Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 of type Solo on Sunday 11th March
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Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript's Dark Side
Are we being seduced by the animation and rich UI capabilities of modern browsers at the expense of the underlying platform of the Web?
The Web has entered a new phase in its evolution: The proliferation of a JavaScript enabled audience with increased processing grunt in their devices, better and more ambitious JavaScript developers, and users with an appetite for sophisticated experiences, all seem to be helping to move the web in a rich and exciting direction. Good developers understand about graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript and the like, so why are we seeing big companies building web offerings with little apparent thought for their impact on the Web?
We'll explore this by looking at what the Web was, is now, and might become. We'll look at examples of exciting user interfaces and sophisticated interactions. We'll also examine some emerging techniques for providing rich user interactions without hurting the web or killing kittens.
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Fixing Broke(n) Governments Through Serious Games
by Luke Hohmann
It’s no secret. Local, state and federal governments face budget shortfalls, spending cuts and reduced service—in a political climate that favors gridlock. Serious games have emerged as a viable approach to budgeting that is both participatory and scalable. In this session, we’ll discuss why serious games are a particularly good tool for budgeting and their advantages over alternatives such as deliberative democracy, participatory budgeting, or majority voting through polls. Participants will learn to conduct in-person and online games built specifically for resolving multi-scalar budget problems. These models are based on Budget Games, which we designed and played in San Jose, CA, on Jan. 29, 2011 in which more than 100 community leaders collaboratively re-crafted the city’s proposed budget. Because the game revealed real consensus, San Jose officials were able to act on the game’s results with more confidence than traditional polling.
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Killer App Design with Javascript and HTML 5
HTML5 paves the way for a browser-based universe, and javascript is its shining star. Go beyond rounded corners and <section> tags and bask in the glory of dynamic stylesheets, CSS3 and responsive UI! Wield the awesome power of web storage, web sockets and device access! Conquer your single page app with event-oriented programming and client-side MVC! Even if you're not launching spaceships from the Chrome Web Store, you'll work faster and code better with emerging technologies and tool sets designed to manage complex, browser-based apps, viewed on any device. Websites are for wusses. Web apps = world domination.
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The Hispanic Persona Project
by José Villa
The Hispanic Persona Project provides innovative insights for marketers eager to tap the ever-expanding Hispanic population and its use of digital technology - Web, social media, mobile - to connect with family, friends and extended social circles. Hispanic marketers used customer research for decades to create segments that model the complex demographics of the U.S. Hispanic consumer. Similarly, software developers and digital marketers used ethnographic research to create Personas to understand the behavior and motivations of “users” to create optimal user experiences. The session will present the results of a comprehensive primary research study combining Hispanic demographic segmentation with digital ethnographic research in the form of comprehensive digital Personas for the U.S. Hispanic consumer market. Multicultural and digital marketing thought leader José Villa will introduce attendees to 4 Hispanic Personas and facilitate a thoughtful discussion on Hispanic digital behavior.
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The Potion for Motion: Interactive Interfaces/Apps
by Dan Simpkins
Decades ago, the mouse and graphical user interface (UI) transformed the computer industry, ushering in an easier and more efficient way to control the user experience. Consumers ultimately abandoned the “conventional” up-down-left-right arrow keys as the primary means to control the computer. The TV industry is on the verge of a similar transformation, as service providers face increasing pressure to make UIs better suited for interactive content coming from the Internet. This session will discuss key methodologies for improving the UI beyond today’s rudimentary navigation approaches, to discover choices buried under hierarchical layers of media and content menus. This session will explore the benefits of motion control and in-air pointing for common uses on TVs and next-gen devices, such as navigation, text entry and casual gaming. It will also compare contending technologies that enable pointer-based controls, including touchpad, camera-based and in-air pointing motion technology.
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The Social Network for Computers
In today's connected world, we humans are always on, always ready to switch to the next task at hand -- and *in* hand, on a multitude of powerful devices. Soon there will be up to a trillion connected devices on the Internet. To power the resulting massive computational need, our entire computer infrastructure is being redesigned. Moore's Law is not enough anymore. The requirements of new media on a global scale can only be supported by a powerful "Social Network for Computers" -- aka the Cloud. Through the cloud, servers quickly switch from one task to another, making efficient use of idle compute, storage and networking resources. Cloud computing is "fungible" - dynamically expanding and contracting to meet the world's compute load, and it is the only way to serve the growing Internet.
