Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 on Tuesday 15th March

LEVEL: Intermediate

When a friend invites you to dinner, you bring wine or flowers – not $100 cash – as a gesture of thanks. That goes without saying. But if a brand comes to dinner, what should they bring? When it comes to social media, there are unwritten rules for how to behave that many brands simply aren't getting.

Brands are grappling with social media as they try to find a place at our virtual dinner table. Some brands get it, some gaffe it. The rules, it turns out, are hidden in basic social psychology. The established behaviors of friendship are the prevailing rules of the road in social media: sharing valuable information, entertaining one another, support in a crisis, celebration of a personal achievement. But the established behaviors of transactions (the way we historically interact with brands) can feel awkward and forced in social media. So how can brands build trust with their networks while being social like a friend? This session will look at social media behavior and what brands can do to become a delightful guest and valuable contributor at our virtual dinner party.

LEVEL: Beginner

To conclude their trilogy of successful presentations at SxSW about the analysis of interfaces in science fiction, the authors of Make it So will invite a collection of production designers who have been responsible for on screen interfaces to share and discuss their work. (This panel had to be canceled last year. Consider it a comeback.)

LEVEL: Beginner

Major and indie artists are leveraging new technologies and smart marketing to re-define success in today’s music industry. These artists are not only reaching their goals, they are profiting from their success BIGGER & FASTER than ever before; this panel will show you how to do the same. Since new technology start-ups are a dime a dozen, its critical to know which strategies and companies will drive success while making you the most money online, offline and on the road. This panel features representatives of innovative, tech-savvy artists and best-in-class technology providers to discuss recent developments and relevant success stories from tour-centric to online marketing strategies that employ both innovation and technology to improve the bottom line. After this panel, you will walk away knowing how to take immediate action and make career defining decisions.

LEVEL: Intermediate

In the wake of one of the worst economic disasters in our lifetimes, recruiters/headhunters can hold the golden ticket to finding a dream job. Mega corporations are moving to vendor managed processes that silence the average job seeker and all but force them into the waiting arms of a headhunter. Job seekers new to town and new to a job market rely heavily on the knowledge of recruiters to shine a light on who's hiring. What's not mentioned are the massive turnover numbers inside the "search industry". 70% quit within the first year and then those that stay wonder why job seekers despise working with them.

This panel will feature both sides of the coin. (1) Recruiters (technical) that have proven successful in their respective industries but had to battle to achieve independence among the masses of greasy sales folk. (2) Job seekers (software developers) that have gone through horrible processes and are not only unafraid to share the horrors but can speak intelligently about what the loved and hated.

A no holds barred session of what works and what doesn't and more importantly why and why not. In the spirit of SXSW, ample time will be given to dauntless dialogue from those in attendance. The veil of secrecy will be dropped.

LEVEL: Advanced

Former White House Deputy CTO and Open Government leader addresses how to use technology to design smaller and smarter government for the 21st century. Bringing innovation to the public sector doesn’t require new legislation or new budgets. It requires changing the default way of working from closed to open.

In theory, with global brands, instant communication and efficient markets, innovative sites in one country should be quickly copied in others. But cultural idiosyncrasies, language barriers and entrepreneurial egos often conspire to limit the diffusion of innovation. This panel looks at the web culture in Hungary, a European innovation hub, to evaluate its web imports and exports. Are entrepreneurs overlooking opportunities for innovation arbitrage between countries?

LEVEL: Beginner

What do you learn when you get the entire internet together in one room? In this panel, the cofounders of ROFLCon (Tim Hwang and Christina Xu) will share what they’ve learned from cramming the internet’s celebrities, content creators, and community organizers into the same space as their fans and the academics that study it all. We will give you the condensed, Cliff Notes version of what guests like moot, Mahir Cagri, Ben Huh, Tron Guy, and Autotune the News have revealed about the currents at work underneath the internet universe.

Beyond merely sharing some moments and the usual pictures of funny cats, we’re also going to focus in a bit on the even more amusing backstage of putting something like this on. What have we learned? How are we thinking about events around internet culture now? And how/why did we get Leeroy Jenkins to do our conference security?

This panel will also be taking a step back to grapple with some of the questions that have emerged as the most important in our dealings with the internet at ROFLCon: what happens when internet culture becomes big business? What counts as an “internet culture”? What are the ethics of operating in this evolving ecosystem?

LEVEL: Intermediate

Suffering from "game fatigue" yet? While many sites have slapped on badges and points to make things more engaging, the companies that "get it" have a better understanding of the psychology behind motivation. They know how to design sites that keep people coming back again and again.

