You want to attend this conference? Become an optimization expert!

Imagine a conference so big, so sprawling, that navigating it requires you to draw multiple decision trees and redraw them on the fly as needed. Why? The conference is spread out across a convention center the size of four city blocks, several neighborhood hotels, as well as some hotels a few miles away. Just walking from one room in the conference center to another takes 5 minutes; a walk to a neighborhood hotel takes 10 minutes, and to a faraway one, as much as half an hour.

And when you get to your destination, you discover that the organizers picked too small a room for the panel, and there's a line to get in the door_*. You can only get in if someone leaves, and no one is going to leave because they are as interested in the panel as you. The speakers don't use a microphone, so you can't hear a single word from outside the door.

Imagine all this, and -- that's right! -- you'll get SXSW.

To get an idea of just how many people were at SXSWi, consider that this amorphous line is just the people waiting to take an escalator down from the 4th floor of Austin Convention Center (and some getting off the escalator in the opposite direction). More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Congratulations, you have walked 10 minutes for nothing. It's time to pull out your handy decision tree. Say node A represents your preferred panel. It is linked to nodes B, C, etc., that designate the next most interesting panels to go to in case panel A is full. Each node is assigned a weight according to its desirability. The edges that connect the panel-nodes in turn should be weighted according to walking times required to get from building X to building Y. And if you want to make the problem more realistic, you could make those weights depend on pedicab availability, or your willingness to pay for a pedicab, as well as a probability that the free sponsored shuttle will be waiting outside the hotel at that moment. Then voila! Solve the optimization problem, and you know where to go next!

Is there an app for that? I don't know, I still don't have a smartphone. (That alone should disqualify me from SXSW attendance, I suppose.) I know SXSW has an official app, but I doubt it solves optimization problems. If it doesn't, should I spawn yet another clone to write such an app (joining the league of all my clones in parallel universes that are writing other applications I've dreamed up, while I'm toiling at my job)? Then, and perhaps only then, I would have a real reason to come here again. After all, as everybody says, the real purpose of going to SXSW Interactive is to schmooze with other entrepreneurs and wannabes. Panels be damned.

Cloaking geeky topics in cutesy terms

Maybe panels should be damned. Most panels were for internet marketers, since that's what most SXSWi attendees are, and marketing is not that interesting to me. Software developer panels were dominated by mobile development, a perennial hot topic; unfortunately, I haven't done any mobile development and I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to do it where I could get paid for it. There was a good presentation on the basics of semantic web -- a loose set of methodologies that let us mark up the meaning of the text, instead of just its structure, in an HTML-like way. This allows computers extract meaning from texts they "read". The panel would have been even better if it hadn't tried to hard to achieve mainstream appeal by drawing parallels between semantic web and dating. But even renaming Linked Data Principles "The Bro Code", and urging people to "get your data a date" (i.e. link it to other data on the web) did not attract more than 10 people into the room. What the presenters did right, though, was to illustrate the notion of a semantic triple as something we routinely create in our daily lives when we fill out forms. This, and not sketchy dating analogies, would make the concept of semantic web more interesting to people.

	A patient information form illustrates a semantic triple. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.
	An subject-predicate-object triple: the person filling out the form is the subject, field labels are predicates, what you put in the blanks are objects. Thus by filling out a patient information form you are creating triples such as {Joe Schmoe, Home Address, 1000 Main Street} or {Joe Schmoe, Date of Birth, 1/1/1900}.

General interest panels on emerging technology, such as gesture interfaces, or "internet of things" weren't all that worthwhile to me because I read a lot on those topics, and the presentations didn't add anything to my knowledge. The curse of being ed-yoo-ma-cated.

So after a while I lost motivation to pick the best panels and brave the crowds to get to them. Instead I spent big chunks of time just milling around the convention center, parties, and satellite events, not going anywhere, and cursing myself for wasting the time I'm paying for with my own precious future time, that is to say, those volunteer hours I'm obligated to put in. Speaking of which...

