Banky For President

Here is what I took away from this year’s South by Southwest festival(s)

1. You really can push the point of fun overload. Either that or I’m getting old.

2. Meeting loads of new people + loads of adult beverages = forgetting lots of names. I really did love you all. It’s not you, it’s me. Honest.

3. When you throw a bunch of geeks in a room talking about all the cool new products we’re all building, the future looks completely rosy. Reality (and my SxSW hangover) tells me the future is really much bleaker than it appears.

4. The real value of social networking takes place offline. The value we bring to each other is best measured offline actually. Case in point . . . South by Southwest!

5. Speaking of offline, life is actually lived there. It’s not about taking the virtual world to its real-life counterpart, it’s the other way around. The digital world is actually more compelling when it’s expressed with real world physics. Get out and do things like this or this.

6. Contribute something. Don’t sit back and be a pundit. Build something and contribute to the conversation that way as opposed to just commenting on what other people are doing.

7. My yearly take-away: Austin is one of my favorite cities in the whole world. Great movie venues, great music, great culture. It’s also a community that supports technology.

8. Twitter is really cool. Yeah, I caught a glimpse of that last year. But connecting in real time is really special.

9. Everyone! Listen to the community! It’s smarter than you can ever hope to be!

10. If you’re going to fail, fail so big that everyone wants to twitter about it.

Eisner and Cuban

Originally uploaded by bankythehack3000

The ubiquity of the Web grew tremendously within the last few years due to bandwidth, low cost of hardware, democratization, and the emergence of standards. All of this converged in 2005 with the launch of YouTube and the Web was never the same. Video, finally, became a compelling channel on the Web and today a search for video returns 77 Million generated by about 2.8 Million users.

Enter stage left, one Michael Eisner. The once proud king of the Mouse descended on Austin Texas to talk about the idea that now is the right time for compelling “story driven monetized content” on the Internet. His company Vuguru has produced a modest success in Prom Queen via a key partnership with Myspace and this Spring will produce a prequel to Robin Cook’s upcoming book Foreign Body which will consist of 50 episodes of 90 seconds each. On the 51st day the new book will appear in stores.

Eisner acknowledges that no one really has it right, just yet, and interviewer Mark Cuban acknowledges, and rightly so, integrating digital content on the PC with your Hi-Definition television really hard to do. Lost in the discussion though is that IP based television is mainstream. AppleTV 2.0 and XBOX Live currently allow users to download hi-def content from the Internet to be played right on the television. In the future, and even today, our televisions will be just another screen in which we interact. It will be devices like our phone, both wireless and wireline, computer, and set-top boxes that will be the conduit for video on-demand.

Eisner predicts that within five years, IP based content will be just as compelling as what we’ll find on television. YouTube is already experimenting with various advertising models.

Another paradigm shift is coming. The infrastructure has capacity and when the number of eyeballs can support the revenue the content creation will generate, we’ll just need to be able to relax comfortably in our living rooms with devices that enable all the magic to happen.

Convergence is coming. And that is what Eisner is betting on.

Macbooks 35

Others 18

Recording userless information . . . so you don’t have to.

While strolling the hallways of SxSW, I began coutning the ratio of Macbooks to other machines. Current tally:

11 Macbooks

4 Others

I’ll keep you posted.

I had never heard Kathy Sierra talk before, so colour me suprised as hell when I got up from this conversation feeling as energized about what I could with do with my life as I had when my divorce had finally become reality.

So, welcome to my blog on the best conversation I’ve heard at SxSW (so far)

Consider the balance sheet, the number of users, the money raised, or the quality of your content or customer service . . . is that the true measure of your success? They are all indicators, certainly. But Sierra may have hit on something that may be a better metric . . . how kick ass do you make your users feel about themselves?

She outlined about 20 things to consider and at the end introduced Gary Vaynerchuk as a person who is doing all the right things.

Of the top 20, here are my top five (in no particular order):

1. Inspire first person language. Your product should allow the user to talk about themselves instead of the product. Other users will be motivated by hearing from people just like them who are talking how the product allows them to kick ass. . .

2. Give your users a way to reduce stress. Solve a problem for them that when they use it, their stress level goes down.

3. When users become experts, they become mentors. Speed the process by creating mentors earlier. Encourage your users to ask and answer questions. There are no bad answers!

4. Make your product feel more alive. real world physics matters . . . really. From the way cars get dented when you crash them in Grand Theft Auto or when you see the little “throw bounce” when you scroll an iPhone. Acknowledging the real world compels the virtual.

5. Create Joy. Think about the last time you felt like you kicked ass. Give that to your customers.

For me, the best examples of who does this the best would be (in no particular order)

1. Apple
2. Wordpress
3. Men’s Wearhouse
4. Bluetooth
5. My Day Job

What are yours?

I wish i would have called it beforehand. The entire ballroom was already filled by 10 til 2 and given the subject, a man who dazzles with his software but not as a speaker, I nearly twittered . . .”There’s going to be lots of disappointed people in about one hour. “

And disappointed they were, but for a very different reason.