So what are the secrets? What actually motivates people online? How do you create sustained interest in your product or service? We'll look at everything from game design to learning theories to neuroscience to understand what motivates--and demotivates--people over the long haul.

NOTE: This is a follow-up to the 2010 SXSW presentation "Seductive Interactions" where I focused primarily on initial engagement. Where that presentation discussed "getting to first base" with our users, this one looks much farther out at how to create "lifelong love and devotion."

LEVEL: Intermediate

Information overload is less about having too much information and more about not having the right tools and techniques to filter and process information to find the pieces that are most relevant for you. This presentation will focus on showing you a variety of tips and techniques to get you started down the path of looking at RSS feeds in a completely different light. The default RSS feeds generated by your favorite blog or website are just a starting point waiting to be hacked and manipulated to serve your needs.

Most people read RSS feeds, but few people take the time to go one step further to hack on those RSS feeds to find only the most interesting posts. I combine tools like Yahoo Pipes, BackTweets, PostRank and more with some simple API calls to be able to find what I need while automatically discarding the rest. You start with one or more RSS feeds and then feed those results into other services to gather more information that can be used to further filter or process the results. This process is easier than it sounds once you learn a few simple tools and techniques, and no “real” programming experience is required to get started. This session will show you some tips and tricks to get you started down the path of hacking your RSS feeds.

LEVEL: Intermediate

In an extension of the Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, logic, now that background processing is possible on iPhones and iPads as well as Androids, the possibility of having a global audience on alert is possible via mobile devices on Android and iOS. What are the new possibilities that news and entertainment providers have to keep an audience engaged with the next LeBron moment? What will democratization of events look like in terms of the mobile UX, and how important will private events be in relation to public events now that the barrier to communicating to EVERYONE in any time zone at any time will come crashing down?

If too much stress at SXSW has you a little uptight, then the solution is simple -- relax and let it go. Start your day mindfully with an hour of light, meditative stretching. Yoga was developed thousands of years ago as a way to prepare the body and mind to be more receptive to enlightenment. What better way to prepare for all the new people and ideas you will encounter every day at SXSW Interactive?

To effectively bring a social app to the market, companies must focus not only on design and marketing, but also on the underlying – and often unglamorous – job of managing their IT infrastructure. The hope, if not the expectation – is to achieve rapid and massive popularity across the world. But many compute infrastructures are not capable of handling unpredictable growth and scaling, much less support fast, day-to-day development cycles.

In the fast paced social app industry, development teams must have the technology agility to stay ahead of the curve. The audience will learn best practices for launching apps in the cloud and discover how industry leaders including Zynga, Playfish, and Crowdstar are using cloud computing to manage and grow their infrastructure. This session will also discuss the use of cloud computing throughout the entire application lifecycle -- from concept and development to end-of-life.

Is it morally correct for the US to pursue prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange? Is alleged leaker of military documents Bradley Manning a hero or a traitor? And what do Wikileaks and the Internet mean to the future of journalism? James Moore, the New York Times bestselling author of "Bush's Brain" is joined by technologist Ben Werdmuller from the UK, the creator of one of the web's early social networking platforms, and KRLD Dallas radio host Scott Braddock, to discuss "Wikileaks, the Web, and the Long, Strange Journey of Journalism." Moore will lead the panel by arguing that Assange and Manning are heroic figures and ought to be honored in a culture that requires information to sustain a democracy. Werdmuller will offer his insight on the Internet’s long term reach and impact with regard to information, systems, and public access to data that was previously unavailable, and Braddock will articulate the perspective that Assange and Manning have done harm to America and its allies and need to be treated as people who have acted outside of the law. Audience participation and questions will be encouraged.

The digital revolution has allowed thousands of people not only to conceive great ideas but also to execute, produce them. With digital technologies, you don’t need raw materials, factories, distribution centres, stores… you can reach a worldwide audience quickly and cheaply just by using your brain and your PC.

This innovation-led culture is now ubiquitous, and it looks like it has inspired (or liberated) not only entrepreneurs and businesspeople, but also civil servants, engineers, artists and architects: even if their ideas belong to the “physical” world, their approach belong to the digital culture.

This presentation provides example of this new spirit of liberation: from a science-fictionesque tram station in Austria, to an Italian village that, with the help of a giant mirror, created the physical equivalent of Facebook (http://bit.ly/al875a), through to artists who conceived the ultimate hotel experience in Paris (http://tinyurl.com/ybxjlty), used physical crowd-sourcing to create a piece of art or wrote a twitter-inspired theatre play… etc.

