The greatest hits of SXSW 2013
We came, we saw, and the Oculus Rift conquered. Here's what we found this year in Austin, Texas at SXSW 2013.
Dr. Shaq goes social: SXSW and the future of learning in an AI-dominated world
Remember what it was like in 2009 when you were trying to explain what Twitter was to people who didn’t use Twitter? I used to feel like I was a lifelong Burner trying to explain Burning Man: “You won’t understand it unless you experience it, man.” It was the anti-explanation and everyone hated it including me and then I found Shaq.
It was this tweet, sent out when Shaq himself still didn’t really understand how powerful 140 characters could be, that made Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey...
Death by notification: will Google Glass drown us in data?
Let's face it: we're all pretty horrible at turning off push notifications on our smartphones. You install an app, give it permission to notify you with updates, and before you know it, your phone's buzzing like a beehive with status updates, tagged photos, and friends checking in nearby. The definition of "urgent" is becoming harder and harder to define. According to Google's Timothy Jordan, Google Glass is all about "getting technology out of the way," but if his keynote yesterday was...
NASA rockets into social space, but lacks a clear mission
It was dark and chilly in Austin on Sunday, March 10th, the night that NASA planned to break the Guinness World Record for "largest outdoor astronomy lesson." The cold front had cleared the clouds, leaving the stars bright and stark in the sky, and the 526 space geeks in NASA ball caps and T-shirts didn’t mind the temperature – they were happy to participate, even though the talk was just a basic demonstration on light and color. Some even lugged their own telescopes.
At 8:35PM, Dr....
We are all routers: a new empathetic internet and the orgasmic mediation that fuels it
Flipping through the pocket programming guide for South By Southwest 2013 feels a little bit like reading through an entire year of one of those Joke-A-Day or Far Side calendars you had on your desk when you were a kid in one sitting: you are really not supposed to take all of this in in just one day.
Getting Started With Angel Investing #catvidfest: Is This The End Of Art? What Can We Learn From The Unabomber? Extreme GPS: Limits of Security & Precision Latinos y Mobile: A Silver Bullet? ...
Don't ask me anything: Reddit-critical panel provokes contentious Q&A
Friday afternoon, SXSWi hosted a panel called, “It’s Reddit’s Web. We Just Live in It.” The room was packed. And sadly, as though to prove the title’s point, what might have been a reflective, thoughtful discussion about the massive site’s power and influence – its achievements as well as its flaws and foibles – instead became a contentious Q&A session dominated by apparent Redditors who felt misrepresented.
The three panelists, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, Gawker writer...
Google reveals Glass apps: New York Times, Evernote, Gmail, and Path
We're watching Google's Project Glass developer panel live at SXSW Interactive, and the company's showing off some of the first third-party software integrated into Glass — all using a unified "Timeline cards" interface to position short bursts of useful information in your peripheral vision, and Google's Mirror API to pull down that data. Google's developer advocate Timothy Jordan demonstrated that software on stage, starting with The New York Times. Breaking news can be delivered...
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley: your phone knows if you're a local or a tourist
Dennis Crowley is the man behind Foursquare, the check-in and food recommendations machine challenging Yelp as the de facto place to answer "what should I grab to eat?" Foursquare emerged at SXSW four years ago, and has since grown to 30 million users who have checked in over three billion times. What was once a cool way to see where your friends are evolved into one of the most important sources of data on where urbanites like to eat and drink. Crowley took some time to talk to The Verge...
Samsung designer Golden Krishna: 'Our love for the digital interface is out of control'
Golden Krishna, Senior Designer at Samsung Design America, wants to upend the way we think about user interfaces. "Our love for the digital interface is out of control," he says. "It has become our answer to everything." If he has his way, the future of Samsung consumer electronics might work more like the Nest thermostat, which learns about your favorite temperature, or a Mercedes-Benz automobile, which automatically unlocks when it detects the keys in your pocket.
