by Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering

Curious about the interactive parts of SXSW? Looks like 2008 will be the year to check it out.

Of the many excellent music, film and interaction festivals Austin hosts each year, SXSW tops the list each spring (together with ACL Fest each fall, it should be mentioned). Originally a smaller gathering of music industry insiders, SXSW has grown enormously in recent years. Fans, musicians, producers and the press travel to Austin each spring from around the US and the world for a week of shows and networking. SWSX organizers added the interactive part of the festival some years back to showcase graphics design, web and game development, and the interactive arts. And interactive attendance has grown ever since.

Confirmed panelists for this year's interactive sessions include Bryan Caplan (author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies), Jason Fried of 37signals, Kelly Goto of Goto Media, and Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress). I've written elsewhere about Kelly Goto and her approach to design and the workflow of design. And, in fact, all the panelists lined up so far sound right on.

The 2008 interactive part runs from Friday 7 March to Tuesday 11 March. Music runs after from Wednesday 12 March to Sunday 16 March. And film runs the whole week. More information on SXSW is here.

Another excuse to visit Austin. Come check us out.

By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

Jack and I hit Monterey last week for the Red Herring 100 and some good weather. Red Herring is one of the leading technology and VC mags (both online and in print) and they've run the Red Herring 100 for some years now as a way of recognizing important and emerging technologies.

With four separate presentation tracks running simultaneously, you really have to pick company overviews carefully. Vitali Khvatkov gave an overview of Simagis and the company's image analysis technolgies; think Excel for image analysis. Greg Drew went through the Web Trends product portfolio and spent some time on the importance of analytics technologies for understanding site visitors and not just site *visits*. Greg's thinking on the importance of the visitor resonates with Kelly Goto's take two weeks ago at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 expo on the need for designers and UI folk to go beyond traditional user profiling to behavioral and even lifestyle profiling.

And for a good example of a new off-Web technology there's Recordant. Christopher Demetree introduced the company and the "moment-of-truth intelligence" (or MOTI) technologies which underlie the company's technology. Here's how it works. You're a regional manager for a series of retail stores on the west coast. You want real data on the effectiveness of the salesperson / customer interaction at all 20 or 30 of the stores in your region but, of course, you can't be everywhere at once. So right now you rely on whatever your store managers tell you (which is anecdotal instead of quantitative). You partner with Recordant and get small digital recording devices (slickly designed to look a bit like the smaller iPods) for the salespeople in each of your stores. Your salesforce wear the Recordant devices around their necks while they're on the floor and hundreds of hours of direct salesperson / customer digital audio result. Recordant then vend some speech analytics software to help you see into the audio data and help you figure out whether your salespeople are, for example, following some new sales skit on the floor.

Chris's presentation helps make the point that the Red Herring 100 this year covered a good mix of Web, communications, CRM, and conventional retail start-ups. And throw in Steve Bollinger's presentation on Pervasis for an example of where biotech may be heading. Pervasis addresses an unmet need in treatment for vascular injury in the form of Vascugel, a type of external suturing patch to be applied external to injured portions of the circulatory system and help reestablish a healthy vascular system. And, according to Bollinger, stage I and II trials have been remarkably successful.

By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

Web 2.0 was worth it this year. Tons of talks and a tremendous number of booths on the floor. Plenty of new ideas.

Huge shout-out to Kelly Goto of gotomedia. Kelly kicked off the design track Sunday morning with "The 2.0 Iterative App". Topics included web / desktop mimicry, microformats, cuteness look-and-feel, user profiling (and its descendents), context profiling (and its descendents), the hybrid designer, focus groups (and how not to have them), and so on.

Perhaps most interesting of all are Kelly's thoughts on the coming of "placelessness" and what it means for the construction (or reconstruction) of the site / place / page metaphor we've built up in the commercial Web. There's a whole lot of thinking to be done here and I'm hoping that the discussion will broaden even further by next year's expo.

Kelly's got a phenomenal tack on all the core and emerging usability concepts and if anybody's out there looking for an inspiration for your usability or design teams, you might start by checking out Kelly's site (or even her book, which is something of a classic at this point). The real core of "The 2.0 Iterative App" covers the process integration of usability workflows and agile PM. So it might also be worth the time to download the slide set if you've got a PM or designers looking for ways to better the process.