We are in a more open society where creativity is less constrained by cultural, technological or financial constraints. We are moving from “everyone can have ideas” or “everyone can be an artist” to “everyone is an innovator”.

LEVEL: Beginner

For centuries, libraries, archives, and museums have been creating structured data, organizing information, and managing metadata in order to organize and share cultural artifacts and knowledge with the public. Unfortunately, the bulk of these systems have evolved in isolation, long before the advent of the World Wide Web. However, the convergence of developments in culture and technology are resulting in exciting new ways for individuals and developers alike to interact directly with unprecedented amounts of structured data, historical photos and archives, and more.

Expert developers and project managers in this field will lead a discussion focused on the question: How can developers leverage open data from libraries, archives and museums being made available to the public? Panelists will review new developments and highlight examples, considering use cases with Linked Data, Flickr Commons, Smithsonian Commons, mobile apps, and scalability.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Don’t you think the internet should be accessible to all, including people that are visually impaired? The visually impaired are people that need aide to see, either with glasses or contact lenses or they can’t see anything at all. Society is living longer, thus making older web users more impactful in market segments. The visually impaired demographic is exploding and will require technology to bridge a visual communicative gap.

Imagine how marketing, advertising and the general quality of life for the visually impaired would drastically improve if accessing the internet was easy and addressed their needs. This panel focuses on groundbreaking new technology that will allow the visually impaired to have full access to the web with voice browsers, speech interaction and desktop projection.

There will be a demonstration of voice browsers in development and how they work. A discussion on the W3C initiative called the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) that is rolling out in full force with technology and information for designers to understand how to make their designs inclusive for the visually impaired at minimal effort.

LEVEL: Advanced

In an extension of the Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, logic, now that background processing is possible on iPhones and iPads as well as Androids, the possibility of having a global audience on alert is possible via mobile devices on Android and iOS.

What are the new possibilities that news and entertainment providers have to keep an audience engaged with the next LeBron moment? What will democratization of events look like in terms of the mobile UX, and how important will private events be in relation to public events now that the barrier to communicating to EVERYONE in any time zone at any time will come crashing down?

LEVEL: Intermediate

The perceived wisdom for business success is that you need to follow the rules. Sure, there’s room to be a maverick but you still need to have a 5 year plan, a marketing strategy, a HR department, a path to profit.

Now the rule book is going out of the window as people prove you can be a success by putting passion and authenticity at the heart of their business, and doing it their way without compromise. Ideas like business unplanning and freemium models are busting the myths and disrupting the status quo. Now there’s a new generation of role models from Gary Vaynerchuk to 37signals who are proving that by keeping it real and eschewing a big strategy, they can still be a success.

Ditch the rule book is for freelancers, start-ups, executives and entrepreneurs. It’s for anyone who needs an injection of fresh thinking to shake things up: to be a game-changer whilst staying true to their DNA. It’s brought to you by a bunch of guys with their own stories of how they ditched the rule book. These stories will educate, inspire and hopefully entertain. But we also want to create a forum for participation and interaction with contributions from the floor.

Ditching the rule book can bring you breakthroughs in your business whilst making sure your business stands out in the crowd.

Ditch The Rule Book is for 'rebels without a suit' and anyone looking to revolutionize their business by doing it YOUR way.

LEVEL: Beginner

As we continue to embrace all forms of social media, we unwittingly allow privacy settings and engineered functionality dictate the evolution and devolution of our relationships. We're beginning to see a new model of relational progression that is constructed by the levels of 'friendship' or 'following' allowed on sites, not necessarily what is psychologically beneficial.

With establishing social sites in an industry where success and product value are measured by data sets, user base growth, and scalability comes an ever growing ignorance of the distinction between building a successful service using computers and building a successful model of relationships.

Is it possible that the immediately fulfilling and addicting satisfaction of social media site use conceals the concept that the rules, metrics, and system preferences which define the world of tech and internet are not necessarily the ones that should be defining our relationships?

This presentation will take a look at the differences between psychological relational progression and the new world of engineering defined relationships. We will discuss the nuances and experiences that are important to relationships and how they integrate, or don't, with the informal new relationship model that social technology is creating. We'll then discuss how we foresee coming back to a middle ground between socially engineered and naturally occurring relational experiences.

LEVEL: Beginner

The U.S. Copyright Group has quietly targeted tens of thousands BitTorrent users for legal action in federal court in Washington DC. The defendants, all Does, are accused of having downloaded independent films such as "Far Cry," "Steam Experiment," and "The Hurt Locker" without authorization.

