Editor’s note: Marc Ruxin is CEO and co-founder of TastemakerX. Follow him on Twitter @ruxputin.

If you went to SXSW 20 years ago, you would have been there to see and discover new music. You worked at a label or publishing company, or perhaps you were a journalist or PR rep. Sure, there were locals and college kids swaying next to you at the shows, but in the end, SXSW was an industry event where bands were discovered, signed and given a chance to break out. There were no cell phones. There was no social media.

Buzz was entirely old-school word of mouth. There was no Pitchfork or BrooklynVegan or Hype Machine. There weren’t countless photos and tweets flooding the universe with directional information. There weren’t massive compounds across the freeway like those from Fader or Spotify, mostly just the venues up and down 6th street and a few other streets. There was no aggregated crowd wisdom. You had to stand in front of a band and use your eyes and ears to have a sense for whether the band was happening. You’d have to look around the room and read the faces of the fans in the audience to see what kind of reaction the music elicited. Yup, the old-fashioned way, when tastemaking wasn’t crowd-sourced, but a skill you either learned or inherited.

There was no aggregated crowd wisdom.

Although the first films showed up at SXSW in 1994, the film fest picked up steam a decade ago, and is now a steady and lower decibel buzz that extends for the duration of the festival. And although I am a film nut, I rarely have the time to see many films. I did see the star-studded slacker romance Drinking Buddies, which seemed a near-perfect choice to play in Austin. The films are appropriately and largely American indies or documentaries focused on young hipster types or iconic American documentary subjects. The lines are long for most buzzy screenings, but unlike Sundance or Toronto or Cannes, SXSW isn’t a buyer’s festival. It’s more a low-key event for film fans and a fun place to premiere a film.

Flash forward 20 years. Music almost feels second fiddle to what SXSW has become. The world has changed dramatically. The label ecosystem has been decimated by a combination of incompetence and the inevitable evolution of technology. Indie film has been largely relegated to Netflix and Amazon; fewer and fewer screens play indie films and for increasingly shorter runs. Technologists are a new breed of rockstar: Elon Musk ~Thom Yorke, Daniel Ek ~ Dave Grohl, Jack Dorsey ~ Bono. Tech companies also have band-like counterparts: Jawbone ~ Radiohead, Uber ~ Alt-J, Airbnb ~ Mumford.

But in the end, as much as technology has democratized so much of our lives, it has also eaten SXSW.

But in the end, as much as technology has democratized so much of our lives, it has also eaten SXSW. What began as a music conference/festival has become a carnival of hype and ambient noise. Tech companies large and small slog it out on the streets of Austin trying to break out or expand their lead. There are panels throughout the week that very few people seem to attend, and parties that almost nobody seems to be able to get into. There is free shit everywhere. GroupMe still buys grilled cheese for people with the app on their phone (thanks, Microsoft). Other companies ply attendees with food, booze, energy drinks, stickers, T-shirts, free pedi cabs, and music. It is an endless sea of noise, and it rolls out like this for the uninitiated.

In the event that you question the magnitude of the real battle for consumer attention, SXSW is an exaggerated ground zero for understanding the intersection of technology, youth culture and the evolution of media.

On Friday, the techies invade Austin. The locals vacate and rent every available room in the city on Airbnb at increasingly egregious prices. Thousands of companies compete for press on the blogosphere, with the hopes of becoming the next big thing (although it has been quite a few years since Twitter and Foursquare broke out and they didn’t really launch at SXSW). And those companies that have already broken out throw increasingly outrageous parties, fighting hard to seduce an A-List crowd. It’s a big hipster schmooze filled with old guys trying to stay relevant and young guys dreaming of becoming rich old guys that somehow managed to stay relevant. There are VCs, brand marketers, PR folks, engineers, biz dev guys, legit celebs, and Internet celebs dining at food carts and sampling $20 club sandwiches at the Four Seasons.

This lasts until Tuesday or Wednesday when the nerds leave and the real hipsters and music tech nerds arrive to do essentially the same thing but with endless amounts of epic live music, prioritized wait lists, and endless venture-funded boondoggling. Great bands play everywhere from Stubbs to a tiny stage in a restaurant. This year bands on a meteoric rise like Alt-J, Lord Huron, The Joy Formidable, St. Lucia, Foxygen and others played 10 times over a week and often three times a day. But this is a different SXSW. Everywhere there are phones in the air capturing photos, video, tweeting, checking in, texting. In the air there is a sea of Vine, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Path, Snapchat, and a bunch of other smaller apps like TastemakerX, Soundtracking and Songkick focused on music.