It begain okay enough. Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook was making an impression by allowing protest to occur in Columbia and how the world seems less isolated to those in Lebanon who are able to connect with their friends on different continents.

All the while though, Ms. Lacy twirled her hair, leaned back in her chair, and talked about how nervous Mark Zuckerberg can get when he gets interviewed. She called him a kid a few times and honestly didn’t seem to have much respect for him as either a subject she was interviewing or as a man who has built a company that can be valued at over 15 billion dollars.

And as I was sitting there watching all this, after having seen all the anticipation first hand just prior to the keynote, the tension in the air became so palpable, it became another energy entirely. My twitter feed read like this “She’s disgusting,” “She’s flirting with him,” “She ruined his keynote.” And when the energy was sensed by even Zuckerberg himself when he asked innocently enough 45 minutes into the interview, “Did you run out of questions?” the crowd . . . just . . . roared. It wasn’t so much what he asked, but the crowd saw a window of opportunity to react . . . and the crowd did. And the crowd just kept reacting for the rest of the interview.

It went downhill from there for Lacy but when the crowd saw the opportunity to vent, the crowd were immediately more engaged. She said later that she got Zuckerberg to announce the launching of Facebook in France, but actually, Lacy was the one to break the news. Lacy reacted poorly and defensively. “My job is hard!” she exclaimed. She snarked an apology at the end, “I’m sorry it was such torture.”

The criticism poured in on both Valleywag and Cnet. Still in denial hours later she twittered, “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.”

And because most had hoped to understand more about Facebook’s roadmap and what was on the horizon for such a monumental company, that sums up exactly how many of us still feel . . . screwed.

Henry Jenkins of MIT and author Steven Johnson treated the geeks at SxSW to a garden of insight about our culture and our future.

The Web is a growing reflection of our society and for the geekerati, the waft of change is palpable to those who seek to change it. Collaboration and “user-generated” content merely reflects what is natural about all of us . . . we are, in truth, all dependent upon one another. Think of the shirt you’re wearing: who sold it to you? Who stocked that shirt on the shelf for you to buy it? Who unpacked that shirt from the box it was shipped in? Who drove the truck that contained that box? Buddhists would call this Dependent Origination. Our speakers might refer to this as a natural reflection of our social community. Platforms like Facebook and Myspace merely allow us to do what comes naturally . . . and that is to be connected or feel a belonging.

There are two models of this collaboration. One, an aggregated model, where the majority rules. For instance, on the front page of YouTube, you’ll see the videos generating the most views. Should we ignore the fact that the majority of people selecting those videos for us are typically young white males? The other model would be one of diversity. Wikipedia, for example, tries to let all diverse viewpoints of a given topic shine through. No one viewpoint is more important than another. All views are represented and, in fact, if you have diverse knowledge of a subject, it is your duty in the community to come forth and share.

Zappos is a very interesting company. What has made them successful might be considered counter-intuitive to some. Their focus on the customer and not the competition, their corporate culture and not cutting costs on the balance sheet are but a few oddities that make them unique.

Odd maybe, but it seems to me they have hit on something that spell real success. Culture is important. Passion is important. Being able to rely on team members to do their job is important. And as a company who write all their own software from CRM to the engine that drives their ecommerce site, being able to rely on their programming team is a key to execution. Their costs must be extravagant. No drops-ships (warehousing everything that is sold), no scripts in the call centers(empowering their employees to make key decisions on behalf of the customer), and no discounts (you won’t find a zappos coupon anywhere), mean there isn’t a lot of room to appeal to our commoditized low-priced Wal-mart-like culture. And did I mention they write all their software in house? And they are going to roll-out a re-write in Java within weeks?

Here’s the presentation:

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Went to a Geekfest and a panel broke out at SxSW this afternoon. Acronyms like H.O.S.E.D, S.H.A.F.T. and F.U.C.K.D were used to illustrate how bad business leads to failure. It was a how-to guide really complete with loose and fast money thrown on stage, a few Godzilla and Mothra references and a unicorn. Just another friday night for me. Hell it reminded me of when I was married. But I digress. It was good to meet Francine and Halcyon right after.

Dinner next and after that . . . 21.

SxSW 2008 kicked off for me with a panel on how to be both more innovative and fulfilling. This panel led by Amy Hoy and John Athayde of Hyphenateme.com was essentially a plea to not have tunnel vision if you want to be healthy, happy and innovative. They cited several quotes but the most comprehensive was their opening quote from Robert Heinlen:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.“

The concept makes sense to me. Once we become experts, we stop learning. And if our ego gets in the way, we horde what we know and, many times, decide not to share. It’s only those that don’t know or the n00b that can be honest enough about what they don’t know so that they can begin to ask questions.

Essentially have a shoshin.

They also had a good analogy for how ideas grow. The best dirt is compost, which is made up of anything biodegradable. Shit, rotten meat, dead things . . . essentially failure is the compost heap for success.

A really good first talk for the week.