My UX @ SXSWi

Thoughts on SXSWi

[sxswi]

Music, Apps, Devices: Next Gen? - Remixes coming to iTunes - 68% of people now listen to music on mobile - As artists you don't have any connection or control over your music once it's online - Creating transparency for the music industry using block chain - Artists should be able to connect with their fans and song and not have it fall off the Facebook cliff - YouTube is the largest viewership of music by far - There needs to be a middle class of the music industry - There's no one digital definitive version of artist online, it's fragmented - Break the bundle, free the music - We're living in a world where the industry is very controlled as a reaction to years of piracy - Music search is happening less, it's all about personalization (next track, playlists) - Music is less social and more personal

[sxswi]

Why Happiness Is Hard And How To Make It Easier - We run the risk of doing the same to the health of our mind as we have our bodies - There is no place to hide from your mind - Life is tough and the we layer on thoughts - Mindfulness is the ability to stay present in the moment

[sxswi]

From Success To Significance - Aspen Institute - Set goals for the year - Study great leaders - Study great societies - It all boils down to resources, especially time and money

[sxswi]

12 Inevitable Tech Forces That Will Shape Our Future - New book, The Inevitable - AI, Cognification - Hints of this over last 20 years - Already analyzing X-rays and legal documents - Perfect storm: neural networks + GPUs + big data - AI today can perform very specific functions - Artificial smartness (calculators, navigators, search); a utility - Create lots of types of AI based on lots of different types of (non human) minds - IQ as service (like electricity) - For startups: take x product, service, or industry and add AI - The more users, the smarter it gets - Baxter programmable robot - All productivity jobs will go to robots; robots will make new jobs for humans - Learning to work with new AIs will become a desirable skill - Creativity, science and innovation are inefficient processes (non productive jobs) - Vituality - VR isn't 1000x better than in the 80s but it is 1000x cheaper - VR is the next platform after smartphones - Immersion VR (Oculus) - Presence VR (Magic Leap) - Lo fi activity is swivel (cardboard) - Hi fi activity is roaming (room tracking) - The Internet of experiences; internet won't be a place but something you interact with - We'll go from watching to experiencing - Redirected walking and touch - VR will be the most social of social media - Founder of Second is creating a VR world to interact with people - Tracking - Anything that can be tracked will - Scanadu Tricorder - LifeChart: tracking biometric data over a lifetime - Anything that can be measured will be measured - A more civil way of tracking: co-veilence - Vanity trumps privacy - Believe in the impossible more often

[sxswi]

The Eyes Of Robots And Murderers - Bad Robot Productions, JJ Abrams production company - Effortless and engaging content requires hiding the technology - Everybody has a movie studio and distribution system in their pocket - KnowMe video app - No technology can make a story better, only how it's dressed

[sxswi]

How A Sports Giant Is Now Tackling Your Health - Under Armour - Culture eats strategy for breakfast - Teammates not employees - 22 quarters of 20%+ growth - Every new athlete signed, product created is a new chapter in the story. The job is to make sure that story reads from chapter to chapter - 160M users across acquired apps -Data is the new oil - The companies that will succeed are those that can aggregate and apply data to decisions - The job is to give consumers products they didn't know they needed but couldn't imagine living without - Adding 1M new users every 8 days - Largest digital community in the world - 4 quadrants: health, sleep, nutrition, exercise - Partnered with Watson to help make insightful value from masses of data - Good board members never give their opinion, they give perspective - 8B foods recorded, 2M workouts logged - Map and terrain - 7B USD projected by 2018

[sxswi]

Accessing The Inaccessible: Evolving Search - We're super connected: 6 degrees of separation has been reduced to around 3. - Jelly routes queries to people rather than pages - Google indexes pages; Jelly indexes people - The goal of technology should be to enhance the best human traits - Subjective search, tap into human experience and opinion - Give your company culture the attention of a product

[sxswi]

Lead, Not Follow: The Consumer’s Mobile Journey

- Biggest mistake for brands on mobile is not frequency capping, which is largely a tech constraint - A more interesting approach is showing bits of content in different places and times that collectively create a story arc - Mobile is not a one-size-fits-all platform; it will become more personal and fragmented over time - Don’t forget to include fun, it’s not just about being transactional - Mobile marketing means thinking in moments - The lines between CMO and CIO are beginning to blur - Creating and distributing a lot of content comes with its challenges; creating and distributing a lot of content for specific segments is vastly more complex - If you’re buying CPM banners you’re wasting your money - You need to understand what communications you’re putting into the market at once; the perils of siloed organizations