But when the dust settles, there is no more vibrant a microcosm for observing the modern age than SXSW. Culture, technology, food, film, art all displayed at a hyperbolic scale. Music and film have been massively disintermediated by technology, and in a sense music and film now compete with social media, social games, and the Internet broadly for time. But in the same breath, technology has now enabled musicians and filmmakers to create and distribute their art to a global audience at a significantly lower cost and with very little friction.

SXSW used to be about music, but now it seems to be about everything and nothing at all. Like the occasional trip to Vegas, the first 48 hours are great. But at 48 hours and one minute, you feel like you need to leave immediately. And like the indie bands you used to love until they got too big and commercial and you lost interest, SXSW is all grown up. It’s not the DIY mecca it used to be, but then again occasionally there is that band that grows up and still remains relevant and cool, and in that way perhaps SXSW is kind of like Radiohead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Beyond the edge of SXSW last week, the ESRI team camped out in an old brick firehouse with the interior of an Italian palace. It felt like the home of an eccentric Texas aristocrat, alone in his mansion, dripping with rich fabrics, chandeliers and the odd sense of a New York loft. And it was just right — an old world yet modern setting for a 44-year-old mapping company to host a new generation of developers who know little about cartography but a lot about data.

“Do you want to make a playing card?” asks Amber Case as she points to a rich backdrop, a painting of rock and red oozing lava. Case and her partner Aaron Parecki brought their playful, forward-looking, geek-centric view of the world when they sold their company, Geoloqi, to ESRI last fall. They now run a research and development lab for ESRI out of Portland where they are in many ways helping this 3,000-employee, privately held company reconsider how geodata is as much for cartographers as it is for developers and even the rest of us with little or no programming/mapping experience.

Amber jumps in front of the camera, dons some bee antennas and hams it up.

It’s not what you would expect from a traditional mapping company with more ties to the august world of National Geographic than the edgy data playground where hackers play.

But here they are, making playing cards to show on a map and the different ways their tools can be used to shape geodata.

Developers played with data that has helped communities like the city of Austin create a map of its most dangerous dogs (chihuahuas — no joke). They scanned and mapped the ridges of visitors’ thumb prints to create personal, 3D virtual cities.

Here’s what my thumb print looks like as a city:

Bernard Szukalski is a product strategist and evangelist for ESRI. He showed me how my thumbprint became a virtual city and gave a demo of ArcGIS Online.

I looked over his shoulder as he added live weather and weather warnings data to a “community basemap” – that GIS crowdsourced basemap compiled from various GIS sources. He also dragged and dropped a spreadsheet with traffic onto a map and configured symbols and pop-ups. It required no coding, just configuration steps to create aan app that a user can embed in blogs, websites, etc.

ESRI was founded in 1969. Its fame comes from its Arc-GIS mapping tools that urban planners, cartographers and other technical professionals have relied on for generations. It’s a world of its own. People speak language that pretty much they only understand. It’s a rarefied community, much like tens of thousands of other professional communities that now face a different reality. They are experts at what they do in a field that no longer necessarily requires a deep technical background. It’s the data that’s the difference, giving programmers room to abstract complexity and make it easy for people to use and understand. And that data is essentially shaped with accessible programming languages that developers use to create lightweight covers — essentially what we know of as apps.

And the result is a revolution in how we think about almost anything imaginable.

Maps are an appropriate metaphor for this new data universe. Today’s maps help us shape an infinite space, giving structure and visibility to what had before been empty and invisible.

ESRI sees itself blending its GIS software to create relationships about where things are and how they are connected.

That’s a shift for ESRI. It means they have to create a data mesh that spans the globe across thousands of data centers. You don’t do that one vertical software stack at a time. It’s impossible. And so ESRI is turning to the cloud with ArcGIS Online as a way to give developers and people without a technical background, access to its vast geodata stores. Again, that data gives developers ways to create apps that help us navigate using virtual tools that will soon be, if not already, more predominant than the paper maps and atlases that many of us grew up with.

But they will have to act fast. Google, Microsoft and a host of startups are building or have built platforms that have made it easier to use geodata in their apps.

“The future is that developers will become more and more like geographers and cartographers as they increasingly work with real-world data,” Case said in a text message today. “ESRI will be there for them with the tools they need in the languages they use at the subscription model they’re used to.”

