Salon.com > SXSW

Danny Boyle: “Trainspotting” sequel is back on

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:45:00 +0000

The buzz out of Austin this afternoon is Danny Boyle's SXSW Film Festival talk with the New York Times' David Carr (more on that later). The filmmaker unveiled some footage of his new mind-bending heist film (which we've seen mind you, and it's very good), "Trance," starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson, discussed his filmmaking career and his ongoing musical collaboration with Underworld's Rick Smith.

Much more exciting however, is our interview with Boyle this afternoon. Drew Taylor spoke to the director in Austin and all the projects the filmmaker has brewing are quite tantalizing.

The man with the 3-D-printed gun

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:37:00 +0000

Before I saw Cody Wilson, the University of Texas law student who wants to give everyone in the world the power to 3-D-print their own AR-15 assault rifles, I had him pegged as no more than a run-of-the-mill Texas gun nut. I'd watched some of the videos he had produced to promote his efforts to 3-D-print high-capacity ammo magazines, and found his provocations mostly juvenile.

But when I saw that he was speaking at SXSW I knew I had to see him. As I've written before, open-source 3-D gun printing is where the values of the information-sharing Maker community smack head on into the life-or-death political realities of gun control. When music became software, copying music became effectively impossible to stop. The same principle will hold true when guns become software.

In Austin, where hacker libertarian values flourish under the Texas sun, I figured Wilson's talk would be a hit that I couldn't miss. My first surprise: The huge Grand Ballroom on the sixth floor of the Hilton was only about one-third full. This might have had something to do with the inexplicable decision of the SXSW organizers to have Wilson speak at the same time as a panel on "The Future of 3D Printing." But the real surprise came later.

Nick Cave instructs SXSW in phone etiquette

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:59:00 +0000

As the SXWX Interactive tide starts to ebb, the Music festival is beginning. Internet geeks are departing by the throngs, replaced by considerably more fashionable musicians. And on this day of interspecies mingling, Nick Cave came to town and talked about his life for an hour. Standing room only, obviously.

His conversation turned out to have nothing remotely to do with technology, except for one cathartic moment.

As soon as Cave walked onto the stage, audience members began to raise their phones and tablets above their heads to take photographs. This being the last day of SXSW Interactive, well, let's just say that there were a lot of devices.

I have seen the future of retail and it looks like an Oreo

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:06:00 +0000

When B. Bonin Bough leaned toward the microphone in a standing-room-only meeting room at 9:30 Monday morning, his voice crackled as if his lungs were clearing out a pickup truck's worth of rusty nails.

"Sorry," he apologized. "It was a long night last night."

It was only the first of multiple occasions on which Bough, the V.P. of Global Media and Consumer Engagement at Mondelēz International, sparked raucous laughter from the crowd. I don't know if I'd normally expect an audience that came to hear a panel on changing demographics, retail sales and ad budgets to be so approving of late night carousing, but that, I guess, is SXSW in a nutshell.

Once his voice cleared, Bonin proceeded to show why there wasn't an empty seat in the house with his incisive analysis of how social media, mobile technology and personalization data were remaking the retail landscape. As he did so, he solved a minor mystery for me: Why Oreo was such a huge presence at SXSW 2013. Yahoo and Esurance, sure. Pepsi and Doritos -- they're everywhere, all the time.. But Oreo? At a tech conference?

The politics of Austin’s rickshaws

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:14:00 +0000

When night falls on SXSW, festival attendees hide their badges and explode across the downtown area in search of food and (lots and lots and lots of) drink. Think Mardi Gras without the beads, or perhaps hell opening up its bowels (mostly on Sixth Street). Legions of conference goers who have spent their days listening to panels on copyright and the future of free porn abandon all semblance of nerd decorum and spend their remaining conscious hours frantically trying to force their way into dozens of overcrowded private party-hosting venues.

And everywhere, the roaring drunk are ferried across town by chariot.

Wait, no, I mean pedicab.

It's old news to veteran SXSWers, but immediately striking to anyone new to town. Bicycle-powered cabs are a fixture downtown. Twenty-four companies operate pedicabs. As of last summer, reports the Austin Monthly, there were 341 permitted cabs and 955 authorized drivers. There's even a company called "Metro Rickshaw."

Grumpy Cat reigns supreme

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Every single day, rain, shine or howling wind, patient throngs have waited hours in line outside a tent next to the Austin Convention Center for the chance to spend a few seconds getting their picture taken with Grumpy Cat.

Just writing that sentence makes me question my chosen career, but it's hard to argue that one of the breakout stars of SXSW 2013 is the cat with the frowny face who became an Internet sensation last September.