For those who are developing new innovative services, this emerging social network for computers means new challenges, new choices and new opportunities. In this talk we look into these changes and what they mean for the next generation of social and mobile apps and services.
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Big Data for Everyman: Help Liberate the Data Serf
by Erik Swan and Michael Wilde
WTF is Big Data & Why Should I Care?Love that smartphone? Navigate with your GPS? Tweeting about this session? Everything other than brushing your teeth has is generating data. Every action we do generates data & a record of that action. According to a recent study by McKinsey, 15 out of 17 industry sectors in the US have more data stored per company than the Library of Congress. The sheer volume of data, driven by new devices & disparate data sources, requires a shift in how to capture & analyze information. If you could mine data generated by your audience, what questions might you ask? Improving your perspective on what users are doing or how they're interacting with you can yield some amazing returns. Analyzing big data can be as easy as surfing the web. We'll show some cool ways to ask questions, in realtime, to some fun data sources & get amazing answers. See how to turn data into information, information to knowledge & knowledge to action.
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Culture Networks and the Codes That Drive Them
by Tim Stock
Culture networks historically have spun narrative for how we live. Think about it. After WWII, an emerging American middle class decided to expand its options for commerce and camaraderie, so they built highways and a networked culture of early suburbanites was born.
But when we talk about networks today, we see only the technology system that supports the network, not the human structure. It’s the structure and process behind the human connections that’s critical.
The structure empowered by technology allows likeminds to connect, thrive and make global impact -- no matter how micro. Not too long ago, rave culture leveraged digital networks and pioneered podcast. And, more recently, the Tea Party leveraged digital networks to make its stand. Without technology, we might have dismissed the movement as laggard.
To understand where we go next means we need to evolve our perspective on how we look at the systems and unlock the human codes that drive them. If we do not, culture will leverage system decline before we know what’s happening, much like graffiti leveraged the decline of cities and skate culture leveraged the decline of suburbia.
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Cultures of Basketball: Sports in Higher Education
by Yago Colás
In this presentation, I will share the story of a groundbreaking pedagogical experiment that quickly gained national and international attention: teaching “Cultures of Basketball” at the University of Michigan. Inspired by my lifelong love of the game and informed by my scholarly interests in the role that stories, particularly informal stories, play in shaping our daily lives at the individual and collective level, “Cultures of Basketball” quickly surpassed my wildest expectations. Its appearance in university course listings provoked hundreds of student e-mails begging for one of the 24 spots in the course. The impromptu course diary I posted on my blog drew the attention of local newspapers, ESPN.com and other major online venues in this country and abroad, as well as hundreds of readers per day. Finally, the in-class experience provided challenges unlike any I’d faced in my 20 years of university teaching: negotiating the balance between formality and informality, emotional experience and intellectual inquiry, student and student-athlete (students included 8 members of Michigan’s men’s basketball team), the freedom to openly explore uncharted pedagogical ground and the imperatives of academic integrity, all while making my first foray into blogging and micro-blogging social media.
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Digital Sport: Know More, Do More
by Allyson Felix, Andrew Wilson, Fred Santarpia, Jimmy Fallon and Stefan Olander
Sport by its very nature is social. How do you bring sport and activity to a new level of engagement? How do you motivate people to get moving? What influence does music have on motivation? Do we create more fun if we make it a game or a competition – is social the catalyst? This session is sponsored by Nike.
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Fast CSS: How Browsers Lay Out Web Pages
This session explains the basic concepts in browser implementations of core Web document technologies (HTML, XHTML, CSS, and SVG), explains their general performance characteristics and how they interact with Javascript, and explains common optimizations (such as coalescing changes) that browsers make. Rather than presenting specific techniques authors can use, the goal is to build understanding of the performance characteristics of the Web platform so authors can have ideas of what things are likely to be fast or slow, and what types of changes they can experiment with to improve the performance of their Web pages.
