Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 matching your filters
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Payment Revolution is Coming: Welcome to Interchange Zero
When money flows frictionlessly, good things happen. Good things for small businesses. Good things for consumers. Good things for the economy as a whole. The game layer and the mobile payments space are on a crash course, and it's going to be awesome. So awesome that it’ll force credit card interchange rates to zero and pump 50 billion dollars a year back into the economy. Sounds crazy, but before Al Gore invented the internet, we never imagined information would flow so freely. As soon as the friction was removed from information-transfer, a new economy emerged that changed the way we do business. The same is about to happen with money. It's just another medium of information, and it's high time to suck the friction out of the economy. There are two elements driving this transition to interchange zero 1) the technology that’s driving fees down (along with some far-reaching legislation thanks to Dick Durbin) and 2) the information inherent in payments that’s being leveraged to drive revenues up. Join Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja of SCVNGR + LevelUp for a fast-paced session on how a combination of mobile payment startups (even the ones being formed by big companies), The Durbin Amendment, and a tipping point in consumer behavior will completely change the way we think about money -- maybe even re-wire how our economy works.
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The Smart Grid Is Inseparable from the Internet
America's electric power grid hasn't changed much since the days of Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Everything else has. Imminent local and global challenges from climate change to global competition make today’s approaches to planning, operating and managing the electric grid obsolete. Only the best combination of electronics, telecommunications and information technologies will ensure that consumers receive acceptable reliability, economy, sustainability, safety and customer service. The public Internet is the obvious only foundation for the new Smart Grid, but most electric utilities have yet to understand or embrace this. For this reason it’s likely that non-utility entities will have a central role in advancing the Smart Grid. Learn why a Smart Grid is essential for our future, what it’s key components are, and why electric utilities have such a hard time moving it forward. See how the Smart Grid will have to be an “e-grid” . . . or maybe the iGrid? . . . and maybe largely independent of today's incumbent electric utilities.
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White Space: Shaping Nothing for Clean Design
by David Kadavy
There is little compliment for a design greater than saying that it "looks clean." But clean design is much more than just a look. To make a clean design, you have to know how to communicate clearly by using white space wisely. In this solo presentation, David Kadavy, author of the #18 Amazon best-seller "Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty," breaks down the invisible forces that shape white space and make a design look "clean." Using fascinating examples that have explained mysteries such as "Why You Hate Comic Sans," Mr. Kadavy illuminates how geometry, typography, and the grid all work together to shape white space, communicate clearly, and create clean design.
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Network Effect: Building a Business Around Sharing
by Drew Houston
Drew Houston, CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, has led Dropbox's growth from a simple idea to a service millions around the world rely on – a modern day Network Effect. From the classic example of the telephone to today’s social networks, every so often a new medium grows from obscurity to ubiquity because the more people that use it, the more enticing it becomes. That nearly 60% of adults online own at least two Internet connected devices not only increases the capacity of sharing but creates a need for it. In this session, Drew will sit down with a well-known tech influencer to discuss how to take a need in the market and turn it into a service so fundamental to people’s everyday lives, that it encourages them to recommend and share it with everyone.
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Reinventing the Graphic Novel for the iPad
Nobody foresaw the dramatic impact the iPad would make on us as media consumers. However, it looks like the “giant ipod” is here to stay, and with it comes brand new never before methods and tools for story telling.
With the ability to blend together games, comics, literature, film, and mobile services into new hybrid experiences, we are just beginning to see the vast opportunities this device has created for storytellers and audiences alike.
In this panel, we will take a brief look at the traditional forms of games and comics as standalone, (but often associated) mediums telling stories, and explore the new ways in which they are starting to overlap in the tablet space.
In this panel, audience members will get a guided tour of the process involved in developing Operation Ajax, showing just how vast the opportunities are when you use a realtime 3D game engine to build an interactive graphic novel from the ground up for the tablet.
While the sky is the limit, there are certainly some obstacles to overcome. For one, the mobile space is not treated like a high value entertainment space like the living room. The average mobile experience is a 99 cents to 5 dollar experience. A high value game experience is a 50 – 70 dollar experience. -
The Infinite Resource: Growth on a Finite Planet
by Ramez Naam
The sun strikes the earth with as much energy in 14 and a half seconds as all of human society consumes in a day. In 88 minutes it provides as much energy as humanity uses, from all sources, in a year. Our world is home to a thousand times more water than humans tap into, mineral deposits that stagger our needs, and enough arable land to grow food for tens of billions.
Yet climate change, peak oil, peak water, and global poverty and hunger are real. In the midst of abundance we face crisis of scarcity.
How do we reconcile these facts? How do we create a path forward that taps into our world's natural abundance in a sustainable way, rather than slipping into a downward spiral of scarcity?
Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human, demonstrates that knowledge is the ultimate human resource, and that properly directed innovation can tap into our world's vast resources while at the same time reducing the negative impact we have on the environment.
With the right incentives and right choices, we can increase the wealth, health, and wellbeing of everyone on Earth, and do so in a way that preserves our world for generations to come.
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PostSecret + BLUEBRAIN: A Multimedia Presentation
by Frank Warren, Hays Holladay, Paul Fireman and Ryan Holladay
PostSecret, BLUEBRAIN and Fireman Creative team-up for an exciting new live multimedia performance. Always innovative, BLUEBRAIN will live score the latest PostSecret video composed of artful, funny, sexual and heart-breaking secrets. Bring your own secrets and be ready for some surprises. Free and open to the general public.
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