Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 with slides on Tuesday 13th March
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Augmented Reality = ARPA’s Original Vision of Web
by Chris Grayson and Heidi Hysell
Using a variety of original source material, Chris Grayson will give an overview of the global network, as envisioned by thinkers at ARPA before the creation of the ARPAnet. Examples include J.C.R. Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis," 1960; Douglas Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect," 1962; and Ivan Sutherland's "The Ultimate Display," 1965. Some focus will also be given to the people and personalities involved. Heidi Hysell will provide the technical explanation for many milestones in the evolution of the Internet, making the case that the human interface to the network has historically been limited by the available technology, and with Augmented Reality, we are now entering an era that truly begins to deliver on the original vision.
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China: Creators and Consumers of the Future
by Brandon Berry Edwards and Kaj Vatsa
China is considered home to the world's factories, manufacturing everything from zippers to photovoltaic cells and with its population of over 1.3 billion and booming economy, consumerism is on the rise, too. But lets peak into the hidden layer of China's unique blend of creativity and tech innovation. There's the Shanzhai phenomenon - unique to China but even more interesting is looking at how Chinese consumers use technology differently, creating and combining platforms to suit the demands of a generation bred on instant gratification and constant connectivity.
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Compass/SASS/LESS: Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
by Beau Smith, Wynn Netherland, Drew Yeaton and Jacob Thornton
Sass & Compass are quickly becoming a standard for authoring and maintaining the styles (CSS) of many of popular websites. A derivative of these languages may someday replace CSS as the default language for styling html. As with using any new technology, a full understanding of how it works, how to use it efficiently, pitfalls to avoid, and patterns for success will benefit any user.
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Creating a Mobile Wallet Worth Having
by Omar Green
With buzzwords like “NFC” and “mobile wallet” thrown about in the press ad nauseam, consumers and the mobile and financial industries are looking for who will emerge the winner in the effort to control mobile money – and there’s a great deal of money to be had if it’s done right. But as often as the mobile wallet is lauded for its convenience, it’s derided as “a solution in search of a problem.” Ultimately, in order to meet the real needs of consumers, wallet-makers need to stop focusing solely on the technologies of mobile payments, and actually look at what will drive usage: a mobile solution that is actually worth having. This doesn’t yet exist, but it could, if application developers create tools that actually change the way merchants and consumers feel, think, spend and save money. We will discuss what the true opportunity is for the mobile wallet and the elements that need to be included to move beyond technologies like NFC, to delivering the customer benefit to end users.
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Epic Battle: Creativity vs. Discipline in Social
by Jason Harris, John Manoogian III, Kristin Maverick and Sarahjane Sacchetti
As social media marketing moves from experimental to institutional, brands no longer question social media marketing as a line item. That said, the strategies and deployment of social campaigns continues to introduce big questions about ROI versus spending and effective measurement has been a trendy topic without clear answers for years. The tension introduced by the the creativity made familiar by traditional brand campaigns and the measurement that performance/Internet marketing allows has created increasingly urgent questions for CMOs, agencies and social networks alike. This panel brings together divergent voices in the evolving social media marketing realm and will address the questions brands, agencies and social networks need to answer in 2012.
With a mix of measurement and analytics experts 140Proof, standout creative agencies Mekanism and BBDO and social network Formspring will review specific intereactions with brand case studies and discuss the following questions:
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Gaming Tools Kids Want to Use
by Alexander Repenning, David Gerding, Tamara Hudgins, Virginia Mcarthur and Ward Tisdale
Limited choices exist when kids seek to author, not just play, their own video games. If video games are on track to topple film as the last big media mammoth, how can we build a video game workforce that we need? Instead of reinforcing the divide between artists and programmers, can we get more kids interested in learning the complex work that game development involves, and foster a really great game development community? What kids like to use for game development may surprise you. Come hear what they like, why the like it, and how new tools need to be built to meet the demands of future game developers. Join a conversation about authorship, identity, creativity, and the tools kids really use for developing serious and social games. Gain insight on elements of game tools that kids would use--if they existed!
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How the iPad Can Save Accessibility
Usability has come a long way since the dark days before "Designing with Web Standards". Now nearly all companies see the value of UX in their digital designs. But despite heightened focus on the user and a growing awareness of accessibility concerns, implementation of accessibility standards have often fallen victim to time pressures and obsolete design practices. Disabled users struggle through sites missing alt tags, keyboard inputs or text alternatives. Enter devices like the iPhone & Android … and the iPad.