Volunteering shows its dark side

After I had an easy time volunteering at SXSW in 2011, I expected something similar this year. Yet volunteering showed its sharp claws this time. As before, I spent most of my time at Film Venue. Most Film Venue volunteers perform a vague function of "line management", which is to say, they stand around and see that the audience lines up in an orderly fashion: one line for SXSW film badge holders, another for film pass holders, and yet another for those with individual tickets. Most movies don't get a lot of audience, so there isn't much standing around to be done. However, on my first day the theater manager told us to take our positions an hour and a half before the movie started. We were supposed to stand at attention the whole time. Needless to say, standing on your feet while 6 months pregnant isn't a picnic. It's also excruciatingly boring. I would rather have spent that time moving furniture (well, lightweight furniture) than standing still. So I went to the theater manager and told her I couldn't do this while pregnant. She said she didn't realize my condition (what, did she think I carried a basketball under my shirt?), and told me to go home for the day. The next day the management agreed to transfer me to another theater where I got a desk job. For the rest of my volunteering week, I sat at a desk and answered customers' questions. That was much better.

All in all, I should try coming here one day as a wannabe turn-your-side-project-into-a-startup entrepreneur. I heard those people get the most out of SXSWi. Until then... I don't know.

----

* That was the case with "Agile Self-Development" panel. Having been introduced to agile software development concepts at my recent job, I was curious how this would apply to self-development. Should I hold daily scrum meetings among multiple facets of my personality?

SXSW 2011: People as Peripherals: The Future of Gesture Interfaces

"People as Peripherals". The title of this speech conveys unease about a future where humans are little more than input devices for our computer overlords. Not surprisingly, presenter Lee Shupp segued from gesture interfaces to brain implants, and from there to technological Singularity.

At the first glance, there is neither much to fear, nor great promise to expect from such gesture interfaces as Kinect, a Microsoft game console. Current interfaces suffer from the case of "gorilla arms": you have to wave your arms vigorously in big, sweeping gestures to make yourself understood to the machine. You are also limited by a small square of space where you need to stand so the computer would capture your gestures correctly. Even so, it's all too often inaccurate, if Kinect is any indication. It's a long way from here to detecting micro-gestures, such as subtle finger movements.

Lee Shupp speaks about gestural interfaces, brain interfaces and Singularity. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Not unlike at a science fiction convention, the audience pointed out plenty of other problems gesture interfaces will have to solve before they are seamlessly integrated into our lives. How would a gesture-driven plane cockpit respond if a pilot sneezes? How would such interfaces adjust for body language differences between cultures? For example, in many oriental cultures it's considered extremely rude to point your foot to anyone. Never mind the bugs -- the potential of well-implemented gesture interfaces can be equally disturbing. A guy in the audience expressed a wish for an interface that would understand sign language. He can sign much faster than type, and he'd like to "text" while driving without raising his hands from the wheel. (I sure hope for the sake of the humanity that his wish won't come true.)

But before we can even make sensors that understand sign language, there are more basic problems to be solved. As a person in the audience pointed out, current interfaces require that you come to them. You are supposed to stand in front of the machine and wave your arms at it. That doesn't integrate well with our daily lives. However, I saw this Technology Review article, Talking to the Wall, about an experimental technology that lets you turn any wall in a building into a touch-sensitive surface. Now that surely has a few killer apps in it.

Lee Shupp's vision of transhumans. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Brain interfaces are still in a rudimentary stage too, says Lee Shupp. So far brain implants haven't done much more than allowed people control a cursor on the computer. There are serious obstacles to their adoption. To connect a brain to a machine you have to drill holes in the skull, and sending thought commands requires concentration, which is hard for humans to achieve in the multitasking world. Finally, Shupp says, if people can't read people, how can computers? For that matter, if computers can read our brain signals, does that mean we can't lie anymore? To the guy who asked that last question, Shupp recommended "The Truth Machine" by James Halperin, a SF novel where this is addressed.

Despite these nontrivial problems, he believes brain implants will take off. Already 80000 people worldwide have them. An informal survey of the room shows that most people here think we will be using brain interfaces in 50 years. At some point brain implants will likely augment our intelligence, and we'll on the road to Singularity. And then, if this slide correctly reflects Shupp's vision of transhumans, we will spend our time with our brains plugged in directly into simulated medieval worlds. Swords: the original gestural interfaces. ;-)

(Tangentially related, here is another take on Singularity, where the original popularizer of the concept, Vernor Vinge, discusses the concept with several science fiction writers.)