[sxswi]

Smartertainment: Bushnells On The Future Of Fun - Two Bit Circus - We're moving away from consumer driven efforts and towards experiential - Everyone is a casual gamer but we lost them in the nineties with the addition of violence and more buttons - Early on the graphic capabilities weren't there so you had to Fuchs on game mechanics - Social VR: person in headset has some info while those who don't have different info and must solve the problem together - Sleep No More immersive theater in NY - Hopscotch immersive limousine experience - The future is overlaying info atop reality - Story rooms, bigger category of escape Roma - Escape rooms are now using tech to leave the rooms - IoT is the tech that will change the game on entertainment - Self driving cars means you don't need Windows, which could become screens for creating immersive drives through different environments

[sxswi]

Skip The Sale: Acquiring Subscribers In The Digital Age - Subscription business is the relationship business - People not users - Create relevant messages to segmented audiences (consumers, app downloads, etc) - Know what matters to people --> test and learn - Price is ever only ever an issue in the absence of value - Users increasingly expect personal experiences - NYT: what time of day do we deliver specific content (break crossword, etc) - Active Days = strong indicator of subscribers - Kiwi identifies and links key content, segments and timing - Retargeting pixels used to target specific content based on 3 levels of user engagement - How much content should NYTs give away as samples - Profile user segments based on content samples - It's not all about algorithms, it's about personal experiences

[sxswi]

Mo' Money Mo' Problems: Luxury Confronts Digital - Luxury has been democratized as a result of access: price (licensing) and tech (rent jets, cars and houses) - American definition of luxury: price point - European definition of luxury: knowhow for making something, an archive and a historical birthplace/address - People will remember what they did with the product rather than the product itself - Luxury is all about fascination - Instagram is more important than print - 40% of lux brands don't sell online - Advertising lets brands share their POV, the future is sharing the stage with others to tell their story and version of the brand - Civilian Stripes are the different consumer tribes and what price point they can buy into - Visual listening is key for any brand

[sxswi]

Anatomy Of A Cognitive Startup - Cognitive = AI and machine learning - Watson is still slow and simple, but gaining steam - Watson can do image recognition, 15 dimensions of personality and tone analysis - Cerebri AI - Alpha Modus - Cognition only works based on reliable data: shit in, shit out - Cognitive systems require a balanced partnership between human and tech - Information supply chain for cognitive business: sensors --> data --> analytics --> information --> cognitive --> knowledge

[sxswi]

Covering The Chinese Technology Revolution - Chinese government doesn't police and censor the platforms, the platforms do - Focus on getting platforms profitable ASAP - Relationship with KOLs is very transactional - The amount of info available in China now is a fraction of what's censored - WeChat has become the first mobile, direct CRM connection to consumers - Social commerce from China will be one of the first social exports adopted in the West

[sxswi]

Daring Greatly - Entering the arena means choosing courage over comfort - If you're going to be brave, you're going to get your ass kicked - If you're innovative and creative enough you will experience failure - Our emotions get the first crack at interpreting new input; evolutionary survival - The brain rewards us for a story that makes sense of something, regardless of accuracy - The story I'm telling myself right now is... - Mindfulness is another way of paying attention - Conspiracy is a story with an absence of facts that we fill in with emotions and bias - All great writers stat with a Shitty first draft - When you own your story you get to write the ending; when you deny the story it owns you

[sxswi]

Building Influential Tech Brands - A brand is not a logo or cull but a system - Start your positioning with a meaning people can understand versus what you want it to become - The product you offer today is not your brand in full

[sxswi]

Distributed: A New OS For The Digital Economy - Douglas Rushkoff - We're running a 13th century business operating system now using digital - Digital companies are vacuuming out value faster than traditional business; the Wall art effect but really fast - Optimize the company for the circulation of rather than extraction of capital - Make your users wealthy - Companies need to get closer t value creation

[sxswi]

Here Are The Keys To Your New Innovation Playbook

- Kite - CrunchBase - Maxus - Evolution of innovation: internally --> agencies --> startups - New potential for partnerships that wouldn’t have existed a few years ago - Searching for startups is an in-person endeavor - Watch and establish relationships with investors, they see the new first - Most face to face meetings with startups should help understand their reach, user experience and how a brand can integrate - Brands and startups need to craft a really good reason to work together - Finding the right startup partners is fundamentally a CRM problem