With the proliferation of non-desktop devices and browsers like tablets and gestural smartphones, suddenly more people are finding that the web isn't as nice and clean as they remembered: broken formatting, too small text, hover functionality that doesn’t work, and entire swaths of the web rendered as Flash-based wastelands that millions can’t access.
We've now discovered that by solving for many of the issues that iOS and other mobile users face, we can also solve for the most prevalent accessibility issues. Using side-by-side examples and case studies, I'll show how we can make sites more accessible and more usable by mobile devices. Through combinations of better markup, HTML5 and CSS3 functionality and better scripting, we can serve two masters at once. Better yet, in some cases, we can take advantage of the accessibility capabilities built into newer mobile devices to make the digital experience even better than they would get on the 'old web'.
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Human Language Technology and Where It's Headed
by Jason Baldridge and Lillian Lee
Language is the holy grail of artificial intelligence. When we imagine sharing a world with smart machines, we don't think about logic, or problem solving, or winning at chess. We hear HAL-9000 declining to open the pod bay doors, and the Terminator saying he'll be baaack. Researchers have been working on building computers we can talk to for 60 years; in the 1990s, Bill Gates predicted that speech would soon be “a primary way of interacting with the machine”. So why aren't we talking to our computers yet ....Or are we? Thanks to new developments in human language technology (also known as "natural language processing") and text analytics, computers are analyzing everything from e-mail and tweets to clinical records and and speed-date conversations. How does the technology work, when does it work well (and when not), what's it doing for us, and where is it headed?
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I May "Like" You, but I'm Not in Like with You
So people “like” your brand on Facebook. Big deal.
Many brands have become slaves to the “like” button. They give away valuable stuff in return for a passive thumbs-ups, never realizing that this behavior could actually be cheapening their customer relationships.
“Likes" come easy, but real relationships come with real exchange and sacrifice. The laws of currency show that people value something more when they have to give something to get it. And if brands can provide experiences that solve real problems, they can ask for more in return. What can brands offer customers so that they have more skin in the game?
In this session, we will look closely at examples of a deeper, more balanced value exchange between consumers and brands. We will discuss strategies to uncover what your brand has to offer, and what your most valuable customers can give in return.
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Gen Y&Z Expectations to Transform Customer Exp
by Adam Edmunds and Al Nevarez
Today’s customer is complex, but tomorrow’s will be even more difficult to understand, communicate with, support and please. Tomorrow’s customer will be used to an always-available ecosystem of online, mobile, and social media feedback channels, and will expect and demand fast responses. They will have a seeming “A.D.D.” mentality and businesses need to be ready. Listening to customer will change; surveys will become a hidden dialogue, communication channels will change and what customers expect from a company will change dramatically. Adam Edmunds and Al Nevarez will share best practices from leading edge companies today, and those who will pioneer this important area tomorrow. This session is sponsored by Allegiance.
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Government As a Catalyst: Prizes 4 Tech Innovation
by Chris Gerty, James Pol, Jenn Gustetic, Mari Kuraishi and Michael O'Neill
Want to make some money? Federal agencies have recently been given the authority by Congress to sponsor competitions for individuals, groups, and companies to develop new ideas and technology innovations for a chance to win potentially lucrative prizes. These competitions can range from new mobile outreach technologies to web-based data analytics tools to even vehicle-to-vehicle communications; the government is looking for breakthrough technologies from the minds of the most innovative and forward thinking Americans, many of whom are at SXSW. This session will highlight some of the coolest prizes for technology development that the government has been involved in to date, including the DOT’s Connected Vehicle Challenge, the VA’s Open Source and blue button projects, and NASA’s centennial challenges. Additionally you will learn about some prizes government did NOT play a role in to explore what role the government should be playing in these activities moving forward.
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How Simulations Can Change the Future of Learning
Humans learn by doing. We master how to ride a bike not by watching a PowerPoint presentation but by trying it out and falling down. Yet, in school, most of our time is spent listening and memorizing facts. But the world is changing. As computer games become more social and computers become more prevalent in the classroom, the opportunity for true interactive multi-player learning through games and simulations is finally becoming tangible.
