Making the Rounds @ SXSW

Editor's Note: Lynn’s SXSW report yesterday came in on Texas time, so we’re running it today. The interactive folks are beginning to join the long lines at the Austin airport today, while the music portion of the festival starts heating up. (And speaking of heat, sunny and in the 70s in Austin today!) The overall consensus from the show is that unlike previous years, there was no new big thing announced. What got the most buzz? 3-D printing perhaps, and Leap Motion, a technology that enables you to interact with a screen that reacts to movement, and no touch is necessary.Also unlike some previous shows, it was said, everything was well organized and the sessions were well curated. As a first-timer, I have no basis for comparison, but I certainly found lots of thoughtful and interesting content. I found myself drawn to some of the many sessions on creativity. I trekked all the way to the Hyatt to hear Gordon Walton and Richard Vogel talk about “Creative Clusters: Fostering Creative Environments.” Unfortunately, they got sidetracked and instead of giving their prepared presentation, wound up answering questions from the audience, so I learned more about how to keep the geeks in town and less about how to foster creativity among my colleagues and my readers. (I did hear about the “Keep Austin Weird” campaign, however, and saw the tee shirts in the airport. Didn’t buy one.) He did mention Richard Florida’s book "The Rise of the Creative Class" so I’ll check that out.In another much more useful creativity session, Von Glitschka, who runs a multi-disciplinary design firm in the Southwest, talked about the value of drawing as part of the creative process. It’s an appealing idea, even for those of us with artistic skills that are slight or non-existent, and it’s backed up by some compelling data. Glitschka says, for example, that we can communicate 65% more effectively when we use visuals to accompany a presentation. You’re more likely to remember what someone said when they accompany the information they present with graphics that illustrate and support their points and make them more memorable. 75% of our brain’s processing skill is visual, he says. “Drawing is the way our hands talk,” and “our hands are an outward facing tool for what we see in our minds.”Draw every day, Glitschka urges. Doodling is not a waste of time, in fact it improves our memory and our recall skills by 30%. I find this to be a very compelling case. (Perhaps my next column will be illustrated!)Another speaker in the area of creativity was Scott Belsky, a popular SXSW repeat speaker, author of "Making Ideas Happen" and creator of the blog 99u, who spoke about the process that led to the founding of his company Behance (recently acquired by Adobe) and shared some of his insights. His goal: to help connect and organize the creative world (a world made up, in this case, largely of creatives from the advertising industry). Belsky asks: Is the web verticalizing and isolating itself? In other words, when we find, and stay in, an online community, as inspiring and supportive as that can be, are we losing out on the “discovery and innovation that can happen in overlapping communities?” He exhorts us: “Host the overlap and your will prompt innovation.”As far as his take on innovation, Belsky recommends one “be motivated by problems worth solving,” and choose “love over money.” He says, “a weekly salary is an addiction” and a deterrent to innovation. Tough words, but they contain truth.And speaking of innovation, I had a nice chat with Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association and author of "Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses." Shapiro will be a keynote speaker at our show, the Publishing Business Conference & Expo in NYC September 23-25, where he’ll share insights into what we can learn about coping with digital disruption from other industries, and he’ll talk about how to “innovate or die.”And connecting back to big launches that may or may not happen at “South by,” four years ago a certain app named Foursquare debuted at the show, and this year Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley came back for an interview in front of a packed auditorium. He talked about the gaming aspect of the site, saying that it’s now being downplayed, whereas back in 2009 it was mainly used as a means to get people to check in. What he has that he thinks is most valuable is new data about where people are and what they are doing. The misperception they must correct, says Crowley, is that Foursquare is about gamification. What is it really? “A local search product.”Foursquare started iOS only and now their Android version is “a little ahead of” the iOS version. They have 30 million users now, their demo is expanding from the original late 20s demo, moving down, to include college kids, and up, to include their parents. They’re moving into other countries/languages (Japan, e.g. and “Brazil is big!”), and they’ll be preinstalled on the new Blackberry 10. Foursquare is not just for hipsters and city folk anymore—watch out y’all!

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Making the Rounds @ SXSW

Lynn Rosen

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Lynn Rosen