SXSW Interactive 2016: news, panels, speeches, and brand antics – The Verge

The Daily Show’s Baratunde Thurston on comedy in the age of Trump

2016-03-21T16:45:48-04:00

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 prod …

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Universal Pictures made different Straight Outta Compton trailers for different races

2016-03-17T19:10:36-04:00

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 connecte …

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How to make friends and thinkfluence people at SXSW

2016-03-17T16:41:46-04:00

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.

It felt like necessary counter-programming to all the bogus "connecting at SXSW" emails, free food, handshakes, and business cards. If I had a dolla …

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SXSW’s Gamergate panel was as disappointing as expected

2016-03-16T13:24:39-04:00

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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."

"St …

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Why there was no breakout technology at SXSW this year

2016-03-16T11:00:21-04:00

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, …

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Google’s bus crash is changing the conversation around self-driving cars

2016-03-15T14:56:10-04:00

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-we …

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George Hotz promised to end capitalism in a manic sermon at SXSW

2016-03-15T11:09:07-04:00

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"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.

At most presentations at SXSW, there's an air of skepticism, or at least, reasonable human detachment. But at this presentation, people had come to be impressed. And they were. I'm not saying Hotz is a huckster - he's done enough to prove that he's talented - but he worked that hotel conference room …

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The return of The Powerpuff Girls was the most lit party at SXSW

2016-03-15T06:50:02-04:00

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, an …

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Samsung is building a new social network called Waffle

2016-03-14T17:27:53-04:00

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 crea …

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Samsung is building an app that makes music from your humming

2016-03-14T15:16:41-04:00

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 Andr …

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