SmartAcre off to SXSW Interactive 2015
Jon, Juan, and myself the ‘g33ks of SmartAcre’ will be at the 22nd annual SXSW Interactive Festival in to Austin, Texas from Friday, March 13 through Tuesday, March 17, 2015. As in year’s past SXSW has been an incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity. The 2015 event features five days of compelling presentations and panels from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.
SmartAcre® looks to gain hands-on training and inspiration to big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW Interactive has become the place to preview the technology of tomorrow today.
Our Goals
In addition to leaving with a jet pack, 2,000 business cards and our corporate Segway, our goals are to:
- Improve existing user experience, creative, and technology skills by attending sessions that cover services we provide to clients daily.
- Network with Interactive’s best in the world to compare their approaches to SmartAcre’s.
- Attend sessions that will open our minds to think beyond the task at hand and push ourselves and our clients.
- Get hand’s on with some of the latest emerging technology and see how we can develop into new products back at SmartAcre.
With hundreds of sessions cue’d up and spanned over the entire city of Austin, it will be nearly impossible do it all, but here are a few sessions we can’t miss.
Visual Storytelling: The Power of Design + Data: In a world of hyper-connectivity and fragmented communication consumption, our ever-increasing volume of big data is only useful if it drives insights that are comprehended. We use data all day long at SmartAcre, it’s one thing to collect it, t’s another to tell a story with it.
Biz Stone on Creativity and Redefining Success: I got see Biz last year at SXSW when he talked about how he transitioned from twitter to Jelly. His ideas and perspectives follow closely to SmartAcre’s #neversettle approach. Biz this year will shares stories of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit showing us a new way to move forward with a new definition of success.
Right Brain Leadership: For years, the global marketplace has been driven by left brain leadership. Now, the tide is turning. In a time of never-before-seen problems, the world needs never-before-seen solutions. The complex nature of today’s social climate, economy, and institutions calls for the vision and perspective that a new generation of creative thinkers provides. However, the world needs more than creative thinkers. The world needs creative doers. This hit’s home for us we like to think and DO!
The Evolution of the Web: The web has changed a lot in just the past few years and continues to grow in exciting ways. We have new devices and interaction paradigms as well as increasing expectations from users. We’ll look at demos and techniques that allow us to take advantage of what we have today while looking to the possibilities of the future. We know at SmartAcre that the web is constantly changing and content is what drives it, however will be interesting to see if Privacy, Security and new Tech will shape it.
Design for Fingers, Thumbs and People: Touch guidelines like Apple’s 44 pixel target are based too much on technology, and pixel sizes. They are not based on the real world, on people’s hands, fingers and thumbs. Testing goes beyond your desktop, at SmartAcre we have over 100 checkpoints in our launch list.
How to Be a More Inefficient Designer: Never settling and always improving is out motto. We’ve all been taught to value efficiency, because obviously time is money. But the religion of efficiency comes to us from industrial revolution assembly lines with the goal of churning out the same product repeatedly with as little variation as possible.
Look for us in Austin – we hope to connect! Leave a comment here or reply on Twitter to tell us where we can find you at #sxsw!