This interactive presentation will focus on how simulations can change the way we learn. Using examples from corporate training and the K-12 space, it will explore how simulations can teach children and adults in ways that increase engagement and retention of knowledge.
The presentation will include examples of both successful and unsuccessful simulations and chart a path of how simulations can revolutionize education by allowing learners – both young and old – to internalize knowledge through the process of learn-by-doing.
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Juggalos: Rabid Branding, a Case Study
The Insane Clown Posse, a Detroit gangsta rap group who literally dress like clowns, have leveraged a rabidly devoted fan base to become the best selling indie band of all time (for REAL). They've accomplished this without radio airplay, major label endorsement, or any mainstream media exposure. In addition to selling millions of albums for decades, they make millions in merchandising every year. The group's brand is so far reaching that millions of people who have no interest violent clown rap have watched their viral videos.
We'll look at what the band did historically to garner such a devoted fanbase and how you can do the same for your brand. If these clowns can make 7 figures a year, so can you!
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Lightweight NLP for Social Media Applications
by Bruce Smith
Social media includes lots of free-form textual data in "natural languages", the languages people speak. Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps you analyze that data. Some NLP problems are very hard, but a number of lightweight NLP techniques are available in open-source tools. You can use these to improve your social media applications, even if you're not a computational linguist. In this session, I will introduce some of these techniques and tools, and I will give hints on getting started using NLP in your social media applications. Many NLP techniques require training corpora, sets of annotated documents. I will talk about constructing and maintaining a training corpus. And, I will talk about some of the ways we use NLP at Lithium Technologies.
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The Science of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea
The business world is increasingly enamored with design. Business leaders look to designers for guidance on everything from product innovation to corporate strategy. While designers and business people may bring different perspectives to the table, they share one common language: research.
But research can be dangerous. It often provides easy answers that go unquestioned because the research feels like science. What if we’ve put too much trust in research? What about the aspects of design and product development that are important, but hard to measure? Where does research end and design judgment begin?
In this talk, frog Associate Strategy Director Ben McAllister explores these questions and takes a hard look at the role of research in design. Drawing from not only design, but also economics and the philosophy of science, Ben confronts the conventional wisdom around design research, offering a new vision of how research can inspire creativity and guide decision making.
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Using Psychology to Increase e-Commerce Conversion
If you could only get inside your customer's head, it would be so much easier to get them to buy on your website. Fortunately, there are several powerful psychological tricks that you can use to convince your prospects to buy from you and help them smoothly make it through the purchase process. This presentation will dive into the psychological principles that are being used effectively by e-commerce websites in both B2C and B2B selling. You'll gain a better understanding of why your customers behave the way they do on your site. You'll be armed with a toolkit of principles and examples that you can take and apply to your e-commerce website. These ideas will help you improve conversion rates, customer experience, engagement, and your company's bottom line.
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Community-Centered Design: It's Not About the User
by Richard White and Steve Huffman
It seems like everyone is trying to build an online community these days. Unfortunately, designing a community space is much trickier to nail than your typical web app. The smallest changes can have butterfly-like effects that greatly impact, sometimes irreversibly, community behavior as the community grows. Designing for a community is like running a small island nation with every design decision a matter of public policy. You’ll often find that the needs of your community are at odds with those of individual users.
In this talk, Richard White, co-founder of UserVoice.com, and Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit.com and Hipmunk.com, will cover some of the key concepts behind community-driven design and how you can incorporate them into your design thinking. We’ll also cover some of common pitfalls that drive participants away from online communities or create insular bedroom communities. Most importantly we’ll share our experiences with building online communities and walk you through real data we have collected that illustrate how small design changes can have a big impact.
