Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 of type Solo on Sunday 13th March
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Creative and Effective Leadership in Design Environments
by Sarah Nelson
A search on Amazon shows 62,000+ books on leadership but almost nothing to help creative team leaders build and sustain a creative environment. Creativity and innovation can be delicate and emotionally fraught processes. Leadership theories are helpful, but what do you do when your star designer suddenly starts mailing it in? Or a project team is frozen in infighting? Or one of your designers just can't find their footing in a new project? When you got your big promotion for being an amazing designer, no one told you that you needed an entirely new skill set. Sink or swim, baby.
For this session, Sarah B. Nelson gets practical on the topic of creative leadership. From vision development to team alignment, from bottom-up empowerment to top-down intervention, Sarah will inspire you with practical ideas to motivate your team and rouse them to greatness. She will draw on her extensive experience leading creative teams at Adaptive Path and Hot Studio -- and inform the discussion with research and interviews from organizational psychologists, experienced managers, and successful creative leaders.
LEVEL: Advanced
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Death of the Relational Database
People have begun to realize the enormous gap between the relational database abstraction and the way people actually think about information. To be clear, I am not suggesting that relational databases will stop being used or that they are going to go away, but that developers are going to stop thinking of their data in relational database terms.
Everyone from regular users to sophisticated developers thinks about information in a pretty simple way. There are objects, and there are connections or relationships between objects. For example if you have two objects, a cup and a table, the relationship between them might be “sitting on”, indicating that the cup is sitting on the table.
What makes this model so sturdy is that we can continuously add new objects: tables, cups, chairs, floors, table cloths, etc. And we can add infinite relationships, such as sitting on, sitting under, covering, etc. Computer scientists, and now, thanks to Facebook, everybody else, refers to this structure as a graph. New data models such as the graph provide new ways to think about persisting data.
The death of the relational database means the death of the relational database *abstraction* as a way that programmers think about data. What programmers need is to model data in the most natural way possible, and we are starting to see storage abstractions that are closer to how humans think instead of how computers need to.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive
We drive cars to the gym to run miles on a treadmill. Inclement weather notwithstanding, why don’t we just run down the street? The activities are disconnected. We sit in close physical proximity with each other and text others far away. The activities are disconnected. Technological mediation creates a disconnection between physical goals and technology’s "help" in easing our workload.
There are at least two types of disconnection enveloping our days: one between ourselves and our environment (e.g., pumping water vs. pumping iron) and one between ourselves and each other (e.g., individual distraction vs. global connection) with technology wedged in between in both cases. If our culture is essentially technology-driven, then what kind of culture emerges from such disconnections between our physical goals and our technologically enabled activities?
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Getting Your Breakthrough Idea Approved by Decision Makers
by John Ellett
Whether it is a cool iPad app, a Facebook promo or an engaging blog concept, great new interactive ideas must get green-lighted before they see the light of day. In many companies this can be a frustrating experience. This panel will provide advice on how to get to “yes” from marketing executives who have approved (and killed) ideas like yours. A discussion of examples from the panelists’ respective companies will be followed by an “open mic” session where the members of the audience get to make one-minute quick pitches for advice from the panelists. The attendee with the best pitch will get a $100 gift card to celebrate his/her creative idea by exploring Austin’s exceptional eateries (or drinkeries) during the conference.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Local: The Next Big Thing in Online Advocacy
by Ben Rattray
Online advocacy groups traditionally focus on demanding change from Congress, which is largely unresponsive to these efforts. Find out how citizen activists are changing the face of civic participation by using social media to mobilize people in their neighborhoods, schools and cities to successfully fight for local change every day.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Mobile Social Gaming: The Next Frontier
80% of the world population has access to mobile vs. only 23% with access to the Internet! Social interaction has revolutionized (online) digital media as it has opened new demographics and provides for a more compelling and relevant experience for users in addition to opening new tangents for search, recommendations, etc.
The transformative power of social context was especially pronounced in gaming (cf. Zynga ["Farmville"] et al. who have grown into large businesses very quickly).
