researching people, including what you need to ignore customers effectively, just like Apple and 37 Signals. I'll go over examples from our research with Volkswagen, Electronic Arts, and Wikipedia, and show how to use remote research to construct behavioral scenarios and eliminate poor research.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Ever since grade school I've been told organization is my number one problem. Like most people involved in the web, I'm creative, technically proficient, and often lacking in focus. I've had to balance managing my personal disfunction with managing huge web projects and now running a startup business (FeedMagnet). More than once I've been introduced with the disclaimer, “Jason is really smart and talented...but he's kind of all over the place.”

Nevertheless, I've determined to master my disfunction—and I've tried everything. Inbox Zero. GTD. Scrum and Agile. Countless systems involving whiteboards. Moleskines and the Hipster PDA. CRMs, RTM, and other TLAs. I won't claim I've found the holy grail of organization but I've made a lot of progress—and life and business are much more manageable now.

This session is not for beginners. I'm going to assume you've already tried, or at least heard of, most of the popular project management and personal organization techniques out there. This session is for folks who have been fighting the same fight as me and are looking to learn from my mistakes and successes.

Specific topics to cover: Why systems work (or don't) for individuals. How to map your individual profile of disfunction. Putting custom-tailored systems in place to meet your specific needs.

If you have enough focus to have read this far, this session may not be for you—or maybe you are just desperate to figure this out and the session will be perfect.

LEVEL: Advanced

The economy for small business has changed. You can't count on: a job, an income, a loan, the government. Resources are limited. Things no longer always go up. Society has changed. It is cycling away from big: big companies and big retail. Geographic advantage is shrinking, and competition is everywhere.

In order to thrive under these conditions, it is essential that every business build a community. Businesses are increasingly using social media to build their reputation and market their business. Companies spend their marketing dollars to find and participate in online communities based on a specific interest. In fact, social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are frequently compared to the old time country store, where everyone knew everyone, and friendly conversations lead to doing business together.

Small town entrepreneurs have been building communities to grow their businesses for hundreds of years. We will unlock the secrets of rural entrepreneurs that can now be used to help anyone build a business regardless of where you are located.

Why small town entrepreneurs?

If every customer can talk to every other customer now, is there anyone who knows how to do business this way? Small town businesses.
If building community is the new way of marketing, who is still living by community and can teach us? Small towns. If the old country store is the model for social media, where do we find them? Small towns.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. I agree about the banana, but I'm not so sure about the arrow. What is the shape of time? Our online calendars, clocks and other models of time often are designed with the understanding that time is a forward-moving arrow. This sounds logical to the Western, English-speaking scientific mind. However, not everyone conceptualizes time as a relentless hurtling forward. Some cultures understand time as a fractal, a spiral, a mandala, a cycle. And a child, playing with the same toy over and over again, lives in a single seamless moment from dawn to dusk. Visualizing temporality is a fundamental issue in interaction design today. For example, we are looking at a future where our work must be useful for both Eastern and Western audiences, who differ in time-oriented cultural traits such as long-term vs. short-term orientation. We also need to be able to provide tools to differentiate the personal, bodily-felt experience of time from clock time. We may want to expand our customers' perception of time, to invite them to stay in the Deep Present. Our beliefs about time and its passage profoundly affect the design of software and interactive media. It's time for interaction designers to understand deeply how our customers know time, whether as an arrow, a spiral or a squiggle. How people slice and dice nature into concepts is fundamental to designing tools people can use to successfully live on the earth, for a long time.

LEVEL: Advanced

How is social media changing the TV experience for good? Over the past ten years, we've seen television become truly interactive, from SMS voting on American Idol to real-time audience feedback via Twitter and Facebook becoming a part of everything from CNN to Oprah to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon; at the same time, web series have built millions of viewers on places like YouTube, iTunes, and XBox Live. Now a new wave of always-connected mobile apps, set-top boxes, and gaming platforms are making entertainment more social, location-aware, and connected than ever. Our panel of television and web producers and representatives from top social networking platforms will talk about how they're enabling social viewing and collaboration between producers, stars, and audiences in real-time to create new kinds of TV experiences.

LEVEL: Beginner

Think NPR and PBS are just broadcasters? Think again. Public media is no longer just a one-way street. In many towns, NPR and PBS stations are the only locally-owned broadcasters, and their mission to serve the public demands that they develop new ways of engaging and strengthening those communities. They're convening Barcamp-like unconferences called PubCamps all over the country, allowing local techies and citizen journalists to forge collaborative projects with NPR and PBS stations, both online and offline. Public media staff work with volunteer coders, creating software for public media organizations that otherwise lack the capacity to develop it on their own. Public media engages communities in new ways that go beyond those annual pledge drives, challenging them to work together for the common good. They're putting the public back in public media - right where it should be. This ain't your father's public broadcasting. Come learn how people are plugging into public media - and how you can get involved.

