Poll: Help Pick My South by Southwest 2010 Schedule

Written by Thomas Trumble
Posted in SXSW 2010 on March 8th, 2010

It’s official. I am going to South by Southwest this coming weekend. I’m not going for the full four and a half days, just Saturday afternoon, Sunday and Monday, but based on the schedule even an abridged trip should leave me exhausted. I’ve gone through the full SXSWi schedule and picked out what seem to be the most interesting and applicable events to create my own schedule for SXSWi, but it’s an impossible one. There are just too many interesting things taking place at the same time.

So I’m opening this up to you, my friends, colleagues and anyone else who happened to stumble across this blog. Since my goal of attending SXSWi is to gather information and ideas for our work together, and of course I’ll be blogging and twittering it all, it seems to make sense for me to ask you what you would like to learn about, what events you are interested in and then I’ll attend those. My picks from SXSWi are below. Select as many as you like and I’ll attend the most popular.

Saturday, March 13

The Ten Commandments of User Experience In this presentation we will explain how following the Ten Commandments of User Experience can boost your project's ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.
User Experience Design Deliverables: Expert's Choice Which of the myriad of user experience deliverables are most effective for capturing the design concept, process, and vision?
Does My Sh*t-Talking Really Help Your Brand? Is social marketing successful if people talk about it? What really makes social media successful... and what doesn't.
Reality Check on Augmented Reality AR seems to be the next big thing for marketers and advertisers. But how does it work and can marketers make it work for them? Showcase of current and upcoming technology.
What Can Carl Sagan Teach Us About The Web? 2010 is the 30th anniversary of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Not only is his explanation of our universe relevant today, it can teach us a great deal about how to create better websites.
Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity The SXSW Interactive Festival is very excited that danah boyd, one of the world's foremost authorities on social networks, will serve as the Opening Speaker for the 2010 event.
Mobile Technology: What's New, What's Out, What's Next? What's hot, what needs to be changed, and what the future for creating engaging experiences for consumers on their mobile phones.
Is WordPress Killing Web Design Leading creatives from the world of web design debate whether CMS tools have made designers lazy, and created a new set of design conventions that designers feel obliged to follow.
That Game Feels Nice: Tomorrow's Touch Interfaces a unique client/developer presentation about the creative concepts, technical challenges and future promise of touch-based user interfaces for both gaming and productivity.
Uprising Tide - Inciting Online Communities into Offline Movements Tech community instigators from New Orleans discuss how to create an organic net-roots movement that upends traditional power structures and galvanizes your community.
Ze Frank Conversation: The Creative Lifestyle Too often we focus on the latest trendy technology meme or e-commerce scheme and forget that the Internet is really a sandbox for engagement, fun, and participation.
Booze Blogging: Liquid Conversation explore the relationship between bloggers, bartenders, and brands while discussing how technology has influenced their discussions.
Connecting the 'Dots' to Create Successful Global Brands Getting serious about the international market is a lot trickier than just running your site through Babelfish. Hear from start-ups who are successfully building their global brands.
Engines of Sociality: 2010 and Beyond The transformative technologies and paradigms on the horizon in 2010 that will power the new augmented sociality, including the social filtering, personalization, and contextualization of real-time messaging.

