SXSW Interactive Recap

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I found the SXSW Interactive sessions I attended to be, in nearly every case, thought provoking and of a fairly high quality, and I typically found myself jotting down many notes and things to followup, such as books or web sites mentioned. Over the course of the conference, three core trends or convergence points emerged, at least for me, given my intrinsic interests/biases: (1) lifestreaming/tracking/curation, (2) leveraging technologies for creative collaboration, and (3) data mining/analytics. Each of these (admitedly, rather broadly defined) areas has an associated set of panel sessions, apps, companies, books, etc, and over the next few weeks I will try to give a meaningful overview of each one.

In the mean time, I think it's useful to at least summarize the sessions I attended:

Friday, 3/9/12

Saturday, 3/10/12

Sunday, 3/11/12

Monday, 3/12/12

Tuesday, 3/13/12

Wednesday, 3/14/12

Thursday, 3/14/12

SXSW 2012 Overview

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I had an amazing time in Austin for SXSW this year. I headed down on Thursday March 8, and was there for the entire duration of the festival, closing it out with the annual SXSW Softball Tournament on March 18. This was my second time in Austin, but my first time at SXSW. I'd booked my trip back in September 2011, and had developed pretty high expectations as March rolled around. It did not disappoint.

Although there are a number of different components to SXSW that happen in tandem, it consists of three core parts: Interactive, Music, and Film. The Interactive segment went from Friday March 9 - Tuesday March 13, at which point the Music segment kicked off and lasted until Sunday March 19. The Film portion spanned the entire duration, woven into both the Interactive and Music segments. Another major component was the SXSW Screenburn videogame convention, which will become SXSW Gaming in 2013, and perhaps become more prominent.

When I planned my trip back in September, the only hotel that had vacancies for the entire duration of the festival was the Wyndham Garden Hotel south of town, which is where I stayed. The hotel was pretty comfortable, but being so far from downtown where all of the action is turned out to be pretty inconvenient. I had to rely on the R&R shuttle service, which was pretty unreliable, at least for the first half of my stay. The next time I do SXSW, I will most definitely find a way to stay closer to downtown. Really that, and the few days of chilly rainy weather at the start of Interactive, were my only complaints.

During the next several weeks, I will attempt to process everything I experienced there: all of the seminars, interviews, panel discussions, book readings, and networking during Interactive, and all of the new bands I discovered and films I watched. In the midst of all of the varied content, there were definitely some convergence points and trends, which I will try to distill out into coherent narratives.

Things in the cloud

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A quick update on the project management front:  CulturedCode just recently released to the public a beta version of the upcoming cloud-based version of their app Things, which you can read about on their blog. After a couple of weeks trying to use Evernote for task/project management, I'm throwing in the towel and happy to be revisiting Things. I am, however, still on the lookout for the next big upgrade of Action Method Online, to see how it compares.

I also recently learned that Mariner Software released a major new update, version 6.0, of MacJournal, which I use. Although Evernote is not well suited for task/project management, I still think it can play a role for my extended notes on projects. So, I'll be attempting to gauge which one of these apps, MacJournal or Evernote, will be my de factor app for notes/journaling. One thing in Evernote's favor is that it is cloud-based, and as far as I can tell, v.6 of MacJournal does not yet introduce cloud sync. 

Mobile App Craft: the birth of a new trade

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Last January I set out to teach myself how to build an app for iOS (i.e. for the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch). The notion had been swimming around in my head for more than a year, for example, I'd already joined Apple's iOS Developer Program the previous year (which has a subscription fee of $100/year), but I'd never fully committed to doing it until a year ago. I think there were a number of factors that contributed to my finally taking the plunge: (1) it's simply a pleasure to learn a new language (Objective C) and SDK, (2) it's also very appealing to learn a new marketable skill, which seems to be increasingly in high demand, (3) I had a fairly specific idea for an app to build, which I felt would provide for me an awesome creative outlet, as well as an excellent context for learning and (4) Apple has built an amazing piece of technology that is a pleasure to use, so why not get in on the action of trying to harness it?
 
I'm happy to report that I did indeed follow through with my plans, having clocked probably something in the range of 500-1000 hours in the evenings and weekends over the past year teaching myself Objective C and learning the iOS SDK, as well as designing and building my app (I'll describe that in more depth in future blog posts). As I mentioned, I had already subscribed to the iOS Developer Program, and so began by playing around in Xcode. There is a wealth of information through Apple's developer portal, but I tend to learn best from books, so I purchase a couple of O'Reilly books:  'Learning iPhone Programming', by Alasdair Allan and 'iPhone App Development, The Missing Manual', by Craig Hockenberry. These were ok, and certainly helped me start getting my hands dirty. I also started exploring some of Apple's WWDC videos that are available via the developer portal. I think by March of last year I had developed enough basic skills that I was able to build a very crude first prototype of my app, which was fun.
 