The mobile landscape is significantly more complex than the Internet (dozens of platforms, hundreds of distribution channels, hundreds of jurisdictions), and the medium has indeed very different underlying dynamics (screen size and general form factor, input methods, mobility, use cases, etc). It is therefore vital to gain deep understanding about the underlying dynamics of both the medium as well as the users' approach in using that medium.
It is essential to avoid a "Galapagos effect" where certain models only work on limited platforms (e.g. iPhone) or in specific territories (e.g. Japan). Only a fraction of the world's 5bn (!) mobile subscriptions are on iPhones or are in Japan, and one needs to look to tackle the fragmentation dilemma in order to unlock the enormous potential the largest medium in the world has to offer.
This session will show the rationales that need to be applied to understand the medium and will outline paths to successfully address it.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Mobilizing Performance from Search
by Rich Devine
By 2012, 20 percent of all search queries will come from a mobile device. While there is growing focus on creating mobile site experiences and applications, not enough businesses focus on their mobile search experience. Just because you’ve optimized search for the desktop doesn’t mean it works on a mobile device. Mobile search is different than desktop search—and for many businesses, it’s a critical step toward customer success. Our discussion focuses on three core actions: how to identify unique business opportunities for mobile search, how to optimize for mobile search, and how to measure the performance and value of mobile search.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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One Codebase, Endless Possibilities: Real HTML5 Hacking
by Joe McCann
HTML5 is no question the "buzzword du jour" in tech nowadays, but looking past the vernacular cruft one will discover that the HTML5 technology STACK is actually an incredibly powerful & useful framework for apps well beyond the traditional web browser. Massive companies like Google and Hewlett Packard are placing huge bets on the future of "HTML5 App development". From HP/Palm's WebOS to be used in their mobility products to Google's Chrome OS, HTML5 is not simply another buzzword that can be treated as a mere passing trend, but should actually be taken seriously for app development.
But what makes up the HTML5 stack and how will it truly be the future of software? What are the benefits & risks associated with using the HTML5 stack? Prove to me it works. All of these questions & demands will be answered & showcased in the presentation including important issues such as:
- What constitutes the HTML5 stack
- Benefits of using the HTML5 stack
- Use a single codebase
- Rapidly prototype an app targetting multiple devices including: iPhone, iPad, Android Devices, Chrome OS Devices, Mobile Webkit Browsers, Desktop Browsers
- Target thousands of developers for extensibility & community development
- See code & install an actual working HTML5 app that works on a number of devices
- See code best practices in use for tailoring the UI based on the user's device
- See code using Phonegap to create native mobile apps
- See code using Titanium to create native desktop apps
LEVEL: Advanced
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Radical Openness: Growing TED by Giving it Away
by June Cohen
LEVEL: Intermediate
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The New Gilded Age: Telecommunications in the 21st Century
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Your Computer is the Next Wonder Drug
A few times each year, the press buzzes about the latest scientific advance that will someday cure any one of the diseases we fear the most. Nearly every one of these will turn out to be nothing more than a news story and far from a pill that can help improve our health. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every day on research, as we struggle to find the "magic bullet" that will rid the world of conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. We almost never find the magic.
While the big, historic scientific advances may be what dominate the headlines, in the end, it's the small improvements and better utilization of the technology we have already have that will ultimately lengthen our lives and improve its quality. These technologies don't come from labs filled with test tubes or cell cultures, but rather from labs filled with computers and the programs that run them. In the future, it will be digital technologies that prevent, treat, and finally cure diseases and not the latest "blockbuster" drug that has yet to be discovered (and might never be).
Digital technologies can already help us understand which treatments are best for us, what diseases pose the greatest risk, and how diseases spread among us. They can improve our interactions with doctors and improve access to care for everyone.