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Content Is Currency: Content for Web & Mobile
by Jon Wuebben
“Content is Currency: Developing Powerful Content for Web & Mobile” is the latest, most definitive book on web and mobile content development. Using the latest research, best practices and case studies, it is positioned to change the way companies everywhere view and value their website, mobile and social media content – forever. Come find out how you can dominate your market with compelling content that connects. “Jon Wuebben has done it again. Yes, we are all publishers today, but most organizations are unclear how to use content marketing within their organization to truly make an impact to both attract AND retain customers. If you want the answers to why...and then how exactly to operationalize content marketing within your business, read this book!” - Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute
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Language Technology and the Clinical Narrative
Electronic health records have the potential for enormous good, but in order for them to live up to their full potential, information about patients -- their symptoms, diagnoses, allergic reactions, medical backgrounds, family histories -- must take the form of standardized, structured, easy-to-manipulate data. One obvious way to get there is to tightly structure the way that doctors create the medical record. As a result, physicians are under increasing pressure to abandon unrestricted natural language and the clinical narrative, and turn the medical documentation process into a jungle of pull-down menus, checkboxes, and restricted vocabularies. In this presentation I argue that the results could be catastrophic, I make the case for preserving the clinical narrative, and I argue for a practical way out of the dilemma: using natural language processing technology to produce the structured records we need, while still allowing physicians the freedom of unrestricted clinical language.
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The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands
by Bryan Person, Eric Ludwig, Molly DeMaagd and Mark Williams
Managing customer service on a Facebook Page is a messy proposition, particularly for large businesses and brands. Increasingly impatient customers and fans are flocking to the Facebook Wall to fire off specific questions or complaints about product and service issues, with the expectation of receiving a rapid-fire satisfactory response and the threat of making a big stink across their social networks if they don’t. Plus, the exchange happens right out in the open for all to see. How can brands cope?
From discussions on scaling staffing coverage to evaluating when to respond and the right tone to take, our panelists will share their experiences, hiccups, and words of wisdom for carrying out good customer service in the challenging Facebook environment.
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The Math That Matters in the Real-time Web
by Gilad Lotan
“My real competition is 30 billion status updates,” PepsiCo Head of
Digital Shiv Singh has said of the challenge of being a brand in the
social space. Attention is the new bottleneck, and brands often adopt
counter-productive strategies to try and break through. They swear by
a certain time of day or spend an inordinate amount of time trying to
reach certain Twitter users deemed "influencers."But what if there's something else at work in the massive flow of
information on Twitter? What if its not so much these so-called
"influencers" that propel a piece of information to major viral
broadcast, but the micro-networks and the aggregated interactions that
amass around them instead? Part case study of how massive spreads of
information and half how-to on the tools brands need to create and
manage micro-networks, this presentation will unlock that data
patterns on social that, when intelligently predicted and captured,
can be used to amplify the spread of a message on a grand scale. -
UX in the Cloud: Creating Amazing Enterprise Apps
by Craig Villamor and Dave Knight
Enterprise and consumer experiences are blurring more everyday as applications move to the cloud and companies build a vertical stack of offerings. Today's Facebook and Twitter generation expect their applications to be as easy and enjoyable to use as consumer applications. As the cloud evolves, our design process must evolve with it. What does the enterprise user experience design process look like today and where is it going? Guided by examples from Salesforce and Do, learn about the unique challenges and solutions of designing usable applications for enterprise users.
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Are Free Customers Better Than Captive Ones?
by Doc Searls
It is standard in business to talk about "acquiring," "capturing," "locking in," "owning" and "managing" customers as if they were slaves or cattle.In the Internet Age, shouldn’t we be free to set our own terms, control our own data, and even state the prices we are ready to pay—outside of any company's silo? And haven't free customers been a promise of free market as well as the Internet from the start?Doc Searls says yes. Doc co-authored The Cluetrain Manifisto, and his new book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge — due out in May 2012 from Harvard Business Review Press. He has also been working since 2006 with developers on tools for customer liberation, through ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.Some of those tools are now coming to market. But will they prove out? In "Are Free Customers Better Than Captive Ones?" Doc tackles that question and invites many more. Bring your own to what will prove to be a highly interactive session.
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China: Will It Redefine Our Digital Landscape?
Not only is China on course to having the #1 economy in the world, but it's also establishing itself as the most influential country in the world. Its 500 million strong internet user population makes up the single largest internet-using community in the world with almost 100 million more new users added each year. China, in many people's eyes, is regarded as an industrial nation with vast production capabilities that imitates but does not innovate. This panel will explore how China's digital landscape will change the lives of its population, and consequently, it's effect on our society and the rest of the world.Topics will include China's social networks, mobile platforms, music services, piracy, pop/meme culture, BBS society and changes in society due to digitalization.
