The greatest hits of SXSW 2013 – The Verge

Dr. Shaq goes social: SXSW and the future of learning in an AI-dominated world

2013-03-15T12:00:07-04:00

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Remember what it was like in 2009 when you were trying to explain what Twitter was to people who didn't use Twitter? I used to feel like I was a lifelong Burner trying to explain Burning Man: "You won't understand it unless you experience it, man." It was the anti-explanation and everyone hated it including me and then I found Shaq.

It was this tweet, sent out when Shaq himself still didn't really understand how powerful 140 characters could be, that made Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey call him "the ideal Twitter user." It also made explaining Twitter (and all social media) a lot less annoying for assholes like me. I absorbed vast quantities of O' …

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Death by notification: will Google Glass drown us in data?

2013-03-12T16:13:04-04:00

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Let's face it: we're all pretty horrible at turning off push notifications on our smartphones. You install an app, give it permission to notify you with updates, and before you know it, your phone's buzzing like a beehive with status updates, tagged photos, and friends checking in nearby. The definition of "urgent" is becoming harder and harder to define. According to Google's Timothy Jordan, Google Glass is all about "getting technology out of the way," but if his keynote yesterday was any indication, Glass could easily become just another screen, buzzing, beeping, and vying for our attention. When that screen is on your face, it's impossib …

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NASA rockets into social space, but lacks a clear mission

2013-03-12T15:30:05-04:00

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It was dark and chilly in Austin on Sunday, March 10th, the night that NASA planned to break the Guinness World Record for "largest outdoor astronomy lesson." The cold front had cleared the clouds, leaving the stars bright and stark in the sky, and the 526 space geeks in NASA ball caps and T-shirts didn't mind the temperature - they were happy to participate, even though the talk was just a basic demonstration on light and color. Some even lugged their own telescopes.

At 8:35PM, Dr. Frank Summers, the master of ceremonies and a Hubble astrophysicist, stopped abruptly to make an announcement. "Those of you with smartphones," he said, with a …

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We are all routers: a new empathetic internet and the orgasmic mediation that fuels it

2013-03-12T12:30:42-04:00

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Flipping through the pocket programming guide for South By Southwest 2013 feels a little bit like reading through an entire year of one of those Joke-A-Day or Far Side calendars you had on your desk when you were a kid in one sitting: you are really not supposed to take all of this in in just one day.

Getting Started With Angel Investing#catvidfest: Is This The End Of Art?What Can We Learn From The Unabomber?Extreme GPS: Limits of Security & PrecisionLatinos y Mobile: A Silver Bullet?The Comfy Chair! Are We Sitting Too Much?

Some sound like they are for babies, others sound like they are for EMBA students, most sound like they are for blogge …

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Don’t ask me anything: Reddit-critical panel provokes contentious Q&A

2013-03-12T10:00:07-04:00

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Friday afternoon, SXSWi hosted a panel called, "It's Reddit's Web. We Just Live in It." The room was packed. And sadly, as though to prove the title's point, what might have been a reflective, thoughtful discussion about the massive site's power and influence - its achievements as well as its flaws and foibles - instead became a contentious Q&A session dominated by apparent Redditors who felt misrepresented.

The three panelists, Slate's Farhad Manjoo, Gawker writer Adrian Chen, and Skepchick's Rebecca Watson, briefly discussed Reddit's achievements, including its part in defeating SOPA, the contentious bill introduced by the US Congress in …

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Google reveals Glass apps: New York Times, Evernote, Gmail, and Path

2013-03-11T18:35:36-04:00

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We're watching Google's Project Glass developer panel live at SXSW Interactive, and the company's showing off some of the first third-party software integrated into Glass - all using a unified "Timeline cards" interface to position short bursts of useful information in your peripheral vision, and Google's Mirror API to pull down that data. Google's developer advocate Timothy Jordan demonstrated that software on stage, starting with The New York Times. Breaking news can be delivered hourly to your Glass headset. If you use the "look up" head gesture, Glass can show off photos and headlines, and read the text of a story to you as well.

Subscri …

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Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley: your phone knows if you’re a local or a tourist

2013-03-11T13:30:05-04:00

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Dennis Crowley is the man behind Foursquare, the check-in and food recommendations machine challenging Yelp as the de facto place to answer "what should I grab to eat?" Foursquare emerged at SXSW four years ago, and has since grown to 30 million users who have checked in over three billion times. What was once a cool way to see where your friends are evolved into one of the most important sources of data on where urbanites like to eat and drink. Crowley took some time to talk to The Verge about the ever-changing buttons of the Foursquare application, the data science behind its recommendations, and why push notifications can be an extremely …

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Samsung designer Golden Krishna: ‘Our love for the digital interface is out of control’

2013-03-10T15:30:04-04:00

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Golden Krishna, Senior Designer at Samsung Design America, wants to upend the way we think about user interfaces. "Our love for the digital interface is out of control," he says. "It has become our answer to everything." If he has his way, the future of Samsung consumer electronics might work more like the Nest thermostat, which learns about your favorite temperature, or a Mercedes-Benz automobile, which automatically unlocks when it detects the keys in your pocket.

"The best interface is no interface."

"The best interface is no interface," he repeated over and over at a SXSW keynote this morning. Three principles form the roots of the movem …

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Zen robots and augmented reality Porta Potties: exploring the ‘Other Singularity’ with Frog Design

2013-03-10T15:00:04-04:00

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The folks from Frog Design have been throwing the official SXSW Interactive kickoff party for ten years. First it was just a chance for a few nerds to get drunk. Then it got so big, the fire department came and shut it down. Now it's become a sort of high tech art fair meant to spark a conversation about the future of the digital world.

Frog was founded in the Black Forest of Germany, arriving in the States back in the 1980s, when Steve Jobs hired them to work on the design of the Apple II's portable case. They founded an office in Austin in the 1990s, as the company expanded from industrial design to digital work.

The party is weird, it's …

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Banned from the internet for three hours in the middle of SXSW

2013-03-10T14:40:28-04:00

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It was just after 6:30PM on Friday and still light outside when Jeremy Hollander, a Belgian entrepreneur who lives in San Francisco, strolled into one of the high-ceilinged, gold-hued ballrooms at the Hilton Austin wearing a suit and a dark blue yarmulke.

The room was in disarray as hotel employees shook tablecloths over five rows of long tables, placed napkins, and hauled an offending electric-powered water cooler out of the room. They were setting up for the third annual #openShabbat dinner, held on the first night of the South by Southwest Interactive conference, and this year's meal was expected to be almost three times bigger than last …

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