March 2008
42 posts
The SXSW Bristol/Texan Team
Welcome to the South by South West Interactive Festival scribbles and thoughts of Mike Bennett of Bristol Media, Benjamin Hostler of Beef, Hazel Grian of Licorice Media, Andy Parkhouse of Team Rubber and Clare Reddington of iShed. Our mission? To head to Austin, Texas and research new business opportunities, spot emerging digital trends and explore what Bristol can learn from one of the...
On reflection...
Whilst balancing a cup of tea on my new cheese baby I got to thinking about what we experienced and learnt during our trip. SXSW truly is a great conference/festival/party. From the spot on organisation, great facility (Austin Conference Centre is really, really, really big) and the varied presentations and keynotes all made this a memorable and inspiring event. And that’s without mentioning...
SXSW rocks
Still suffering from jetlag and an overload of cheese (Texas is not a vegetarian heaven) I thought I would scribble down some points about the Festival. Dan Taylor sums up it up in nine words: “Wi-Fi, Queue, MacBook, Shiner Bock, Twitter, Walking, Ribs, Lacygate.” Replace ribs with cheese and I pretty much concur. Reasons why SXSX rocks: Festival organisation From picking up of...
Some things we learnt for a Bristol festival
The city doesn’t have a large convention centre like Austin. Instead we should use the harboursude as a Festival campus, making use of venues in close proximity and outside areas. Programme lots of parties (rather than just one a night) Awards make people turn up Vary the size and format of the sessions,but make clear whether you are attending a keynote or an open space Provide, free...
When it didn't (rock)
With the over use of the word rockstar (Too) many ‘next big social network’ ideas Too much queueing for parties Not getting into Moby session coz the room was too small Missing the facebook showdown that caused much news coverage Futurologist session replaced by crap performance artists giving a fake eulogy for Dirk Diggler in a ‘hilarious’ end of Festival jape.
10 Tips For Managing a Creative Environment
Managing a creative environment is tough. Creativity can be an intensely personal, time consuming and elusive process. It is made even tougher (sometimes) by clients, budgets and large teams. The guys from Adaptive Path interviewed organisations where the creativity has to thrive inside a very defined and time sensitive environment where there has to be a well oiled team dynamic else things will...
Growing Pains
I decided to take a look today at a series of business related ‘core conversations’ (a format where 4/5 different panel talks/debates take place in a large room, a bit like “Open Space”). Subjects included “Growing Pains”, ”Start-up Management”, to “Keeping your team motivated, productive and happy and “When to Sell Up”. So many choices… Core Conversation - “Growing pains - Your Web Company’s...
5 things (well, lots actually) elite designers...
Core Conversations - James Reffell, Design Director at Yahoo brought a collection of big printouts of designers he’d taken in his studio looking very “designer-y” and had the audience, about 60 people, come up with stereotype phrases like “I am the designer and I said the design is right” and “well it works fine in safari”. James tapped into his LinkedIn contacts to get contributions from...
You can see our photos at flickr →
How to create a great design team
Edited highlights: How measure success? Happy clients, designers, great output Your designers sometimes need to make clients nervous (ask hard questions, push them our of their comfort zone) How often and early clients WANT to bring your team in to discuss ideas, rather then just sending your team a completed briefDesired skill set? People who “go all the way” and do what’s necessary, as...
Games a more effective way to learn stuff
There are currently 30 companies in the UK working in Serious Game development. What are serious games and why should you be using them? Digital 2.0 is a serious games consultancy. They don’t have in house developers however, they work with the client and manage the project. They support developers by providing the people needed by small developer companies. Digital 2.0 present Serious...
How Can Games Be Used For Teaching?
A panel of games designers and academics this morning discuss using ‘serious gaming’ to help people learn. They were referring to ‘video games’ and only mentioned Alternate Reality Games very briefly when one of the makers of World Without Oil asked about it. This showed that there is still very little understanding of ARGs and their potential as a learning tool is still...
Engineering happiness
Interactive designers are in the happiness business, designing services and experiences which improve people’s lives. Today’s keynote is from ARG queen Jane McGonigal. Despite her worry there would be less excitement than previous day’s sessions, she delivered a great talk on how ARGs are helping to define a new type of happiness. Presenting happiness as the new social...
Phizzpop - a digital design showdown
We headed out last night to see the final of Phizzpop - http://phizzpop.visitmix.com/ a digital design challenge that pitches the creative and technical teams of 5 leading digital agencies togther from LA, New York, Austin, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago. We headed to Maggie Mae’s a huge multi level bar donwtown, to see how each agency would tackle their final 15 minute pitch. It included a...
Big Market - casual games for girls.
Casual Massively Multiplayer Online gaming is not only a mouthful of words it’s also very, very big business and success is to be measured by the level of engagment experienced by the users and not by large numbers of click throughs. What constitutes immersiveness with casual MMOs? Any place where a number of people gather online and there’s some kind of loose game structure and the...
trackstick - track your location →
World's Top ARG Producers Sit Around The Table
So yesterday was my best one yet! I sat at a small round table with some of the coolest and most creative people in the gaming world. A step towards turning Alternative Gaming into an industry distinct from the video gaming industry. The business model? Funding from clients and not subscription. Amongst those attending our cosy chat were Steve Petersof 42 Entertainment (The Beast etc etc!) Jane...
http://sched.org/ →
Genius web calendar app being used for SXSW. This year’s twittr apparently.
postsecret
Post Secret is a simple concept that invites people to share secrets anonymously by snail mail. The results are shared on a blog, and published in books. It’s a great idea, a great project. Part of the discussion around it touched on how free web tools make this possible. This publishing power is amazing, and amazing tools support it. One thought that stayed with me after the event was that...
“Dude, where’s your revenue model?”
– Phrase of the day
As a self-effacing Brit, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer optimism and enthusiasm of 5,000 Americans who all seem to have a web app to promote. Dig a little deeper with some of these guys though, and you find there’s a lot of optimism, and not a lot more. Their commitment to their idea appears total, but after a while you get the sense that there’s only a single dimension to their...
Bootstrapping through collaboration
With so many small businesses starting up without funding, this panel set out to explore how collaboration can help. Interesting and appropriate stuff? You would hope so, sadly the obvious anecdotes from the panel focussed on the tiny and the banal. They do have funny accents tho and we got cool stickers.
and the winner is
The UK did well last night at the web awards, with Preloaded winning Best of Show for Launchball. The winners were: Activism – World without oil Amusement – Elf yourself Art – Viscosity Blog – Passive Aggressive Notes Business – Wikinvest CSS – Ficlets Classic – Wired Community – Flock Educational – The Story of Stuff Experimental - MetaNotes Film/TV - Animoto Productions Games – Launchball...
Goodbye Tiny Screen?
A panel on how mobile interaction can be more useful and intuitive in future and how outside the US there are some interesting developments in this area. The main thrust of mobile devlopment is to get us away from peering into the tiny screen and getting stuff which is actually useful and relevant. The panel agreed that the lack of uniformity of the mobile platform causes great barriers between...
ARG wins award
Hurray! The Alternate Reality Game ‘World Without Oil’ last night won the award for Activism here at SXSW Interactive. Made by a team headed by ARG supremo Jane McGonigal, World Without Oil invited a couple of thousand people to become citizen journalists in this imagined senario. The website holds the archive of all the user generated content created for the project and is a great...
Keep Austin weird
Strange things happen in Austin. On the way to the web awards last night, hundreds and hundreds of American starlings started to gather in the sky above us. “We-ird” said a nasal american woman, stopping us on the street. “They look totally like birds”. Er yes. Keep Austin weird started on car bumper stickers and is now the city’s unofficial slogan. It is everywhere...
Mondays schedule
10am: The Art of Self Branding 11.30am: Designing for “Oh No!” 3.30pm: Ten Tips for Managing a Creative Environment 4.30pm: SXSW Clicks: Interactive Designers (networking event)
A Big future for Alternate Reality Games
I’ve been making Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) for 2 years and finally this week I am able to say with confidence that this is what I do. The interest in ARGs as a new artform was reflected here at SXSW Interactive with a dedicated panel discussion. The panel members included Dan Hon, ex-Perplex City now of 6toStart and Dee Cook, an ARG writer/designer who I believe worked on World Without...
“It is okay to think about the future, just don’t write it down or you lock...”
– Ricardo Semler
Words of wisdom from 37 signals
You make money by helping other people to make money. Spot the chain reactions - be the catalyst Always ask - Why are we doing this? What problem are we solving? Is this actually useful? Are we adding value? Will this change behaviour? Is there an easier way? What is the opportunity cost? Is it really worth it? The worst thing on the internet is bad copy. Read your websites aloud. Make your main...
SXSW reading list
Maverick!: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (Harperbusiness Essentials) by Clayton M. Christensen The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E Raynor
“What is your cookbook? Empire are built by sharing, this is what all the famous...”
– Jason Fried of 37signals (makers of basecamp)
10 top things - Saturday 8 March
The variety and scale of the festival (see Benjys earlier post) The organisation (picking up our passes was amazingly quick for a festival of 6000 people) All you can eat breakfast at the Embassy Suites LED flashies as the google party Queues at dorkbot (so many dorks) Creative economy session and our new consultancy business The hideout cafe Friendliness (everyone is so easygoing) Laptop...
Are you geocurious?
Notes from the Geolocation panel: Location can be fuzzy, relative or absolute but the important thing always is to start with the experience. NEVER the technology. Although saying that the panel did seem pretty excited about the prospect of the iphone getting GPS. With four speakers and a mic problem it was hard to stay focussed on this panel, but there were lots of new examples of location based...
The scale of things
One of the most interesting things I took from today was the scale of things it takes to make these things special - from watching Jason Fried of 37 Signals talk to 2000 people, down to a really inspiring and affirming discussion about running a small web company that was literally 30 people around a table. Fantastic. I also ran into a friend - Dom, Creative Director @ Tak!. It’s a small...
We're here!
After what seemed like an endless journey (which wasn’t without it’s comedy moments), we’re here in Austin - and as Clare’s picture below shows it’s a glorious day (although deceptively cold). We’re all about to head off in a minute to register and gear ourselves up for the days ahead. There is so much on it’s difficult to decide what to go and see,...
“For me, the highlight of SxSW Interactive was the Dorkbot event on the Saturday...”
– Gareth Mitchel, BBC World Service. As an overlord(!) of dorkbot bristol, I am very curious to see the SXSW dorkbot in action. Watch this space.
Bristol Media article on SXSW trip →
“A group of the city’s leading creative entrepreneurs from the digital and music sectors are heading out to the world-famous SXSW (South by South West) festival in Austin Texas this week.” That’s us and we are off to the interactive festival on Friday.