SXSW 2011: The Singularity: Humanity's Huge Techno Challenge

Will supercomputing intelligences outsmart human-level intelligence? "The Singularity: Humanity's Huge Techno Challenge" panel claimed to dissect the very core of the Singularity, if and when it will occur, and what we can expect to happen. The question was debated by Doug Lenat, founder of an artificial intelligence project CYC, Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Natasha Vita-More, vice chair of Humanity +.

Technological Singularity is considered to be a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future impossible to predict. It is commonly thought that such event would happen if superhuman intelligence was created. For starters, Doug Lenat gave an overview of possible scenarios of how technological singularity would happen, or why it wouldn't happen. He lists these forces driving us towards creation of superhuman intelligence: demand for competitive, cutting edge software applications (commercial and government); demand for personal assistants, such as SIRI, but enhanced; demand for "smarter" AI in games; mass vetting of errorful learned knowledge, such as in Wikipedia. And the forces that may preclude Singularity? Large enterprises can stay on top in other ways than being technologically competitive; humans, too, may be satisfied with bread and circuits, immersing themselves in games to distract them from pressing realities. Also, Singularity may not happen if some event or trend kills all the advanced technology: an energy crisis, neo-luddite backlash, or AI's merciful suicide (say, AI realizes it's a threat to humanity, and kills itself). Then there are pick-your-favorite doomsday scenarios, such as grey goo, wherein nanobots multiplying out of control munch up all the matter on Earth.

Doug Lenat speaks about forces pushing us towards Singularity. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Which is more likely -- that the Singularity will happen, or that some forces will prevent it from happening? How dangerous will it be for us, humans? How compatible it will be with our continuing existence?

As one would expect from a president of Singularity institute, Michael Vassar seems to think Singularity is likely, and that we would get there much sooner if we planned technology more deliberately than we do. "The more you study history, the more you'll see that we don't do very much deliberation. And the little that we do, really goes a very long way," he says. For millenia, technology was evolving in a random, unplanned way, similar to biological evolution. About 300 years ago humans started thinking more deliberately. (I don't know where Vassar gets this number -- Industrial Revolution started 200 rather than 300 years ago.) Automating the kind of human thought that can be well performed by machines, and combining it with the kind of thought that's not easy to automate, may lead us to a very rapid technological acceleration. But to close the gap between machine and human intelligence, we need to build a very good understanding of human intelligence. At some point in history humanity discovered scientific method, which is a very rudimentary understanding of how reasoning works. It allowed us to build institutions that will shape the future, the way no other institutions have been able to, says Vassar.

As to us being able to control whether nonhuman superintelligences will help us or cause our extinction, Vassar is not too optimistic. "Ray Kurzweil thinks we can get emerging superhuman intelligences to slow down. But we, humans, don't have a good track record of getting potentially dangerous trends to slow down."

Michael Vassar, Dougt Lenat, and Natasha Vita-More. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

In every panel on Singularity, you'll get people who understand that Singularity may happen entirely without the humans' control, and then you'll get those who view Singularity only as a tool for progress, especially social progress, and have no interest in it otherwise. This was the case, for example, at the Singularity panel at ArmadilloCon 2003, when one writer said, if Singularity isn't going to enforce social justice, it's not going to happen. I got an impression that Natasha Vita-More is in the second camp. She spoke about how advancing technologies need to solve aging, healthcare, and social problems, especially those that still needlessly exist in the third world, as if technology will only do what we need it to do. She did not address the possibility that Singularity might take off without our control or influence.

She started by saying: "The Singularity is presumed to be an event that happens to us rather than an opportunity to boost human cognitive abilities. The very same technology that proposes to build superintelligences could also dramatically enhance human cognition. Rather than looking at the Singularity as a fait accompli birthing of superintelligences that might foster human extinction risk, an alternative theory forms an intervention between human and technology. [...] The Singularity needs smart design to solve problems." According to her, humans would achieve that by "evolving at the speed of technology", in other words, cyborgizing themselves.

