RobQuig

Finally, a panel with some serious bite.

 Making a SXSW panel debut, sort of, was @BronxZooCobra. Yes, a snake.

The cobra, which had a tank and a name tag at the panelists table but wasn’t actually present, didn’t have much to say. The humans on the panel, Esty Gorman and Grant Hunter of Iris Worldwide, Michael Logan of Next Media Animation and Remco Marinus of Lemz spoke about advertising (and showed off some creative ads). They were a little less scaly than the cobra.

Gorman spoke on behalf of the Egyptian Cobra, which is the second-most followed animal on Twitter with more than 200,000 followers (I have no idea who the top followed animal is). The audience was tweeting questions to the cobra. The snake is only 20 inches long, but deadly, and when she escaped from the Bronx Zoo a year ago, she made worldwide news.

The cobra did an “interview” on the screen (with snake-to-English translation). She said she gained 200,000 followers in six days and managed to tweet despite lacking hands.

Gorman said “newsjacking” allowed this story to go “really, really viral very fast.”

Newsjacking, which is a PR/advertising term that I hadn’t heard until this SXSW, apparently means using social viral ability to “create” a news-like event or run parallel to a news story, just like the Twitter account for the snake did.

Iris created an event called “Urgent Genius Weekender,” which challenges people to create compelling content in 48 hours (mainly ad campaigns).

An audience member asked how they consider this “news,” since it’s mostly advertising satire. She said, “Newspapers are usually much more serious,” and wondered if any of them had even been sued for libel or slander. They said they’d never been sued for that, but didn’t really answer otherwise (plus, newspapers could/should have more fun).

The panel itself showed off some fun content, including some great ads, but the snake was the draw. Let’s hope she has an after-party.

I made a bit of a detour for my second session of the day, breaking from my pre-made schedule to see “Pocket Intelligence,” a panel about mobile interaction and feedback networks. I made the detour because the panel promised to talk about how our mobile phones will react to the world around us in the near future (oh, and because I ran into my friend Christian McDonald in the Hilton hallway, and he was going to this panel. Sometimes the best panels at SXSW are found this less-planned way).

On the panel were Fritz Desir, the director of experience strategy and architecture for Tribal DDB, Myrian Joire, the senior mobile editor for Engadget, Nick Holroyd, the lead UX designer for Junk My Car/Peddle.com, Reno Marioni, the director of platform production management location and commerce at Nokia and Richard Guest, the president of Tribal DDB. 

Desir told the crowd in the packed room that he was “totally committed to making sure this panel does not suck.” What a relief.

Holroyd talked about contextual mobile interactions, like your phone knowing you’re in a bar networking, so it shares business card-like information with people around you.

Marioni said Nokia has 1 billion phones. He said the tech is changing so quickly, so the challenge is making these advances in a “smart way.” 

Location and checking in will become more useful soon, Marioni said. It will help us get around the city and live our lives. “You don’t want it to be really annoying,” Marioni said. “You have to be really smart about this.”

Desir said to the layperson, this kind of thing comes across as creepy, so he asked the panel how do you win over the public with super-smart smartphones?

“Most of our audience is quite tech savvy,” Engadget’s  Joire said. “But there is a lot of resistance to making phones smarter.” Joire said Foursquare, for example, would be easier and more useful if it automatically checked people in, but it “freaks people out.”

Once people adapt to this and find use in it, the developers will step in, Joire said, and the “friction” people have over smarter location-based networks will go away.

“The users will decide what’s creep or not and what will be adopted, Holroyd said. “We need to let the users decide and open up the technology.”

This is all about trust, Marioni said. The social network Path had a problem recently with phone address book information being uploaded without permission. “You have to be careful with information,” he said.

Marioni said worried users can turn off location services on their phones, and they can turn off wifi if they’re really paranoid, but they lose an opportunity to have phones that can be more useful. 

Joire said Facebook overcomes privacy concerns by being so integral in people’s lives. “There’s a tipping point” where people stop worrying as much about privacy concerns. 

Notes from me: This panel sounded interesting, but it didn’t do much for me. I would have liked it more if they talked more about what’s coming up. It didn’t help that it was hard to hear the panelists due to the audio system. Oh well, you can’t win them all. 

