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Aqueduct
This year’s SxSW interactive festival was bigger than ever - over 10,000 delegates, with up to 10% of that figure from the UK and there was definitely a buzz in Austin. But, where were the really BIG ideas at the event that previously catapulted Twitter and Foursquare to prominence?
It could be that the well is simply dry – that the big ideas have been had, and we’re entering a new era where the thousands of 'engineers' will take over from tens of 'inventors' and will set themselves to the painstaking task of improving, pixel by pixel, what we already have.
It is important to note at this point that world changing new ideas are not the only point of SxSWi. In the gigantic programme there is a lot about content... a lot about ‘social for good/social for change’ (boosted by the eerily apposite timing of Kony2012); there was Al Gore’s and Sean Parker’s sell-out presentation… and a lot of highly detailed sessions around niche skills and interest areas, such as ‘digital health’, ‘technology and fashion’ ‘financing’ and so on.
But, what of 'new'? What about the headline making ability of this greatest show on earth?
Not for the want of wanting
Photo by matt-lucht.
From lunchtime on Friday, the opening day of the interactive stream, Austin caught a fever. With the nightmare of a half-a-mile registration queue done, the first keynotes, panels and workshops could be attended. Expectations soared as it dawned on everyone that "we’re here!"… here where it happens, here where ideas that were incubating suddenly explode into the mainstream and make rock-stars of their founders - like they did for Biz Stone and Sean Parker (who, incidentally, both appeared here later in the week). It’s excitement central.
FOMA, TTSE and a secret shared
Of course, there’s a massive collective interest in this festival being “amazing” once more. After all, someone’s paid a fair whack for each attendee and it’s better for everyone involved if that wasn’t a Texas turkey of a decision. A frenzied day of FOMA (fear of missing out) and TTSE (trying to see everything) ensues. All the coffee bar chat was “cool this” and “awesome that” but, by the end of day two, a tentative, “I’ve been a bit disappointed with the panels” and “haven’t seen anything really, you know, new” was met with agreement and not derision.
JeremyJet is near you
Of course, there are themes and movements but it’s debatable how really new they are. There’s ‘location driven social amalgamation’ – the Banjo and Sonar genus of app-brands that promise to tell you who else is in the bar that likes restoring camper vans (or whatever your sugar is). Is that really new? Certainly, you’ve got to be an evangelist to say it works now, there simply isn’t the critical mass of users behaving similarly and the burden of set-up is pretty high - log in with Twitter, Facebook, Google and the others when you’re ready.
Careful you don’t miss the show tweeting about it…
Then there’s the GetGlue and GroupMe set, building intimate second screen communities around traditional entertainment products, but weren’t they all here last year? Certainly they’ve gained some users and some investment from the big entertainment providers like Showtime and MTV. The panel I saw never talked about the future and only really discussed how they had got to where they were, with GetGlue’s marketing director barely able to offer anything other than “so we did this really cool badge thing”. It then hilariously descended into a stand-off between the audience and the panel when the latter steadfastly refused to offer any metrics at all from their ventures despite repeated requests from the floor – not a user number, not a budget, not a growth %... nada, niente, squiddly dit.
Can Datatainment break new ground?
All this meant that the session Aqueduct was involved in featured rather higher up the scale of innovation than we had imagined (vested interest declared obviously). UK Digital Person of the Year 2012 (at the Dadi’s), Richard Ayers, sometime playmaker for Manchester City FC, presented a session about what he calls ‘datatainment’ – the not yet conquered art of turning sports stats (think Opta) into entertainment. Though it was 9am on a horrifically wet Saturday morning, there was standing room only for a presentation that built the case for doing to possession statistics what TopGear has done for televised MOT’s! I’m pleased to say there were positive murmurs when the creative prototypes were shown. Even this can be seen as an enhancement - a step change to those geeky sports sites (EPL Index, ESPN Gamecast etc) that currently only appeal to the most obsessive anoraks.
Bring on the enhancers
So if there were themes in the NPD vein, they were largely about ideas that need to get better to get massive: Like amalgamating the many different social platforms so users have real-time contextuality to the communities they belong to for instance. Or developing self-organised second screen communities that are ‘mass’ but ‘micro’, or getting Opta stats to make housewives laugh.
It struck me that at some point long ago, a now forgotten Egyptian has the idea to create the mother of all burial monuments by stacking several Mastaba on top of another. In Saqqara they produced a prototype that was refined with the employ of hundreds of architects and millions of labourers to create monuments that would really blow your Pharaoh’s socks off. It took centuries of small advances in technique and a lot of tenacity, but didn’t require grand conceptual radicalism.
And so it goes (as Kurt Vonnegut would say). Making things better is the new inventing things and now that there are tens of hundreds of thousands of hipster geeks to work in the digital quarry, we can set about the painstaking job of building, pixel-by-pixel a better, more usable, more relevant, more blow-your-socks-off digital future. It’s a very big task, but, as anyone who was in Ray Kurzweil and Lev Grossman’s amazing and packed out keynote (Expanding our Intelligence) will tell you, there is the will... and there is the most important tool-set of all - our motivated, networked intelligence.
Let’s roll.
