Keynote: Tina Roth Eisenberg

Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss), creator of design blog SwissMiss, temporary tattoo site Tattly.com, and Creative Mornings, inspired the SXSW crowd to follow their passions on the side in order to reach success and fulfillment

She came from a small town in Switzerland to New York to Austin to present to an audience larger than her hometown.

Tina’s 11 Rules To Live By
1. Invest your life in what you love

2. Embrace enthusiasm - “no one looks stupid when they’re having fun” - Amy Poehler

3. If you find yourself complaining, you either do something about it or let it go (Tina saw her daughter’s shitty temporary tattoos and decided to create Tattly)

4. Trust and empower your team
5. Experience > Money
6. Surround yourself with likeminded people - Studiomates has a camaraderie where everyone is surfing the same wave
7. Collaborate - launched Tuexdeux based off a convo about To Do apps
8. Ignore haters - haters gonna hate. “There are people who build things and people who tear them down. Just remember which side you’re on.” - Sharon Lee
9. Make time to think and breathe - “wonderful things can happen when your brain is empty”
10. If an opportunity scares you, take it.
11. Be someone’s eccentric aunt

Closing thought:
“Whatever you are, be a good one.” - Abe Lincoln

Idea Orphans

#IdeaOrphan

This American Life’s Starlee Kine (@starlee) related her ideas to the little orphan Annie, just leaning on a windowsill waiting to be picked up and taken care of.

During a TAL segment, Starlee interviewed Phil Collins and talked about the inspiration for some of Gensis’ best work, which came after a divorce that was finalized on his birthday. The moral of the story was not to let go of bad things that happen, but actually turn them into something creative - get those orphans out of your head.

Illustrator/Animator/Writer Arthur Jones showed his story-telling illustrations that depicted peoples fears and problems.

An idea can rot. If you don’t do something with it soon enough it just won’t work any more.

Elon Musk is Going to Mars

Elon Musk is Going

Photo Credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE via Compfight cc

Yesterday we talked about the fact that innovating isn’t as easy as it used to be. As the pace of technological progress continually accelerates, the shelf life of our brands’ competitive advantages shorten accordingly. And as the value of a company’s internal knowledge depreciates, their continued success starts to rely instead on their ability to innovate quickly, and repeatedly.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, doesn’t take much interest in the debate at all.

Which isn’t to say that he disagrees with the argument. But in his own words, he has little patience for incremental innovation. Musk is the founder and figurehead electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors and commercial spaceflight firm SpaceX. And as his startups (if we can call them that) will attest, he’s only interested in starting a company if it can do something “substantially better than what came before.”

Which is to say that he is not interested in competing at all. He wants to build companies that are so radically beyond what is available in the current market, that he can develop it in a minimally competitive market.

Private spaceflight has been a pipe dream for decades, and Musk’s SpaceX is the first company to achieve it at scale. Sure, Richard Branson’s space tourism program is off to a good start, but it has a finite purpose at present: to send small groups of people into space for short periods of time. Musk must find it silly.

SpaceX, for its part, isn’t interested in the glamour of space travel. They aren’t appealing to millionaires with a desire to briefly experience weightlessness. Instead, they’re trying to bridge the gap between what our public spaceflight program could accomplish with the Space Shuttle, and the very real possibilities that exist for mankind.

As Musk remarked, we’re at a pivotal time: for the first time in 4.5 billion years, our lifespans are long enough to get us to other planets. And he won’t rest until we’re on Mars.

Yesterday, he discussed SpaceX’s plans to build reusable rockets that dramatically lower the costs of space travel. A few days ago, they initiated one of the first launches of their new rocket technology, which Musk showed in a short video during the keynote:

It’s one of several specific space products they’re developing today, including the Dragon 2 capsule which can return to earth in a targeted manner - unlike the capsules we’re used to which parachute to earth and land in a general geography, the Dragon 2 can land with the accuracy of a helicopter. Why? Because it sounds like something we can all use. Not because there’s a competitor, or even because there is a clearly defined balance sheet that shows the ROI of hyper-accurate, self-landing space capsules.

