It’s true, everything’s bigger in Texas. This year’s SXSW Interactive was no exception. Based in Austin, Texas, SXSW Interactive has grown into the must-go festival for marketers interested in the impact of future technology.
You’ll find the festival highlights in this week’s edition marked as SXSW News.
HEADLINES
- SXSW News: AI and Chatbots dominated the SXSW conversation. Ray Kurzweil stood by his prediction that we would reach singularity by 2029 and Bill Ford argued autonomous vehicles would be incredibly advantageous to urban populations
- Snapchat pitches original shows to advertisers
- Samsung S8 will use facial recognition to verify payments.
INSIGHTS
- L2 looks at how brands are innovating on messaging platforms
- How The Economist uses data to drive subscriptions
- ‘Sixty-nine percent of transactions came from only one device.’ Stats from Criteo’s US cross-device marketing report.
COOL
- SXSW News: ‘Sci-Fi No Longer award’ for the coolest scientific achievement or discovery that before 2015 was only possible in Sci-Fi. Winner: MIT Media Lab, DuoSkin. Here’s the full run down of all the Innovation winners
- SXSW News: With so many headset experiences it was hard to choose a stand out example. Inition’s ‘Spatium’, which celebrated the sculptural qualities of one of Philip Treacy’s millinery creations for Madonna, won for its visual artistry
- Super cool category: AR that projects onto a car windscreen.
DEEP READS
- SXSW News: Joe Biden opened the Festival to outline his plans for his cancer initiative, in The Urgency of Now. Biden was subsequently crowned ‘Speaker of the Event’
- SXSW News: Beyond the Screens: the Ubiquity of Connectivity from Google’s Project Jacquard and Levi’s. You can see all the keynotes (including those from the film and music festival) here
- Harvard Business review ‘What’s the Value of a Like?’
