SCHED* SXSW 2011

150 Twitter users were selected, from over 2,500 entries, to attend NASA's STS-133 Discovery shuttle launch, with special access at the press site, and two days of programmed events -- meeting crew, talking to astronauts, exploring NASA -- and to top it all off, to view the launch from the countdown clock. We formed an instant community (within hours of being selected) via Twitter, created a Google group, FB group, email lists, and 15 of us who had never met before rented a house, and started sharing space knowledge, social media knowledge, etc. 4 other shared houses came together. Our house, the Big House, was the hub of all activities. Never having met meant nothing to us. Our first night there we gathered (over 70 of the 150) and formed our space tweeps family. Astronomers, scientists, NASA workers, digital storytellers, educators (k-12 and higher ed), videographers, all passionate about space. The shuttle never launched. The communities which were formed out of this experience are still going strong. The entire week was broadcast on JustinTV by one of our colleagues -- sharing the entire NASA learning experience with thousands of folks. We're invited back to watch the launch when she's scheduled to go in February. This was an amazing use of Social Media, and a perfect example of the power of these tools, and how they can be used to market, share, teach, grow, explore, inspire.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8405

The growing hole in your back jeans pocket is getting a bit too personal. No need to swipe anymore. Just scan. When can we get rid of our wallets without losing the cash? We know mobile is here. Now learn how far we can take it. Digital wallets are within very close reach. With RFIDs, QR codes, and Big-Brother-like tracking, the technology is already in place. Checkout with your phone. Instantly grab coupons when you checkout. Scan your digital ticket at Friday’s ballgame. Digitally split the bill with your friends. The possibilities that we’ve always wished for are now within reach. Get a glimpse into how retailers are edging towards digital, understand the impact of how this will change the way we buy, and ultimately, as designers, understand how this will change the way we interact with our mobile phones.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7267

America’s students are bored. According to the Gates Foundation, boredom is the number one reason they give for dropping out of school. How can creativity, innovation and technology address this growing crisis in education? If technology is a driver for shorter attention spans, can it also be the solution to bring back the wonder of education? Can we extend the reach further and engage our students more both inside and outside of the classroom, to reawaken a love of learning? This session is sponsored by Samsung.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000303

The iPad and its entourage of Android tablets have introduced a new style of computing, confronting designers with unfamiliar aches and pains. Learn the symptoms (and fixes) for a range of new-to-the-world iPad interface ailments, including Greedy Pixel Syndrome, the dreaded Frankeninterface, and the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" bait and switch. Explore practical techniques and eye-opening gotchas of tablet interface design, all grounded in the ergonomics, context, psychology, and nascent culture of these new devices (both iOS and Android). The presentation inoculates you against common problems with close-up looks at successful iPad apps from early sketches to final design. Genial bedside manner is administered by Josh Clark, author of the O'Reilly books "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" and "Best iPhone Apps: A Guide for Discriminating Downloaders."
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5507

Mobile application design is a conversation that allows the developer to speak to the user. While manuals are able to guide this conversation, nothing is more immediate and enduring than the user interface of the application itself. The small size of mobile device screens requires developers to create user interfaces that communicate to users in ways that are concise yet easy to understand. The comic book medium offers many design standards that mobile application developers can use to improve the effectiveness of their graphical user interface designs. Comic books have evolved through the years to maximize their ability to tell a story while confined to two dimensional static images. Comic book legend Will Eisner published “Comics and Sequential Art” in 1985 in order to document his mastery of using graphics to tell a story. This presentation will explore the design principles Eisner shared in his landmark book and specifically apply them to mobile application design. Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics”, which built on top of the foundation laid by Eisner, will also be covered as well as McCloud’s later work “Reinventing Comics”. Film makers have used comic books as the blueprint for blockbuster movies like “Spider Man” and “Batman Returns”. The comic book medium can provide a blueprint for blockbuster mobile applications as well. When attendees leave this session, they will know how to throw some Eisner onto their mobile application designs!
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6840

A funny thing happened last spring: Netflix let me build the front end for their iPhone product. Yeah. Me. The punk-rock-API guy. The initial conversation went something like this: Netflix: "It's five weeks to WWDC. We've got Mobile Safari, our open APIs, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." Me: "Hit it."
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5519

A jaw dropping 80% of iPhone and Android apps have hardly any active users. Tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of thousands of mobile applications have gotten it wrong. But mobile apps done right can provide unprecedented value to users and rapid transformations of businesses. Gilt Groupe, USAA Bank and Pandora can attribute much of their recent success to their mobile applications. The biggest barrier to success? More is absolutely less. As Mark Twain famously said, “It would have been shorter if I had more time.” With seemingly infinite options of features, ‘what’ and ‘how much’ is the hardest part of development. This presentation will provide a detailed unbridled view into the strategy and creative process of creating a compelling, successful mobile app by finding the right balance between business objectives content, design, functionality, and concept.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7373

Augmented Reality (AR), is an emerging technology that allows for digital images and information to be overlaid on smartphone screens or computer monitors. While still an emerging technology, many major players in retail and technology are executing successful AR campaigns that move beyond catchy 3-D graphics to deliver ROI by connecting to people’s social networks and providing clear incentives to purchase. The presenters will demonstrate how Augmented Reality (AR) provides a ‘touchstone technology’ that layers mobile commerce, social networking and location-based advertising in a seamless format for consumers and brands. This session will also cover: How brands are getting attention with Augmented Reality, How brands are seeing ROI from Augmented Reality, The multiple B2B and B2C applications for Augmented Reality, How Augmented Reality links to Location Aware Advertising and Predictive Modeling, Why Augmented Reality is not a gimmick but the future.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6340

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.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5760

Americans are increasingly turning to high tech tools to recreate the small town experience. Join us for a discussion with pioneers of local tech to learn about how location-based technologies are connecting people to create the next generation economy and a more engaged citizenry. We’ll cover tools of the trade, best practices and give you tips on how you can infuse place into your project. Finally, we’ll envision what the ideal connected neighborhood might look like in the future.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6375

Online dating has, since its inception, been primarily about people sitting in front of their computers, endlessly composing and perusing (often highly contrived) profiles, hoping to find the right combination of words and flattering photos to lead them to true love. Location-based technology in mobile phones (both browser-based and apps) means that dating can make its way back to the streets. New services like MeetMoi and others put the dating back in digital dating, facilitating introductions to like-minded singles within a certain proximity. This panel will address: 1) what privacy concerns need to be taken into consideration when people begin meeting IRL through this technology? 2) Is a check-in based model, like Foursquare, or persistent-location, like Google Latitude, the best format for mobile dating? And 3) how do daters change the way they present themselves when their potential paramour may be right around the corner? Location-based dating is the future of online dating… and it’s about more than just hookups with the new technology that increases the “intent-to-date” among users. Now that people read books on their iPhone, keep their entire music library on their BlackBerry, and use their Android to house their entire family photo collection, why wouldn’t a mobile phone become a personal matchmaker extraordinaire?
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6507

Grassroots movements, flash mobs and now group purchasing--they all have an intimate relationship with location; it’s the linchpin that ties the movement together. For some time now, advertisers have tried to say “Go here. Buy this. Do it now.” But as consumers, we’ve been pretty reluctant to give in easily—there’s always another holiday for a car dealership to celebrate, and a liquidation sale at a furniture store just doesn’t motivate us anymore. Flash mobs, grassroots movements—they have been exceedingly difficult to create. They’re purely organic movements, born out of internet chatrooms, with a bitter reaction to rigid organization. The holy grail—a sudden influx of consumers—has always been just out of reach for most businesses. But more and more, brands are finding interesting ways to cultivate flash mobs of their own. Location based services play an important role in aiding these movements. Whether it be group purchasing sites created around local communities or mobile check in apps with flocks of users descending on a bar or restaurant, new tools continue to emerge for businesses and brands to create their own mobs. We'll look at what tools are available for building mobs and how they are being focused towards completing a specific action. We'll envision what tools have yet to emerge. And we'll explore the delicate balance between pushing an action or a message while maintaining the organic feel that characterizes these movements.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7415

Social media applications encounter messy user-generated data in blog posts, status updates, tweets, user profiles, etc. These documents contain free-form text that obeys no particular rules of grammar, punctuation or spelling. If the data is so messy, how can a computer program recognize adult content or hate speech or spam? How can a computer program tell the difference between an advertisement and a product review? How can a computer program distinguish between a positive and a negative product review? Machine learning offers some solutions. For example, given sample tweets labeled (by people) as spam or non-spam, machine learning tools can generate a program (or model) that makes similar judgments. You could use this in your application to filter out tweet spam. I will describe some machine learning tools, how to acquire, label and manage training data and how to extract features from your documents. I will also talk about choosing the right technique for a problem, measuring quality and improving your model over time, and integrating a machine learned model with your application. Coming out of this session, you will know where you might use machine learning in your applications, and you will know how to get started.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7209

