While the rest of us were scrawling inelegantly in our Moleskines or jabbing at our iPads as we listened to the speakers at SXSW, Patrick Ashamalla was capturing their words in these fascinating visual notes.
See more of Patrick’s visual notes on Flickr.
Ben Essen, iris London:
If the last few years at SXSW have been dominated by social and startups, 2013 felt like the year for science fiction, as mind-boggling hardware took centre stage over the ‘simpler’ ideals of twitter and foursquare. Portable 3D printers spewing out custom sunglasses and 3D models of people’s heads, life-size holograms for retail stores from 3M, the $89 gesture controller for your PC from Loop and of course, Google Glass. Watch the demonstrations of these products, and you realise that they aren’t just mood-film concepts, but mass-produced products on the seemingly unavoidable path to ubiquity. Meanwhile talks like ‘Big Data Democracy’ and my own ‘Your destiny in the digital age, whose in control?’ explored the influence data-driven algorithms are having on human behaviour at a mass level.
For many attendees, these glimpses into a science fiction future created a sense of unease. Was the relentless march of technology necessarily making things better? Would this SXSW mark the point at which humanity finally gave way to the machines? And what can we do to reconnect with our human side and fight back against the machines?
The answer to this final question lay at the Mashable tent, in the form of the cat-in-residence “Grumpy Cat” - the frowning feline who had more social buzz (and a longer queue) than any other participant at SXSW. This cat represents far more than tech’s obsession with cute animals. As Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti pointed out in his talk ‘The Big Power Shift in Media’, our empathy for animals is the characteristic that makes us uniquely human. It’s a Bladerunner reference that was echoed by Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman: ’the intrinsic value of human beings is how nice they are to small animals’. As data and technology continue to creep further and further into the heart of our lives, we increasingly look for antidotes - technology-free ideas and inspiration that help us feel as human as possible. And cute animals are top of the list.
In Peretti’s opinion this humanising of content in the digital space is only just beginning, as we head for a new ‘human age’ in digital. The last ten years has been the decade of the aggregator, where superficial content designed for “click-baiting” has been the most successful. The next ten years will truly be driven by sharing - and only content that makes people feel human will succeed. Content that is moving, content that provokes emotions - from nostalgia to belonging to empathy (for cats).
And perhaps the most fundamental emotional need of all? The urge to laugh. From Inman to Baratunde Thurston’s What’s so funny about Innovation?, we were reminded that honest, provocative, observational humour is the perfect outlet for people who need to feel like people again. Humour is what keeps us human. And that humour is best when it is unpredictable, imperfect and surprising.
Which takes us back to the 3D printers. In his closing remarks, Bruce Sterling described the sunglasses and models being produced by the new wave of 3D printers as ‘crabjects’ - pointless pieces of plastic with no benefit to anyone - a kind of ‘physical LOLcat’. But, like LOLcats, perhaps the very pointlessness of these things is what makes them so important. Their value is in the emotional reaction they provoke. They make us laugh, they connect us, they make us feel human. In his talk ‘Hackers are shortcutting the product lifecycle’, Dave Caygill celebrated the makers of the Frivolous Engineering Company - a group of engineers building purposefully useless machines, such as the gadget whose only job is to switch itself back off again. A reminder that the most inspiring technology comes with human stories and emotions attached.
Because however many machines we have augmenting our bodies - and however much data we have tracking our desires - they’ll never make us feel the same way as the 33 animals who are extremely disappointed in you.
Ben Essen, Head of Planning, iris London with a lot of love for technology, tequila and tacos. Follow @benessen
Toby Gunton, WCRS:
I once heard someone say that the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Well this week it feels like its all been in one place, Austin, Texas.
SXSW in Austin is divided into three festivals or conferences; Music, Film and Interactive. It’s the Interactive part that most of our industry seems to descend on every year but the title doesn’t do it justice.
SXSW Interactive is where technology, creativity, culture and business come together and the output is, quite simply, a vision of the future. There is plenty of marketing related conversation but there is also so much more, something that reflects the increasingly complex relationships between products and services, technology and marketing.