Humans may have to deliberately redesign their brains and bodies to keep up or merge with the machines, but it still does not preclude the chance that Singularity might not come about by our design. If nonhuman superintelligences evolve, what incentive would they have to merge with humans? Why carry around flesh bodies, even engineered with excessive strength, resilience, or longevity? I'm reminded of what Bruce Sterling said on another occasion about trying to fit new technology into a conceptual framework of old technology: it would be like putting a papier-mache horse head on the hood of your car.

Doug Lenat disagrees that integration of our physical bodies with machines is necessary or sufficient for Singularity to happen. He would focus on not dramatic cyborgization, but just the information technology. Having information processing apliances that amplify our brain power would change us the same way that 100 years ago electrical devices amplifed our muscles. We travelled farther than our legs would carry us, we communicated farther than we could shout -- it changed our lives in fundamental ways and never changed back. Approaching Singularity, we'll see appliances amplifying our minds the same way. The society will amplify as well, become smarter in general, and will be able to solve the problems that Natasha Vita-More was talking about. At the same time, he doesn't think technology is a panacea for that. "When technology automated a number of things that were done manually before, social stratification only increased."

Michael Vassar goes even further: "We have technologies to solve most social problems today. But what we don't have is ability to engage ourselves in solving the problems we don't care about."

Somebody in the audience asked: "do you think a consciousness that exists outside human body (e.g. in a machine) can be spontaneously generated?" Michael Vassar replied: "I don't know what you mean by spontaneously generated, but I think, not likely. Consciousness would not be generated without a great deal of design." Doug Lenat thought this question was too vague. In a limited sense of consciousness, programs are conscious. You can interrogate CYC (Lenat's AI project) programs about their goals or methods, so they do have some self-reflection built into them. But it's probably nothing like what a human observer would perceive as consciousness. To answer this question, a better definition of consciousness is needed.

Also, in the future we will each have many avatars doing many different things, says Doug Lenat. Mental aids will direct our attention to where it's most needed at the moment. In that sense, each person's consciousness will exist everywhere.

Another question from the audience. "To be truly creative, you have to unplug yourself from technology often enough. So how would uploaded brains do that? Would inability to do that kill their creativity?"

Michael Vassar. "If I was an uploaded or enhanced being, I would be able to unplug myself much better. I would not only unplug from my laptop or the internet, but even from my visual cortex."

And here is another take on Singularity, where the original popularizer of the concept, Vernor Vinge, discusses the concept with several science fiction writers.

SXSW 2011: Social Media is Science Fiction

One of my most anticipated SXSW 2011 panels was "Social Media is Science Fiction". What do science fiction stories tell us about how social networking and user-generated content will evolve? How it will affect us as a civilization? These topics were debated by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders of the futurist magazine io9.com, Matt Thompson from NPR, science fiction writer Maureen McHugh, and artist Molly Crabapple.

So, what future trends in the society are driven by social media?

Pushing us to create authentic selves

Social media, especially Facebook, pushes us to maintain a single, solid avatar, says Annalee Newitz. (Interestingly, the panelists used the word "avatar" to mean not just userpics, but entire digital selves, or digital personas.) It wants us to expose all the different aspects of our lives, and to consolidate them into one. For the first time in human society we are seeing a new man, who has to be authentic, who has to be the same person in every context: as a worker, as a "john", as a father or as a child. Maybe this authenticity is good, it's pushing us not to be hypocrites, says Newitz. But also it's making us more and more of an open book, vulnerable in new ways. Molly Crabapple says: "A delusion we have is that only cool people will read our updates. At 13, I genuinely believed that my updates will be read only by sympathetic audience." The reality is, says Newitz, that you might tweet "I just got my period", and you'll get an ad from Tampax. (She says she marks all Facebook ads as offensive.)

Maureen McHugh and Matt Thompson. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Controlling the image we present to the world on social networks is becoming more difficult. A teenager may carefully pose in a mirror to make sure their self-portrait looks just right, but Google, already on the way to becoming an AI, may outrank it with more candid shots of him or her. It is as if, after all that posing, you walk by a shop window, and catch a glimpse of yourself, and think "OMG, do I look like that?" says Maureen McHugh.

