Alla Gringaus

SXSW 2012 Keynotes I attended

Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

#sxsw #AmberCase @caseorganic
UX Designer and tech writer. TED Speaker. Co-founder of Geoloqi.com.
Portland, OR · http://caseorganic.com/
Birthplace Salt Lake City, Utah
UX designer Amber Case will share insights from her research in cyborg anthropology and talk about what really makes us human. Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist currently working at Vertigo Software. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers. Her main focus is on mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, as these reduce the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect with information. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding. She formerly worked at global advertising agency. In 2010, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the Most Influential Women in Tech. Podcast.

RAY KURZWEIL “Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit”

Monday, March 12 at 2:00pm

Legendary visionary Ray Kurzweil will join writer Lev Grossman from TIME Magazine for a mind-expanding conversation about our future on Monday, March 12.

Ray Kurzweil (left) has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s website Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written four national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Fred Wilson’s Goodness: Golden Principles

Guess what? Plain brilliant: Speed is First.

Anatomy of a Design Decision – Jared Spool!

Mar 14, 5:00, ACC, Ballroom D
What separates a good design from a bad design are the decisions that the designer made. Jared will explore the five styles of design decisions, showing you when gut instinct produces the right results and when designers need to look to more user-focused research. You’ll see how informed decisions play out against rule-based techniques, such as guidelines and templates. And Jared will show you the latest research showing how to hire great decision makers and find opportunities that match your style. Of course, Jared will use his unforgettable presentation style to deliver an extremely entertaining and informative presentation.

For my SXSWi schedule for March 11-15 click here. The overlaps reflect my options.

Wikipedia and Emergence – Happy Birthday!

The State of Wikipedia

From Wikipedia: In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, EMERGENCE is the way complex systemsmultiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. and patterns arise out of a

The early draft of Emergence book by Steven Johnson, the American Popular Science author, had subtitle: “Emergence: What the New Science Can Teach Us About Our Minds, Our Communities, and Ourselves.” changing it later to “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.” The book was published in 2001, and so the Wikipedia project, a free web-based, collaborative online reference. Both are Ten-Year Old Babies this year!

Wikipedia Brand via visual storytelling

http://www.thestateofwikipedia.com/media/wiki/img/infographic-lg.jpg

Which is Which? Wapplications

Great excerpts from Keynote Benchmark on The Mobile Dilemma

Which is Which? Which is the app, and which the mobile website? The New York Times app (left) gives users an extra headline or so, and navigation/function options at the bottom, but the mobile Website (right) offers more types of information such as stock quotes and weather.

Which is Which? The YouTube “wapplication” an HTML5 website, actually delivers better design than the native iPhone app (left), and more closely mimics the functionality of the main YouTube Web site.

Which is Which? The app (left) is a little more colorful, but the content is virtually identical, and the wapplication/mobile Website delivers a little more functionality such as texting.