RobQuig

I snapped some videos on my iPhone at various times over the weekend and put this together.

Pandora started 12 years ago as an experiment of sorts into manually classifying music. It now bills itself as “Internet Radio,” and that’s exactly what it has become, with 125 million users and a 5.74 share in all radio listening.

Along with Spotify and Grooveshark, Pandora has disrupted the traditional radio model by bringing a customized, user-friendly web radio format to the masses.

Tim Westergren, one of the founders and the chief strategy officer for Pandora, gave his vision for the future of music at South by Southwest Interactive. It’s a future filled with, you guessed it, Internet radio.

He’s probably right. He said there already are 2.4 billion playlists that have been created there is more time spent listening to music on Pandora than watching video on YouTube.

He said Pandora is part of a “migration of broadcast radio model to a one-to-one model of radio on the web,” he said. “I think there is no single larger more important change” to the music industry than the switch from broadcast radio to the web.

He said Pandora has more than 900,000 songs, from 90,000 artists and comedians and more than 350 genres. He said 70 percent of the artists are independent, and they get paid each time one of their songs are streamed.

How they make money

In one month, Pandora sees 19 hours of listening per user, more than 14 billion songs streamed and more than 750 million “thumb interactions.” Not surprisingly, that sounds appealing to advertisers. “People interact strongly on our site. We can also target - we know the age, gender, Zip code and the type of music they like. Advertisers like that, too.” Early on, Pandora planned to use subscriptions, but now have decided to make it ad-supported.

Pandora has graphic advertising, video advertising and traditional radio spot advertising. Pandora has about 1,400 advertising campaigns per week running, from national spots to local spots. Pandora even has local sales teams.

Broadcast vs. web radio

Westergren said in the United States, people listen to 15 to 16 hours of music a week, and 80 percent of that come from broadcast radio. He said that surprised him considering the growth of iPods/iTunes. 

“Despite all that innovation, that 80/20 split remains true,” he said. He said radio has kept its popularity because:

* It’s really easy. You hit a button and sound comes out. Music buying is an activity you do when you have more time. 

* It has serendipity. You discover music you haven’t heard before. “If you don’t have that, the enthusiasm for listening to music begins to fade.”

* It’s free.

“I say this as someone who is a fan of radio: I think it suffers from a handful of important problems.”

He said the problems with broadcast radio, include:

* It’s not particularly satisfying for people. Radio can only play a single playlist. “It’s trying to please a lot of people with a single playlist.” He said he has his hand on the “seek” button in the car a lot of the time trying to create his own radio playlist.

* It’s not very inclusive for musicians. “Most musicians, the vast majority, have no opportunity to play on radio.

* Musicians are not paid. “I think that’s not right,” he said.

“All three of these things get fixed when you move into Internet radio,” Westergren said.

How Pandora works

The core, he said, is personalization. “What gives the web its power is you can deliver an individual stream delivered to an individual.” 

The foundation, he said, for Pandora is humans. He said the Music Genome Project is still the backbone of Pandora’s service. People in his office are analyzing songs, and scoring it based on dozens of criteria and classifying them. “For the voice alone, we capture over 20 attributes,” he said.

He said for a simple pop song, it might take 10 to 15 minutes. For a symphony, the song would take about an hour per piece.

The idea being that they can sequence the “music DNA.” 

When you log into Pandora and type in a song or an artist to create a station, they use their analysis to figure out what other songs belong in those playlists. 

Westergren said this analysis makes it much easier to personalize a playlist for people. It’s easy for users to create their own channels. He said the genome is blind to the success of the song or a band, so the playlist is not based on popularity. “It’s a completely level playing field,” he said. “A lot of them are unknown bands. They are bands that would never float to the top of Amazon, for example.”

Westergren founded the company in 2000, but it didn’t launch as a radio business until five years later. It was a recommendation engine before that. “It was kind of a tree falling in a forest - interesting technology but not in front of an audience. That has changed today,” he said.

Growth to other devices

“Internet radio has really become a large audience, and a large piece of the overall pie,” he said. The change has come thanks to technology, he said.

He said Pandora used to be something people listened to on their computers at work, but once the iPhone came along, his service really took off. “People were plugging their phones into stereos and into the aux jack in their cars.” He said tech companies saw that and started embedding Pandora in their electronics. He said there are more than 500 devices now and has 23 auto partners.

“I actually think Pandora in a car is a particularly cool experience,” he said. He said he shares a car with his wife, so he didn’t really use Pandora in his car until recently. “I still very clearly remember this first time that I did,” he said. “I remember thinking, man this radio station is just nailing it for me.”

