By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University
The South by Southwest Interactive Conference & Festival is more than just a social and media technologies conference. It’s an experience. More than 15,000 people descended upon Austin this year (its eighteenth) to attend more than 250 panels and keynotes, browse the Screenburn Arcade, visit the Trade Show and attend the countless parties and networking events.
As a member of the Advisory Board and an 18-year attendee, I’ve watched the conference morph and change over the years, reflecting the evolution of the technology world. SXSW Interactive has moved from the developer and programming centric businesses and towards the social and media created businesses (that rely, of course, on the developers and programmers). However, the Geek Spirit still rules the roost in Austin. (For instance, more than 800 people lined up for a panel on analytics.)
To help capture the spirit of innovation and thinking for Tech Meme, I decided to forgo the normal panel and keynote recaps. Instead, I spent five minutes with some of the smartest people I know and asked them one question: In the media sphere they operate, what’s the most interesting thing they see.
What follows are their unedited responses. I hope you enjoy.
JOURNALISTS
Evan Ratliff, Writer (New York City, NY)
Ratliff is a freelance feature writer and in 2010 he was nominated for a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for his amazing piece, “Vanish,” that appeared in Wired. He’s a brilliant guy (so brilliant I can’t tell you the coolest project he’s working on) with interesting ideas about long-form stories.
Shane Richmond, Head of Technology – Editorial, Telegraph Media Group (London, England)
Richmond is in charge of developing editorial products at The Telegraph, a national paper in England. A trained journalist, Shane became the defacto community manager for The Telegraph before taking over the role of managing the community outreach teams.
Eric Hellweg, Editorial Director, Harvard Business Digital (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Four years ago, Eric took over the online operations of the Harvard Business Review. His charge: help overhaul the print business, preparing it for the digital transition. Within the last year, the site and magazine were re-launched, and they are now poised to move forward with a modern publishing process.
WRITERS
Andrea Phillips, Alternate Reality Game Writer (Long Island, NY)
Phillips was one of the writers on the Alternate Reality Game Perplex City, a complex story created by Mind Candy (and the esteemed Hon brothers, Adrian and Dan of Six To Start). She thinks deeply about story, narrative, technology and interactivity.
Nina Steiger, Writers’ Center Director, The Soho Theater (London, England)
A few years ago, Nina was charged with finding ways to integrate emerging technologies into the theater experience. A writer and artist at heart, though, she was adamant that the traditional experience of theater not be changed. She set out on an exploration of how the “art of theater” might expand, change and morph to include emerging technologies.
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATORS
Travis Kalanick, Investor (Los Angeles, CA)
Kalanick is one of the original founders of Scour.com, the first popular file-trading network. Different than Napster, Scour allowed people to transfer audio, video, images and any kind of file. Of course, it ended up in the same litigious spot as Napster. But Kalanick took the idea of Scour and transformed it into Red Swoosh, an edge-of-the-network delivery system eventually purchased by Akamai. Now, he’s an angel investor and world travel. (Side note: There’s a special appearance by Gary Vaynerchck as well.)
Brian Zisk, Co-Founder, Collecta (San Francisco, CA)
Brian is a serial entrepreneur. He helped Jenny launch the Future of Music Coalition, but that’s just one of dozens of ventures he’s been involved. He helped launch Greenwich Radio and Ogg Vorbis, an open source alternative to MP3s (which is one of the reasons MP3 compression remains free). These days, he’s working with Collecta, a real-time search and widget application.
Toby Padilla, Vice President of Mobile for TweetDeck
Toby is the recently-hired VP for Mobile strategy at TweetDeck, the desktop application that helped move Twitter from an interesting mobile experiment into a full-fledged information system. The “social media” dashboard enables users to search, update and archive Tweets and Facebook posts. More importantly, Padilla knows how people use this tool, giving him great insight into emerging trends.
Tim Malbon, founding partner, Made by Many (London, England)
Made by Many builds custom publishing platforms, creates media on that platform and manages the community for companies. Most notably, they built The Telegraph’s platform for social media and blogging. Full disclosure: I edited about a minute from our discussion because I asked him a question about a platform the company built that isn’t public knowledge because they White Label their work. Rest assured, it’s awesome.
Michael Adamson, Vice President of Sports New Products and Services, Turner Sports, (Atlanta, GA)
Adamson is in charge of developing new products for Turner Sports, which recently has involved examining the ways in which people interact with sports information on mobile platforms.
Stephanie Frost-Rocca and Eric Wolf, Zero-G Creative (Atlanta, GA)
Frost-Rocca and Wolf work for Zero-G Creative, a digital advertising agency that targets small businesses. The two recently published a book on marketing for small businesses, Marketing Unmasked (http://marketingunmasked.com/), and they also have a podcast, Gravity Free Radio (http://gravityfreeradio.com/), to go with it.
FUNDING
Jenny Toomey, Program Officer for Media and Cultural Policy, Ford Foundation (Washington, DC/New York City, NY)
An accomplished musician, Toomey may be best known for starting the Future of Music Coalition, an independent musician rights organization. Over the years, she’s been actively involved in health care issues for artists, copyright legislation, low power radio and other “access” issues. Now, she’s in charge of a grant program through the Ford Foundation that seeks to fund groups working towards ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access and Net Neutrality.
EDUCATION
Sarah Krueger, Marketing Specialist, RGK Foundation at the University of Texas (Austin, TX)
The RGK Foundation is a collegiate philanthropic organization that seeks to fund ideas college students have to change the world. A marketing specialist for the grant program, she uses social media to reach out to college students around the world.
Brian Sheridan, Professor, Mercyhurst College (Erie, Pennsylvania)
I met Brian a few years ago after giving a talk to the regional conference of the Society of Professional Journalists. Since then, he’s been working on teaching his students emerging technologies and storytelling techniques to better prepare them for life in the digital age.
Brad King is an assistant professor of Journalism and an Emerging Media Fellow at Ball State University. He is also on the advisory boards for South by Southwest Interactive and Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press.