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Fashion and the New Taste Graph
by Dave Surgan, Cannon Hodge, Elizabeth Canon, Hilary Peterson and Rachel Tipograph
Panel in the The Driskill's Citadel Room to be followed by a meet up at The Driskill Bar downstairs...
A new generation of social curation communities have risen over the past year with the mission of enhancing shopping and product discovery across retailers. These services provide an easy way to create wish lists and curate styles. Soon we will see shoppers, retailers, brands, media outlets and blogs joining these services to curate photography, new products and news stories. We will explore how social curation is currently being used and its future impact on the taste graph.
SXSW: http://mrphe.us/SXtastegraph
Sched: http://mrphe.us/xHYJ6j
Lnyrd: http://lanyrd.com/spgwq
Plancast: http://plancast.com/p/8cic
Facebook: http://on.fb.me/xuGxQl -
Freakin' Fast Cassandra: How Do They Do It?
by Ryan King and Tom Wilkie
Ryan King (System Engineer at Twitter) and Tom Wilkie (co-founder and VP engineering at Acunu) delve into the bowels of Apache Cassandra, the highly scalable second-generation distributed database in use at Twitter, Netflix and more others.
In this talk, they'll look at how Cassandra works and show you how to make it growl!
This dual session will share the journey the Cassandra team at Twitter has taken to make Cassandra deliver on its promises while Acunu will talk about the dramatic performance improvements that take place when you move some of the heavy-lifting into the Linux kernel, by using the open source storage engine for Big Data, codename Castle.
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News Entrepreneurs vs. Traditional Journalism
by Jan Schaffer and Susan Mernit
J-Lab counts more than 1,200 entrepreneurial news start-ups around the country. Placeblogger counts 4,000-plus placeblogs. These sites often get bad raps from traditional media for being the equivalent of unlicensed drivers behind the wheels of quasi-journalistic enterprises, trafficking in rumors and opinion. Yet many are trying to do the right things, tip-toeing through pay-to-play pressures from advertisers, navigating the reporting of locals' minor infractions, sunsetting search-engine tidbits, and fielding partisan accusations from political candidates. A corps of entrepreneurs is developing new codes of rights and wrongs.
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Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web
by Adrian Stevenson, Jon Voss, Julie Allinson and Rachel Frick
What happens when tens of thousands of archival photos are shared with open licenses, then mashed up with geolocation data and current photos? Or when app developers can freely utilize information and images from millions of books? On this panel, we'll explore the fundamental elements of Linked Open Data and discover how rapidly growing access to metadata within the world's libraries, archives and museums is opening exciting new possibilities for understanding our past, and may help in predicting our future. Our panelists will look into the technological underpinnings of Linked Open Data, demonstrate use cases and applications, and consider the possibilities of such data for scholarly research, preservation, commercial interests, and the future of cultural heritage data.
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How to Write an RFP for Social Media
by Beth Mulhern and Kendall Morris
Every day we meet companies who realize the importance of participating in social media but have no idea how to begin. “What department does social media live in; Marketing, IT, PR, Customer Support?” “What type of commitment of resources and budget do I need? “Can’t we just hire a college student to do this?” “How do we measure success?” With all these questions, it is no wonder defining the need has become so challenging. Some companies are finding themselves “stuck” before they even begin! How to Write an RFP for Social Media will walk you through the process of creating an RFP that clearly identifies your company's business objectives and leads you to an ROI. You will learn how to:
- state your needs
- identify resources
- define requirements
- determine timelines
- evaluate measurement
- share budgets
You will come away with a clear outline for how to meet your individual goals with a template worksheet to ensure you are asking yourself the right questions throughout the process.
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JavaScript Performance MythBusters™ (via JSPerf)
by Kyle Simpson, Chris Joel, John David Dalton and Lindsey Simon
JavaScript is everywhere from mobile phones and tablets to e-readers and TVs. With such a wide range of supported environments developers are often looking for an easy way to compare the performance between snippets, browsers, and devices. jsPerf.com, a site for community driven JavaScript benchmarks, was created to help devs do just that.
Join Mathias Bynens and John-David Dalton from jsPerf.com, Chris Joel from Cloudflare.com and Lindsey Simon from Google/Browserscope in this panel discussion on some of the best dev-created benchmarks and most interesting practices debunked by real-world tests.
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