The future

He said Pandora is about 70 percent of all Internet radio but still only has that 5.74 market share in all of radio. “What happens when that changes and the majority of radio listening is web-based?”

He said people who say they are going to run off and join a rock band, parents will think it’s a good career move for a middle-class job instead of being horrified. 

“We’ll be applying this level playing field that pays royalties and multiply it by a huge number and scale,” he said. 

When asked about whether Pandora is planning on having original content, like “Howard Stern,” DJs, morning shows, etc., Westergren pointed out that 15 percent of radio is non-music, and Pandora has looked into it.

“Technologically, it’s a bit of a different product,” he said. “We’d love to find a way to do that. It would be great if you were listening to Pandora’s station and every 15 minutes, you get a weather update.”

Look out, broadcast radio.

Two loud protesters interrupted George Friedman, the chief intelligence analyst and founder of Stratfor, an Austin-based private intelligence, during his South by Southwest Interactive speech Tuesday.

A few minutes into the talk, two people, rehearsed in their chants, started yelling from either side of the room about Stratfor’s December leak of information by WIkileaks, and what they said was the use of public funds to spy on Occupy Austin.

“For what it’s worth, I agree with the demonstrators. It would be an outrage to use public funds. I only have a very lame answer: We didn’t do it.”

He said somebody gave them “some material by Occupy Austin - we never published it. We never used it. It was in our emails.”

“Occupy is an open group, and Stratfor is not all that interested in what they do,” he said as the protesters were escorted out into the hall. For several minutes after they left the room, the protesters continued to yell.

Friedman said he planned to talk about how people are dehumanized thanks to the Internet and social media when he was invited to speak by SXSW in October, “In the end, I’m not going to let others define who I am and what I talk about.”

The hacking of Stratfor’s emails and credit card numbers, and the subsequent leak of the information by Wikileaks, dominated his talk. He said the incidents illustrated the point he planned to talk about all along. He said he chose the title “Surviving Technology” for his SXSW talk when he was approached in October. “I had no idea,” he said.

He addressed the hacking incident, saying it was the first time he has talked to an audience (he said he considered not coming). He said he wanted to talk to this crowd because the crowd is technologists. 

He said for the past three months, he has been “living” the hack every day. “I suspect in some sense it will define Stratfor going forward.”

“We were legally and morally obligated to tell our subscribers that their credit cards were stolen,” he said, but the FBI wouldn’t let them. “Thus began a month of fear and loathing in Austin,” he said. He said they could have “told the FBI to go screw themselves,” but he said they wanted to help catch the people who did this.

“It put us in a difficult position,” he said. “On Dec. 24, we were stunned,” he said. It was not revealing that the credit cards and e-mails were stolen, but far more, he said, they attempted to destroy the company. “The hit our servers so hard that they destroyed vast amounts of data to the point where we don’t have a copy of our emails. We lost our emails. We lost our servers.”

He quoted Jeremy Hammond, one of the people accused in the hack, as saying that the hack was the equivalent of a “nuclear bomb.”

“Their intention was to destroy us. What I don’t understand is why,” he said. “They have certainly done a great deal of damage. The New York TImes reported that the hack cost us $2 million. The New York Times is never wrong, so it must have.”

He said it put hundreds of people’s jobs in jeopardy. “It was not an attempt to destroy a company. In reality it was an attempt to harm our subscribers. Harm our employees who made a living, cost us a great deal of money that we could have used to hire people that we’re not going to be able to do now.”

As to why they were hacked, Friedman said if it was done for laughs. “A practical joke is a practical joke; devastating lives is another matter.”

He said they were portrayed as spying on Occupy Austin, engaged in espionage, and therefore not worthy of being protected.

“After destroying us, the release of the emails were critical because without that there would be no justification,” he said. “Within the emails, there was the justification and explanation of why they did this. The idea was that we were evil.”

He gave a little background on the company, saying it is not a security company, and “God knows we weren’t a cyber security company.”

Instead, he said it’s an analysis firm for global events. He said when he started it in 1996, he thought of the company not as a publisher but a consulting firm. In 2000, he decided to start charging for their website. For $129, you could subscribe. In 2005, they stopped working with corporations as consultants because he said it wasn’t fun. 

He said the emails leaked by Wikileak were misread and misunderstood. He said the “wonderful echo chamber” of the media let it take on a life of its own. “It became well known that we were spying on the behalf of corporations. We didn’t.”