Over the week I heard things that have inspired me and scared me in equal measure. The over zealous optimism of companies developing technology, both hardware and software, that will fundamentally change the way we live was everywhere even if it felt like the longer term aggregated impact of these changes isn’t always being considered.
However, there is so much to hear at SXSW that often it takes a while for the real themes to emerge. Each individual view is shaped by the different sessions people manage to attend and at best you’d be lucky to attend even a tiny percentage of what’s on offer.
For me the big themes were the increasingly connected world, the data that it produces and the impact that will have on people’s lives. There’s no way to make sense of it in a single blog post but I am going to try and explain what I mean.
1. MAKING CONNECTIONS
The first theme refers to the increasingly connected world. A few years ago people talked about the semantic web, the Internet of things. Now they are talking about the Internet of everything; from your smartphone to your washing machine, from your connected thermostat to your tablet, from your car to your wearable device, be that Google Glass or any number of health related wristbands.
Increasingly these devices and software have APIs which means they can talk more easily to each other. And with RFID tags this connected world will soon extend beyond smart hardware to simple everyday objects.
Not only are the things around us increasingly connected, they are also learning more and more about us. The huge fall in costs of the smartphone technology stack along with all sorts of sensors means it’s cheap to create connected hardware that learns. A wi-fi chip costs $1, an accelerometer not much more, GPS is built into everything. Devices know who you are, where you are, what you’re doing, what you have been doing and who you’ve been doing it with.
That means all these connected devices are collecting data, huge amounts of data. They are also generating data, meta data. They are creating data from data, learning about us and recording things we may never even know or see. And we are getting better at interpreting and understanding all this data.
2. CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS
Cheaply available processing power, smarter software and new ways of examining all this data means that more and more can be learned about us, our preferences, our needs and our habits.
NLP, Machine Learning and the creation of distinct ontologies (a taxonomy of how objects relate to each other) all mean software is getting smarter. When it comes to how we analyse data, as well as more traditional deterministic approaches there is a growth in the use of stochastic systems. We’re getting better at looking at both predictable actions and random elements to understand probability with increasing accuracy.
For example, if you want to know if it’s going to rain the forecast is a deterministic approach. But if you also have data on what shoes everyone is wearing that day you can derive the weather from it. Essentially if you have enough data you can expose correlations that reveal things you might not have even been looking for.
3. RISE OF THE ROBOTS
The combination of this increasing connectedness, growing data and improving intelligence means a subtle but fundamental change is taking place. The technology we increasingly use is making the transition from being a tool to becoming a robot. Not the Asimov kind of robot but software that can make decisions on your behalf.
No one is going to flick a switch and we suddenly find robots rule the world but there is a gradual, almost unnoticed change happening where we’re moving from using this technology and the data behind it to help inform our decisions, to a point where it makes those decisions for us.
Let’s take a case in point from the week. On our trip to Austin we had a Google Nexus phone with us sporting Google Now. With almost no manual input it learned an incredible amount about us and influenced our behaviour through proactive suggestions. It knew we were away from home, it fed us the weather, suggested places to see, healthy places to eat because it knew what we’d been searching for, it knew which flights we were on because the confirmation email had gone to a Gmail account, it showed us how to get from the hotel to the airport at the right time, all unprompted. Unlike Google’s search product, we didn’t have to search or ask, it simply learnt and suggested.
This is just the start. Google Now looks like a toy when compared with some of the technology we saw evidence of at SXSW.
So where does this take us? Well from social, political, economic and cultural perspectives it has implications that are almost too huge to imagine. So for now I’m going to take the easy way out and focus purely on what it means for marketeers. And the answer is pretty straightforward. It means that we have to learn a whole new set of skills.
For marketeers this explosion of data has created opportunities for us to be increasingly effective with messaging and efficient with media thanks to the ability to target. However, as the shift from tool to robot takes place we’ll have a new challenge.
4. INFLUENCING CHANGE
As the human is slowly removed from the decision making process emotion plays less of a role. That means there is a very real chance we are going to have to work out how to market to the machine.
Picture this – your fridge knows what food you have eaten, it’s connected to your wearable health monitoring device which knows how many calories you are burning, and both are connected to your online supermarket. The order for food is therefore placed automatically based on what your body needs.
This may sound like some far flung sci-fi fantasy that will never happen but Nike Fuel band exists (as do many more advanced devices), whilst LG and Samsung sell smart connected fridges already. This is not a big leap.
Take another scenario. Your smart washer dryer monitors itself, and realises it has a fault. It is connected to your calendar and connected to the Internet so it books a local engineer (it knows where it is thanks to that GPS) to come at a time that it knows you will be at home and adds the appointment to your diary.
Again, all this technology already exists and it’s already connected. This is coming and it’s coming quickly.
The answer for marketeers will be in understanding the algorithms that make the decisions. What are decisions based on, how do you maximise the chances of products and services being selected? The answers aren’t going to be straightforward and will require a new way of thinking and a new set of skills but they are also not completely alien.
Natural search, SEO, is all about trying to understand Google’s algorithm. There’s a whole industry who are already marketing to one particular machine (well, two if you include Bing).
So is there no role for emotional advertising in the future? You’d be a fool to think that, but the more commoditised the product or service the more likely we’ll be to let algorithms do the hard work of selecting, buying and booking. Even with less commoditised goods and services, that growth in data with a layer of intelligence may well play a much more significant role in influencing our decisions.
And once we’ve told the machine our preferences it’s going to become harder and harder to influence change. It’s already happening. Think of your favourites list on your online supermarket. How often do you add something completely new? Less often than when you are wandering down the aisles of a physical supermarket, I bet.
So the future for our industry is going to involve marketing to the machine. It means new approaches, new views on media and technology and a different role for creativity. And it’s coming quicker than we can possibly imagine.
Toby Gunton is Chief Digital Officer at WCRS
James Jefferson, Equator:
The final day started with a taste of the serendipity that everyone at “South-By” keeps going on about. In my hurry to get a seat to see Nick Cave in conversation, I walked into the wrong room.
Robert Scoble came on stage and introduced, not the goth aussie, but Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote.
The talk was a real surprise though. Phil’s clarity of vision for Evernote is a test case for many businesses. He sliced cleanly through management-book jargon in defining his vision for Evernote as a “100 year start-up”: A business that never grows out of its early passion and entrepreneurial spirit.
Easy to say but hard to do – I know from experience as this resonates with our vision for Equator.
The key, according to Libin, is in a simple, direct business model that eliminates customer and partner conflict.
This is what drives Evernote. He described the term ‘disruption’ (another SXSW buzzword) as bullshit; “It’s a side-effect of successful entrepreneurs, not the goal.”
I love this guy!
Rather than aiming for disruption, they aim for coordination. They aim for a non-zero-sum-game at every opportunity. For example, and this is great too, they don’t sell advertising space on the free version of their products as it puts partner and customer in conflict – “On the one hand we’d be asking businesses to advertise on our platform and on the other asking customers to pay us to remove that annoying advertising.”
From here, we raced to Ballroom A with high hopes.
A man, who is actually called Astro Teller, was going to tell us about Moonshots – The work of Google X – Google’s innovation labs.
Like the Glass presentation, the room brimmed over with people and anticipation.
Astro, talked about the importance of impossible, yet impossibly-important ideas. How by shifting perspective you avoid having to be smart enough to solve really complex problems.
They have created an amazing ethos at Google X that celebrates failure (“If you’re not failing at least 50% of the time, you’re not thinking big enough.”) and is committed to creating moonshot prototypes that are likely to be discarded in the final cut.
Unfortunately he went no further than this. No SXSW exclusives or even peeks behind the curtains at Google X. Once again, the Google machine talked about openness but demonstrated quite the opposite. An inspiration but not a revelation.
Apart from quite a few beers to round off the event, this was the end of an amazing second SXSW.
Mind-blowing as usual but with a hint at a future of interactive that’s moving into a very new and exciting phase:
Using big data and sensing technology to make intelligent products that interact with us rather than vice versa.
