Tag Archives: south by southwest

Help the Department of Alchemy return to South by Southwest!

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Basically, there’s a big tech/film/music event called South by Southwest every year in Austin, TX. Last year, I was chosen to speak during the Interactive (ie. tech) festival, and I’m trying to make it back there to give another presentation. SXSW chooses panels/talks by outsourcing opinion via the “Panel Picker,” which provides about 1/3 of the overall score (the rest of the score is formed by the panel judges & staff).

If you’ve seen me in the past at anime conventions, you know that I can dish out a good talk. My proposal for SXSW 2010 is “Lurk Moar: Why Internet Culture Matters.”

So, if you’re inclined to spare 57 seconds of your time, please go to my talk’s page (http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3203) to 1) vote up, and 2) leave a positive comment. Signing up for the voting is super easy (name, email, password), and you receive practically no messages (if you’re concerned about that).

Thanks for your help!

SXSW: Promote That Which is Awesome

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Awesomeness will be going down in Austin, Texas come March 2009.

I’m putting together a panel on technology in the classroom for an infamous conference called South by Southwest. My presentation’s called “Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow.” This thing’s BIG. And I’m trying to make it bigger.

I’d love to show the audience the potential and capability of students connected. The Internet is a grandiose machine. So I’m extending a hand to fellow students and friends to get the word out.

If you’re willing to help, go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1123, take five seconds to create an account, and vote on my panel idea. If you want to be more awesome, vote and then leave a comment, to get people talking.

This would be an awesome way to show that students, together, can break the system, be it a simple voting interface or the conventional, old-school methodology of education.

Visit the original Facebook note here and throw it around between your own group of friends.

Also, check out these other nibblets of amazing:

Christina Xu’s Behind the ROFLs: Next-Gen Conference Organizing While Broke

Tim Hwang’s The State of the Internet Memescape: 2008-10 and Obsolete?: A World After E-mail

O-Face and Interface

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On the path to planning panels for South by Southwest next March, I came across a link for ETech 2008, an O’Reilly conference held earlier this year in California. One panel discussion, Really Really Really Intimate Interfaces, caught my eye because on the conference homepage it linked to the panel’s placeholder with the term “sex hacking.” A query for a “hacking” and “sex” combo on Google turns up only the faint whispers of a long-past forum post from HOPE 2006.

There’s life hacking and even school hacking, but can we hack sex? Or, at least follow LifeHacker’s motto and “get things done” with technology when it comes to romping in (or out of) the bedroom.

Explanations aside, today I came across this nifty little item from OhMiBod:

They call it the NaughtiNano — essentially it’s a vibrator powered by your DRM iPod. According to the website, it “vibrates to the rhythm and intensity of the music.” Now good for them if they got the piece of equipment to shake its tail if you turn up the volume. But let’s try to conceptualize: what if the unit pulsated according to a song’s bass, or wavelength oscillation, or any other obscure yet relevant musical factor. It’s already possible for a music UI to produce a visualization of music. But what if an orgasm looked like this…

or this…

(borrowed from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³‘s Flickr)

Or, a deeper question: can a genre excite us? Can sexual desire derive from accordion-dominant, Louisiana zydeco between 150 and 170 BPM? Would seventeenth century Gregorian chant serve up a stronger pleasurable climax?

OhMiBod also sells a product, monikered as Boditalk, a vibrator that reacts to your cell phone calls, buzzing for the duration of your wireless chat. I’m sure that someone could engineer an idea to combine the iPhone’s GPS and some odd sort of social network with this amusing gizmo.