He urged people to look at the Wikileaks documents to see for themselves.

Another allegation was that Stratfor knew something about Osama bin Laden not being buried at sea. He said the company uses email to put speculation out there. He had an email where he said that he thought burying bin Laden at sea so quickly was something he wouldn’t do. It was a theory, he said, and he had no information to know what was true at the time. 

He said internal emails were where theories and speculation were bandied about. 

“The world will go on with or without Stratfor, and with or without me,” he said. “Boy, it’s important to me. To suddenly find myself portrayed as something absolutely different than I thought I was is a humbling experience. Since I don’t humble well, it’s enraging.”

He said the world is howling at him, and his desire to howl back might be satisfying but not helpful. He said the situation while he kept quiet got out of hand. 

He said Stratfor also had jokes in their emails that were treated as serious business. 

Friedman finally got around to his real purpose of the speech: to talk about how he thinks social media is making for shallow human connections. He said the constant reproduction of ideas makes it easier to demonize other people and dehumanizes us. 

“One of the points that I think is so important in this is you can’t isolate a thought,” he said. “It comes from somewhere from within your soul. It can’t be reduced to a slogan, or shouldn’t be. It can’t be reduced to something standing by itself.”

He said most thoughts are kept in absolute privacy, and we don’t usually want large amounts of people to know them.

“At the heart of thinking is the idea first that you can’t isolate the thought. You have to see the genesis - where it came from.”

He said thoughts are taken out of context when they are isolated. 

“I say things to my wife that I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear, some good some bad, but they’re mine. They’re hers. There is some authenticity in those thoughts.”

When his company’s emails were taken, and put on their own without context, it misrepresents them. He said he expects to find an email uncovered where an employee calls “Friedman the biggest asshole they’ve ever worked with.” He says he wouldn’t fault the employee because that was the thought at that moment at that time as the employee was venting with another employee. 

“Bear in mind, most emails are written thoughtlessly,” he said. “They are a casual comment.”

He said one of the emails uncovered were from an employee about his son to a doctor about his son’s mental problems and how the meds aren’t working. 

“Imagine having those emails published,” he said. He said the hacker who uncovered it had commented, “I almost pissed myself this was so funny.”

He said he can forgive them for the hacking, but “I’ll never forgive them for that. That was an act of such breath-taking cruelty, such unjustified viciousness, that it’s almost unbelievable. Embedded in all of this is a level of cruelty, a willful indifference that can only be used if you don’t see people as human beings. You invent a monster.”

He took more than a few swipes at the media.

“What I love about the media is they don’t think it’s going to happen to them,” he said. “Somehow, the New York Times thinks that they are immune because they have a Pulitzer.”

Friedman said he can’t write an email now without thinking about what it will look like in print. “It’s like having dinner with your wife, and having someone taping it.”

The rising star of the social media world isn’t a giant, well-known corporation, and it isn’t filled with Silicon Valley geeks and celebrities. Instead, it’s Pinterest, a unique platform built by a non-engineer that’s turning people who probably never read TechCrunch or Mashable into loyal early adopters.

A year ago, many expected Google Plus to be the talk of the social media world. Instead, Pinterest, which has been around for two years, has taken off like a rocket in the past six months.

Although Pinterest is still in invite-only mode, it has millions of loyal, enthusiastic users who spend large amounts of time within its platform. Interestingly, it is also used much more heavily by women than men (comScore says 68 percent of the users are female, and they drive 85 percent of the site’s traffic). It’s also raising serious amount of venture money and is valued at an estimated $200 million or more.

Ben Silbermann, an Iowan who cofounded Pinterest, gave a little background on himself and his product and answered questions about what’s next for his company during a talk at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

Silbermann was a pre-med major but realized he didn’t want to be a doctor, so he left the major and tried to find his way. He said discovering TechCrunch piqued his interest.  He went to Google and got a job working on Google’s advertising platforms.

“I thought Google was the coolest place,” he said. “People there were so smart. I felt really lucky to be there, even in a small way. There was such a concentration of talent at that company.”

He said he learned two things at Google:

* The audacity to think at a huge scale, in a way that you don’t really think about when you’re at a regular job. He cited Google Maps as an example. “They decided they had so much money that they took pictures of every street in the world.”

* Being exposed to people who were building great products.

For inspiration, he watched Twitter, Reddit, Google’s Answers product.

“The reason I left Google was not because I didn’t like that company, but with my background, it would have been hard to build product there” since he’s not an engineer.

