SXSW Interactive 2016: news, panels, speeches, and brand antics

Election years have always proven to be fertile ground for The Daily Show, as Jon Stewart and his Peabody Award-winning band of satirists poked fun at the absurd characters, stump speeches and gaffes that populated America’s unique brand of democracy. But in 2016, Jon Stewart isn’t leading the way anymore. Late night is ruled by a new class of hosts, and the show has recently rebooted itself under newcomer and cultural outsider Trevor Noah. With Noah at the helm, the show has gained a younger sensibility — one that has tried to cater itself directly to audiences online.

Baratunde Thurston was hired last year to join Noah as supervising producer in charge of digital expansion, a job that forces him to put concerted effort into how the new Daily Show can better live on the internet. He’s championed the kind of comedy that embraces technology for years, having worked as the digital director at The Onion and founder of Cultivated Wit. This year, he was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame, and I caught up with him during the festival to talk about his work, The Daily Show, and how comedy is changing.

Universal Pictures and Facebook teamed up to create custom trailers for white audiences to promote the N.W.A. film Straight Outta Compton, scrubbing any mention of the rap group and instead focusing on the rise of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. Universal marketing chief Doug Neil and Jim Underwood, Facebook’s head of entertainment, discussed the partnership on a SXSW panel today in Austin and described the film’s success as a victory for race-specific marketing, according to Business Insider.

The reasoning behind showing white Facebook users a different trailer was the demographic’s lack of expertise on rap history, according to Neil. “They connected to Ice Cube as an actor and Dr. Dre as the face of Beats,” he said, using the phrase “general population” when speaking about non-African American and non-Hispanic viewers. So Universal’s “multicultural team,” as it’s called, worked with the social network to cut and serve a unique trailer that would detail the two men’s rise without tying it to N.W.A. The trailer shown to African American Facebook users, Neil added, opened with the word N.W.A. and prominently highlighted the group’s Compton beginnings. “They put Compton on the map,” he said. Universal also showed a special trailer to Hispanic Facebook users that displayed words in Spanish on the screen.

At my first SXSW, I tried so hard to make friends.

Let me be clear: I didn’t want to network. My reasoning behind that was simple: I don’t know how to network, and I already suspected that I would be bad at it. I tried to go to a two-hour workshop called “The Business of Friendship,” intending to write very imperious content about it, but it was full. So instead I decided to pick a task much less ambitious: find all the other desperate weirdos on the fringes of this festival and befriend them.

In the world of Gamergate, empathy isn’t allowed, the harassment women face online is exaggerated, and online abuse doesn’t cause real-world harm. And that’s exactly what was heard at the SXSW “SavePoint” panel yesterday. In one of the same rooms that housed SXSW’s day-long anti-harassment summit, there was no room for sympathy for people like Brianna Wu, who days earlier offered examples of the roughly 200 times she had been attacked online, including one man telling her he would put a drill through her skull.

“We’re not talking about people saying, ‘You suck’ on the internet,” said Wu on Saturday. “It’s a lot more serious than that.”

Of the hundreds of panels at this year’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival, one stood out for sheer ambition. On Monday morning, a Canadian company named Synbiota would teach us how to make custom micro-organisms using its proprietary DNA prototyping tool. The process would be as easy as stacking LEGO blocks, the company promised. “By the end of the workshop you will have engineered and grown your own custom micro-organism that does useful work, or makes valuable biological products like medicine, materials, food, and fuel,” Synbiota said. At a festival where ambition rarely stretches beyond eating tacos for both breakfast and dinner, Synbiota’s panel promised an actual glimpse into the future.

Unfortunately, Synbiota’s founders skipped the panel. One never arrived in Austin at all. Ten minutes after the panel was due to start, a visibly angry festival volunteer took to the podium to announce that the panelists had never picked up their badges. And they weren’t answering their phones, either. (“Last-minute emergency,” they later told me, via email.) Just like that, a promised glimpse at the wonders to come receded a little further into the future.

