vicariously experiencing SXSW

Alright, another South by Southwest has come and gone in Austin, Texas and while I didn't go this year I did get something of a vicarious experience by way of working downtown, and, more so, today my company had a let's-talk-over-pizza lunch in in which those of us who did go spoke to their experience. I come away with the following notes:

• The bad: A lot of it was too high level to be practically applicable to one's work life which was basically what I experienced last year and what left me little incentive to return this year. At the view from 20,000 feet there was at least one talk on Artificial Intelligence with an imagine this, imagine that fluffy feel to it. Tim Ferriss supposedly gave a talk "on how to do SXSW" which recommended reading the bios of speakers when considering a session to attend and not the blurb on the session itself. Something new this year seemed to be that many sessions required a RSVP (répondez s'il vous plaît) in advance and there seemed to an inclination to wish there was more of this required instead of less of it once one was shut out from a full event where the RSVP rule did not exist. It was suggested that the JW Marriott Austin was a poor venue as it has small rooms. RSVP signups got an email asking them what they thought of their experience too. Netflix offered a slideshow as a companion to one of their talks to compensate for people being shutout. One coworker suggested that panels, for which one could not RSVP, should just have been scheduled earlier.
• Beyond the talks: One coworker went through the trade show in the convention center on a Sunday. She said that NASA was there as were a lot of kickstarter companies. On display was a portable power supply that one could power either a laptop or a smartphone with and retractable earphone and USB cords. She said there was robot petting zoo, and she also fell victim to some social engineering in which she was tricked into posing for a photo with some people who ended up getting her to hold a "Legalize Cannabis" sign. It sounded like there was plenty of robot stuff in general.
• I learned more about what the M-Pesa money system in Kenya is. It turns out it all comes from a tragic/comic situation in which Kenya has no strong currency and thus individuals trade cell phone minutes over the M-Pesa system as the de facto currency. M-Pesa takes a 30% cut of a transfer though making it not so practical. A Bitcoin system would be a better way to go.
• Of Bitcoin, there was some security stuff. It uses decentralized caching. A ledger is spread out across several volunteer computers in a decentralized chain block. One has to wait for six transactions with the decentralized computers to be affirmed to verify a payment. Bitcoin has volatile exchange rate and another challenge is the anonymity of where payments are coming from and going to. How do we know Bitcoin isn't funding ISIS?
• A lot of coworkers liked a talk called "How to Rob a Bank" which suggested that it was just easier anymore to steal someone's identity. One's home street address, which is typically not considered a super-sensitive piece of information, may be used in tandem with a social security number to fake an identity and thus, it does have some sensitivity as a datum. SSN and DOB (date of birth) together are also pretty good for faking identity. Tokenization was emphasized for security. It was noted that the law doesn't really keep up with technology when it comes to transactions. There were some statistics on how much a credit card number was worth to a hacker. It has fallen from about ten dollars to a single dollar. On the dark web, hackers will launder credit cards with gift cards, setting up credit cards based on gift card funding. This factoid led to some out loud speculation as to how to verify cards and time limits upon them.
• Astro Teller of Google X gave a talk in which he covered the crazier stuff that Google X does like self-driving cars and WiFi balloons. He said that you should not be afraid to fail and that in order to innovate you need to fail often and fast.
• "Drive" author Daniel Pink gave a talk on getting people to change their behavior with nudging. An example was given in which a hotel wanted guests to reuse towels instead of expecting the hotels to rewash them daily and it got this to happen by leaving note cards in the rooms which suggested that 70% of guests reused towels. He asserted that rhyming, repetition, and alliteration help in messaging and that, thus, "Woes unite foes." messages much better than "Woes unite enemies."
• There was much talk on big data and if there is a way to sanitize and sell big data. Collect non-sensitive data and selling it to people? Big data was seen as an emerging theme. Every piece of information about you is probably worth something to someone. What are the times of day a business' sales have the most volume. Little subtleties like this may be opened up and exploited. F1 exhaustively records biometric data on its drivers. Pharmaceutical researches do big data too. "Drop Dead Healthy" author A. J. Jacobs suggested that we are all related and that big data proves it and that Barack Obama is effectively a twelfth-cousin or whatever as he can show a 14% generic match with him. He plans to have a family reunion in which everyone on Earth is invited. 23andMe can take a generic sample from you and try to find lost relatives with its big data abilities. They can also tell you if you a prone to certain diseases. You might have a genetic marker for heart disease that you didn't know about in your youth.
• There were talks on both storyboarding and gaming that no one at today's event personally attended.
• Optimizely was suggested as a cool tool in a talk on integrating A/B testing with an automated testing framework. Well, honestly, "Optiwiser" was what was said aloud, but I could not find this in Googling for it. As a concept A/B testing involves the moderation of a change variable. A lot of this talk delved into mobile space stuff.
• There was apparently also a talk on UX testing which encouraged getting your customers together to do testing and taking their pulses.
• There was a talk on JavaScript testing which suggested that PayPal is now using NodeJS and the NodeJS allows for modularized code. This was high-level talk which also had some Python and some CSS in the lesson-to-learn that one was to download and experiment with.
• A coworker attended a talk on beacons. Beacons are wearable tech which let you send and receive Bluetooth signals in lieu of jumping on wireless networks. The coworker thought that perhaps the Round Rock Express baseball team used beacons to allow persons at the games to either order food or reserve places in lines. If you are walking in the mall with a beacon you could get an alert from The Gap for jeans on sale for $42.95 and the like. Pier-to-pier networks were also discussed in the beacons talk.
• The government is trying to update the tax code to help with innovation in the name of patent reform.
• Coworkers went to a talk called "seemingly seamless" which they hoped would be about things like how Uber takes payments without you ever giving a payment to the driver, but it was instead on subscription services. ClassPass and Braintree (recently acquired by PayPal) had speakers there.
• Dwolla had a talk. There were talks on art. There was a talk on Nielson ratings stuff. There was a talk on how to draft in sports. There was talk on the ten greatest gambling moments ever.
• Charles Barkley (basketball) gave a talk on controlling your digital identity. His company (tech) looks at the dark web for where others have been attempting to use your password. If someone gets your password from one source they are likely to try to reuse it at big venues like Amazon and the like, etc.
• Speaking of basketball it is March Madness time and a panel set up a March Madness bracket to vote their way into what was the greatest geek moment ever. Star Wars ended up beating the internet. The crowd was allowed to vote afterwards and the crowd found the internet to be bigger.
• Art Briles, the coach of Baylor football, gave a talk on coaching fast and furious and taking a no name team to the top.
• There were not that many plugs from speakers on panels themselves for their companies. They just said who they worked for and went forward. The plugs happened went audience members got up to ask questions. They would then plug their companies.