He said he always wanted to build a product like Pinterest because he was always a collector (stamps, baseball cards, etc). “These things that you collect say a lot about who you are.”

“I had a bunch of ideas when I first left,” he said. “I was literally trying to figure things out. I had a lot of time, and no structure.”

He took a run, working with a college friend, to make iPhone apps. 

“Eventually we came to that idea I had about collections. It was one of those ideas that I can’t say came from really hard-nosed business analysis, it was just something I wanted to see built.”

He said collections, to him, were more than just stamps, etc., but clothing, design, and other “discrete collections.”

“There was nothing on the web that made it easy to show off those kinds of collections,” he said.

He said development was really expensive - they were outsourcing development. They had some seed money.

“I think in those early days, we spent a lot more time on the design of the site itself. We really labored over the display of the collections,” he said. “I felt the collections had to be something you’re proud of. We spent a lot of time on the actual model of the product.”

He said he has respect for Twitter for building a “simple and symmetrical” model for design. 

“We were building it for ourselves, really,” he said. “We never tried to think about what would work for a million people. We had debates about whether we should have boards, repinning … we worked through those issues.”

The grid look was something he said they really labored over - “There were dozens of versions of that that were fully styled. We just felt that if your collections didn’t look awesome, if they weren’t incredibly beautiful, why would anybody spend time on them?”

He said Facebook is the pinnacle of graphic design, Apple is the pinnacle of interactive design and Google is the pinnacle of efficient design.

“The hard part is keying in on what is essential about your project,” he said. 

He said he mailed it to 200 of his friends. “I think 100 of them opened the email.”

He said they had a “catastrophically small number” of users at first. He said the first few people he emailed were people at Google and friends in Iowa. “There were a few people who used it, and they used it the way we hoped they would. Those few people kept us going for a long time. Nine months in, we were still under 10,000 users.”

He said he only kept going because “the idea of telling everyone we blew it was totally embarrassing. Another part was really believed there was something beautiful that we built. If everyday we were getting a little bit closer, we wouldn’t regret the time we spent.”

So what was the turning point?

He went to a conference for design bloggers in Utah. He said he created a little event there for the designers where they created their own boards. “There was never a celebrity who joined, but what did happen is we started seeing regular percentage growth.”

“People would join, and they’d be really proud of their collections, and they’d invite their friends,” he said. Silbermann said he personally wrote the first 5,000 or so users to meet up with them, get their feedback. “I was just so happy that people were using it.”

He said the early adopters of Pinterest were not from Silicon Valley or New York, which is the opposite of just about every other popular social media site. “What was really cool about that is the people who were using Pinterest early on, they were using it for hobbies and interests and their real life.”

SIlbermann said a lot of people use it for “core lifestyle activities.” He said he goes to the bookstore and looks at the lifestyle magazines. “There are a lot of magazines on cooking and design.”

He said people are using Pinterest for things they didn’t expect, including everything from a “Fake Mitt Romney” board, which is filled with pictures of yachts to travel boards.

He said when he first started, everyone was “obsessed with the idea of real time, and text. So Pinterest was really hard for a lot of people to understand, especially in Silicon Valley. To me, boards are a real human way of looking into the world.”

On copyright issues, Silbermann said “every Internet service that gets big has questions about copyright.” Silbermann says they have a notification system for copyright violations, and they will take photos down. He said the mission of the site is to drive traffic out. He said Pinterest rolled out a “no-pin” system they rolled that lets people keep their work from being pinned.

“Overall, it’s something that’s really important for us. I spend quite a bit of my time reaching out to people who are concerned about it,” he said. 

As for making money off the site, Silbermann said “monetization has never been a big focus for us.”

He said he’s still focused on building the discovery engine, and is not focused yet in how to make money on it. “That’s the rationale behind going for venture capital. When you get venture capital, it gives you the freedom to focus on the product.”

Silbermann said in the near term, the profile will be redesigned, “It should go live this week.”

He said he wanted to make the profile different from what you have on Facebook and Twitter. He said they’re also introducing a new way to find new people to follow based on repins.

They are also expanding the number of things you can pin - including content from Vimeo, Hulu and Netflix, and they’re also working to make attribution easier and more clear.

Longer term, they are working on platform expansion. “I can’t wait to be able to use Pinterest on an iPad,” he said. “We have a team working on that.”

Silbermann says the meteoric rise of Pinterest is exciting, but he also feels the weight of responsibility.

“We brought this little product into the world, and I want to see it get better. I look at it every day, and I think about the things I want to make better.”