Amid the nonstop parties, panels, activations, and tacos, Google was dealing with a pronounced shadow hanging over its presence at SXSW this week: the company’s ambitious self-driving car program was responsible for its very first collision back in February. Now the fallout has found its way into nearly every transportation-focused panel discussion here in Austin.

Even with high-flying names like “Autonomous Vehicles Will Remake Cities” and “Autonomous Cars Will Make Us Better Humans,” the tone at SXSW’s many forward-looking talks has been more subdued. Self-driving cars may be on the road today — in pilot programs in various sunny, fine-weathered locales. But the most optimistic of technologists are starting to acknowledge that the problem very well may take decades to crack.

“I’m here to tell you a story.”

George Hotz welcomed a packed room at SXSW yesterday for his panel “I Built a Better Self-Driving Car Than Tesla” with an intro as buzzy as the event’s title. Hotz introduced his company, comma.ai, saying “We are a company! I did that whole song and dance,” and then sprinted on into a whirlwind of a presentation.

Cartoon Network pulled out all the stops tonight for a party at Austin’s Long Center Terrace in celebration of three very special ladies — Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. What’s a party without pink, green, and blue cotton candy, blankets, glow sticks, t-shirts, popcorn, and... Macy’s Parade-worthy balloons!

Hardly a party at all, of course. Which is why every other party at SXSW had nothing on The Powerpuff Girls’ bash. When I arrived, the DJ was bumping 2009 Miley Cyrus and the sun was just setting over the Colorado River. Attendees saw the first episode of the rebooted series before anyone else on the planet (spoiler: it’s good, funny, and contains a Dolly Parton reference), and everyone went home on a sugar high. Good party! If you missed it, you can watch the first episode of the new Powerpuff Girls — “Horn Sweet Horn” — on April 4th on Cartoon Network.

If you’re building a new social network likely to get battered in the marketplace, you may as well call it Waffle. The latest entry in the ever-expanding category of Weird Samsung Things allows you to post a photo that your friends can annotate by adding their own photos or drawings in a grid surrounding the original. It’s a product of the C-Lab, a skunkworks inside Samsung that develops and tests new products. “Waffle offers a new, differentiated service that illustrates multiple points of view to generate a collaborative story,” the company says. It’s currently in beta in Android.

Waffle was named after the grids of images that users create. A video about the app shows someone wishing a friend a happy birthday, and other friends chiming in with birthday wishes of their own in separate squares. The grids are technically infinite — users can continue expanding them in every direction. That gives them potential to be akin to “a communal graffiti wall,” the company says, with each user contributing a piece of a larger whole. In one example, a user posts a photo of a rabbit sitting on a wall; other users fill in the surrounding pieces of the wall below and the sky above using drawings. “Waffle enables users to add their own perspective to someone else’s content, and vice versa,” says Joseph Kim, who’s heading up Waffle, in a statement.

Since the dawn of music, mankind has wished to turn their laziest vocal expressions into song. And since roughly 2011, when Smule introduced the Songify app, that’s been totally possible. But what if you just wanted to hum? That was the ambitious question that Samsung began to ask itself last year inside its secretive C-Lab, an “innovation program that helps its employees to nurture their own creative business ideas.” The result is Hum On!, an app now in beta that takes your most minimal vocalizations and turns them into something resembling music.

The app, which was shown off today at South By Southwest, is currently in development on Android. Tap the record button and hum a few bars, and the app will convert your vocals into musical notation, and play them back as a MIDI-like recording. You can edit the track if you hit a bum note or two, and you can also change the genre of the song by tapping “R&B,” “rock,” “orchestra” or so on.

The first thing I see when I put on the HTC Vive virtual reality headset is a McDonald’s Happy Meal. It’s floating by itself against a blank white backdrop, gesturing toward me with its unmoving smile and a dog-like eagerness. With my two hands now firmly grasping the Vive’s mushroom-shaped motion controllers, I reach out for it, and prepare to let McDonald’s show me the capitalist dystopian side of VR, where the only limit is how many logos your eyes can take in at once.