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How Digital Softened Brazil's Iron Lady
In 2010 Brazil elected their first female president, Dilma Rousseff. Not only was she the first female to be elected, she was also unique in being the first candidate in Brazil to connect with millions of voters online to solidify public opinion. While many emerging markets, South America in particular, love social media, their electorate had never participated in elections through an online medium. The session will explore the future of digital in Brazil (and emerging markets) that have thus far embraced the evolution of new media, mostly by embracing it via traditional media channels. We will look at how, by leveraging diverse social media channels, Dilma’s team was able to introduce and humanize her in a way never before seen by the Brazilian people.
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Open Source Government, Enterprise and Innovation
by Rohan Silva
What happens when you throw open the doors of government and let the public decide what happens? Join Rohan Silva, senior policy adviser to the British Prime Minister David Cameron, as he shares his stories about the British Government's adventures in crowdsourcing - and the UK's radical agenda to harness the best ideas and innovations to build a better government. Silva will also be talking about the future of open data, open government and technology policy in the UK - and the entrepreneurial opportunities being opened up in the UK and beyond.
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Tapping Into America's Secret Sauce: Entrepreneurs
by Steve Case and Tim O'Shaughnessy
During this session, Steve Case, one of America’s most iconic entrepreneurs, and Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial, will explore the role entrepreneurship plays in launching some of the world’s fastest growing businesses. As LivingSocial’s first investor, Steve (and his investment firm, Revolution) was one of the earliest believers in the transformative power of local commerce. Tim will share his experience working with early investors and building one of today’s most promising new companies, as well as his vision for how LivingSocial is poised to bring local commerce to a new level. And looking more broadly, Steve will talk about his efforts to support entrepreneurs through his investments at Revolution, as chair of the Startup America Partnership and a member of the President’, and what we can all do to tap into “America’s secret sauce” to ensure that the US continues to be a leader in innovation and growth.
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Unpacking the Myth of the Intuitive
by Matt Boch
Marketing from Apple, Nintendo, and other companies focuses on the promise of an intuitive interface, but what does that really mean and how is it achieved? Over the last few decades we've seen QWERTY keyboards give way to an incredible diversity of interfaces: mice, trackpads, motion wands, voice-based interfaces, cameras, touch screens, and even real instruments. These devices are regarded as increasingly "natural" or "intuitive", but this marketing-speak is ill-defined, unactionable, and potentially insulting to users; if they don't get it, are they "unnatural" or stupid? In this talk, I will explore the concept of the intuitive, using case studies from Engelbart's early work on computer-human interaction, Miyamoto's work for the NES and the Wii, and my own work at Harmonix on Rock Band and Dance Central. I will ultimately arrive at a new set of goals for interfaces.
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WEF to SXSW: The Global Cloud Revolution
What if we put our collective technical expertise and resources to creating something more impactful than the next incremental addition to Twitter? Developing nations have an untapped potential to become regional hubs for research and development. Ideas are in abundance, but how can we help fuel this drive with essential tools and make them a reality? How can the cloud revolution enable these nations to grow into global think tanks?
In this session, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader Winston Damarillo will address the reason he sees the scarcity of computing resources as a matter of national security. The implementation of cloud has the potential to turbo-charge entrepreneurship in developing nations around the world – through allowing aspiring organizations to access high capacity computing power without the need to invest in hardware, software, network, and real-estate space, maximizing scarce energy resources.
The session will include the benefits of the cloud with respect to social development, indigenous innovation and economic growth, as well as the ways that we can leverage our Silicon Valley resources and expertise to change the world in ways that parallel the impact of Facebook and Twitter on our global network.
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Brands: The Cost of Being Human
Why do brands resist being human? Understanding the question, and its answer, reveals much as to the reasons why companies continue to struggle with the adoption of social business practices. Fear not! You can do something to make your company more connected, more human, and you can do it now.
This seminar is for all you enlightened brand strategists, hard working late night community managers, and social business practitioners. We will show you: how to build the business case for being human; how to properly measure the ROI and engagement value of each conversation; how to convince senior managers to give you more headcount; and how to prove that people can scale. At a more macro level, you will understand hidden fears of CMOs, and how to speak their language. You will walk away with real life examples, measurement models, and a plan of action. Let the humanizing begin!
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Computation and Its Impact on the Future
Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist and inventor who is most recently known for the launch of the computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. Along with the computational software system Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha has put into action some concepts Wolfram has been developing throughout his remarkable career, most notably documented in his book A New Kind of Science (NKS).
Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science and technology, and shows how computation offers a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. He believes that computation is the most important idea that has emerged in the past century and that it will have profound implications on our future.
Each one of Wolfram's accomplishments is representative of his vision of computation. Stephen's life work is based on the idea that computation empowers the individual to discover facts and concepts that have never been explored before, with emerging platforms making computation more accessible than ever. His goal at SXSW is to inspire attendees to explore new corners of the computational universe.
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Creating Responsive HTML5 Touch Interfaces
The proliferation of touch-based mobile phones and tablets means that users are accustomed to using touch gestures navigate - but so far primarily on native applications – how about web content? Creating responsive touch interfaces in HTML5 is not just possible, but its an amazing evolution of web user interfaces. At Flickr we've learned that because of the nature of touch events, the "feel" of the interface is more important than performance by the numbers. This session will guide you through how to create touch interfaces, with a focus on interfaces that FEEL responsive. Topics covered will include device support, hardware acceleration and handling complex gestures. We'll also focus on how to prioritize the work done in JavaScript so that the interface feels as responsive as possible.
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Customers Are Irrational: Stop Fighting It
by Colin Shaw
Why do people knock wood for luck? Why do people press elevator buttons 20 times, even though they know it won’t make the elevator come any faster? People are irrational. Why do people love inanimate objects like smartphones? Why do people cry when they see an artist’s work? People are irrational.Who are your customers? Irrational people. So why then do organizations design rational experiences? Emotions comprise more than half the typical customer experience. With the immediacy of information and social media, you must embrace that irrationality and use it to your advantage by building a deliberate experience. Effectively managing and engaging subconsciously with these irrational customers is essential.Join international bestselling customer experience author Colin Shaw as he presents new psychological research that reveals examples of irrationality, the mistakes organizations are making today, and how you can embrace irrationality and build an emotionally engaging experiences.
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High On Line: Applying Psychology to Web Design
by Jason Hreha
Design is becoming an applied behavioral science, and your art school background is no longer sufficient.
Fields like neuroscience are starting to come of age, and are beginning to give us insights into human decision making. Companies like Zynga are taking these academic findings and applying them to their products to induce addictive behaviors in millions of their users. Other companies, like Path, are taking findings in social psychology and sociology, like Dunbar’s Number, and using them to build compelling user experiences.
The good news is that you don’t need to get a PhD in neuroscience or psychology to start applying neuroscientific and psychological findings to your work. In fact, with two models of behavior, and one behavior-analysis method, you can start designing behavior-changing products tomorrow.
In this presentation, I am going to teach you the neuroscience of addiction (engagement behavior), and show you how an understanding of the human reward system can help you build more successful products. We will also cover BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model. With this understanding of behavior, we will then move on to Behavior Chain diagrams – my favorite tool for analyzing the behavior of any given website, product, or system. Finally, I will show you how to mine the academic literature for practical insights that you can then apply to your product design work.
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Light Field: Turning Light into Living Pictures
by Eric Cheng
The next generation of photography, light field cameras will unleash capabilities that were never before possible with conventional 2D digital cameras. Lytro’s Eric Cheng will walk participants through the possibilities of light field technology, which will include focusing a picture after it’s taken, re-orienting the scene by shifting the perspective view, and even switching between 2D and 3D views. Get an in-depth, hands on look at this new camera technology and work with a professional photographer to see how light field technology will revolutionize the way the world takes pictures.
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Mixel: Art, Tablets and the Creator Economy
by Khoi Vinh
What comes after just reading on iPad? A new form of creation that's much closer to consumption than what we saw on desktops and laptops. Mixel co-founder and CEO Khoi Vinh takes a look at the journey that led him to create Mixel, the world's first social collage app. Its goal is to get non-artists making art, and Vinh will look at the ways in which the social network has met, exceeded and fallen short of that goal.