They started the panel off by saying, “We’re not really here to talk about Skynet and Mad Max.” Bummer.

Jeremy Ettinghausen (who was a last-minute fill-in for a panelist who got food poisoning) and Mel Exon, the founder of BBH Labs did use the movies to talk about how they parallel where tech and society might go.

“This is an exercise in classic storytelling,” Exon said. “Real life is a lot middle-of-the-road. We believe we use extreme narratives to help us define the parameters of our society.”

As for parallels, they used Skynet, from the “Terminator” movies as the equivalent of an authoritarian, clean and closed system *cough, Apple* and Mad Max for an open, dirty, libertarian future *cough, Android.* It’s hard to see Google as the free-wielding Mad Max, though, so it’s not a perfect analogy.

Ettinghausen said in the Skynet world, “You can wink a $5 tip to someone.” In this state, you have data synced, time is organized, music is scheduled, offers suggested, bills paid. “It’s like having a PA that doesn’t sleep and isn’t distractingly pretty. It just works, is the phrase.”

Exon, arguing on the side of Mad Max, said Skynet is not the future we want. “The problem is no one could exist outside of the system. Movement is tracked and freedom of speech is monitored. What Jeremy discusses as anarchy, the rest of us call freedom.”

Exon painted a picture where brands and corporations have to scrap for each dollar, which she said drives technological development. “The speed by which technology moves can only be hindered” by ubiquitous, Skynet-like tech.

Exon said this world would be filled with disclosure, and people would only be tracked when there is huge value to the consumers.

“In an open world, you can still provide an intelligent analog” to keep information out of your field of vision.

Exon said open access to data transforms an experience for people so they can enjoy things together. In her future, creativity would be seen as an important value. 

They created a quick little vote for the audience to chose which way they want the future to go. More people chose the Skynet, closed system over the Mad Max, open system.

Exon showed off weavrs.com, which is a Siri-like interface that uses the social web to find answers to your questions. You can also apparently create robots that will blog, comment on blogs and tweet. Pretty fun to play with, but my robot didn’t know what a “taco” is. Fail.

At the end of the presentation, they gave some tips for people when it comes to pushing content.

* Be useful. Be entertaining. Or be adblocked. 

* Be a serendipity engine

* Be a filter, an expert.

* Comments are free, facts are sacred

* So is choice

They showed off a Guardian spot to illustrate the importance of creativity and entertainment being important. Hooray for newspapers getting points for being the creative ones at SXSW.

There are two sure-fire ways to pack your session full of attendees at South by Southwest Interactive: Put “F**K Privacy” in your title and give out cookies. This panel at the Stephen F. Austin hotel by Joseph Carrabis and Shaina Boone did both.

The cookies even had the expletive put on them. Remember to delete your cookies by eating them, for privacy’s sake.

Boone, the vice president of marketing science for Critical Mass, a Canadian marketing company, said this area of research is “just beginning.” 

“We found that there is a lot of emotion that goes on around this topic,” Boone said. “You’d think that people are dying over this every day.”

She said Critical Mass did a survey, and they found that people don’t really know what they’re afraid of, “they just know it’s bad.” She said there’s a lot of confusion and a lack of education on this.

“The likelihood of having my identity is lower than me getting in a car accident on my way out of here today,” she said. “We need to slow the pace of the panic and the fear that everyone is having.”

She said that people are “really afraid of being watched, and they don’t really think about what they get when they are watched. They feel bad about it. They don’t realize how much over the last 13 or 14 years how giving up information” had made their lives better.

Carrabis, the founder of NextStage Global, is a neormarketer. He calls this fear the “inverse flying saucer theory.” He said people don’t know what they’re anxious about, so they freak out.

Boone said people need to realize that there’s a “fair exchange,” in which you get something if you give up something. The idea being that if you give up your information online, you get convenience, and time-saving technology. 

“Are you willing to give for an equal get?” Carrabis asked. He talked about the “pleasure-pain equilibrium,” which means it’s more painful to complete a task if you don’t give up information for convenience. So you get to choose how much you give up to avoid the pain.

Boone said Netflix a few years ago wasn’t useful, but now it’s more relevant because you give up information to Netflix (what you liked and watched). Amazon.com’s shopping experience is better because it has information on you, she said.

“Consumers expect everything for free,” Boone said. “When you run a business, you can’t give up everything for free. People get mad at Google, but if they didn’t collect data on you, they wouldn’t have a business.”