What is the U.S. Copyright Group? How are they suing so many people? What should you do if you're sued? If you're a movie fan, should you be worried? If you're the producer of an independent film, should you be suing your fans?

We're going to find out.

LEVEL: Beginner

PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING addresses 89 of the most compelling and important issues that marketers face on a regular basis when it comes to social media, providing advice and insight on how to deal with each issue from the perspective of two thought leaders in this arena: Stephanie Agresta from Weber Shandwick and B. Bonin Bough from PepsiCo. Together, they discuss what social media is, how it has changed the marketing landscape, how to implement a tactical and strategic social media plan across your organization, how to best measure the ROI of a social media campaign, and more.

Come meet Stephanie, chat about the current Social Media Landscape and get your book signed!

**Stephanie Agresta currently serves as EVP, Mananging Director of Social Media for Weber Shandwick. She loves Austin and SXSW and her favorite Austin restaurants include Guero's and Salt Lick!

Stephanie Agresta will be stopping by the SX Bookstore immediately following her book reading to greet registrants and sign copies of her book, Perspectives of Social Media Marketing.

Dave Bruno will be stopping by the SX Bookstore to greet registrants and sign copies of his book, The One Hundred Thing Challenge.

For decades, TV show fans have sought ways to extend their connection to their favorite show characters with things like branded cereals, toys, board games, music or the like. Fans often can't wait for the next episode and especially dread the time between seasons. They want to interact and even play along with their favorite shows. This is a reality that TV networks are creating through branded online games and social games. This panel, consisting of online gaming experts and digital leaders at TV networks, will explore how TV networks are keeping fans engaged between episodes and seasons with quality online games that extend the show's brand and interactivity with fans - taking TV entertainment to the next level. The session will sample real case studies from experiences over several seasons with shows and branded games like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Biggest Loser, Survivor, and others. Panel members will also explore how games enable an additional channel for TV networks to reach global fans via social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo, especially as we're seeing games being the number one used applications on many social networks.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Sure, smartphones are everywhere and apps stores are loaded. But how do developers address the explosive growth in tablet computing, eReaders and digital photoframes? What do you have to do to be successful in launching apps for these new devices? Manufacturers of new mobile devices also have their own set of issues to cope with like Wi-Fi or 3G? CDMA or GSM? LTE or WiMax? How do you go about choosing the right module and get it approved by a wireless carrier?

LEVEL: Intermediate

The purpose of this panel is to focus on a few key points. The first point is to briefly discuss how to form content within the channels of social media communication (microblogging/microcommunication/anything that uses XMPP to transmit information) that shows off a person's expertise. The presentation will use examples from key figures in the field and note how those figures connect their knowledge with their audience.

The second point that will be explored in this presentation will be how “opinion leaders” were formed in this channel. It looked like since these channels used as a pseudo-formal “many-to-many” communication platform, it seemed that the strength of speaker comes from the ability of that speaker’s message to be re-transmitted, how “well-known” is the user and the value of the information/knowledge being delivered by the user. It is a through a combination of these factors that a user can attract and maintain a following. Examples of this will be shown during the presentation.

The final point that I want focus on is how these opinion leaders using these channels to deliver vital information to an audience. I would like to be able to tell the stories of the community outside the confines of the network. There is a series of interesting and complex narratives that can be shared by these nanocelebrities to the rest of the outside world. These narratives will be shared during the presentation.

LEVEL: Beginner

Most ARGs are like icing on a cake - they make an existing TV show, movie, game or book taste even better by giving fans another way to explore and interact with the fictional universe. But you can't live on icing, so the question is: can an ARG ever work on its own, without relying on a massive audience from another medium?

Very few have tried, and there are no enduring successes (including my own Perplex City). As a result, many have implicitly concluded that a 'native ARG' can't be done, and are now moving on to transmedia. But at Six to Start, we think it can be done, and we've been developing Project 314 to prove it.

Project 314 is an online social game blended with an ARG, aimed at a mass audience (just like Zynga and Playfish games) but with a depth of gameplay, story, and world that they can't approach. During development, we found that there are enormous advantages in creating an ARG that's attached to an online game; for one, you can avoid the irritating friction that always occurs when switching between media; for another, it feels incredibly natural (and there are a few more to discuss)

It took us three years to come up with the idea for Project 314, and to assemble the right team. In this talk, I'll also share why Project 314 is so important for the future of games and storytelling, why it took so long, and how other game developers can create similar games (while avoiding the pitfalls we encountered).

LEVEL: Intermediate