SXSW Day 1: Digital Privacy – Rob Meldrum

By Rob Meldrum, innovation director, Naked UK

Day 1 at SXSW. Wow. It’s been big. I’ve crammed in as many talks as I possibly could. I’ve also crammed in as much free BBQ as I possibly could, but that’s another (much less interesting) story.

It didn’t start well. I joined a large queue and waited patiently. Twenty minutes later and I’m being turned away at the last minute as the venue was full. But my enthusiasm was not dampened and I ended up wandering into a very interesting book reading by Jeff Gothelf, of his book Lean UX. Other than having possibly the best name ever, there were some really insightful thoughts on structuring teams and borrowing from software development within product design.

But the big theme that ran through many of the talks today was data privacy. Eric Schmidt (of Google fame) spoke at length about the issues facing the developing world; their corrupt governments and the people that fight against them both using the digital world to control and to mobilise. And of course he couldn’t talk about corrupt governments without discussing GCHQ and the NSA. He said “we were attacked by the Chinese in 2010. And we were attacked by the US in 2013. Know for sure that we have strengthened our defences.”

Data permanence played a part in the discussion – the realisation that everything you put on the internet will be there to access forever, like a digital scar. He even suggested that parents might have to have ‘the data permanence’ discussion years before they have the awkward ‘birds and bees’ one.

Continuing the theme of privacy Tony Salvador from Intel was concerned that we are becoming too smart because of technology. He spoke about the concept that the few knew everything about the many, and that this has only been possible due to the digital revolution.

With video linkups from Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon to come, digital privacy is going to be one of the big themes of this years SXSW.

SXSW Day 2: Robots, nano-technology and space exploration

Two days in and I’m starting to get used to the craziness of SXSW. Waking earlier than I should on a Saturday the day started with robots. A fantastic talk from Carl Bass: he spoke about the role of robots in our lives and the future; how we need to change our behavior in order to continue to grow with new technology rather than against it. Oh and he also suggested that we’ve been living with robots for years: we only call them robots until we work out how they work and then we give them a name. Like a train.

Then it was onto more robot chat with Dimitri Grishin, who suggested there are three key reasons why robot development is happening right now; components are far cheaper; the testing process is easier; and it’s simple to start a company. He also spoke of the concept of ‘the economies of un-scale’: it used to be that to make money you had to scale, whereas now you can make money with technology at a micro level.

The talk I really wanted to go to was a reading from Andy Goodman of his book “Embeddables: the next evolution of wearable tech”. I was not disappointed. There were so many themes and insights within it. My favourite was the concept that by having controllable nano-technology inside of us could mean that the technology would be able to actually change us. It could alter our moods and could even be thought of as the new psychedelic. Trippy.

My highlight of the day however was the keynote with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I must admit I knew little about him, but he was incredibly inspiring. He threw out pearls of wisdom such as “We define ourselves as intelligent because we came up with the test for that”, “Don’t Believe. Question”, “Some lessons need to be learned first hand” and “We should learn how science works, rather than learning science itself”. He wrapped up a mesmerizing hour with a request: he wants us all to take a cosmic perspective. He said “we’re not special because we’re different. We’re special because we’re the same.” He fully deserved his standing ovation…

My mind was blown today. In fact, I’m surprised I’m even able to cobble this blog post together. There were also some ‘meh’ talks and one that was so badly put together that I walked after ten minutes. It doesn’t matter if you have a celebrity asking the questions, if you fail to prepare your discussion properly it is going to be terrible.

Not the best speaker, but an amazing man, was Dean Kamen. Inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist and all round nice guy I was impressed by his vision for providing clean water, power and wifi to the developing world. And it’s not only a vision; he’s gone and done it. The way he spoke of how he convinced the CEO of Coke to help him deliver his water purification machines around the globe was nothing short of remarkable.

Educating our children in technology and science has been a prevalent theme at this year’s SXSW. Kamen’s work with his organisation First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was inspiring. Getting children excited about science and technology is not an easy task, so turning to sports and entertainment stars to help promote and bring to life his vision has been a stroke of brilliance.

But this was just for starters. The highlight of the day for me was always going to be Stephen Wolfram’s session; I was excited. What would he talk about? Would he be giving us a demo of anything new? Am I going to be able understand any of it? He launched straight into his company’s new tool: Wolfram Language. He fired up a window on his laptop and got straight into it. Within seconds he’d created an instant cloud-based API, published and ready to go. He explained: “everything in language is just a symbolic expression. And once we’ve captured that knowledge (within Wolfram Language) there’s a zillion things we can do with it”.

And then he furiously coded all sorts of weird and wonderful examples right in front of us. Some of which worked. And some of which didn’t. Even Stephen Wolfram is susceptible to the live demo curse.

He finished his hour by suggesting: “in the future there won’t be lots of computers. Everything will be made from computers”. A hugely talented, highly intellectual, slightly crazy genius. And if you hadn’t guessed already, it was Wolfram that blew my mind…