Someone in the crowd asked whether the businesses who get the information you voluntarily give up should be allowed to not protect it carefully. It should be the people’s choice in the long run, Boone said. It’s not easy, however, to manage your own data, she said. 

Another said the fear is not what we’re giving up, but that we’re giving up information by default. 

“It’s all about shades of gray,” Boone said. “That’s the stuff that hasn’t been defined” by legislation yet. She said Germany has set up recently where you have to approve any tracking on each website, but she thinks that will be onerous and annoying to most users.

“The marketing data is what everyone’s attacking, and they’re doing it because it’s easy to do so,” she said. The marketing data is far less serious, she said, than what doctor’s or pharmaceutical companies might be doing with people’s information.

Another person in the crowd said that the bigger concern for her is that you don’t know that you’re being tracked.

Carrabis said this goes on in the real world, there are four million cameras in the United Kingsdom and 2,397 in Manhattan, but we still walk the streets. 

Another person in the crowd said she didn’t understand why anyone feels threatened that we are being tracked by product marketers online. “Who cares if Zappos knows what kind of shoes I was looking at and those shoes’ ads are following me around online?”

She must be a f**king marketer. 

Amber Case, the co-founder of Geoloqi.com and a cyborg anthropologist (cool!), talked about ambient location and the future of interfaces for Sunday’s keynote at South by Southwest.

Case said that using your smartphone all the time makes you a cyborg. She said we’re creating walls of information (if printed out) via Facebook, which she said is similar to what the ancient Egyptians did, but we’re not archiving the way they did.

“All of this is hanging there in mid-air or in the cloud somewhere” as opposed to carved into stone. She said we all become paleontologists in a way because we’re digging through content (think of searching through your email) to find information.

She said we also have “information jetlag” because we interact on Twitter, with text messages and emails, etc. “When you put this all together, you kind of panic,” she said, showing off a screen grab of her inbox with more than 20,000 unread emails after her TED talk last year.

“Every time I look for what the future, I look to a research institution that has a lot of funding and time,” she said. She talked about Steve Mann, an inventor who was one of the pioneers of augmented reality. He created a heads-up glasses display years ago that took video of the world around him and then allowed him to alter it (in his case to make billboards and other advertisement say whatever he wants the to say. He also used a “Twiddler” to type.

He also used “computer-mediated reality” for facial recognition and history so he could remember names (something I could use).

“It took a very long time to reach everyone’s pockets, but it is not yet heads-up displays,” Case said. “It was really expensive and difficult to use” until recently, she said. 

She said Flipboard makes her happy because it’s a “superhuman interface.” - it reduces the time it takes to get to the information.

She also showed off a massage vest, which you wear and as someone plays a video game, it causes you to get a massage. I think this might save some marriages.

She talked about Calm Technology, which was looked into in the 1970s by Xerox PARC in California. The idea is that your natural actions become input. As an example, she talked about the Haptic compass belt. You wear it, and it buzzes in the direction of North. What do you do with this? It helps you get around, and it gives you a new sense of direction without looking at a map. If you hook it into GPS, it can buzz you which way to go when you need to turn. “It’s compressing a video into another sense. It shouldn’t be in the visual space.”

The ambient location part of her speech was about getting use out of your phone without spending time staring at your phone all day.

As an example, she said her co-founder was capturing his location and speed every 5 seconds of every day for quite a while using GPS. What can you do with it? Case said you could leave a message in places, and when you get to that place, you get the message (sounds like Siri’s notifications system). You could put a “geofence” around the house, so when you get home, your lights turn on because your phone tells you that you’re home. “The phone becomes a remote control for reality,” she said.

Another use, she said is to have your phone tell you when you’re at your bus stop and when to get off. “That sort of thing - where you’re using this in the background so you help your life and you don’t have so much intensity in life by staring at a screen all your life.”

She talked about an app created as an experiment in Portland that knows when you’re waiting at a bus station and buzzes you to tell you when the next bus will be there. Another gives you all the Wikipedia articles around you as you walk through a city. The interface is set up to behind the scenes, so you don’t have to think about loading the app and asking it questions, like Google. Instead, it just know when you’re at a cool spot and pushes it to your phone.

What keeps all this tech from reaching the mainstream? Battery drain, she said. When you use location-based apps, the battery dies quickly. Another problem is there are several platforms, and it’s hard to develop for several platforms. 

She said the next generation of location is in the background, doing things to help you and the above problems would be solved. So she created Geoloqi to try to solve the core problems.  

She announced they are partnering with three companies to make this happen.

* Appcelerator - They have a toolkit for developers and 1.5 million users.