LEVEL: Beginner

LEVEL: Beginner

Slacktivism versus real engagement is a false dichotomy - the fact is that smart technologists who care about the world are innovating new ways for people to get involved in the causes they care about. Get used to it.

Now, however, as we enter the next phase of this trend, questions still circle around the relationship between the new, less tested forms of involvement and traditional forms of volunteering and service that are still the bedrock of thousands of social change organizations.

If new technologies are adding more rungs to a ladder of engagement in the form of sharing, viral promotions, micro-volunteering, and micro-giving, what's at the top and the bottom? Where do these actions live beside other innovative, non-technical forms of volunteering -- such as pro bono and skilled models? And what are the right business models for social enterprises that are innovating these technologies?

Join moderator Robert Rosenthal from the pioneering social enterprise VolunteerMatch (www.volunteermatch.org) as he discusses these issues with technologists from three bleeding edge social change Web services: Dan Jacobs, founder of Everywun (www.everywun.com), Jacob Colker, co-founder of The Extraordinaries (www.beextra.org), and George Weiner, CTO of DoSomething.org.

LEVEL: Intermediate

This session is about how the history of Print Design is becoming an important influence in the evolution of Interaction Design. As a craft, design for printed media has a rich history. Several generations of designers have pushed its boundaries in countless directions. It has been shaped over several hundred years as both a functional and aesthetic discipline, with a deep foundation of principles, practices, theories, and professional dialogue. In comparison, Interaction and UI Design is still a relatively young field. Its history has largely been driven by technology and functional goals. The dialogue around it has been centered on usability, which has been its purpose in the context of technological advancement. The visual language of UI has evolved from that standpoint: that it should evoke the familiar, analog experience of tools, buttons, knobs, and dials. That foundation has led to a very specific visual language in interactive experiences. In the past ten years however, the relevant technologies that support the design of Interfaces - displays, processing speeds, and rendering engines - have matured to a point that they provide a more capable canvas for design. Meanwhile, our culture has become visibly more comfortable with the technologies that surround it. These combination of trends are creating an important inflection point for designers. The aesthetic experience of the digital surface can now be considered and explored in a more sophisticated manner.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Once upon a time slow connections begat the Progress Bar - bloated sites would taunt us with '15% loaded' screens. High-speed promised to kill the beast and free us from their tyranny but yet it lives! Progress bars are being used MORE lately to direct user actions. Look to Farmville and LinkedIn which push their users to collect 100% of their personal information. Incomplete progress bars are an itch that needs to be scratched. They carry the implicit language that declares 'You are here' but more importantly 'The end is in sight'. Game design motivates us through incremental, measurable progress towards a tangible goal but is this the way real life works? Is the progress bar's ubiquity in technology starting to affect the way we measure progress in meatspace? This panel will reach far across time and space to look at the story of progress bars, why they hypnotize us and what we need to do - slay the beast once and for all, or throw ourselves into its partially-complete embrace...

LEVEL: Beginner

The iPad and its entourage of Android tablets have introduced a new style of computing, confronting designers with unfamiliar aches and pains. Learn the symptoms (and fixes) for a range of new-to-the-world iPad interface ailments, including Greedy Pixel Syndrome, the dreaded Frankeninterface, and the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" bait and switch. Explore practical techniques and eye-opening gotchas of tablet interface design, all grounded in the ergonomics, context, psychology, and nascent culture of these new devices (both iOS and Android). The presentation inoculates you against common problems with close-up looks at successful iPad apps from early sketches to final design. Genial bedside manner is administered by Josh Clark, author of the O'Reilly books "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" and "Best iPhone Apps: A Guide for Discriminating Downloaders."

LEVEL: Advanced

Technology and mathematics are transforming consumer lending. Historically, it has been nearly impossible for people with bad credit to get loans. Yet, these are often the people who need it most - to buy groceries or pay bills.

Until now, lenders determined who should get loans through a simple underwriting function based on a small amount of credit data. When this data is missing or wrong, banks deny the loan, leaving people to payday loans or pawn shops - very expensive options that put people further in debt.

Millions of people are being denied credit because underwriting hasn’t evolved. Why use only a handful of variables when we have vast amounts of data provided by the customer, the Internet, and social media? All data is credit data and we should use it all to make better underwriting decisions.