Instead of waiting for the next miracle drug to be developed, you might find the miracle was there all along right inside the computer you use every day.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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#FAIL: Infamous Social Media PR Disasters
by Marla Erwin
#Amazonfail, United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms: These are just a few of the social media PR disasters caused by inattention, poor service, or a failure to understand the target market. In the age of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, one customer service mistake can be all over the web before you can say “non-apology form letter.” Enjoy a history of edifying and often hilarious social media misfires, and learn how to avoid being on the receiving end of user-generated campaigns that can cost thousands or even millions in bad publicity.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Analytics and Social Tools in Practice
by Chris Traganos and Sean Brown
Measuring the reach of your social media efforts is a good first step--but it's not enough. Sean Brown will show how MIT Sloan Management Review uses analytics to turn data into insight, and insight into action. Chris Traganos will describe the social tools that aggregate, syndicate, and amplify Harvard's message to the world, including integration with Facebook's open graph and real-time Twitter collaboration via Social Flow.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Building Fences in the Sky: Geo-Fencing Has Arrived
Imagine walking past your favorite restaurant, and receiving a coupon for a free dessert. Imagine jogging through Central Park, taking a break, and receiving a text from The North Face about a trail nearby that you’ve never taken but sounds great. These scenarios aren’t set in the future, but happening today, and are made possible through geo-fencing, the location-based technology pioneered by Placecast. Through geo-fencing, Placecast creates virtual fences around physical locations – stores, entertainment venues, parks, apartment buildings – literally anywhere on Earth.
The technology is described here by the NYTimes http://www.vscconsulting.com/pla... and here in the WSJ: http://www.vscconsulting.com/pla...
This session will provide data-backed information and dispel myths around location-based services (LBS). The audience will learn:
1) How to go about starting a location-based program utilizing geo-fence technology
2) Challenges and best practices in LBS
3) How geo-fences are being used today, including case studies from major brands such as The North Face, American Eagle Outfitters, SONIC
4) How privacy/security issues are handledLocation-based services can offer information, discounts, alerts, and more – all making our lives easier, and bringing the messages we want directly to mobile phones via SMS. The possibilities for geo-fencing are immense, and we’ve only begun to tap into them.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan One Year Later
by Colin Crowell
Activity on Capitol Hill and at the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) this year will directly affect the prospects for ongoing innovation, entrepreneurial investment, universal broadband access, mobile policy, and Internet openness.
Early in the Obama Administration, Congress tasked the FCC with the responsibility of developing a National Broadband Plan (“NBP”) to establish the nation’s goals with respect to broadband service and provide a roadmap for achieving them.
The NBP, delivered to Congress one year ago, contained a series of recommendations to advance universal broadband access and affordability, promote innovation, and create new wireless opportunities.
A principal staff architect of the NBP and a 20 year Capitol Hill veteran, Colin Crowell will discuss the status of the NBP’s implementation, including prospects for obtaining more wireless frequencies for broadband use, reform of the multi-billion dollar universal service program for the Internet era, and current legislative threats to Internet openness and entrepreneurial investment.
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Designing iPad Interfaces - New Navigation Schemas
by Lynn Teo
With every new “form factor” comes a unique set of design conventions and interaction paradigms. The emergence of tablet interfaces such as the iPad marks a new chapter in digital design. How much of web navigation or smartphone conventions persist in this new world? And what are we seeing that's new? Are there specific wayfinding and browsing mechanisms that make for a satisfying and productive iPad user experience? Based on an assessment of 50+ iPad applications that run the gamut from utility/transactional interfaces to comic readers and other publishing apps, this presentation provides a focused analysis and assessment of navigation methods in a distilled format. Navigation schemas will be explored by interaction design themes, supported by examples, and recommendations on when best to employ them.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery
by Paul Lamere
With so much music available, finding new music that you like can
be like finding a needle in a haystack. We need new tools to help
us to explore the world of music, tools that can help us separate
the wheat from the chaff.In this panel we will look at how visualizations can be used to
help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting
music that they will like. We will look at a wide range of
visualizations, from hand drawn artist maps, to highly interactive,
immersive 3D environments. We'll explore a number of different
visualization techniques including graphs, trees, maps, timelines
and flow diagrams and we'll examine different types of music data
that can contribute to a visualization.Using numerous examples drawn from commercial and research systems
we'll show how visualizations are being used now to enhance music
discovery and we'll demonstrate some new visualization techniques
coming out of the labs that we'll find in tomorrow's music
discovery applications.LEVEL: Advanced
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Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction
The classic ARG storytelling technique involves putting content into the real world and web as if the story were really happening. But the line between truth and fiction online is blurry -- and getting blurrier all the time -- so not everyone who finds your content will know it's not for real.