Philip R. Zimmermann, technology visionary and internet folk hero, says “it is sometimes better to take direct action to change unjust laws”. He is an encryption guru and privacy innovator who has made huge personal sacrifices to create technology that protects people around the world. Phil is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, an email encryption software package. Originally designed as a human rights tool, PGP was published for free on the Internet in 1991. This made Zimmermann the target of a three-year criminal investigation because the government held that US export restrictions for cryptographic software were violated when PGP spread worldwide. Despite the lack of funding, the lack of any paid staff, the lack of a company to stand behind it, and despite government persecution, PGP nonetheless became the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Phil has recently focused on launching a secure VoIP protocol that allows people to make encrypted phone calls over the internet. He will discuss why encrypted phone calls are the next evolution in privacy, why easily wiretapped, unsecure VoIP is bad for society and good for organized crime, and how a secure VoIP protocol will protect the criminal justice system. Other topics include the effects of pervasive surveillance technology on democratic institutions and the future of consumer authentication. Presented by AllClear ID
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8332

Google is the web's most popular search engine. Being listed well in Google can generate hundreds, thousands or even millions of visits per week. But for many, it's a mystery about how and why Google ranks one site over another. Meanwhile, Bing "powers" results at both Bing and Yahoo, making it another important traffic source. In this session, representatives from both companies answer questions about how they list and rank web sites. Get your search engine optimization (SEO) questions answered directly from the companies that list you.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5928

Take a look at how the complexity of design has increased exponentially with the web moving onto today’s mobile devices. There are so many more considerations when thinking about a design or a campaign that go beyond the basic, “who is my target audience....how do I reach them?” Now it’s also, “what devices do they use...what browsers.....do I use Flash in my designs....what about HTML5?” Hear from a panel of industry experts about how they are dealing with these questions and what winning strategies they have found to be most successful for them.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6657

I ran a workshop on Location Based Services [LBS] at SXSW Interactive 2010. The specific session I conducted was titled "LBS 101: Geolocation On The 'Horizon'" –http://sxsw.com/node/5016. LBS is still a highly relevant subject and given that people are still curious and learning about LBS, there's an opportunity for another LBS 101 session targeted towards beginners in the space, but this time we can dig a little bit deeper. Some of the topics I will address include: (1) Locating feature phones vs. smartphones -- can all phones really be located commercially? How? What are the differences between locating different kinds of phones from a technology standpoint, a privacy standpoint, a functional standpoint? (2) The economics of locating phones -- what does it cost? How are wireless carriers and handset manufacturers involved? How are advertisers involved? (3) Types of LBS apps -- are downloadable iPhone/Android apps the only LBS apps? What about SMS and voice apps which have a far greater addressable market and potential for ubiquitous usage? (4) LBS app use cases -- what are some compelling LBS use cases besides the obvious mobile advertising / marketing ones, e.g. fraud detection, roadside assistance, gaming compliance, security, etc. (5) The future of LBS -- who’s using LBS today and who will be using LBS in the coming months/years? With always-on location becoming more pervasive, what new and compelling services will we see? (6) Privacy -- how much transparency do end users have when sharing their location? What incentives are being offered to end users to share location constantly?
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5664

The digital revolution has allowed people not only to come up with great ideas but also to execute them. With digital technologies, you don’t need raw materials, factories, distribution centres, stores… you can reach a worldwide audience quickly and cheaply just by using your brain and your PC. This innovation-led culture is now ubiquitous, and it looks like it has inspired (or liberated) not only entrepreneurs and businesspeople, but also civil servants, engineers, artists and architects: even if their ideas belong to the “physical” world, their approach belongs to the digital culture. This presentation provides example of this new spirit of liberation in arts & architecture: from a science-fictionesque tram station in Austria, a giant mirror in an Italian village (http://bit.ly/al875a ), a physically crowd-sourced piece of art and a twitter-inspired theatre play to the ultimate hotel experience in Paris (http://tinyurl.com/ybxjlty ) and so on. We live in a more open society where creativity is less constrained by cultural, technological and financial constraints, and where innovation is paramount. Are people, businesses and governments ready for this?
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8123

Most companies are content to pursue adaptation strategies in times of high uncertainty – sense and respond quickly to events as they unfold. While adaptation is certainly valuable, it misses a much greater opportunity – the ability to shape entire markets or industries in ways that create significant advantage for the shaper. While most disruptive innovation strategies focus on a single company betting heavily on a disruptive approach to the market, shaping strategies emphasize the opportunity to mobilize a very large number (thousands and, in some case, millions) of other participants to leverage investment and accelerate learning. As a result, shaping strategies can succeed with small initial moves, smartly made, that set big things in motion. This talk will review examples of successful shapers in the past to determine the key elements that determine the success of shaping strategies.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000004