But, I definitely felt as though I was only scratching the surface, and had a pretty superficial understanding of the entire iOS platform. So, I endeavored to learn more and to go deeper. I came across what turned out to be a very effective source of training: Stanford's iPhone Application Development course (Winter 2010), which was available online through the iTunes U collection of educational videos. I later discovered the Fall 2010 version, taught by Paul Hegarty, which is even better than the first course. Today I learned that yet another semester of this course is available: iPad and iPhone Application Development (also taught by Hegarty), advertised in the video above. They cover some relatively recent developments, such as Storyboards and automatic reference counting, which look pretty cool.
 
Late last summer I discovered a couple of books that I highly recommend: 'Programming iOS 4' by Matt Neuburg and 'Core Data for iOS' by Tim Isted and Tom Harrington. I dedicated a couple of months reading both of these from cover to cover (well, mostly). The Neuburg book is very pedagogical and well organized. The Isted/Harrington book is decent, but derives it's value mostly from the fact that there aren't many books out there about the Core Data framework for iOS. More recently, as a more robust version of my app has taken shape, I read the book 'App Savvy' by Ken Yarmosh, which describes the process of distributing and marketing your app on Apple's app store.
 
Even with an entire year of fairly focussed self-guided learning, I still feel I have quite a bit yet to learn about building mobile apps in general, and for the iOS in particular. I feel that you can only take your understanding so far while learning on your own 'in a vacuum', and so a couple of weeks ago I started attending an eight week long 'Introduction to iOS Programming' course at the start-up incubator EnterpriseWorks in the Research Park on the UIUC campus, taught by Mike Haberman. Even though I know quite a bit already, I'm finding the course to be very useful in helping to fill in gaps here and there, and I'm starting to meet fellow mobile app developers, which is my main motivation for taking the course.

SXSW trip

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On March 8th, I'm flying down to Austin, TX for the week and a half long SXSW festival. I started planning my trip back in September and am super excited to be going…this will be my first time attending. If you've never heard of SXSW, check out the above video montage from the SXSW You Tube channel and Baratunde Thurston's video for SXSW newbies, where he refers to SXSW as the "Mardi Gras of the online world". It's a massive convergence of creatives and entrepreneurs from the worlds of tech, music and film…a celebration of resourceful innovation. For the past several days I've been pouring over their event calendar, tagging talks, movies, concerts, meetups and parties I'm interested in: go check out my schedule so far. There are so many intriguing events, it's a bit overwhelming. My strategy has been to tag anything that sounds at all interesting, and then I can make the tough choice later which ones to actually attend. They did a great job on the web interface for setting up your schedule. They also have a social component to their site (check out my profile), which will come in handy during the festival when you want to try and track down someone you might have met at an event. I've been to Austin in March, and it was very pleasant. I'll hopefully be blogging/tumblogging/tweeting throughout my trip as well. Should be a blast!

Still trying to get organized

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Last year I wrote a short review about Action Method Online, a cloud-based task/project management system that I'd just switched over to from Things. Over the past year I've found myself using it less and less, and once again have been looking for the 'killer app' for project management. Over on the AMO blog, they've announced a future overhaul is on the horizon, and I'll be very interested to see how this turns out.
 
In the mean time, I've decided to start using Evernote as a unified solution to store ideas and information, while at the same time tracking todo items. I think that's one of the problems I've had with AMO: I found myself always needing to expand on a task, but not being able to. That is, you can jot down a quick summary of the action item, but within the same widget view, you can't write additional notes. Additional notes can be written separately and associated with a specific project, but not tied closely with a specific todo item. In that regard, Things is starting to look more appealing again, but the problem with Things is that it is not cloud based, although they are actively working on that feature.
 
So, I'll be on the lookout for future versions of AMO and Things. But until then, I'll be trying my luck with Evernote as a light-weight project managment system.

 

Music sharing

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About a year ago I bought a new Taylor acoustic guitar and acquired a renewed interest in songwriting (see related post). At the time I did a little bit of research into online sites for musicians, which fall into two broad categories:  music sharing and music collaboration. Although I have an interest in both aspects, at present I'm mainly concerned with having a means to share my creations with others to get feedback, as well as possibly develop connections with other musicians and tap into their music feeds for inspiration, very much analogous to the Instagram photo sharing ecosystem. Last spring I decided to try using the site garageband.com, and posted a music player widget on this site so people could listen to my works-in-progress. Unfortunately the site shut down several months later in July 2010. 

Recently, after doing a bit of research into the current music sharing landscape (see below), I've decided to try using SoundCloud, and posted one of their widgets on my music project page with my previous song sketches (warning: my vocals consist of humming, in order to get the melody down in the absence of lyrics...so there is an unavoidable repetitiveness). The widget is well designed, and even allows anyone to post a comment at any point in time along the track. Their service is focussed on providing tools to help create connections and communication between musicians, and they offer free desktop and mobile (iPhone and Android) apps in addition to their web-based interface. I've just begun to use the service, so I can't offer much of a critique yet. It looks promising, but doesn't seem to have hit that design/functionality sweet spot that Instagram has.