If you don't control your own "avatar", who does? If you interact with another person, does the content of that interaction equally belong to both people to record, tweet, post, and make as public as either of them wishes? Do you reserve a right to make just your half public? But since that's usually impossible without revealing too much about the other party, how should this be resolved? Back in the day when most conversations and interactions left no record, it was not a question. A society where everything is recorded requires new rules and protocols. This is already being addressed by science fiction. Annalee Newitz recommends a novel "Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi, a far future fantasy where everybody has an organ in their brain that's a privacy negotiator. Such a negotiation may determine, for example, what information you will remember after a meeting with somebody.

Societal memory

Matt Thompson observes that social media is increasingly about memory. He would like to see social media serve as a storage component of the society. All the tweets, pictures and videos could provide an incredibly detailed look at our society for future historians. (If that data is appropriately organized and mined, I might add.)

Has social media changed storytelling?

This was a question from the audience to Maureen McHugh, who is a science fiction writer that also writes for an alternate reality game company, Fourth Wall Studios. McHugh says that in the last 10 years she has discovered that traditional story still works very well, and interactive storytelling doesn't make it better. Hamlet does not become a better play if the audience gets to select the ending. Audiences want characters to be either happy or punished, and sometimes the story isn't good if the characters are happy or punished too soon. Charlie Jane Anders adds that she allowed the audiences to select a story ending twice. She tweeted, which story ending do you like better? And she chose the ending they selected.

By the sound of it, the panelists are more inclined to be grim than optimistic about social media-shaped future. Molly Crabapple observed that the recent trend of gamification may restructure future workplace in such a way that it would require us participate in game-like challenges with no pay -- the "fun" we'll be having will be its own reward. "You will go to Walmart and participate in the box-lifting challenge. You'll see who can lift and stack the most boxes and the prize will be what used to be your salary." (Thanks to Dale Roe for that quote. His own take on this panel can be found in this Austin American-Statesman blog post.)

Molly Crabapple, Charlie Jane Anders, and Annalee Newitz. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

In the end, Annalee Newitz asked all panelists to end the panel on a positive note on social media. The panelists took turns telling what good things social media has brought into their lives.

Maureen McHugh. I keep in touch with my kid via social media every day.

Molly Crabapple. I founded a company with no money that has branches in 28 cities, because of social media.

Matt Thompson. Craigslist is a miracle. It has helped my life in giant, immeasurable ways, including that this is where I found my partner. There are opportunities for connection, and for us to step outside our worlds, that we are only just beginning to appreciate.

Annalee Newitz. I work at home alone with my cats, so for me Twitter is like being at work, it's my social contact. I sit there and have all those conversations via Twitter.

SXSW 2011: Bruce Sterling admonishes

If social media can be used for social good, this good can't come soon enough for Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and a long time SXSW keynote speaker. Bruce Sterling's speech is traditionally the last SXSW session. I don't know if this is his usual habit, but for the last two years he implored 20-somethings ("some of you are younger than SXSW") to go out and be the force for a better world. He demanded to know why we aren't using social networks for political change. If Texans knew what was good for them, they would be marching in the streets and taking to social networks demanding wind power, he said.

We, the crowds, should also be funding projects to study bacteria that can convert materials to biofuel or break down pollution, said Sterling. As it is now, a certain scientist (whose name escapes me) got 300 billion from Exxon Mobile to study them, but that's because people on the street don't know what's good for them. I guess he implies that it is a job of social media-savvy people, such as SXSW'ers, to disseminate these ideas to the general public. Craig Venter, the famous biologist and entrepreneur who sequenced the human genome, may have come to SXSW this year with just this goal. Bruce told the audience that Venter's goal for coming to SXSW was "to reframe 20th century genetic engineering as 21st century synthetic biology". To put simply, it may mean that Venter was trying to create good PR for genetic engineering. Bruce Sterling has hopes for public support of synthetic biology, specifically, the kind that creates pollution-neutralizing or fuel-producing bacteria. There shouldn't be knee-jerk objections to it neither from the left (microbes are not cuddly baby seals) nor from the right (microbes are not in the Bible).

But for all his lamenting that SXSWers' tweets are all parties and name-dropping, Bruce Sterling himself is not without celebrity obsession. He spent part of his speech rambling about Italy's prime minister Berlusconi's escapades, which seemed beside the point to me. He also pointed out that Catholic Church in Italy stands with Berlusconi, supporting behavior they have condemned for centuries. Hypocrisy of the Catholic Church isn't news to anyone, but it's still an easy way to score points with the audience, which unfailingly applauded. In his Twitter feed he also regularly updates us on the lives of the failed femme fatale spy Anna Chapman and other has-beens... so I don't know how this ties into a call to use social media for greater good.