One person's hoax is another's deeply immersive experience. And what one considers a killer practical joke can be a terrifying ordeal to somebody else. So how does a transmedia designer learn to strike the right balance between immersive and responsible?
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Lawful Intercept: I Saw What You Did
by Jay Cuthrell
Social network privacy concerns? Step back and consider this: Lawful Intercept (LI) is how all network users are able to be monitored and analyzed in real-time. While many are concerned with privacy on a popular website, LI empowers an elected or appointed authority to know our digital comings and goings around the clock. This presentation will highlight the latest in LI technology, LI challenges , and how each of us can shape future of how LI is perceived and used.
LEVEL: Advanced
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Stop Dreaming, Start Doing: Tips For Execution
by Scott Belsky
Ideas don't happen by accident - or because they are great. Ideas are made to happen through a series of forces related to organization and leveraging the power of community. After years of research, Scott Belsky and his team at Behance have found a series of best practices common across some of the world's most productive creative people and teams. Scott's recent book, "Making Ideas Happen" has become a national bestseller. In this session, Scott will run through critical insights for any start-up and creative enterprise.
LEVEL: Beginner
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The 4-Hour Body: Hacking the Human Body
by Tim Ferriss
Based on lessons learned during research for the #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Body, this session will look at how to systematically hack the human body. From losing 100 pounds to running 100 miles, lifting 500 pounds or holding your breath for 5 minutes -- what are the limits? From screw-ups (emergency surgery, anyone?) to importing stem-cell growth factor from Israel for black market injections, Tim will discuss the promises, pitfalls, and methods of cutting-edge self-experimentation.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Transmedia Storytelling: Constructing Compelling Characters and Narrative Threads
Transmedia storytelling is increasingly being seen as the future of entertainment. A film is no longer just a film; its narrative extends to games, books, online documents, Internet videos, mobile applications, and beyond.
But at the foundation of these new storytelling methods are certain narrative traditions that have held up over the centuries. Without a clear understanding of these structures and methods of character development, a narrative will struggle to survive. We must, therefore, look beyond the Matrix, going back instead to the Greeks, whose myths provide some of the first examples of genuine transmedia. These ancient tales crisscrossed through a complex web of drama, poetry, ritual, role playing, and oral recitation, utilizing archetypes that are still the foundation of stories today.
In this panel, I will address key archetypes and plot formations found repeatedly in both historical narratives as well as recent successful transmedia franchises. I will discuss how to asses an audience, then strategically choose specific plot lines and characters for specific mediums based on those audience segments.
We will look at:
1. Making sure your narrative has a solid premise on which to build – without a foundation you cannot lay bricks.
2. Key characteristics of appeal characters – how to have bad heroes and good villains
3. How to structure the story in an appropriate narrative thread
4. Choosing mediums and messagesSpoken of here, transmedia narratives are not adaptations; they are extensions, networks composed not as afterthoughts to an “original” creative work, but conceived instead in conjunction with them, with thought given to the story, the medium, the audience, and how these elements relate to a cohesive fictional world.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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America's Future in Innovation
by David Kappos
Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property David Kappos is charged with Advising the Secretary of Commerce, and the President of the United States, on all aspects of Intellectual Property policy.
Our nation faces an uncertain economic future. It is clear however, that in order to be successful, America will need to harness the ingenuity, creativity, and innovation of its people—America will need to harness its Intellectual Property.
A sound Intellectual Property system will help support R&D that propels the Green Tech revolution; will allow people to harness the power of digitization and an internet-connected world; and will better ensure the preservation of cultural diversity and drive growth of the creative arts.
Under Secretary Kappos will lay out his vision for the future of the Intellectual Property system and describe its impact on the world’s entrepreneurs, innovators, and creators.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Love Can Pay The Bills
by Phil Libin
Want 1 million people to pay for your product? Get 100 million people to love it. But how do you get there? What's the secret to creating engagement and building value? What makes a successful Freemium business work? Here's a hint: don't be clever. Invest in making a product that brings joy and business success will follow. Best part, you don't need single social feature to do it. We will discuss ways to reach your business goals by focusing on a positive, long-term relationship with your users and fans.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Social Health: Who Wants to "Like" Hemorrhoid Cream?