VR promises to change our relationship with what’s real, giving us otherwise impossible experiences and sensory escapades into the unknown. At SXSW 2016, McDonald’s is reminding us that VR will just as easily be a vehicle for corporate consumption. Like the early web being irreversibly branded by the banner ad, VR too will face its own unique struggle with the forces that wish to monetize and market with it.

Whittled down from 78 submitted proposals, the finalists are:

As reported by Gizmodo, each of these seven cities will now receive $100,000 to finesse the plans for their city before the winning proposal is announced in June. “For a long time these cities have felt very powerless seeing congestion and travel times going up and haven’t had the resources to aggressively tackle those things,” US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx told the publication. “We’re saying, if you’ve got a creative idea to answer those challenges, let’s see how we can help.”

Sony’s Future Lab is a R&D group responsible for taking crazy ideas into the prototype phase, and one impressive vision shown here at SXSW in Austin this week is a projector that turns any flat surface into a screen for light to play on. The “Interactive Tabletop” concept uses depth sensors and motion tracking to know when objects are placed on the table and even bring storybooks to life. The project looks like a fully realized version of the augmented reality coffee table inventor and technologist Bastian Broecker constructed back in 2012 using a PlayStation Eye camera and a Microsoft Kinect sensor.

Sony programmed its prototype to recognize a copy of Lewis Carroll classic Alice in Wonderland. When the company’s representative opens the book, it springs to life with animations that can be dragged off the page and then used to interact with a nearby physical objects like a teacup or deck of playing cards. The tabletop also responds to any finger press by tracking the direction of your hand, while hovering your fingers over any portion of the surface highlights the grid of light the projector uses to monitor your movements.

The origin story of SXSW’s Online Harassment Summit is not a pretty one, and it informed the tone of the event months ahead of time. SXSW canceled a panel called “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Gaming” in October after it received “numerous threats of on-site violence.“ An outcry from the panelists and other activists, paired with planned boycotts from the media and other sponsors, led SXSW to change course a week later and reinstate the panel. The festival also announced an expansive, day-long summit on issues of abuse online and invited several public figures who had been vocal about the cancellation, including Congresswoman Katherine Clark (D-MA), former Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, and game developer Brianna Wu, to speak.

That wasn’t enough for some of the scheduled panelists. Randi Harper, founder of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative and one of the panelists of “Level Up,” told Recode at the time that she had “no confidence in [SXSW’s] ability to run this summit while keeping panelists safe and providing for a productive conversation.” In the end, “Level Up” did take place (though SXSW cancelled the livestream of the event without explanation) and security at the summit was extremely thorough. My bag was checked four times over the course of the day, security guards were posted inside each ballroom, and panelists read warnings that anything left behind in the room would be considered a suspicious object and destroyed by the Austin police.

Sony, which became an industry giant thanks in part to its pioneering audio technology, is trying to reimagine headphones for a world with too many sounds. The idea behind N is to create a system for listening while trying to retain background noise for when you’re wandering about outside or riding your bike. The device also comes with an accompanying pair of cone-shaped ear pieces that communicate with the neckband, in the event you want a more traditional headphone-like experience. The buds, with holes punched through the middle, don’t block outside noises, so you’re still able to, say, hold a conversation while listening to music.

N also comes equipped with voice control and a camera, and Sony programmed it to respond to commands with the name “Arc.” In a way, it resembles a toned-down version of Google Glass that, instead of being plastered to your face, gets worn like a necklace. It’s less obtrusive than Google’s wearable, but still not quite fashion-forward enough not to turn heads.

It’s easy to love a robot with a face. But it turns out we’ll react just as positively to a trash can sitting on a Roomba. That was the finding of four students at the Stanford Center for Design Research, who sent a mobile trash can equipped with a hidden camera into two public locations and recorded the ways that people interacted with it. Unbeknownst to the research subjects, the researchers were piloting the trash can from out of view, letting them drive it over to anyone who started brandishing trash at it. Almost immediately, people began treating the trash can as a cherished family pet.