This shift is exemplified in any variety of services and in the number of people now making maps as illustrated by Thierry Gregorius this week on his blog, Geofenced:

ESRI is making the changes you see with more forward-looking enterprise software companies. The company has a market-leading position but faces its deepest challenges from companies that do not have legacy software to support.

The only way to make the transition is to work with technologists like Case and Parecki – people who understand the geek culture and how to connect to the ever-growing developer community.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Xi3 recently opened preorders for Piston, the company’s gaming-optimized personal computer. I actually had a chance to speak to the company’s chief marketing officer David Politis over the weekend at South by Southwest Interactive, where he described the device as a combination of the best aspects of PCs and gaming consoles:

Consoles are great because they’re small, they’ve got a great environment, but they are closed and you can’t update them. Computers, on the other hand, they’re typically great because there’s a lot of software for ‘em, you can run basic computing things, you can surf the web and all of that, but they’re typically really big and they typically suck power. And they’re ugly.

Piston, Politis said, represents a “middle ground” with the size and elegance of a console, plus the modularity and updatability of a PC. He also hinted that Xi3 is trying to land some exclusive games from developers.

Politis was vague about the exact shipping date, except to say that the Piston will ship sometime around the holiday season. Suggested retail price is $999.99, but you can pre-order it here for $899.99.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Bing Gordon has become known in recent years for his role as a partner at venerated Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, but anyone who knows him will tell you that he isn’t your typical finance head. As someone whose career has spanned not just technology and VC but also gaming, literature, and entertainment, he has a very well-honed creative side.

And according to Gordon, that’s not as unusual in this world as people might think. In a chat this week at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, he said that tech entrepreneurship is actually a naturally very creative endeavor in itself — and offered some insight for how entrepreneurs can overcome bouts of the proverbial “writer’s block” that artists and creatives often face.

I met with Bing on the morning of our last day at the notoriously party-hearty SXSW, and it was a bit of an early start for both of us — but he is always a fascinating person to talk with, and this time was no exception. Watch the video embedded above to hear about his outlook on keeping creativity alive, what television could look like in the near future as gamification takes hold, where gaming startups go from here in general, why despite recent stock market setbacks he’s actually long on Zynga, and much more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While I was at South by Southwest Interactive, I had a chance to meet with the Leap Motion team and try out their upcoming gesture-based controller. We’ve been writing about the company for a while now, but this was a chance to see the technology in-person, and to use it with existing apps.

Thankfully, my own feeble attempts to play Cut The Rope using the Leap Motion Controller weren’t recorded on camera, but we did film a short demo by Vice President of Product Marketing Michael Zagorsek. He showed off a 3D visualizer that helps developers understand the controller’s capabilities, then played Fruit Ninja using a chopstick, and finally used the controller to sculpt a digital clay.

After the demo, I sat down with CEO Michael Buckwald to talk some more about his plans for the product. The company still intends to start shipping units to preorder customers on May 13 and selling them in stores on May 19.

I was impressed by what I saw, but I also asked Buckwald whether, in order to master the new controller, some users might have to un-learn certain behaviors acquired from keyboards, mice, and trackpads.

“Interaction with a computer should be as similar to interaction with the real-world as possible,” he said. Other input devices may have “confused or unlearned” people’s instincts, but he argued, “Usually it takes people only a few seconds to recalibrate, and ultimately that deep, hardwired, instinctual ability to reach out and just grab an object in 3D space — because the world is 3D — that wins out.”

Eventually, Buckwald said he wants to see Leap Motion technology embedded into a wide range of devices, including head-mounted displays like Google Glass. In fact, he suggested that gesture-based controls could be the key to making those devices take take off, because typing into a keyboard breaks the immersive experience. Not that he’s endorsing Google specifically.

“There are many other companies, both startups and entrenched players, that are working in that space,” he said. “I think that it is going to be inevitable. It’s just a question of when.”

Earlier this week, the team behind the Fleksy gesture keyboard demonstrated their own integration with Leap Motion.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the big events coming up for comedy fans this spring will be the return of Arrested Development, which will debut its fourth season on Netflix after a long hiatus. While in Austin for SXSW Interactive, Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz and star Will Arnett took a few minutes out of their busy, busy, extremely important lives to answer a few questions about the show. So what’s it like being a big star on TV and then putting your face on the Internet instead?

Arnett said it was “very exciting” to be using the Internet to deliver the show to its fans. In part that’s because that’s where the fans are, according to Hurwitz. At least, when compared to premium cable or other distribution networks.