What the hell will we do with such a technology? Musk’s thought it through, and you or I can think of a dozen ways it will change the world around us. Which leaves only one thing to do. Build it, and find out.

Not exactly the typical words of a C-suite executive.

by Zach Pentel

The REAL Future of Porn

“IM GLAD THAT WHILE YOU COULD BE DOING AL GORE, YOU DECIDED TO DO ME”. - Cindy Gallop

FRONT ROW AT ‘THE FUTURE OF PORN’

I thought I would be fine getting to Al Gore an hour early. Wrong. The line spanned the entire length of the convention centre so I quickly re-evaluated my options. The Future of Porn? It’s certainly an intriguing topic and I thought it would surely be interesting. And it certainly falls under the bucket of Art & Inspiration, right? I had zero expectations.

What actually unfolded in front of me (in the front row nonetheless, because you know, as fate has it I couldn’t get a seat to Al Gore but I got front row to the porn one) was the most refreshing argument and point of view that I have heard in a very long time.

It wasn’t as the name might suggest, a bunch of porn videos. It was a bold entrepreneur named Cindy Gallop, the founder of makelovenotporn.com - a website that publishes real world porn videos submitted by users. The site has just come out of beta but the initial success of it has led to makelovenotporn.tv - a porn channel.

The conception of the site was an interesting story. Cindy opened by saying she loves having sex with younger men. But what she was baffled by was their complete false perception of what women want and what sex should be like. In getting to the root of this, she learnt of the amount of porn young men watch. She learnt of how much it deludes their sense of reality because, lets face it, porn is not real life. It’s a false environment where women’s bodies are one shape, men’s Crown Jewels are a certain size and women orgasm in three minutes.

When I started thinking about it and the more Cindy talked, the more it became apparent that the falsity of porn has a lot to answer for. Condoms are non-existent, women are degraded and violent behavior is promoted. The average age of someone who first views hardcore porn is 8 years old. This is their first experience of sex. And this is where our generation are learning sexual etiquette from?!

PROBLEM: PORN IS OUR GENERATION’S SEXUAL EDUCATION.

Cindy’s vision for makelovenotporn.com was to solve this problem. It is to be part entertainment, part education. Its model is social by design - content is crowd sourced, moderated for any inappropriate content, and posted. Viewers rent a video for $5, of which the ‘real life stars’ get 50% of the cut. Viewers can rate videos, curate their own playlist…you get the picture. But the power of the site is redefining the misconception sex. It is being used as sexual education in schools and by parents who don’t know how to approach the topic with children. It’s showing people that hey, condoms don’t need to be awkward and this is how women should be treated. And of course, a few people are finding some pleasure from it too.

I loved this talk for its brutal honesty, for its fresh perspective and for someone opening up the conversation about something that is so taboo but yet, is one of the most important parts of our lives! Its something businesses and people have shun away from for so long and avoided talking about. As Cindy brilliantly remarked, ‘It’s not that porn degrades women, it’s business that degrades porn’.

What I took away from this talk isn’t really about porn at all. It’s that changing behavior that is deeply embedded requires a new perspective. It means understanding the absolute core of a problem (to Cindy it wasn’t that young men had bad sexual habits, it was that their only form of education was porn), and addressing that. And as much as technology has created these misconceptions, it’s also the most potent tool is changing them.

For anyone who wants to view Cindy’s highly regarded TEDTalk, you can view it here (WARNING! EXPLICIT LANGUAGE!):

http://blog.ted.com/2009/12/02/cindy_gallop_ma/

Leap Motion and the Disappearing Interface

#leapmotion

David Holz and Michael Buckwald, uber-geniuses and co-founders of
Leap Motion, took the massive SXSW auditorium crowd through their journey in creating their breakthrough motion gesture based controller. Think of the Microsoft Kinect, but for your computer.

