SXSW 2013 Panel Picker Time

It’s voting time once again for next year’s SXSW. We have three panels in the running this year and we can use your votes to help push us through the selection process.

Each proposal can receive one vote per user until August 31st. Please give us your thumbs up!

1. Retail, Discovery, and the Path to The Singularity

VOTE!

• Dave Surgan, Morpheus Media / Createthe Group
• Rachel Tipograph, GAP
• Macala Wright, WHY THIS WAY
• Greg Leppert, Svpply

We are all robots. We walk around with technology in our pockets and this will quickly become more easily integrated with our natural thought processes, habits and movements.

Using these emerging technologies, retailers are beginning to enable new forms of discovery and experiences around their products. They aim to bridge online and offline experiences, enable new interactions with objects and people through “calm” technologies, and build new systems with their own APIs. These adjustments to brand planning and goals present unique challenges to traditional organizations. How should brands align internally to handle these new opportunities and challenges?

Through our exploration of the impending Singularity, we will outline how brands and tech partners are building the future of retail with a focus on these new behaviors.

Questions we tackle:

1. How will our path to The Singularity impact retailers and social shopping?
2. With new sources of real time data, how can retailers adjust their tactics to better address the needs of shoppers?
3. How can retailers prepare for these new experiences and opportunities?
4. Within an organization, who is responsible for consumer facing technology?
5. Who should own consumer data? The retailer or platforms?

2. You’re Not Your User

VOTE!

• Garann Means, Etsy
• Noah Dinkin, Fanbridge
• Shawn Bose, uShip
• Dustin Coates, Morpheus Media

 We’re influenced very heavily by the people we spend most of our time with. And for most of us at SXSWi, that’s others who work in tech and on the web. It can be easy, then, to forget we aren’t “average” and most of the world doesn’t interact with the web like we do.

How do you create a compelling and useful product when you aren’t part of the core group of users? How do you take into consideration how they interact with the product, when making hundreds of decisions on a weekly basis? How do you ensure diversity and how can that help your business grow? How do you escape the tech and web “echo chamber?”

Questions we tackle:

1. Surveys, talking to customers, and analytics can be useful for determining user needs. How do you get the most out of these tools and methods?
2. The same tools and methods (surveys, talking to customers, and analytics) can have their own drawbacks as well: You must actually have customers first. They are—by their nature—reactive and hard to use for what your customer will want in six months. They are also unreliable (in customer response, with users telling you what they think you want to hear) or difficult to divine meaning from (in analytics). What other methods are available for getting into the heads of your consumers?
3. The push to bring more women and underrepresented minorities into tech has brought to the fore how often products that are used across social groups are built by largely white and largely male teams. What benefits does a company see by focusing on diversity in team building?
4. How early do you bring a member of your core market onto your team? Should that person be a co-founder?
5. How can product teams and development teams work together to ensure that they’re building a site or product that takes into account how users will actually employ it?

3. You Can Do It: Parent, Spouse, Entrepreneur

VOTE!

Shenan Reed, Chief Media Officer

I have failed. I have succeeded. And I’m going to tell you all about it so that you can do it better. 13 years ago I married the man of my dreams, 11 years ago we started a company together, 9 years ago we had our first child, 5 years ago we had our second child and a little over a year ago we sold our company of over 100 employees and 60 clients. The question I get most often is “How do you do it all?”

Questions we tackle:

1. How to never let your spouse feel deprived.
2. How to never let your kids feel deprived.
3. How to never let your employees feel deprived.
4. How to never let your clients feel deprived.
5. How to make yourself feel fulfilled.

Wrapping up SXSW 2011

A quick post wrapping up some of the sights and sounds from this year’s South By Southwest Interactive. Morpheus Media sent a crew consisting of myself Jeffrey, Dave, Nora, Lee, Naomi and Shenan. Had a great time, and sat in some very interesting talks and panels. I was specifically interested in the Mobile and Emerging Tech panels, and posted up a few notes from them. Here you go:

• Social Networks I’m Using At SXSW
• Staying Organized at SXSW
• Infographic: SXSW By The Numbers
• Linking Foursquare With… My American Express Card?
• Sweater Trees at University of Texas
• SXSW Panel: Rebooting Iceland – Crowdsourcing Innovation in Uncertain Times
• SXSW Solo – Thin is In. The Future of Digital Wallets
• SXSW Panel – U.S. Military’s Mad Science Revealed
• SXSW Panel – Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization
• SXSW Solo – Behind the Curtain: Secrets of Mobile Application Wizardry
• SXSW Solo – Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation With HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
• SXSW Panel – Big in Japan: Outreaching to a Unique Market
• SXSW Keynote: Christopher Poole
• SXSW Solo – The 2011 Open Architecture Challenge: Revisioning Decommisioned Military Facilities/Design Like You Give A Damn
• SXSW Panel – Japanese Mobile Leaders Forum
• SXSW Future15 – NFC and RFID, How It Will Change Mobile
• SXSW Panel – Moving the Web onto Mobile Devices
• SXSW Dual – Touching Stories: Designing Digital Magazines for the iPad
• SXSW Panel – Voices From The HTML5 Trenches: Browser Wars IV
• SXSW Wrapup: QR Codes Everywhere
• The Egg Drop at Ignite Austin during SXSW

(Source: Jeffreydonenfeld.com)

The SXSW Economy

Retail Me Not made this infographic on some of the components of the Austin-based festival and its impact on the city and the industries it supports.