I've seen a lot of pop-cultural Web sensations rise and fall in my day, but I have never seen people wait two hours in the spitting rain for the chance to be photographed next to a sleeping cat. There may be something profound to say about the state of our culture from Grumpy Cat's stunning cultural hegemony over SXSW. Something about how the inexorable future of media will be an increasingly desperate and frantic struggle to create and exploit memes. Or something about how dogs just can't cut it when it comes to generating monster pageviews. Or something about how Grumpy Cat's impact on 21st century civilization suggests that we are all living lives of irritable dissatisfaction with, well, just about everything.

“How 3D printing changed my life”

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:08:00 +0000

John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, was in one big exhibit room talking about conscious capitalism. Guy Kawasaki, legendary Silicon Valley marketing whiz, was in another huge space, talking about the future of Google Search with an esteemed Google Fellow. Half an hour before the sessions were due to start, long lines to get into both presentations stretched like lazy serpents throughout the cavernous Austin Convention Center.

I skipped them both, and I'm glad I did. My favorite session yet was a 15-minute-long mini-talk by a guy named John Biehler: "How 3D printing changed my life."

Biehler is a hobbyist. He didn't have a company to pitch or a world-changing ideology to share. He just wanted to tell his story, how he ordered a kit to build a MakerBot 3D printer a couple of years ago, and became completely obsessed with making stuff.

The room he spoke in was small but packed with attentive, appreciative listeners. If there's anything that can reasonably be discerned as a theme of SXSWi 2013, it's that hardware is the new software and making real things is the bees knees.

Making sense out of SXSW chaos

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:03:00 +0000

SXSW is chaotic, too big for its britches, confusing, and overwhelming. There are long lines for everything. There's no possible way to grasp the entirety of the thing: at every juncture, multiple competing events scream out to be must-attends. When the crowds spill onto the streets after dark to assault the bars, it feels a bit more Lord of the Flies than meeting of minds.

So if you are fond of the contemplative life by Walden Pond, it's not for you. But if you like bright lights and the big city, and are willing to submerge yourself in the flow, like a salmon swimming upstream against the rapids into the rush of a snow-melt-fed mountain river downpour, you'll be fine.

With any event that metastasizes to this level, there's always an undercurrent of naysayers whispering sellout. This is not wrong. The corporate entanglement that reaches through every nook and cranny of SXSW makes the gathering seem like the second coming of COMDEX, the legendary computer expo that used to be the 800-pound gorilla of the tech sector social season. When you see bicycle-powered pedicabs rolling by with ads for Game of Thrones and Google and Oreo, or venture into one of the huge tents in which watered down drinks are handed out in exchange for the opportunity to mingle with a bunch of corporate communication specialists, it can be a little dispiriting.

How to remember Aaron Swartz

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Do not mourn Aaron Swartz. Instead, be radicalized by his example. Such was the message at a Friday evening townhall memorial for Swartz, the open access activist who killed himself January 11.

The panel included Taren Stinebricker-Kauffman, Swartz's partner for the last year and a half of his life, a period in which Swartz faced prosecution on charges that he had illegally downloaded as many as four million documents from the online academic archive JSTOR, Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, Timothy Wu, a Columbia law professor, Jennifer Lynch from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others who had worked with Swartz and shared his values.

The panelists attacked Swartz's legacy from different angles, but their message was clear. Yes, the legal system is broken. Yes, the political system is broken. Yes, progressive change is incredibly hard. But change is still possible and small steps count.

Booty call in China, made easy

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 18:01:00 +0000

At a panel on mobile gaming in China, the panelists were asked near the end of the session their suggestions for the most popular non-game apps. Much mention was made of WeChat, a superpowered chat platform that apparently can do everything except slice bread.

Henry Fong, the exceedingly well-informed CEO of Yodo1, a leading developer and distributor of mobile games in China, held up his phone and shook it.

"One thing you should know is that WeChat has a booty call function," said Fong. "If you shake your phone, everyone within five hundred meters of you who also shakes their phone will show up on your phone."

Fong also mentioned that by the end of this year there will be about 500 million smartphones in active use in China. That's a lot of booty-calling.

Embracing South by Southwest’s shameless hucksterism

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:45:00 +0000

Hunched over my phone while waiting for my Southwest flight to board, I stared at the Twitter feed as if it were an alien code, just beyond my ability to crack. I was pondering a stream of tweets with the hashtag SXSWi, trying to figure out a plan of attack for my very first visit to the legendary Austin festival. What Cannes is to the film buff, South by Southwest Interactive is to the Internet geek.

Or so I've been told. SXSW does a lot of self-mythologizing. As a total noob, I have a hard time discerning where exactly the hype lines are drawn.

But #SXSWi was hopping. I was obviously not alone in my ponderings. A steady stream of meta-commentary on SXSWi flowed by: lists of the "best" parties, tips and tricks for "surviving" the festival, do's and don't for start-up entrepreneurs looking to make a splash.

And an endeless stream of pleas: Come to my panel, RSVP for my party, pay attention to me, me, me!