* Factual - She said you need context and data, and Factual has 60 million data points around the world.

* Locaid - They have access to 350 million devices in their network.

“The best technology gets out of your way and let’s you live your life.”

Computer interfaces are changing quickly, thanks to smartphones and tablets, but what’s next? Pucker up: Phones might someday allow you to kiss someone you call. Really kiss them.

Fabian Hemmert, a PhD. student at Berlin University of the Arts. Hemmert had worked for Marvel Comics and Nintendo, and is now working on shape-shifting mobile phones and phones that can transfer emotions and touches. Seriously.

As an example of shape shifting, he said the phone would get thin when it’s in your pocket, get thick when you need it to stand on a table. It can grow even bigger as you need to display something like maps.

It also can get lighter or heavier, or even have a phone that looks at rest while sitting idle but then actually looks excited (it bounces around a bit when you get a call).

Going further, the phone could react when someone squeezes the phone when they’re calling you. It could also carry your breath (if you blow into your phone, it sends air out the other caller’s phone. Even moisture could be transferred - letting you give that kiss through the phone - through the just-right smack of moisture coming out the other end.

“Some people think this is cute, and others think it’s creepy,” said Hemmert, who was part of this panel at South by Southwest Interactive.  In any case, it’s amazing. Here’s a video of Hemmert showing off some of the tech at TED:

Hemmert was asked where he thought mobile tech will go in 10 years.

He said he thought we’d do more feeling with our interactive devices rather than thinking. He also wants to work on human equilibrium and even hunger. Could you feel full from getting too much Facebook? In Hemmert’s world, that would be ideal.

He said we have conflicting emotions right now: We have an intimate relationship with our phones - we love them - but we toss them the moment a newer phone comes out.

Leah Buechley, an assistant professor of Media Arts & Sciences at MIT, talked about how the form factor of computers might change.

One of the things that she explores is how to connect the tech in our lives with the “rich material world that we inhabit.”  

She has been working with her group at MIT to build giant, flexible circuit boards to look and feel like wallpaper (as in what you put on your walls in your house), but they are network-connected computer interfaces.

She also said that tech building will become “democratized” much the way the media/content industry has been. She foresees open source consumer electronic devices. People would design circuit boards, and then share them online so others can tinker with them to make their own versions of consumer electronics devices.

David Merrill, the president and co-founder of Sifteo, a gaming company, said the future of interactive play will be “a lot more like its past than you might think.”

He said we need hands-on digital play, the way we played board games in the past. 

“Video games are awesome because they’re interactive, but they don’t capture that style of play where we sat around a table.”

He thinks Sifteo is building “games for intelligent play,” which comes in the form of little digital cubes that are wireless and relate to each other. It looks pretty fascinating (and fun):

HootSuite’s Dave Olsen reading from Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer.”

In all the years I’ve gone to Interactive, I’ve never seen someone read out of a 140-year-old classic novel.

Dave Olsen, the vice president for community at HootSuite, read from Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer.”

He read about the part in the novel where Tom Sawyer talked kids into whitewashing a fence for him.

“I started thinking about this,” Olsen said. “He had to convey excitement, a bit of mystery” to get people to help him with the work. “I also realized Tom was being a little manipulative.”

Olsen said thinking about that made him examine whether he was taking advantage of people when working on a crowdsourcing project.

One of his big projects was the True North Media House, a crowdsourcing media project that took place during the Olympics in Vancouver.

To make a crowdsourcing project work, he said you need to:

* Make it fun for people

* Give them an incentive

* Allow people to self-identify themselves. In the Olympics project, he had people print out their own badges and then cover content.

* Give them a chance to be a part of something bigger

* Make it easy to spread information so people will “beat the drum for you.”

He said the media caught onto their project. “All the official stuff paled in comparison to what we did,” he said. “We took over the Internet.”

He also talked about Phones for Fearless, which donated camera phones to people in a poor area of Vancouver and then trained the people who received them on shooting videos photos and posting them online to tell their stories.

“By the end of the day we were jammed packed. We had piles of phones,” he said. “The project has a legacy.” He said people are still donating phones.

He said what made it work:

* They went out into the community to thank people

* It was an important project, which draws people

* Convenience - it was a convenient service for people who had old phones

* Altruism

Another project he worked on is the Hootsuite Translation Project. He said it started when they realized HootSuite was popular in Japan. When they asked people in Japan what they wanted, they told them they wanted the tool to be translated into Japanese, which he said was hard because there are odd terms, such as “retweet.”

