Speakers in the News »

3/25/06
FRANCIS PREVE

Francis Preve (pictured above) talks about using a laptop computer to remix tunes as well as larger issues about the future of interactive music in an intriguing interview on WebMonkey. Preve tells Byan Zilar,"A fellow remixer and artist in his own right, Josh Gabriel from Gabriel & Dresden, has a very interesting take on this. He feels that the 20th Century was a bubble — it was the first and only time music was able to be captured as a recording. He feels that people really like the live element. As the Napster effect cascades outwards, laying waste to the traditional music industry, the one thing that does remain is live performance. A lot of musicians have turned to making their money through live performance. Interactive music will one day be rather commonplace. We are seeing lots of people doing it already. Look at the number of people already using GarageBand, which comes with the new Macs. The number of people who are using Abelton Live in an interactive fashion to do live performance for people outside their living room or bedroom is on the rise. In the coffeehouse, you'll see the guy in the corner making ambient beats, ambient sounds, and so forth." A frequent speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival, Preve led a Geek Lunch Session about "Stupid iPod Tricks" at the 2006 event.

08:52am CST | +

3/23/06
TIM ZIEGLER

"There's also a lot of hype flying around the idea, as well as a backlash from internet folks who see Web 2.0 as nothing more than an attempt to cash in now that the big money is back in Internetland," writes Tim Ziegler in an article titled "Web 2.0: A Pattern Library" that is published on webmonkey.com. He continues, I believe that, yes, self-serving hype is being spread around thicker than apple butter, but also that new models of web publishing are emerging that are more powerful than the ones we knew . . . The web is beginning to be used as a "platform" rather than a host of websites. This means that you use hosted websites to get your business done rather than relying on software on your own computer's hard drive. Related to this is the notion that the best web apps are simple and useful and can be combined for extra usefulness, even if they are not run by the same companies.The best Web 2.0 applications get better the more people use them. Since the internet masses are increasingly both the content creators and the content filters (the ones who rate, tag and otherwise filter content to make it easier for others to find good stuff), the more people who weigh in on something the better that becomes." Ziegler spoke on the "Startupland: A How-to Guide to Starting Your Own Company" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:39am CST | +

3/22/06
ANA MARIE COX

The morphing of new media into old media into new media continues with the announcement this weekend that Ana Marie Cox has joined forces with one of the nation's oldest weekly news magazines. According to an Associated Press report, "Cox, the creator of the popular political blog Wonkette and author of the Washington novel 'Dog Days,' has signed up with the news magazine as a contributor, Time announced Sunday. Cox will write a regular column for the magazine and a weekly column for the magazine's Web site. Her first essay for the magazine is 'Lobbyists in Love.'" Cox served as a keynote speaker at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.

11:15am CST | +

3/21/06
BIJOY GOSWAMI

Bijoy Goswami

As more "energy" returns to the new media space, more and more potential entrepreneurs are considering the option of launching an Internet-related business. But, how is the best way to finance such a new media start-up? As opposed to massive VC dollars, these days the bootstrapping method of small-scale, self-raised funding is growing in popularity. "Bootstrapping Your Way Into Business", a recent story in USnews.com, explains that "it's not necessarily that bootstrappers can't raise big bucks. Rather, these go-getters think financing on the fly is the smarter way to start a company." This article also quotes 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival speaker Bijoy Goswami, who says that having little money to spend forces the bootstrapper to innovate and be flexible, "When you raise [venture capital] money, you are spending all your energy on finding out what your investors want and proving you can return their capital in a certain amount of time." The founder of Bootstrap Austin, Goswami is currently at work on "The Bootstrap Manifesto," a book about the topic of starting a business with little or no external funding. He previously co-authored "The Human Fabric: Unleashing the Power of Core Energy in Everyone".

12:14pm CST | +

3/20/06
RONNI BENNETT

If you had a registration badge to last week's SXSW Interactive Festival, then you were able to attend more than 85 panel sessions and keynotes (non-badgeholders can get a taste of this impressive content by listening to free podcasts of these sessions). If you had a registration badge to last week's SXSW Interactive Festival, then you also got a few additional and somewhat unexpected perks. For instance, Ronni Bennett explains how her badge helped her get on a flight back to the East Coast after she had lost her driver's license. "I had visions of living in Austin, Texas for the rest of my life instead of Maine. The kindly hotel manager tried to help with phone calls of his own to Delta to no avail: 'You must have a photo ID,' they said to him. Assuming it would take hours to talk my way onto an airplane, I arrived at the Austin airport at 5AM on Monday for my 8AM flight home. A Delta booking agent of about age 28 listened to my sad story as he typed into his computer and shuffled through my remaining IDs - electronic boarding pass, a credit card, a voter registration card and an AARP card. I then mentioned that I’d been in town to speak at SXSW, and I handed over my conference badge. The young agent grinned. 'That’ll do it!' he said, and issued me new boarding passes for my return trip. Who knew how powerful that bit of plastic with a really bad picture of me could be." Bennett spoke about elder-blogging at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.