Using rapid prototyping and funding systems to open and accelerate product development.
Introducing interfaces that are so deeply embedded in our lives and our bodies that they become part of us rather than tools we hold in our hands.
I mentioned in a previous post that this may be the year we see the Web Evaporated – well, watch this space. No literally, watch this space; I’ll come back and write about whether this trend continues at the next SXSW.
So long. Y’all come back now ya-hear!
James Jefferson is the Creative Director and Founder of Equator, a digital-led integrated agency based in Glasgow, London and New York. Follow@jamesjefferson.
So you’re on the plane, you’re flying back from Austin to London, most probably by way of Dallas, Chicago or Houston. You’re sleeping. Your neck aches. Your mouth is gaping wide open.
But what’s going through your mind? What’s your brain trying to decode?
It might be something sensory, such as the meal you had earlier; why the chick peas smothered in curry sauce served with ‘wild’ rice, smelt of PG Tips tea. It could be something emotive; such as the ending to the movie you watched, which unsettled you. Or it might be something arbitrary, like why the flight attendant pushing his trolley was Keith Chegwin’s doppelganger, but had the eyes of a wildebeest trying to wade through a crocodile-infested African river.
Or, it could be about SXSW. Your eyes move rapidly. Your legs, face and fingers twitch, as your brain explores the experiences you had in Austin, the themes of the talks you have been to, and the conversations you’ve been party to. Your brain searches for meaning.
One thing that did resonate was the scale of the ambition of many of the talks.
‘Keep Austin weird’ goes the saying, and I was delighted to indulge the sentiment by attending this delightful discussion chaired by Benjamin Palmer of The Barbarian Group.
I settled back, and nibbled the corner of a blueberry sconecake, pen poised to take notes, and was immediately pleasantly surprised.
Not only was it just a little bit weird, but it was hugely ambitious too! All the ingredients were there for total deliciousness. Sending people to other planets? Check. The word ‘aliens’ being uttered more than once? Check. The word ‘dark energy’ being bandied about, more than five times? Check. What a happy individual I was.
Ok so here’s the wheeze. How do we create the capabilities for sending human brings to another star system within 100 years?
And, when you think that sending people to Mars is difficult enough, the ambition suddenly becomes clear.
The sun is out in full force (and would later burn me to a crisp) but our minds and this first talk of the day are on something a little bit colder, Christmas.
Last year the most requested Christmas present by kids wasn’t an action figure, or the latest Call of Duty, it was an iPad. We hear it quite often, but smartphones and iPads really are changing how we live, love and learn. Sometimes its difficult to see exactly how, beyond being able to check your email on the move. One of the best examples is a video on YouTube called iPad Baby. It shows a baby being able to use an iPad, but confused by a magazine. It’s easier for an infant to understand an iPad compared to a computer, mouse and keyboard because they’re not direct manipulations like a touchscreen. That baby is part of a generation growing up in a totally technology lead environment. They’re called digital natives.
This means trouble for big, traditional toy companies like Hasbro and Mattel. Their audience is disappearing. Instead of going to shops to pick out a new toy, a vast amount of that money is now being spent on the App Store. The global toy market is worth $84b, and videogames $67b. By 2017 videogames will catch up with the toy market. The iPad’s runaway success means that toy companies are now looking to become more digital, and there’s a few companies getting a head start.
“We are gods with anuses” quoted ‘espresso philosopher’ Jason Silva in his SXSW interactive opening day talk. Effectively, our minds have the godlike power to transcend reality, imagining virtually anything. And yet we are trapped in a physical vessel with all its biological and indeed scatological limitations. The rest of his talk was largely hyperbole and he’s basically scared of death, but I figured he was on to something with this statement. And it’s a doozy of a way to start an article.
If we accept that innovation is imagination applied, then the internet is probably the nearest we have got to demonstrating this godlike power. Don’t roll your eyes, bear with me… we have a problem with language and perception around ‘the internet’. I don’t just mean the web, I don’t mean cyber space that ‘other place’ we visit when we sit down in front of our PCs, I don’t even mean just the increasingly portable version we carry ‘round with us in the smartphone. Behind all these resides the internet that networks of networks connected together by common protocols. So fundamental and near ubiquitous, we are beginning to notice it more by its absence than its presence. And we are entering a fascinating new stage. In the words of the amazing Ping Fu, CEO of Geomagic we are making the digital, real and the real, digital. This blending or augmentation is the constant behind the key themes of this year’s SXSW and we need to consider them in this context and in the context of each other or else they are in danger of sounding like the latest collection of disparate geek buzzwords.
Wearable computing is something that sounds silly. I struggle to escape the image of schoolkids in the 80s wearing casio watches with 50 pointlessly small buttons on them. But we are at a point not just where Google is about to take wearable computing mainstream with Glass, and possibly Apple with the iWatch, but where the geeks are actually contemplating how stuff makes you look. You know shit got real when geeks are thinking about fashion rather than star trek
If you’re going to wear your tech you need a way to interact with it. This year’s South By winner was undoubtedly Leap Motion – a cheap but mindblowing device that offers super accurate gesture-based human – computer interaction. Ultimately the best interface is no interface. Automatic solutions are a key element of this – a way for computers to serve us in a manner so natural that they become part of the fabric of life – like the sliding doors we take for granted at the supermarket.
This kind of seamlessness requires people and things to be able to sense each other and, ideally, to understand each other. Which neatly brings together two other themes – the mass deployment of sensors and the Internet of Things. These are profound developments too vast to capture here but to make them accessible think toasters and tigers. Internet enabled toasters sound silly but if you share a house with someone who likes to nuke their toast then the prospect of a toaster that can sense it’s me next to it and dial down the setting from 7 to 5 is a win. As for tigers, I went half way ‘round the world to hear a delightful Indian American reference Leicester Tigers rugby team. They use jerseys embedded with sensors to predict and prevent injuries. Which brings us back to wearable computing and no interfaces which brings us back to making the real, digital and the digital, real.
This article was first published on Brand Republic.
Nigel Gwilliam - Consultant Head of Digital. Chef de mission for SXSW. Digital, environmental, cynical. Third time in Austin. Follow @NigelG.
Now that SXSW is drawing to a close, those of you who weren’t there will be spared the deluge of Austin related tweets in your Twitter feed.
Some of you may also be wondering whether you should plan for it in 2014. The past four days have convinced me that its just as relevant than ever.
I’ll admit that I had been wondering whether this SXSW should be my last. After all its not a trivial exercise for a small company to send two people to Texas. One comment I read earlier in the year gave me pause for thought - isn’t SXSW just an expensive social media week?
Social Media week (and similar conferences) is a great event. However, having now come away from my fourth SXSW this is why I’ll be attending my fifth next March:
1 - SXSW is a global meet up. Yes, it’s an American happening, but people come from around the world. And whether they take part in the after sessions partying or not, everyone who I’ve met treats the event seriously and is here primarily to learn and network.
2 - Sure, some of the sessions can be a bit hit and miss. You also see speakers you would never encounter at a standard social media conference.
In the space of 24 hours I heard John Densmore of the Doors talk about how he was sick of being told to ‘write about Jim’ and so self-published, and Time’s Diana Walker who took that iconic Hillary Clinton dark glasses photo, say that she was originally less than pleased with the ‘texts from Hillary’ meme.
3 - AVG’s director of communities @jas put it perfectly the other day when he called SXSW a ‘glimpse into the future.’ It gives you a flavour of what life could be like if new networks and new technologies were to become mainstream.
Yes, those of us who work in digital and social media could sometimes do with being grounded more in the reality of how most consumers live their lives.
Yet, nothing beats the totally immersive experience that SXSW offers. It focuses your mind and it helps you think of fresh ideas for clients.
For that reason, I hope to see you in Austin next year!