The line just to get into the line to register for SXSW

Brad Hunstable, CEO and founder of Ustream.tv at SXSW Interactive

The first session of the day for me was by Brad Hunstable, the founder and CEO of Ustream, a live video service. Hunstable talked to a large, mostly empty room, but his company is one that is of interest to journalists.

When I was at the Statesman, we used Ustream for quite a bit of our live streaming, including during Hurricane Ike in 2008.

“I feel so privileged and honored to have this massive room,” Hunstable joked to start off the session. He said he thought a lot of people were stuck in the registration line. There might be something to that - people around me said it took them around two hours to move through the line this morning.

Hunstable said Ustream takes in more video than any other site, including YouTube. Any minute, there are about 100 hours that are uploaded to Ustream. They have 170,000 broadcasters per month, sending out 1.5 million broadcasts. He said the average length of a broadcast is a hefty 2.8 hours.

He said a lot of people will stream their kids’ football games, but it’s also used by profesional sports, political speeches and, of course, puppy cam (which won a Webby award in 2009).

However, Hunstable, a West Point grad and native Texan, focused the session on the more serious uses for Ustream. He said his Army background led to developing Ustream because he was looking for a way to allow soldiers to connect with family back home. 

He said live broadcasts are taking off because of a confluence of tech and culture:

“We live in a world today where an HD webcam might cost $49,” he said. “The iPhone can fit not one, but two cameras in their phone.” He also pointed to the broadband mobile Internet. “You are able to broadcast from any phone and view it on any platform.”

He said those tools allow content to be aggregated “at a speed and a scale that we’ve never seen.” He said the rise of Facebook and Twitter have helped push their content out. 

Hunstable talked about the “power of Ustream in a news angle.” He said citizen journalists and mainstream media are using his service to “bring lasting connections” to communities.

He said 7 million people tuned in to Ustream over the course of a couple of weeks to see the Chilean miners be rescued. He said the Chilean earthquake was another big news event that citizen journalists covered well. “CNN was relying on feeds from Ustream for the first day to provide information to the world. A really very powerful use of the technology.”

Irony break:Someone interrupted Hunstable to ask whether they can use Ustream to live stream his session. He said no because there were restrictions by SXSW against live streaming sessions.

Back to his presentation, Hunstable talked about the March 2011 disaster in Japan. He said the big news networks in Japan put their linear feeds live on Ustream. “The reason they did that was mostly out of a desire to get information to people who literally had no other way to get the information.”

He said over the course of the Japanese disaster, 53 million people consumed news from Japan through Ustream.

He also mentioned the Arab spring. It started in Iran with some broadcasts from a protest before the government shut those down. It grew with Tunisia and went huge with the Egyptian protests.

He said the citizen journalists in Egypt formed a community around Ustream. “They were a part of what happened with the eventual stepping down of the president.”

Today, he said there are dozens of people “putting their lives in danger” in Syria to broadcast from the streets. “The interesting part about this is that the groundswell of viewership initially was within Syria, and then the Syrian government started blocking that, so now the citizen journalists are about getting information out to the rest of the world.”

In the United States, Hunstable said more than 1,800 citizen journalists covered the Occupy movement using Ustream. The live streaming, he said, put pressure on police and government officials.

My take: Live video can be very powerful, and Ustream is an excellent service. Journalists should be using it when covering something compelling. Having a good wifi connection really helps, though. Note that Ustream isn’t the only live streaming service. Qik is another good competitor.

The hipsters’ skinny jeans are going to be hard to peel off at the end of the day, thanks to a nasty rain and unusual chill in Austin for the start of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

I personally got splashed by two different cars on my way to the Convention Center, though at least I’m not wearing skinny jeans. I had to miss the first few panels of the day so I could teach my University of Texas multimedia journalism class, but I’m ready to go now. 

Here’s my schedule. I planned it with two things in mind: I wanted to avoid walking a lot (the campuses are really spread out this year) and I wanted a good mix of journalism and non-journalism content. First up will be a panel by the CEO and founder of the live video service Ustream. I’ll live blog the session and any others that I attend. Here’s hoping my jeans dry out.