A year-old video of their findings by researcher Wendy Ju, which was presented during a panel at South By Southwest today, shows humanity rejoicing in the arrival of the garbage butler they never knew they always needed. A young child immediately attempts to lure the robot with trash, as one might tempt a dog with beef jerky. An old man whistles at the robot to draw it closer, offering it a garbage treat. (“People seem to think the robot wants trash,” as a deadpan title card memorably puts it.) By the video’s end, humans are so enamored with the trash can that when it falls over they race to pick it up, even asking if it’s OK.

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA) has announced a new federal bill to ramp up cybercrime enforcement training for police departments and create a national resource center that hosts a cybercrime-specific library. Clark announced the bill at a SXSW panel about how law enforcement and the tech industry can work together to bring down online trolls.

The proposed legislation, called the Cybercrime Enforcement Training Assistance Act, would establish a $20 million annual federal grant for state and local law enforcement agencies to train police officers, prosecutors, and emergency dispatchers in identifying and prosecuting cybercrimes. The funds would also be used to aid in extradition of cybercriminals between states.

The plot of the episode centers around Glazer’s character — recently fired for tweeting a bestiality video from the corporate Twitter account of her Groupon-like employer — somehow making her way into the Clinton campaign.

Jacobson and Glazer wrote the episode without a part for Clinton initially, and said they reached out through a couple of lucky connections — their executive producer, Amy Poehler (who portrayed Clinton on Saturday Night Live for several years), and the director of the episode (who had a friend on the Clinton campaign). “You know that meme of Hillary texting? That’s us, she’s texting us,” joked Glazer.

The ARC, which stands for Audience Reactive Composition, looks like an instrumental installation you’d see at a Daft Punk concert fifteen years from now, with Tron-like neon lights and all manner of rotating spheres and illuminating touch-sensitive cylinders. It effectively lets anyone play music by interacting with any one of its five unique “instruments,” all of which influence the sound coming out of a ring of glowing speakers encircling the disc-shaped base station. You’re not playing an instrument so much as you’re gently nudging a series of modulating sounds in a general direction. Still, the ARC is a crazy-looking fixture that’s almost as fun to interact with as it is to look at.

It’s a marketing vehicle, to be sure. Ad agency Deloitte Digital invested in the costly-looking mechanism for SXSW 2016 in collaboration with RAC, the electronic outfit of André Allen Anjos. RAC provided the music while multimedia artists Gabe Liberti and Dave Rife designed the installation alongside artist Beau Burrows, who oversaw visual design and crafted the light animations for the ARC. Deloitte’s effort is part of a greater brand strategy at Austin’s annual meeting of music, film, and technology trying to build unique bridges between those industries’ divides.

President Barack Obama called on the tech community to build a safe encryption key to assist in law enforcement investigations, saying that if it failed, it could one day face a more draconian solution passed by a Congress that is less sympathetic to its worldview. The president said he could not comment on the FBI’s current fight with Apple over its demand that the company build software to unlock data on an iPhone used by one of the alleged San Bernardino shooters. But he spoke broadly about the need to balance privacy and security, and warned that absolutist views on both sides are dangerous.

If the tech community does not find a way to help law enforcement in a narrow range of cases, he said, a future incident could spark a backlash that leads to less encryption overall. “What will happen is, if everybody goes to their respective corners, and the tech community says ‘either we have strong perfect encryption or else it’s Big Brother and an Orwellian world’, what you’ll find is that after something really bad happens, the politics of this will swing and it will become sloppy and rushed and it will go through Congress in ways that are dangerous and not thought through,” the president said.

President Barack Obama is kicking off the first day of the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, with a talk expected to focus on the role that technology should play in civic life. The president is making his first appearance at the festival, and will use the occasion to call for using technology to improve customer service inside the government, according to the New York Times. As the Times notes, Obama has made a point of embracing the the tech community, regularly attending fund-raisers in Silicon Valley and inviting tech leaders to the White House.

He has also spent his second term making appearances in forums no president has gone before — including podcasts nd Between Two Ferns. Obama will be interviewed at the Long Center for the Performing Arts by Evan Smith, editor of the Texas Tribune. The hour-long talk is expected to begin at 3:30PM ET. It is being live-streamed at sxsw.com/live and at the embed above.