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Online Sports and the Internet's Meaning Machine
by Spencer Hall
Ron Prince went from being a disgraced former Kansas State head football coach to being the internet's first job candidate for everything from coaching vacancies to the Presidency of Libya. How did this happen? Via the chaotic and boundlessly enthusiastic meme-building of the sporting internet, the ever-expanding space that has surpassed ESPN as the primary destination for sports fans who want something more than a box score and canned television commentary to feed their bottomless appetite. Spencer Hall of SBNation.com and EDSBS.com will outline the basic growth of the online sports community from its origins in message board and single author blogs to its current configuration of content farms, networks, independent sites, and Twitter feeds. The discussion will trace the current trajectories of online sports communities, follow the money to see what's attracting investors' dollars, and make a few guesses about where it's all headed. There will also be at least one hundred photoshopped pictures of athletes doing silly things, so if the rest disappoints you the pictures definitely will not.
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Optimism: The Ultimate Revolutionary Act
It takes optimism to launch revolutions, to believe that you can end decades of dictatorship and that you deserve freedom and dignity. Why are the people of the Middle East and North Africa - all too aware of the challenges they face in rising up to despots - more optimistic about their revolutions and uprisings than those outside the region - who all too often take for granted their own freedoms?
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Successful Onboarding: Ship Code, See Bathroom
by Scott Porad
Do you want a happier, more empowered team with an attitude of ownership and a focus on productivity? I thought so. We get the party started right at Cheezburger by having our new developers write and commit code to our production software on Day One. (Yes, you heard that right…we throw a newbie into the fire before they even have time to know what hit them!) Yet, given that there are only eight hours on the first day that means there are a few puzzle pieces you need to have in place to prevent this from being a complete disaster. I will show you how we do this, so you can do it too!
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Turning Slacktivism into Online Activism
by Boyd Neil
In this presentation, Boyd Neil a former political activist and trade unionist looks at the fallacy that social web advocacy and activism channels energy away from making real-world social and political change. Using experience as a political and union organizer in the 70s and early 80s, Boyd demonstrates that slacktivism online is a failure not of the social web but of poor 'organizing'.
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Why Location Matters for Your Personal Data
by Glenn Derene
Where is your data? It’s a simple question, yet it’s maddeningly hard to answer in the era of cloud computing. Everything from family photos to bank transactions seem to be floating around in ether, yet they are inevitably stored somewhere. And even though you may not know it, that data is serviced and hosted by multiple subcontractors you’ve never heard of--it may not even be in the same country as you are. This data can be subject to a vast array of contractual agreements, as well as overlapping jurisdictions and regulations. And sometimes, it gets messy and confusing enough to end up in court. Likewise, the integration with cloud services that is common on most smartphones and tablets is outpacing the law, raising questions that have only fuzzy legal precedent.This session is intended to be a discussion about the topic with and amongst the audience, so I’ll give a presentation based on my reporting on the topic, then open up the subject to attendees for conversation and comments.
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Design. Build. Transform.
Emily Pilloton is a designer and builder, disguised as a high school teacher. In this session, she will tell the story of Studio H, a high school design/build curriculum based in Bertie County, North Carolina, the poorest, most sparsely populated and racially divided county in the state. In one year, her students design and construct a full-scale piece of architecture for their hometown (last year, a 2000-square foot farmers market, along with 3 public chicken coops). This session will make the case for bringing back new, design-infused models of vocational learning as a means to engage students in hand-to-mind creativity, and real-world progress in their own backyards.
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Encouraging Innovation and Empowering Entrepreneurs
Startups are an important part of the American economy. Over the past three decades, companies less than five years old have accounted for nearly all net job creation in the United States. Yet, recent data on startups indicate that the startup engine is slowing down, as new businesses hire fewer employees than in the past. Led by U.S. Senators Jerry Moran (R-Ks.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), policymakers in Washington are realizing the importance of entrepreneurs to job creation, innovation, and economic growth. To revive the startup engine and jump-start the economy, Senators Moran and Warner introduced legislation called The Startup Act.
The Startup Act is based on a simple premise: the easier it is for creative individuals to take risks and start a business, more jobs will be created. The Startup Act addresses the need to reduce regulatory burdens, rewards patient capital invested in startups, provides tax relief to help startups grow, supports research conducted at American universities that spurs innovation, and creates new opportunities for American-educated foreign students and entrepreneurs to stay in the United States where their high-tech skills and new ideas will fuel growth.
The Startup Act incorporates key recommendations made by President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the Kauffman Foundation, and entrepreneurs across the country. Senator Moran will speak about his bipartisan legislation and the urgency of capitalizing on the unique attention policymakers are currently giving to startups.
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