By Rob Everton
I’m headed to the Experiential Marketing Summit in Chicago next week. I will share what I find. If any of our readers plans to attend, feel free to drop a comment here or send me an email at reverton at crameronline dot com.
P.S. I noticed that they’re using Leverage Software to connect all the attendees – cool!
By Rob Everton
An interview-style keynote at the SXSW (South by Southwest) tech conference featuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy got rather out of hand this week. Why? For several interesting reasons. First and foremost, the content was poorly prepared – neither the guest nor the interviewer had a clear sense of what the keynote would discuss and actually ran out of stuff to talk about. Also, according to some who were there, Lacy, having written a book about this guy, seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about herself and her personal experiences with the one she calls “Zuck.”
But what’s really interesting is what happened when the crowd sensed that they weren’t going to get what they came for. They took over. Fueled by Twitter, the mobile phone networked community of people constantly twittering (text messaging meets a chat room) about what they’re doing at any given time, the crowd started to build up a hearty amount of disdain over the content on stage. Soon all of Twitter was dominated with conversations about this train wreck of an interview. Then, the worst of social media took over – the crowd simply started shouting out questions and took over the interview. It finally devolved into an unconference. Twitter and unconferences – two very south-by-southwest regional phenomena.
What made a crowd of people suddenly feel they had the right to hijack the conference? Perhaps it was mob mentality. Perhaps it was social media and user-generated content spilling over into the real time real world. Perhaps the same internal controls that prevent most people from acting out violent video games don’t apply to being rude and disruptive at a conference?
And perhaps this one of many disruptive events to come that will remind us that, increasingly, the audience wants to be part of the conversation and if don’t give them a voice they may raise their own.
Video below:
By Rob Everton
Microsoft is bringing Surface to Boston for a public viewing at the Sheraton on Saturday. Details are available on this Microsoft Developer blog. This may be your best chance to see this exciting new technology firsthand as they roll it out through Sheraton hotels and a handful of other launch partners over the coming months.
Touch technology makes an incredibly intuitive user interface for a variety of applications. Touch kiosks and ATMs, when well-designed, have made our lives easier in many self-service solutions. The runaway success of the Nintendo DS handheld game system, which features touch control, has taught us a great deal about human/computer interaction and preferences. Sony has even introduced touch controls on the backs of their digital cameras. But those examples are nothing compared to Surface.
Surface features multi-touch capability, so you can interact with more than just one finger (think iPhone on steroids). It also features a ton of technology under the hood to recognize objects placed on it’s surface and interact with them digitally. It’s not a touch screen – it’s a whole new way of interacting with content.
For more information about Surface, check out Microsoft’s Surface page or my previous post.