SXSW Interactive, a Recap

I’m just back from South by Southwest, a 10-day interactive, music, and film conference and festival in Austin, Texas. I’ll get into more detail later, but I’m giving several conference recaps to various constituencies. As I work through my round-up, I’ll be adding to my notes and blog here.

A brief overview of South by Southwest

Companies from the finals of Accelerator that I thought were cool.

News-Related Technologies:

• The Fun Framework for Mobile Sensing (Funf) Project: An open-source set of functionalities to help collect, disseminate, and understand mobile data.
• Ushahidi: an open-source software for information collection and visualization.

Social Media + Social Networking:

• Thirst Labs: Uses natural language to grok meaning from status updates and social data
• Hoot.Me: A Facebook application for developing student-led tutoring sessions

Mobile Technologies:

• Condition One: This company created an embedded video player for the iPad that allows people to pan and scan (amongst other things) with the environment
• Scrible: Allows you to annotate, research, and share on web pages
• Viztu Technologies: Lets you create 3d images using 2d technology

Entertainment Technologies:

• Wemo Media: They created a shared, virtual ocean that is being created by individual animators
• Grandstand: A platform that turns social and mobile actions into games and visualizations

Health Technologies:

• Medify: A search technology that allows people to sift through medical data to return relevant bits of information related to their health questions
• Simplee: A Mint.com for medical records
• Vital Clip and Ginger.io: Each seek to use mobile applications to track and deliver data to individuals related to their health care to help prevent relapse injuries.

Panels About:

Big Data:

• Big Data for Everybody: Help Liberate the Data Serf
• SXSW Stories 2012: Big Data Will Be a Trend (by me!)
• The Year Big Data Became Intensely Personal (news)

Transmedia and Transmedia Storytelling

• Creating the Code: A BBC Transmedia Story
• Top Chef: How Transmedia is Changing Television
• Would Anyone Miss You: A SXSW Transmedia Experience
• Live the Game: A Lifestyle with a Gaming Sense
• Multiplatform Storytelling: Frontline War Stories

Education and Education Themes

• SXSW Education Panels: This may give you a sense of what companies are working in this space, and what people are talking about regarding education and technology.
• Build a Massive Peer Learning Community Online

Books, Publishing, and Literacy:

• Publishing Models Transforming the Book
• Storytelling Beyond Words: New Forms of Journalism
• Get Lit: Why Story Matters
• Crowdsourced + Collaborative Story Writing
• Next Stage: Cinematic Storytelling + Journalism

Augmented Reality:

• Augmented Reality = ARPA’s Original Vision of the Web
• Marvel Announces Augmented Reality App, Exclusive Digital Comics at SXSW (news)
• The Potential for Augmented Reality in Education (2011 panel)

Marketing:

• Everything You Need to Know about B2B Marketing
• The Promise and Pitfalls of Real-Time Marketing
• The New Hollywood: Building Celebrity Brands Online

Non SXSW-related thoughts:

Museums:

• You Are There, the Indiana Historical Society
• Transmedia Indiana, with the Indiana State Museum (Project Overview video, an early description of the project video)