“For this show, which has always taken some risks with the form, it just seemed great to take a risk with the delivery system, too. Which has only been used, as I understand it, for pornography,” Hurwitz explained. Later he clarified that there wasn’t much difference in distribution between Arrested Development on broadcast TV and how it’ll be shown on Netflix.

“I don’t think of it as being on the Internet… Any more than I think of being on TV as being on electricity,” Hurwitz said. “It’s still going to be an experience where people are going to watch a show, and they’re probably going to be watching it on a TV. The fact that it’ll be distributed by the Internet versus cable hasn’t changed the way we made the show.”

Of course, being on the Internet means a different way of thinking about viewership and ratings. Netflix doesn’t plan on releasing any sort of official ratings numbers for Arrested Development, or any of its other shows, for that matter — in part because it doesn’t rely on a big one-time showing for advertisers.

That said, the Arrestsed Development guys expect huge viewership from the show’s fans. How big? “Probably a billion views a day,” Arnett guesstimated. Hurwitz thought that estimate was low, expecting more like 7 or 8 billion views. What’s that in Nielsen ratings? “Probably about a 4″ in the demo they’re looking at, Hurwitz quipped.

Check out my interview above, which was somehow chopped down from a crazy, 20-minute improv session that I couldn’t keep up with most of the time. (Kudos to TechCrunch TV video producer Ashley Pagán for making it work.) Maybe we’ll have outtakes later.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is the second SXSW for location-based/social/mobile/photo app Highlight, but the company has come a long way since March 2012. Last year to market the app there were just a couple of guys — the founders — walking around Austin in Highlight t-shirts telling people about the service. This year Highlight is doing a little bit more: renting an ice cream truck and cruising around town handing out ice pops.

The whole exercise is a way to introduce people to the new features available in Highlight 1.5, which just launched a few weeks ago. The latest version of the app adds a whole lot of new ways for users to interact with each other, by checking in to events and collecting photos that are uploaded during them.

The Highlight team has been taking pics of the people it’s handing ice pops out to and then uploading them to the service, showing how easy it is to get them after they’ve been posted. Since Highlight’s photos are all tagged based on location, people who already have the app will be able to instantly see the pictures that have been taken of them.

I did a quick interview with Highlight CEO Paul Davison to learn more about the company’s plans at SXSW and new updates that they’ve made with Highlight version 1.5. Check out the video above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Matthew Inman is sick of memes about bacon and kitties. Better known as web comic artist The Oatmeal, Inman gave TechCrunch the lowdown on what’s funny, what’s not, and how he finds inspiration. In this video interview he shoots off his thoughts on 4Chan and The Harlem Shake. When asked about LolCats, he bluntly replied, “Tired of that”.

After the interview, Inman insisted he has no beef with Ben Huh and his company ICanHasCheezburger. The Oatmeal just doesn’t want to see humor turned into a formula of “cat photo + impact font”. Here he describes where he goes for a laugh, plus offers an update on the Nikola Tesla museum he helped fund.

For those of you asking “Why is this on TechCrunch? I thought you were about tech and startups”, The Oatmeal is the future of visual communication online. Much like how Instagram has accelerated the shift from words to photos for conveying our thoughts, The Oatmeal demonstrates how the web’s short attention span values the efficiency of cartoons. Expect to see more businesses and startups ditching long-winded mission statements and blog posts for more communication through images.

But back to Inman. One bit of warning? If you ever meet the guy, don’t scream about bacon or your feline friend Chairman Meow. “I wrote an entire book about cats. Then I went on a book tour and every single person would come up to me and say ‘oh let me tell you about your cat’.” Eye rolls ensued. If you want to get in good with The Oatmeal, you have to reference Admiral Ackbar.

Check out The Oatmeal’s comics. They’ll make you happy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

City governments here in the United States aren’t typically known as early adopters of the latest in technology and innovation — that means that New York City’s first-ever Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot has a pretty big job on her hands.

So it was great to have the opportunity to talk to Haot about her job and her latest projects while she was in Austin, Texas this past week for South By Southwest Interactive. She told us she’s focused on encouraging tech adoption and development not only within NYC’s government and public services, but also in the city in general, with initiatives such as Made In NY aimed at supporting NYC’s tech industry and startup ecosystem.

Watch the video embedded above to hear Haot talk about how cities large and small should focus more on digital technology, what Made In NY means, making the leap from the startup world into the public sector, and more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch