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The Brunner Creatives weigh in on what they learned at SXSWi 2010.
Archive for the ‘South by Southwest 2010’ Category
What do you see?
I don’t blog, I rarely tweet, and sometimes I kinda Facebook. And I definitely don’t Foursquare or Gowalla yet (unless they are having a party, then I Gowalla all night long). Facebook was barely mentioned. Twitter was talked about until the CEO gave a keynote, that, well, had an opt out of around 40%. How did they plan to make money again? Here at SXSW, everyone is using foursquare and Gowalla’s location based socializing tools to find out what’s going on. My not-so-early adoption could be the reason the few parties I went to were all outside, in the rain.
After 4 days of sessions, meet-ups and introductions, I feel like the whole experience has been an illusion. Everything is so intangible. VC money is flowing again, even though nobody seems to know how they are going to make a profit. Why is the money coming in? Because somebody has to fund these exploratory start-ups, and the first one to find a way to monetize the internet wins. That is, if the internet needs to be monetized at all.
Imagining User Experiences
Then there is the design discipline, which I always find engaging. Only one session I attended on design actually showed any design. And I’m glad most didn’t. I think we’re pretty much there when it comes to the power and value of good design. We know it works, and we use it well. That’s why the idea of design fiction captured my attention. Imagining possible future scenarios for our clients businesses as well as our own might be entirely necessary to survive the rapidly changing cultural landscape.
Context was a common thread, the when and where of making things work in the right place at the right time (maybe design fiction can help us out here?). Dj Spooky , a seminal recording artist in the sampling and remixing world, is changing his game. He’ll soon lose his turntables, and attempt to take his art where it hasn’t been before. Everyone can be a dj (and a photographer, and a film maker, and a reporter etc.) so he’s embracing this cultural shift, and has created an iphone app to bring djing to the masses. He’s embraced this change ahead of the curve in hopes of surviving as a relevant artist. We know that digital tools have changed the creative landscape dramatically. The effects on our culture have been, and will continue to be great. So let’s be ready for it, even lead it.
“All the old ways are crumbling. Everything’s ridiculous. Devolution is real. No one owns it anymore.” - Devo. Their ironic take on major label marketing and social networking was in step with their classic satirical social commentaries. Mother LA is their agency, and the presentation they gave was hilarious, from the ridiculous use of focus groups to determine what the most user friendly color for the Devo energy domes should be, to data-driven-product-design for the band. “What’s interesting about this approach is we haven’t sold anything yet. We need to gather data to determine what the product should be.” Other funny tidbits: “We were always Lego lyricists from the beginning.” about having lyrics crowdsourced, to “Chatroulette is more devo than DEVO.” Their entire presentation may have been an illusion.
“Kinda sorry I missed #brucesterling at sxsw - sounds like he was disasturbating all over Nerdvana once again…”. From the final keynote speech twitter stream of Bruce Sterling, futurist. He spoke after I began writing this, and boy, did he blow up the illusion big time. “We’re basically networking while Rome burns” about both the state of our nations financial crisis, and global warming. When he spoke about the state of the internet today he said “None of us is on top of our game. The game is on top of us.” Clearly we have some thinking to do, morally, socially and culturally.
I make things. I like to see artifacts that look like the work we make day in and day out. I’m used to being fed tutorials and how-to’s. So wrapping my head around the SXSW experience has been a challenge. But the illusion is real. The ideas are everywhere. And I think I just might be able to apply some of this thinking in a practical way back @Brunner. Peace.
More answers to our two favorite questions.
We lost an hour to DLST as we started the sxswi Sunday converstaion (a conversation whose participants have increased by 40% from last year). I moved through the day - Gaming the Crowd - a panel on the future of engaging learning tools. A session with artist Michel Gondry and his remarkable blend of technology, inspired handmade sensibility and his love of family and his willingness to explore how that defined him as an artist and a person in his work. An online advertising discussion with Jim Coudal and John Gruber. A presentation from the founder of Ustream on live streaming video and ‘The Power of Live’ to enhance traditional or social media platforms. I listened to the BRUNNER piece of the conversation through tweets, sharing sessions, hallway connections and our dinner discussion of the day’s events. And I realized that the inspiration, energy and knowledge had given us that hour back and many more. The day, the entire sxswi experience, propel us forward in time to imagine what’s next and how to get there as individuals and as an agency.
Saturday at sxswi 2010
Each day here, as always, is a remarkable experience. How could it not be when engaged in an open, passionate conversation with several thousand motivated participants. Certainly Mobile and to a somewhat lesser degree Social Media were hot topics. And ‘Viral’ may have won the ‘The buzz word that must be eliminated from the lexicon’ award this year.
Yet the heart and soul of the conversation, whether defined as audience, fan base or consumer, was how do we truly connect with our fellow man. From Danah Boyd’s Keynote address on Privacy and Publicity - Using the privacy debacle of Google Buzz as an example of Who We Are being so much more powerful than any technology that doesn’t understand us. To the Online Art of Ze Frank and his ability to create amazing emotional connections that demonstrated to me the power of those same technologies to enhance our live’s in fundamental ways. Inspired and energized by yesterday’s conversation I can’t wait to see what today brings.
Blame it on the fact that SXSW is the first multi-day, totally immersive conference I’ve attended since I went to HOW in 1998, but being here has gotten me thinking alot about professional development. It’s an issue that our association clients in particular have been challenged with in the past two years as budgets have disappeared and the technology for other alternatives has improved. That’s because they are often the content providers for PD opportunities. But I would suggest that it’s an issue for everyone, because professional development is one of the greatest total compensation benefits a company can offer its employees.
I started my post-collegiate life at an association, working events like these and trying, as part of the communications department, to get people to “attend and send.” Many of the benefits of these events haven’t changed since then. But I think our (read: the pursestring holders’) perception of their value may have changed. There’s a sense now, with vast communities of thought available to us at the end of a URL, that there’s no reason to wait — not to mention pay — for that once-a-year experience.
So, in defense of professional development given by and for our clients, and as a thank you to the folks who put my name in for what is turning out to be an amazing conference experience, I want to list a few reasons why conferences should remain a part of every company’s PD efforts.
• A group of people you’d never meet otherwise. Even with social media, your circle is limited. Asking friends and co-workers, or checking my trusted online sources wouldnt’t have led me to the handful of new people I’m now following on Twitter because I have things to learn from them.
• Re-igniting your passion for what you do. This hit home with me in yesterday’s session “The Revenge of Editorials” and this morning’s “Why Keep Blogging.” Seeing people who do what I do, who are doing it well — it gets me jazzed. Having employees who get out of bed in the morning eager to do a kick-ass job has got to be worth its weight in gold.
• Stepping back from “do” to “do better.” There’s a theme emerging already at this event of focusing on craft. The pace of pretty much every industry has gotten to the point where it’s easy to go through the motions. It takes more than a lunch hour on a teleconference to break out of your rut. And you walk away from events like this not just with the desire to do better, but also with some pretty good ideas on how to do it.
• Cash equals care. Yes, conferences are costly: airfares, hotels, registration fees, etc. But when you, as an employer, make the commitment to spend that money on ME? That means something.
• It doesn’t end here. Everyone who attends or sends someone to an event like this should be thinking of ways to maximize and extend the experience of it. This blog is an example of that. Sharing information with other colleagues upon your return is another. And, of course, returning to those notes and key takeaways weeks or months after you jotted them down — better yet, making them part of your standard process when you return.
We spend the first 20 years of our lives being immersed in the value of education. And then we get good jobs and promptly stop learning. That’s an exaggeration, of course. There is on-the-job learning, learning by doing, and the continuing education that we give ourselves by reading and talking to others. But every once in a while it’s good to go back to that old fashioned sort of learning: sitting down with a group of your peers, listening to those who know something you don’t, taking notes, asking questions and growing in the process.
Mar
13
Consider that $899 flatscreen on your living room wall. In a few years will it still be a television, or will it merely be a screen hooked up exclusively to the internet where you can access your stored media (housed locally or somewhere in the cloud)?
For some of the attendees at SXSW, it’s a perplexing question, one of thousands being debated here at the interactive festival. But for Mark Cuban (he of Broadcast.net, Dallas Maverics, Magnolia Pictures and HDNET) and Boxee’s CEO Avner Ronen, those are fighting words. The two media heavyweights went nearly toe-to-toe at one of Friday closing the day’s sessions to the delight of 500 fans and the cyberazzi clicking away from the first few rows.
The staged tête-à-tête was actually a re-match, if you will, a resumption of hostilities between Cuban and Ronen late last year on a chat room debating cable TV’s dominance despite its shrinking penetration.
The jabfest Friday was part AV Geek Debate, part professional wrestling weigh-in and part “you’re mama’s so ugly …” smackdown. Except in place of “your mama,” insert “your business model is so screwed, I’ve lost more money in a day than you could hope to make in a whole quarter.”
The argument comes down to a few salient points, one of which was made repeatedly my Mr. Cuban: “In an a ‘la carte world, the cost to create, produce, distribute and market content via internet is unsustainable under any business model.” Coming from a person who made his first billion selling off Broadcast.net to Yahoo, that doesn’t make Cuban a hypocrite as it does make Yahoo a patzee.
Ronen of Boxee on the other hand blames greedy content providers and their billionaire enablers like Cuban and Comcast that perpetuate the strangelhold on household penetration and true net neutrality that will allow all of us more freedom and lower costs in selecting video entertainment content through the web. His company Boxee, which is commonly lumped together with HULU in articles, develops cross-platform freeware with a 10 foot user interface and built-in goodies like social networking tools that have to this point around 1 million subscribers.
Watch the video. It’s not pay-per-view, but it could’ve been. Cuban is always a delight to everyone not wearing a referee’s uniform
My highlight was going up to him during an unexpected building evacuation break. Mark’s a jeans and t-shirt guy who actually went to the high school where I live (Mt. Lebanon). We reminisced about the town and he was aware of the recent high school renovation, as well as the proposed pricetag.
“What, is it something like $113 million?”
“No, Mark. It’s exactly #113 million.”
“Wow, that’s a lot.”
“You know you could do a lot for my taxes and get a the Mark Cuban gymnasium and media center named after you. What do you say?
“No, I don’t do that.”
“Save me taxes?”
“No, put my name on anything.”
He missed the point, or at least avoided it. The same bobbing and weaving he continued the next 60 minutes with his worthy, but overmatched adversary.
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