Zen robots and augmented reality Porta Potties: exploring the 'Other Singularity' with Frog Design
The folks from Frog Design have been throwing the official SXSW Interactive kickoff party for ten years. First it was just a chance for a few nerds to get drunk. Then it got so big, the fire department came and shut it down. Now it's become a sort of high tech art fair meant to spark a conversation about the future of the digital world.
Frog was founded in the Black Forest of Germany, arriving in the States back in the 1980s, when Steve Jobs hired them to work on the design of the Apple...
Banned from the internet for three hours in the middle of SXSW
It was just after 6:30PM on Friday and still light outside when Jeremy Hollander, a Belgian entrepreneur who lives in San Francisco, strolled into one of the high-ceilinged, gold-hued ballrooms at the Hilton Austin wearing a suit and a dark blue yarmulke.
The room was in disarray as hotel employees shook tablecloths over five rows of long tables, placed napkins, and hauled an offending electric-powered water cooler out of the room. They were setting up for the third annual #openShabbat...
Of course Google made a talking shoe for SXSW 2013 (video)
Google has a knack for going big at SXSW. Last year, the company created an entire village near the Convention Center. This year, just outside the convention center, Google has opened a "playground." And what better way to experience the playground than with a shoe that taunts you with a male, British voice.
It's not intended to be a consumer product — the project comes out of Google's Art, Copy, & Code initiative, whose tagline is "Advertising Re-imagined." With an Arduino board,...
Small gestures, big impact: hands-on with Leap Motion's latest games and apps
The last time we checked out the Leap Motion Controller (then known as "The Leap") we referred to it as "a Kinect on steroids." Since then, Leap has attracted an impressive amount of developer support and has announced a full retail launch on May 13th for $79.99 through major channels like Best Buy. We just had a chance to use the final hardware and some of the early third-party apps and games, and frankly, we're still very impressed — but it's still in its infancy.
Oculus Rift at SXSW: is virtual reality the Holy Grail of gaming?
The SXSW Gaming Expo is preposterously loud. At one side of the room, a Starcraft tournament is reaching its climax, but on the other side, one group of guys is yelling louder. They sound like a basement full of adolescents discussing the newest Electronic Gaming Monthly cover story, or like the NINTENDO SIXTY-FOUR kid unwrapping his Christmas present.
“Is the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality 3D headset, the future of gaming?” they ask. “Or, is it something bigger — the future of life...
Watch this: Oculus Rift inventor and Cliff Bleszinski talk virtual reality at SXSWi
We've called the Oculus Rift head-mounted display "the future of virtual reality." But what does that really mean? Perhaps you'd like to hear the answer, live on the air, from a panel of gaming luminaries. At 4PM PT today, you can join renowned game developers Chris Roberts (Wing Commander), Cliff Bleszinski (Gears of War), Paul Bettner (Words with Friends), and the inventor of the Oculus Rift himself, for a live conversation streaming to you direct from the SXSW Interactive festival in...
MakerBot announces 3D 'Digitizer' prototype to scan your world, then print it out
MakerBot founder Bre Pettis today announced the Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner prototype it intends to sell alongside its Replicator 3D printers. The scanner uses a combination of cameras and lasers to scan an object and create a digital file that can then be printed using one of MakerBot's replicators. The company says you won't need any experience with design or 3D modeling software to make use of the scanner, and wants to see it used by businesses, educational facilities, and in the...
At SXSW, the stunts get wilder every year — and more disappointing
At the end of February, a small number of people registered to attend the South By Southwest Interactive tradeshow received a white box stuffed with orange tissue paper and a mysterious object.
"I am intrigued by this thing. I don't know if it’s good or bad," Brooke Hammerling, the founder of the boutique tech marketing agency Brew PR, told The Verge. "I got a mini yam." She paused and called to one of her employees. "What was the company called?"
"YamTrader.com sent...