Analyzing vast amounts of data, however, requires complex machine learning more akin to search engines than your corner bank. The future of financial services is to become more like a recommendation engine, and less like a place where you stand in line to deposit checks.

The panelists will discuss how to use large-scale data analysis to re-invent underwriting and replace today’s antiquated methods. Better underwriting will open up good credit to people who don't have a lot of good options and materially improve the financial lives of the people who need it most.

LEVEL: Intermediate

PBS KIDS has been designing non-commercial websites and interactive games for kids for over 10 years. Making an interactive product that appeals, engages and is usable by a child is not as simple as using Comic Sans and replacing an “S” with a “Z”. Children's abilities change rapidly and producers need to ensure that products are developmentally accessible. This session will focus on designing for two audiences: pre-readers (3-5) and readers (6-8), through four case-studies revealing how and why design choices were made based on experience, user testing and informed guesses.

LEVEL: Intermediate

With the plethora of niche sites it’s hard to deny that the Internet has increased the amount of social, political and personal groups one can join. But is this cross sharing really creating diversity?

In this session, Anne Hunter, VP, Advertising Effectiveness, comScore, will provide a comprehensive understanding of how the digital age has affected diversity. Does the democratic nature of the internet with its open sharing of ideas and cultures lead to a natural increase in diversity or are we seeing an end of true niche and specialty groups? Is over-diversification leading to a weakening of subcultures?

With your grandmother being able to join your band’s fan page how has the demographic makeup shifted? This session will highlight the key differences between visitors. Through understanding key metrics comScore will examine whether or not this democratization has actually created a more diverse audience or simply created a group of samplers versus key users.

Anne will examine how the digital age has affected demographics differently. For younger generations that have only existed within this schism, how is their idea of diversity different from older audiences? Does a generation, who is more prone to buy a single than an album, less likely to be deeply connected to one group?

Finally, this session will also examine how diversity changes based on the medium. For example, how does the audience of BET Television compare to their online component?

LEVEL: Beginner

Federating social networks means people on different networks following each other. It's driven by the growth of private social networks for businesses; the development of new Open Source tools for social networking; and concerns about privacy and control of your brand in consumer sites.

The panel will discuss advances in the federated social web and the technologies that are making it possible. We'll cover who's implementing it today, and what kind of control a federated model gives companies and individuals. We'll give first steps on what you can do to weave your company and your social media presence into a federated social web.

LEVEL: Intermediate

This dual presentation will explore common play elements in location-based games. We’ll analyze the popular "Check-In" mechanic (used by products like FourSquare and GoWalla), and take a look at the business and social forces that have influenced its emergence as the popular geo game model.

The presentation will compare current location-based products, charting their strengths and weaknesses to identify where we believe large areas of opportunity exist in the market.

We'll evaluate the challenges and untapped opportunities of Geo Games from the technological and design perspectives of the two presenters. We’ll outline how the limitations in location technology can be an elegant part of the game design itself, and how new innovations will help to create richer and more immersive parallel worlds.

We’ll describe why we think its time to move beyond "social" Check-In systems, to “true games” that engage, challenge, and stimulate players.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Gone are the days when brands needed to rely on high profile stories to establish credibility –today, brand marketers become content curators by mingling content from trusted sources with their own material. Long gone is the need to purchase ad space in a relevant trade publication—instead, they just create their own site on the topic. At time when the line is increasingly blurred between the role of marketer and publisher, it is a brave new world out there for brands.

As part of a lively debate on what role brands should play in this brave new world, experts from the publishing, marketing, and internet worlds will come together to address some of the most heated concerns about this changing landscape –including matters of transparency and trust, concern over copyright and fair sharing, and where to draw the line between reporting and selling.

LEVEL: Beginner

Skype and other video conferencing tools now enable distance to become an asset (and a sexy marketing tool) rather than a deal-breaker in collaborations between artists on the other side of the world. Austin company the Hidden Room and London company Look Left Look Right are working on two cutting edge theatre projects together via Skype (one Shakespeare, one improvisational comedy) and are finding inspiration and a solid new work model. International rehearsal demonstration included!

LEVEL: Intermediate

Will 2011 be the year of the Universal Translator? As this science fiction dream teeters over the horizon, what can and should we do now to prepare for a time when the translation robot, not the search engine, becomes the single most important audience for your site? Will SEO give way to TEO? Does language need its own subtext markup? And when on Earth is Microsoft Word going to replace its 'Bold' button with a 'Strong' one? Lay aside your Google Goggles and iLingual apps (just for 60 minutes or so), and enjoy a session that's packed full of accessible translation theory, insight into the working processes of web copywriters, and more than the occasional riff on Douglas Adams.