He said HootSuite reached out to the community to see who could help them out with this. He says they now have 14 languages, and “it was done all with stickers and T-shirts.”

“People get extremely passionate” about their languages, he said. They go out of their way to help HootSuite translate their tools because of “love and pride in their language.”

He said anyone can sign up, but they pick a language coordinator to be the arbitrer of what the proper definitions are, etc. They use Pootle as a tool to translate using the crowd.

“We let them paint our fence.”

At today’s South by Southwest Interactive panels, I’ve seen a tweeting snake, a colorful Canadian and an awesome satirist. Next up? An all-pro NFL player. Greg Jennings, who is the star wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers, was a panelist for this session on fantasy sports.

For a little background, Jennings if a fantastic player, and he helped me make it to the playoffs in my own office league a few times. I know this isn’t exactly a journalism panel, but it turned out to be the best panel I’ve seen yet, and it has journalistic implications. It was full of fascinating uses of data visualization information, which is a hot topic in journalism. 

Fantasy has changed the game, from the way the players approach practice and games, he said. “It used to be that when you missed practice because of an injury, the media approached you. Now you don’t know who is there for fantasy information.”

He said the first thing people say is, “You’re killing it for me in fantasy. Or … you’re killing me!”

He said fantasy is great for the league. “You love all players,” not just your favorite team’s players. “As players, it puts pressure on us because we want to be sure we’re that liked player in a category. It’s interesting because I’m on the good side - I’m on the offensive side.”

He said people ask him to “tell Aaron to throw you the ball more. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘I do want to say that to him.’” 

Jennings said he went to Pittsburgh and a fan heckled him for hurting his fantasy team. “I wanted to block that out, but he was being honest. It registered to me. This is what fantasy does for a player. I wanted to say something to the fan, but I didn’t want him to know he’s getting to me … and it’s fantasy football!”

Jennings said he got hurt this past season, and as he was leaving the stadium, someone yelled to him, “Jennings, should I drop you from fantasy? And I thought, ‘Man, really?’ but that’s the kind of connection that I think is made. We mean more to a fan now than we ever have.”

Technology that gives the fans deep stats on players is “scary,” Jennings said. “It can be overwhelming.”

He jokingly told the fantasy players in the crowd that if there was anything we can do to assist him in getting the ball more to help us, he’s open for that. 

Jennings said a lot of NFL players do play fantasy football, and it helps bond them together, and it gives them an outlet. He said he doesn’t personally indulge in it, but “you’re still in it. You want to know what’s going on.”

He said that NFL players who play fantasy football are often in the awkward position of rooting for players on teams that they’re playing against on Sunday.

Besides football, Jennings, who was an energetic, engaging speaker, has a charitable foundation and is an aspiring actor.

There were other panelists as well (good ones), including Bill Squadron, the president of Bloomberg Sports, Clay Walker, of USA Today Sports, Jason Kint, the VP for CBS Sports and Stephania Bell, who covers fantasy sports for ESPN (dream job!).

Bell asked the room how many play fantasy football, and it seemed like everyone in the room raised a hand … except Jennings, who doesn’t need the fantasy part.

Walker said the fantasy sports industry as a business is “really not even 25 years old.” He said he had suggested in 1993 to the NFL Players’ Association to license fantasy football so companies could make tools to track and host fantasy football sites. The NFL came on board in 2000. 

Squadron, of Bloomberg Sports, said technology for its own sake can clutter things up. “It’s really about the sound and smart application of technology.”

Bloomberg is behind the popular DecisionMaker, a data-driven tool to help people make decisions on starting lineups. Bloomberg also has tools that baseball team officials use, and it utilizes statistics “Moneyball”-style. He wowed the crowd by showing off a visualization of one baseball player’s pitches over a multi-year period. It even connected the dots on the visualization to videos showing each pitch. Seriously incredible.

Bloomberg Sports’ visualization of pitch location.

Kint, of CBS Sports, said there are only three really big players who own most of the fantasy sports hosting: CBS, ESPN and Yahoo. He said that there are many sites that fantasy players use to get an edge in their leagues, so they rebuilt their platform and opened it up to allow companies to build directly in their platform to keep people on their site. They announced it a month ago (see apps at the bottom of this page).

He said MLB TV has a deal with CBS in which when your player comes up to bat, the video feed will show on their site (customized to you). “It will change the way people engage with sports, and they’ll watch sports more intensely.”

NFL star Greg Jennings before his panel began Saturday at the Driskill Hotel in Austin