Dirk Singer has been working in the online space since the dial-up days of the 1990s. Currently he heads up The Rabbit Agency (social media agency of the year), and writes about visual social networks at 8mpx.co.uk. Follow @dirktherabbit
The elephant in the room throughout the conference so far has been the question of what Google’s gamechanger - Glass - means for the interactive industry. Today we saw it in action. It was a special moment.
Timothy Jordan from Google did a brilliant job of controlling a packed audience, climbing the walls with anticipation in one of the convention centre’s smaller rooms. Many had joined the previous talk halfway through to ensure themselves a seat.
The demo and tech insights, in my opinion, did not disappoint. The interface, the team at Google has designed, is elegant and simple. Careful consideration seems to have been given to appropriate levels of information, data structures and methods of interaction. There were no pop-up ads to be seen.
The interaction model is based on four elements:
- Timeline cards - a piece of headline content that is time and location linked.
- Menu options - secondary content behind a timeline card
- Share entities - functionality to share with a person or another service
- Subscriptions - the ability to add content into your timeline and be notified about it.
Timothy demonstrated several of the key features live on his prototype Glasses.
- Taking and sharing pictures,
- Commenting on friends’ social feeds;
- Sending and receiving emails
- reading the news
- Integrating with Evernote to transfer content and work on it later on your tablet or desktop.
They’ve thought about the design principles too. Timothy shared of ur principles they see developers working to when creating applications for Glass:
- Design for Glass - quick interactions - headlines rather than articles.
- Don’t get in the way
- Timely - Only show stuff if it matters right now
- Avoid the unexpected
For an early prototype this all looked really seamless. If anything, it looked overly simple. I’d wager it’s been de-scoped a little to get it to market sooner. An example big omission being mapping - using this as a navigational aid is key to this device and none of the demos or code structures hinted at its inclusion.
I, and everyone else, still want one. I got the feeling that if the presenter had dropped his device, 600 drooling geeks would have scrummed to get hold of it. There was definitely the feeling that this was a landmark SXSW moment. Like the first time we saw the iPhone, this was a moment that changes everything. Roll on next year to find out how much.
The Dragonfly
Earlier in the day, I attended a presentation about how to create impact full social media campaigns. Although simply a book plug, the content was great - real clarity on an subject that often comes across as disparate and complicated.
Andy Smith’s book describes four key ingredients for social media success (hence the dragonfly reference - four wings) based on quite extensive research. These are:
1. Develop a clear idea + Identify a higher purpose with a clear action or goal.
2. Reverse the rules - Changing the rules makes it noticeable.
3. Tell a good (truthful) story - People care about human stories.
4. Design for collaboration - encourage others to build on the idea
The Unicorn
As we all know, design education is really struggling to provide students with the skills that ever more agile businesses need. Educational institutions are failing to keep up with the change and have as a whole been slow to engage with businesses to solicit feedback and innovate. Jared Spool and Leslie Jensen-Inman suggested in this presentation, that its because they just don’t care. They are typically focused on awarding the qualification but not bored about what happens next.
Ok, so this we all get. But taking a leaf out of SwissMiss’ book, they’ve decided to build something better. In this talk they shared their vision for The Unicorn Institute. A design school that’s all about collaboration with business. In which students and businesses work together on live projects that run the course rather than stop at theory.
The proposed structure, is for a two-year course made up of blocks of 3 week projects. The project structure looks like this:
- workshop for 2 days - with professionals
- individual project work for the next 3 days
- team project for 2 weeks
All of this will be working in close collaboration with the professional mentors rather than having them parachute in at beginning and end. As a result the assessment will be decided on by the professional mentor too.
For me, this is really exciting. This is an innovative course structure that should give much better opportunities to its students as well as offering the opportunity for business to shape the abilities students graduate with.
Like Google Glass, the Unicorn Institute is a watch-this-space story. I have high hopes.
Oh, and Dennis Crowley from Foursquare and Julie Uhrman were on as well. Both interesting but I won’t bore you any more. Another time perhaps, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.
James Jefferson is the Creative Director and Founder of Equator, Digital-led Integrated Agency based in Glasgow, London and New York. Follow @jamesjefferson