Sunday, March 14

Accessibility: What It Is For and Where It is Going? The basics of web accessibility and the WAI-ARIA principles for accessible rich internet applications. Discussion of the current model for assistive technologies and scalable options.
Extending Your Brand? There's an App for That Applications can extend conversations and perceptions of a brand, as well as add to discussions and ideas. How can applications help your brand be more authentic, genuine, user friendly, and fun
How Social Media Can Destroy Your Business Model Social media can certainly hurt companies from a marketing perspective, but vulnerabilities exist in every area of an organization's business model. Risk mitigation strategies are essential.
Conversation with Michel Gondry Filmmaker, artist and musician Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind) sits down with KCRW's Elvis Mitchel to discuss his remarkable body of work and his latest film.
Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To! How to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control.
Your Design Process is Killing You Designers and developers are efficiency experts for our clients, yet we struggle to provide that expertise for ourselves and how we work. Learn how to collaborate and craft an effective process for teamwork.
Augmenting Maps with Reality With the recent tide of location-based apps, maps are emerging as the gateway to socially exploring the world around us. We'll explore the rise of maps as a social platform and it's potential beyond.
Web of Things - Connecting People and Objects on the Web WoT is a vision of a Web with more devices than people on it. We extend the Web to the real world by enabling devices to become physical Web resources.
Design, Collaboration, Pokemon: How Not to Offend People Globally How do you design your online experience to meet the needs of customers from Taipei to Toledo? How does culture influence design? Tips on designing for global markets.
What If Your Phone Had Five Senses? Live demos of new mobile hardware (could your phone really be replaced by AR glasses?) and what developers and marketers will be able to create with these new tools (speech recognition, computer vision, etc.)
Cross Device Accessibility: Is This For Real? Does the one-size-fits-all approach of "One Web" meet the needs of all users and complicated web content? Strategies for improving accessibility across devices and solutions such as geolocation.
CrowdControl: Changing The Face Of Media Or Hype? A discussion about the new media democracy, citizen journalism and the wisdom of the crowd. The panel will discuss core tenets of this theory and how it is affecting digital media.
Is Innovation Fair? Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, discusses the impact of social media and technological innovation on culture, society and economic justice.
The 10-Minute Transmedia Experience Transmedia experiences are stories played out across multiple platforms (web, mobile and environmental) are going mainstream. What are the techniques to constructing an immersive, compelling experience?
David Hewitt (Sapient), Dennis Crowley (Four Square) & David Gelles (The Financial Times) David Hewitt (Sapient), Dennis Crowley (Four Square) - in conversation with David Gelles (The Financial Times) - Mobile Applications
Extreme Makeover: Profile Edition Get a Profile Makeover from a top beauty blogger, have your picture taken by a noted fashion photographer and finish it off by having a Social Media Expert tweak your bio.
Interactive Agency Workflow: Design and Development Process An in-depth look at the interactive process from sales and contracts through design, development and deployment. Archetype employees talk about their roles in the process.
Is Technology the Great Equalizer? Is technology the great equalizer or is it disguising another truth? This panel will explore that question and reflect on the experience, perspective and vision of the panelists and its relevance in our world.
It's Time to Save the World with Design Thinking Design thinking makes information and products better. Often, we address only the symptoms of society's big problems. Design thinking helps us see why problems happen, so we can create solutions.
Wow, That's Cool... Fun With HTML5 Video Mozilla will show the best and most interesting hacks entered into OVA's Open Video Contest-because when the webmonkeys unleash their creativity, things get interesting.
Improving Social Media With Live Streaming Video Where does streaming video services fit in social media? Learn about what been achieved by employing live streaming video as the core of a social media platform.
Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery Search cab be an amazing challenge for designers. We'll explore a pattern language for search that embraces user psychology, emerging technology, social media, rich interaction, and mobile.

Monday, March 15?

Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online Conventional wisdom calls us attention-deprived, constantly seeking the next scrap of info. But Google reveals our true desire: Context. How must journalism and media adapt?
What Does Corporate America Think of 2.0? Do mainstream companies get Twitter? Are executives in non-high tech industries embracing social technologies and the communities that form on top of them, or are they scared to death?
Making Content Relevant To Me, Here And Now In a world where content is available anywhere, at any time, users will consume more content if relevant and personalized... based on location, time, entourage, tastes and mood.
Web Series 2.0: Big Campaigns on Digital Dollars As social media campaigns move to the forefront of the digital space, savvy producers and content creators must learn how to produce fantastic content with digital (read fewer) dollars.
The Life Graph: You Are Your Location Bridging the gap between cyberspace and reality, the "Life Graph" will revolutionize how individuals interact with the world around them: predictive recommendations with rich local content.
Social Business By Design With the hype around social media organizations are feeling pressured to "join the conversation" or risk being irrelevant. However, a "social business" has to be designed from the ground up.
Work In Advertising And Sleep Well At Night Ashamed of your profession? Learn what happens when brands and people have an understanding around each other's credibility, care, and congruency. Trust is fostered annd a sustainable relationship for
Augmented Reality - Gimmicky Trend or Market-Ready Technology? In this panel we'll explore the promise of AR where it is today, where it's going, and how the technology could add real-world value beyond entertainment and marketing.
Jaron Lanier Presentation
Augmenting Maps with Reality With the risee of location-based apps, maps are emerging as a gateway to socially exploring the world around us. We'll explore the rise of maps as a social platform and beyond.
The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions Usability? Meh, persuasion. Are you designing serendipity, arousal, rewards and other seductive elements into your applications? Leverage basic psychology to motivate and shape online behaviors.
Best Practices for Contextual Applications We now interact with content across more devices than ever before. We'll review technology trends impacting application development and best practices for cross-platform design and development.
Products vs. Users: Who's Winning? In the war for who owns your experience, your data, and your brand the conflicts a war has erupted online between Products and their Users: who is winning? And who will be claimed the victor?
REPO MEN: Extending a Movie's Narrative Online REPO MEN Director, Miguel Sapochnik, Wired "Vanished" writer Evan Ratliffe and Double Barrel Motion Labs CEO Jeff Krelitz discuss extending REPO MEN into the virtual world.
Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends We've got social networks and we've got search engines, is social search just the combination of the two? Learn what social search is and what it isn't, who's working on it and getting it.
Web Accessibility Gone Wild This session presents a wide variety of mistakes, blunders, misconceptions, over-indulgences, intricacies, and generally silly aspects of modern web accessibility.
Video Search Optimization Strategies To Grow Your Business Due to video sharing sites and universal/blended search results, online videos are a growing trend for businesses looking for a more creative way to enhance their online brand recognition.
Breaking it Open: Open Source Consulting Models We'll explore open source models for developers, ad agencies, etc. What does "open source consulting" look like? How do you sell your services if you're giving away your intellectual prop
Web Video: Can We Now Say Something Sucks? Online video has become a legitimate medium, but has it evolved where we can successfully critique it? How do we encourage new creators to contribute while establishing quality standards?
Evan Williams Keynote Interview Williams has co-founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, the now ubiquitous social media platform that hit its tipping-point at SXSW in 2007
Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms Thanks to the success of Wii and iPhone, people are more familiar with interaction paradigms that go beyond keyboard+mouse. We need to embrace gestures, accelerometers, sensors, and more.
Choosing Offline Activities in a Time-Deprived Lifestyle How we spend our time offline is extremely valuable. With so many events it's our job to give users the best choices. How do we know they are finding the events best suited to their needs
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our (Real Life) Social Networks Our real life social networks drive and shape virtually every aspect of our lives. These connections have an evolutionary past. What will be the impact of online social networks?
Convergence 2010: Ten Cool Things That Could Happen This Year Our panel will guide you through 10 digital predictions that will affect us all in 2010. What's next for social networks, augmented reality, mobile, digital out of home advertising,
Twitter Indispensable Tools Seminar This panel features the founders of the "indispensable" Twitter apps discussing the creation and use of key Twitter applications and providing inspiration for other Twitter developers.
"Mikey Likes It!": Does the FTC? This panel will explore the FTC's recently updated Endorsement Guides and the landscape of liability thereunder for communications over social media.
Customer Support in a 140 Character World Does customer support via social media work for everyone and can complex customer service issues really be resolved within a 140 word limit? This panel will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly.
Email: The Next Frontier Email is the killer app of the Internet, but we have a love-hate relationship. Innovation is coming in the form of mashups, plugins and other tools, to help carve out value propositions for us.
Life After Wii Fit: Geeks on Fitness A bunch of cyclist/runner/triathlete/fitness-oriented geeks, approach staying active and having fun. Tips on how to track progress, compete with friends/contacts, stay motivated and find like-minded folks.
Social Games Level Up! Beyond Farmville & World of Warcraft What does it take to build an MMO that everyone will play? Can you teach Farmville fans how to play an MMO? Or get devoted World of Warcraft players passionate about a social network game
Transmedia Storytelling - Creating Stories That Work Over all Platforms Stories are expanding through different screens, surfaces and spaces. This panel will introduce the issues around these media experiences and analyze some examples.

Just one caveat about my attending events. There are so many interesting topics being covered at any given time that if the event I’m at turns out to be a dud or it’s clear that I’m not going to get something out of it I’m going to make the call quickly and bail for a different event. There’s just too much great stuff there to spend a worthless hour in a conference room.

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4 Responses to “Poll: Help Pick My South by Southwest 2010 Schedule”

Debra White, on March 8th, 2010 at 1:10 pm Said:

i wanted to go
Thomas Trumble, on March 8th, 2010 at 1:22 pm Said:

I’ll be blogging and Twittering aplenty. Hopefully it will feel like you were there a little.
Donna Megquier, on March 8th, 2010 at 6:08 pm Said:

Ahem – I believe the plan was to figure out a way for both of us to go.
Thomas Trumble, on March 8th, 2010 at 11:08 pm Said:

D – If you can get down there you can there’s a hotel floor with your name on it.