SXSW Report

I haven’t forgotten about all the giveaways I promised! You still have time to enter these giveaways – Flipboard T-Shirt, the Will it Blend? DVD, the Square device, the Delivering Happiness Book, and the Eyeballs Out book.  I will select the winners near the end of the month.

Now you have a chance to win You Might be a Zombie and Other Bad News from the editors of Cracked.com.  The book is rated 4.5 stars on Amazon.com, and appears to be a great book.  I just don’t have time to read it and wanted to give it away to one lucky reader of this blog.

To enter, simply click the comments link at the top of this post and make a comment.  Make sure to include your email address so I know how to contact you to send you the book.

Good luck and thanks for reading.  Keep an eye out for more giveaways to  come!

A bonus that was not on the agenda at the Tweet House today was the addition of Blendtec’s Tom Dickson.  He spoke a bit about how they started and got to be as successful as they’ve been with their “Will it Blend?” series on YouTube.  Here’s a brief video of his presentation.

At the iMedia Brand Summit, several of us were talking about whether or not we were going to be attending SXSW. A few of us are, and I found out that Robert Freeman, from Michaels was staying at the same hotel as well. As we got to talking, he mentioned that he and his boss were planning to attend the Dachis Group Social Business Summit. Well, as it turns out, Robert’s boss wasn’t able to make it into town in time for the Social Business Summit, and since they aren’t able to refund his fee, Robert invited me to attend.

I had seen this earlier, but after iMedia and SXSW, there was no way I was going to be able to talk to my boss about footing the tab for yet another conference on this trip. I’m really excited about being able to attend this, particularly because one of the speakers will be Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, and I just finished his book Delivering Happiness.  There are some other tremendous speakers on the agenda, including Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Shiv Shingh of Pepsi (got to see him speak last year at work when he was with Razorfish), and Jesse Thomas of JESS3, a data visualization group.  I’m certain the other speakers will be great, and the topics on the agenda look awesome.  As you would expect, I’ll be tweeting and blogging from there as well.

I found out that I will also be attending the iMedia Brand Summit in Lost Pines, Texas (just outside of Austin), right before SXSW. This will take place March 5-9, and I will head downtown for SXSW from March 10-16. Since this conference will be part of the same trip for me, and the content still relates to topics covered at SXSW, I’m planning to cover it here as well.

The conference will cover “Corporate Storytelling Beyond Advertising,” and will feature speakers from Victors & Spoils, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, and IBM. The materials say, “As consumers look for experiences through whatever channel is most convenient, marketers must find a way to deliver our stories across a variety of devices and create the kinds of content our targets want to consume.”

Here’s more on the iMedia Brand Summit – Corporate Storytelling Beyond Advertising if you’re interested.

PepsiCo’s Podcast Playground was back again this year, and it appeared to be a busy place throughout South by Southwest Interactive. One day, I stopped to watch a live Blip.tv interview with LLCoolJ about his latest venture, boomdizzle.com. The PepsiCo Zeitgeist was also on display, mining Twitter conversations and presenting trends in real time. Here’s a quick video of the Playground …

Click for  Video

It’s been five, long, jam-packed days. Koz and I will keep working to post more sights, sounds, and insights from South by Southwest Interactive 2010.

There’s certainly no shortage of interesting spaces where “digital creatives” connect during SXSW to do what they do. Here’s a peek …

Click for video

Panel: Dustin Clingman – Full Sail University, Dave Werner – Atmosphir, Michael Agustin – GameSalad, Adam Saltsman – Flixel, Troy Gilbert – Mockingbirdgames, Shanna Tellerman – Wildpockets

Building a game is getting easier and easier, and the panelists build tools to help people without tech skills/knowledge build video games.  From simple to complex, it sounds like the video game industry is hungry for new ideas since many games are built upon the same premise – shoot ‘em up, explore, etc.

Games don’t have to be just fun and/or entertaining, they have proven to be used to teach very effectively.  While it can obviously be used to teach simple tasks, games are tremendously good at teaching individuals organization or organizational models such as world-politics, physics, math, science.  If you have trouble explaining your business model to employees, consider a game that teaches them what the elements/values/principles of your model are.  When used for good, these games can communicate and engage users in things like the impact of natural disasters, geopolitics, and other significant societal issues.

Some games and systems choose to take advantage of “regular operative conditioning” which rewards you for a repetitive task.  It has been proven that people have an innate need to solve things and with things like gambling, people become addicted to the dopamine that is released when they are challenged and rewarded.  This is a tremendously effective tool for getting people engaged in your game, but it can also be dangerous if people start working toward “points” rather than pursuing the true purpose of the game.  However, reward structures – in the form of points, virtual items, money, etc. – can be a tremendously effective way of hooking people in and keeping them engaged.  Feedback, recognition, rewarding, earning, and achieving are human urges that come through in games.  You don’t necessarily have to make a “game” in order to incorporate this or exploit these urges.

If you are interested in getting started building your own game, here are a few resources to consider:

• Game Maker, by yo-yo games – Not great, but it does the things people want it to do.
• Game Jam – An event that is a good way to get with a group of developers.
• Mockingbirdgames – Provides easy, super basic tools, and very limiting.  It’s flash based for the browser with plug-ins with existing communities.
• GameSalad – Good for scaling and porting across formats. Xml format to be ported to mobile devices, flash for browser, etc. – want to be able to scale.
• Flixel – Flash games for pc/linux – both web browser and download and play – incorporates social sharing
• Wildpockets – Web based 3-D games that supports community – all points/currency shared across games