Social media is a powerful medium, and can really improve patient outcomes. It can also add some much needed life to marketing plans, and help brands build relationships with patients. With any luck this will be a win/win for patients and brands.
Right now the entire Pharma world is busy figuring out how to jump into social media. The problem is very few people are thinking about whether or not someone really wants a relationship with their Rx. Imagine announcing to the world on Facebook that you "like" your prescription Rx cream. Really? You want to do that? Well, different strokes and all.
In this session we'll talk about how to chose the right social technologies to achieve the brand's marketing goals. Part of that decision matrix is understanding people and how and why they use social technology. We'll definitely talk about why Pharma should never say they want "viral" marketing.
In a best case scenario, this will be a highly interactive presentation taking live suggestions and questions from the audience and discussing their unique situations. Tell me your product, we'll talk about your audience, and we'll discuss the appropriate use of social media technology for you.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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The Art of Enchantment
by Guy Kawasaki
Worldwide introduction of Guy's new book. This presentation is for people who have a great product or service but not a lot of money. Learn how to enchant people using word-of-mouth marketing, Twitter, Facebook, and presentations so that they become your raging, inexhorable thunderlizard evangelists.
LEVEL: Beginner
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The End of Reading in the USA
When education serves the state’s desire for obedience and capitalist consumption, individual freedoms and democratic participation are in danger. This is most evident in the failure of schools to promote the creative and critical literacies students should practice when choosing what and how to read.
Democratic values are at risk when many students exit the public education system hating reading and unaware of the aesthetic pleasures in literature. My research indicates that reading, at its best, is the cognitive embodiment of individual liberty.
I ask students to draw a picture of what happens when they read, and these drawings indicate a taxonomy of five metaphors we use when we think and talk about reading, such as “consumption” and “transportation.” At the core of these metaphors is the central metaphor of all reading, “movement.” Thus, if all reading is ultimately about movement, it is also about the freedom to move–that is, the freedom to choose what and how to read.
However, reading in school is rarely about choice, and with the advent of state-mandated testing, reading is now converted into a chop-shop of isolated bits of knowledge to be consumed and regurgitated on demand.
My presentation is to be heard as a rallying call to action, a call to take back schools from the testing bureaucrats and return it to teachers who know that reading is the life-blood of democratic life.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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The Net Delusion
Evgeny Morozov argues that authoritarian regimes are as strong as ever, and use the Internet to their advantage by restricting speech, spying on dissidents, and publishing propaganda. Mr. Morozov will discuss how the spread of new media around the world should not necessarily be seen as a force for democracy.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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The Untapped iPad Market: Is Your Site POUR?
by Glenda Watson Hyatt and Karen Tsang
For the masses, the iPad is the latest, hottest, must-have toy. But, for people with disabilities the iPad is life changing: enabling communication, unlocking minds and fostering independence. However in purchasing these devices lays the challenge: oftentimes websites with product information are inaccessible to this market, which has a discretionary spending power of $175 billion in the United States alone.
The session’s goals are to identify some barriers people with disabilities regularly face, making it difficult to participate fully online; explain the four guiding principles of what makes blogs and websites accessible; and offer key questions to begin asking and what resources exist to make sites more accessible to this under tapped market.
By giving short vignettes of how people with disabilities are using iPads, faces are put to the size of this disability market - and putting faces to the need for web accessibility. This brings alive the technical requirements and guiding principles of web accessibility.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Viral Marketing with The Oatmeal
I'm the author, artist, and founder behind the one man operation known as The Oatmeal (http://theoatmeal.com). In less than a year, my website has grown to nearly 5 million unique visitors a month, I got a book deal, appeared on TV, and was named one of the best blogs of 2010 by Time Magazine. This presentation will cover a ton of examples of my work, explaining how and why they were virally successful. It includes tips, tools, and the process for generating and promoting viral content. There will also be poop jokes.
LEVEL: Beginner
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