While ranting is Bruce's typical mode of speech, I noticed that over the last two years his rants have become less edgy and irony-tempered, and more plain and despairing. "Where is the moral compass of these people?" he says about the Catholic Church's support of Berlusconi. "Do they think it will make pedophile scandals look better?" But his speeches are still enjoyable because he peppers them with phrases that you can't decide whether they are too pretentious to mean anything, or perfectly capture what he's talking about -- such as "There are infinite wars on abstract now's". (Ed. -- maybe he said abstract nouns, such as terror? Then it makes more sense.)

SXSW 2011: Gamification: a buzzword streaks across SXSW sky

Gamification was high on the radar at this year's SXSW, judging by how many panels it was mentioned at. To put it simply, gamification means devising a system of points, rewards and incentives to motivate people to do certain things -- in a software application or in real life. It's funny, but 2-3 years before it became big at SXSW, this trend was noted by "old media" newspapers like New York Times. Even I blogged about an application idea that could combine gamification and lifelogging three years ago. This year at SXSW however, it was brought into spotlight by Seth Priebatsch, creator of location-based game SCVNGR, who gave a keynote address about building a game layer on top the world.

Like other keynotes, it was broadcast live in many SXSW venues -- convention center rooms, and probably those in the satellite hotels. I caught the beginning of it in the Samsung Blogger lounge. For the first 10-15 minutes of Priebatsch's speech the room was quiet, but as he continued, most people tuned out and went back to their conversations. So I missed the rest of what was said. A pity, because Seth Priebatsch is a lively and energetic speaker. (That would be an understatement, according to this New York Times article, which uses Priebatsch to illustrate an idea that hypomania may be an essential trait of an entrepreneur.)

Seth Priebatsch, as seen on a TV in the bloggers' lounge. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Of course, I could have gone to one of the conference ballrooms that were dedicated entirely to watching the keynote, but I was tired from all the walking I did that day, and loath to leave the power strip I found in Blogger's lounge, which I used to recharge my laptops. The opening part of the speech, that held everyone's attention, was Priebatsch saying that many human behaviors are ripe for gamification. For example, parents give young children stickers and points for brushing teeth. School is another area that could be gamified, but in Priebatsch's opinion, incentives are set up in such a way that you can only fail. I think what he meant was that bad grades are penalized, but high grades do not provide any noticeable rewards. (I don't know if that's universal -- it probably depends on a teacher, and also on a curious phenomenon called regression to the mean, described by Doug Lenat in his speech on artificial intelligence.) In any case, it was around that point that the audience in the Blogger lounge lost interest in Priebatsch keynote, and the failed gamification of schooling was the last observation from this speech that my Twitter friends tweeted.

And so yet another trend streaks like a meteor across the SXSW sky, and retreats to... not obscurity, but a long, pothole-ridden path to maturity.

SXSW 2011: Where are the women in startups? Um, everywhere!

Carla Thompson, the founder of women's entrepreneurial network Sharp Skirts, and a Forbes reporter Meghan Casserly moderated a discussion "Where are the women in startups? Um, everywhere!" at SXSW. Carla Thompson is often asked why is there a need for an entrepreneur organization for women. The answer comes from the audience. Talking about her startup in a group of men, a woman first has to get past the "woman" issue. "Oh yes, I'm a woman, but I'm looking for an app developer".

However, not everyone in the audience has had the same experience. Another woman, who is in a tech startup with a bunch of MIT grads, does not feel she is judged differently. Investors ask her the same questions as everyone else. Others commented that this may be a difference between East Coast and Texas. Texas still lags behind treating women equally.

Carla Thompson and Meghan Casserly. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

There were about 5 bootstrappers (startup founders who focus on making their business profitable from Day 1, as opposed to living off investment money) in the room, and none of them had venture capitalist (VC) funding. Only one woman had angel investor funding. Her experiences trying to get VC funding had been, in her own words, terribly demoralizing. 9 years ago she went from VC to VC, and was given messages that she was the wrong gender and wrong everything. Then she found an angel network, and raised some funding from them.

Then we got to hear from the other side, a venture capitalist in the room, named Laura. She noted that over the years, women who come to her for funding don't ask for as much money as they will need, and a business plan they show can't be executed on that money. She challenges women to think about growing their business, and ask for as much money as they need. However, considering the difficulties women have when they ask for even more modest amounts of funding, this may be a vicious circle.

SXSW 2011: Google's Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer, vice president of consumer products at Google, spoke at SXSW 2011 about new products Google is developing. She focused on location-based services. She started her speech with a demonstration of some kind of Google service that shows skiers on mountain slopes. Coming in late, I wasn't sure if this was a new Google Earth feature, or a new product. Superimposed on the live video of skiers was an augmented reality view that provided the information about the ski routes and the weather. Seeing tiny, ant-like skiers zipping around on the slopes, Marissa Mayer emitted a low, warm chuckle, so infectious that the audience giggled with her. Or maybe they laughed at the contrast of a Google VP being amused by the little silly things in life, such as ant-like humans bustling around like particles in Brownian motion.

Augmented reality -- applications that overlay information about objects around you over their images -- can give you a richer, more detailed experience of those objects than real life itself can. Google Art project is an example of that. Google Art images of famous paintings, such as Van Gogh's "Starry Night" were made with a giga-pixel camera, said Marissa Mayer. This lets you zoom into any part of it, and examine every square inch, every brushstroke as close as you would never be able in a museum.

Augmented reality is no doubt a hot trend in location-based services, but Mayer spent more time on context-based discovery. That's a new direction of Google's location-based services. If you are standing in front of the Capitol (to non-Austinites, that's where Texas Legislature meets), and whip out your phone, that doesn't always mean you want information about the Capitol. If you are a first-time visitor to Austin, you may indeed be interested in its history, the date it was built, its architectural style, etc. But if you are an Austinite, you probably just want to check your email. So context is the key.

Then there was time for questions and answers. A guy in the audience asked Marissa Mayer if Google Maps will ever have customer service. Currently it takes up to a year to remove "deadly routes" from Google Maps, he said. Given that it has 8 or 9 million users, Google Maps ought to really do a better job of that. Marissa replied that customer support would be a good idea, as she herself has ended up in wrong places following Google Maps routes. From that I inferred that "deadly routes" meant "dead" routes, or ones that no longer exist -- as opposed to routes with high lethal accident counts. :-)

More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

SXSW 2011: Life as a Startup Parent

Synopsis: You're starting a startup, freelancing as a designer / developer, working on the next Big Thing, or otherwise being a web entrepreneur. But at home, your little one is toddling around in a playpen, learning how to play soccer, working on a science fair experiment, and growing up. How do you balance your role as a parent with your role as a co-founder? How do you reconcile these two worlds, each of which would happily consume you completely? How much do you rely on your (life) partner? Your (business) partners? How do you reconcile the tension between these two worlds? Come talk with other awesome web workers with kids. Share secrets of success, awkward failures, and other startup / parenting war stories.

The first half of this panel the people were divided into groups and asked to come up with ideas for applications that will make their life as a startup parent easier. Over the last few years this has become a common approach to web and technology-related panels. I, however, have become more skeptical whether software applications can be a solution to many real-life problems, let alone parenting problems. But several groups came up with similar sets of ideas: (1) a coworking space that's also a day care (though this wouldn't be a computer application), (2) locating other parents who live nearby and are in the same boat, e.g. starting startups. So you could get together with them and take turns watching kids while everybody works on their projects.

Charlie Park, the moderator. More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Some people asked questions that could not be answered by technology. Somebody wondered if there are any investors out there that understand that sometimes an entrepreneur's family time comes first? Moderator Charlie Park said that such investors, while a minority, do exist. You can tell them that you can't take their call right now because you're putting your child to bed, and they'll understand. A guy in the audience added that angel investors are typically more often family-friendly than venture capitalists. Venture capitalists invest more and expect more returns, so they feel entitled to demand that you work all the time. Angel investors invest less and correspondingly expect less.

Among the more lighthearted smart phone app ideas was a hologram of the parent that repeatedly says "no".