Holz started the QA with WSJ’s Jessica Lessin by stating: What’s holding back computing is the limited ways in which we use them.

Holz then demoed the Leap Motion controller for the crowd by molding a piece of clay into a a weird head, all through a couple swishes of his hands. With only centimeters of movement, his fingers controlled the entire screen.

So how is Leap Motion continuing to blossom?
It’s the users that keep the innovation coming, which bring in more users and so forth. Right now there are over 12,000 developers working on Leap Motion, out of over 50,000 applications received,

Where can Leap Motion technology be used beyond the PC?
Tablets, phones are obvious next steps. But imagine the applications for Industrial services, remote surgeons, clean rooms, etc. They also plan to make it compatible for future devices which don’t exist yet.

How can Leap Motion compete with Apple, Microsoft, Google and the other big guys who are rolling out competing technology?
By focusing on buildinging the developer community and earning their loyalty.
Motion sensing is useless without the content that goes with it, and you need an ecosystem of great developers to create it.

Where is wearable technology going and how does Leap Motion get involved?
By making the sensors smaller and cheaper. Today they are doing the best that can be done, but there’s an exponential increase of the world catching up with technology, and that will enable them to make next leap (PUN ALERT).
Leap Motion has plans to get small enough to go anywhere.
Buckwald asks, “Why should someone have to press buttons on their body? Why can’t they just make natural gestures/movements?”

Regarding bringing intuition to computing:
WYSIWYG - no menus to worry about.
Forget menus and buttons, let’s use natural human movements.
People value creation and inspiration more than consumption, and LM is enabling them to do more.
Kids will be able to understand quantum physics and the movements of subatomic particles because now they can play with them and feel how they move.

You can pre-order your Leap Motion foday for $79.99.

Designing for User Generated Chaos

#UGChaos

A panel of developers assembled today to drop some UGC knnowledge. Here’s a breakout of what we learned, via specific examples from sites and apps.

When creating a site or app, how do we solve the cold start or blank page?
Pinterest has randomly selected images with an endless scroll. You’ll also see this in some music sites.
Lanyrd.com imports identities and profiles from your other networks, and lets you mirror those social circles. They also create “shadow profiles” for high profile people who have never logged into the site.
Path gives new users in-app tutorials on blank state screens to help people fill out their profiles, understand the features and enable Path to get their user base active.

What are some incentives we can use to encourage users to create GOOD content on our sites and apps?
LinkedIn gamifies profile completion by encouraging user to get to 100%.
Tumblr increased the ratio of creators:consumers by inventing “reblogging” function which enables you to take somebody else blog and repost it as yours - and make it socially OK.

How can we facilitate the navigation of UGC and pros and cons of folksonomies?
Taxonomy = a fixed, top-down hierachy. Folskonomie = letting the people tag and decide what is what.
Wunderlist sticks with a standard UX familiar to specific phone users, so their value can stand out with new buttons.
YouTube enables contextual exploration at the end of every video, no matter where it is embedded.
Apple App Store, Chrome Web Store force you to search by categories, but those categories are tagged by the app creators themselves.

How to deal with spammy users and profanity:
Flickr keeps a troll score on every user, and makes their site experience really slow and unenjoyable. They also hide the trolls’ comments from everybody except other trolls. A PARALLEL TROLL UNIVERSE.
Mixcloud limits the rates of comments and tells the trolls to chill out.
Branch, Discourse float the best comments to the top and reward good behavior.

Handing over control to moderators and admins:
Stackoverflow has a points system that lets you level up to unlock authority and features, a pure trust measure.
Hype Machine (hypem.com) curates the most hyped songs across music blogs. The bloggers write to admins on hypem begging for their blog to be featured.

How to balance what your users want vs what you want:
By importing their analyzing their tags - algorithms help too.
Construct a feedback loop that highlights favorite content.
Leaderboards work too as long as people can’t game it.