There are quite a few different music sharing sites to choose from. I chose SoundCloud mainly because it is designed for amateur musicians, while other sites like bandcamp.com and reverbnation.com include features targeting professional musicians, such as building a revenue stream. All three sites seem to be enjoying a growth trend over the past year, according to compete.com:

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Harnessing the deluge of personal data: Part 1

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As I alluded to in an earlier post, I'm trying to better organize my life so that ultimately I can accomplish more of the things that make me happy. So I've been thinking more critically about ways to improve how I manage my time and information, and exploring existing ideas and tools. There are lots of parts to this problem, so it is important to try to distill out the essential bits, and develop some kind of unified conceptual understanding.

The internet is abuzz lately about the problem of data management: as computation, information, and communication technologies improve, there is increasingly more and more data available about every facet of our existence, but how do we best make use of this growing volume of data to improve our lives? A beautiful example that illustrates the key underlying patterns/principles to this problem is the emergence of the online personal finance tool Mint. When you sign up to Mint, you provide it with the login info for all of your online bank accounts (checking, savings, credit cards, etc). It then retrieves every transaction you make from these different sources and aggregates the data together to provide a unified big picture of your finances, allowing you to study spending trends, monitor your budget, or track various financial goals.

This elegant solution would not be possible without the following key technologies coming together: machine readable electronic data + internet communications + raw computational power. Personal financial data has existed for hundreds of years, but until the past few decades it has been stored on paper in books. But even after the emergence of computers and electronic records, this type of data was not so readily accessible. It is only in the past decade or so that all three of these critical components can be integrated together to open a new era for personalized computable data.

The story of Mint taming the flood of financial data is really a precursor to personalized data management on a much larger scale. Over the past few years the internet has exploded with services aimed at managing personalized data spanning a diverse collection of knowledge areas and life pursuits, for both web-based and mobile platforms. It has the feeling of an inflection point of some kind. But it is not clear what the transformative technology that enables individuals to truly harness this ever expanding volume of data will look like. Is it possible, for example, to build an all-purpose universal data management system, providing aggregation, curation, social sharing, and analysis capabilities that can meaningfully cope with such a broad spectrum of data? For example, it seems doubtful that a single service could adequately cope with both financial and medical data through a unified interface. However, it seems perfectly reasonable to devise a single platform for handling social bookmarking of movies, TV shows, books, and music.

In my next post, I will distill the problem further into the core irreducible concepts, and link to some key concrete examples that I have encountered over the past several weeks.

Foundation

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Keven Rose, founder of Digg, angel investor, and cohost of the video podcast diggnation, has embarked on a new venture called Foundation, where he will be showcasing up and coming talent and products in a monthly newsletter and video. Those who subscribe ($3.99/month) will have immediate access to the content, while those who don't will have to wait for a week delay in order to access the video. 

In his inaugural video, he interviews Jack Dorsey, inventor of Twitter and cofounder of Square. The production quality is very good, but more importantly, I found the conversation very engaging, and true to the project's name, they explore the foundational ingredients and creative evolution of Twitter and Square. I look forward to future episodes, which hopefully will continue in this vein.

Instagram

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Recently I've been having a bit of a renaissance of creative activity with my iPhone, thanks to Instagram, an addicting photo sharing app. It seems to hit a design sweet spot between simplicity and functionality. The app comes packaged with a finite set of predefined filters, so when you take a photo, you can quickly decide what transformation is the best fit. For some people this might be an undesirable limitation, but I prefer to have to work within the constraints of a few canonical forms, and develop an intuition about what filter works best for a given shot. The app also provides an in-app-only (i.e. no web version) social networking component which is a lot of fun, providing you a feed showing photos from everyone you are following. It's basically a mechanism for curating interesting photos and provides inspiration and ideas. I'm finding myself being more observant of my surroundings, looking for interesting arrangements of objects, lighting, textures, etc that would make an artful composition to capture. The app also allows you to upload your photos to Facebook, twitter, flickr, tumbler, etc. I highly recommend it!

 

The Neuroanatomy Of Improvisation

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At TEDx MidAtlantic, held in November 2010 in Washington, DC, medical researcher Charles Limb presented his lab's recent research using fMRI to explore dynamic brain response in musicians as they performed. He describes work published in 2008 working with jazz pianists, as well as more recent work studying rap performers. Their basic strategy was to record the fMRI scan during two modes of performance:  playing memorized music and playing improvized music, and then identifying from the data the brain regions that showed activity unique to improvisation.

Their key finding was that during improvisation, a region of the brain linked to planned actions and self-censoring exhibited a slowdown in activity. They also found an increase in activity in a brain region associated with self-expression. Limb remarks that: "We think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses."

In his TEDx talk, he shows videos of how the fMRI was perfomed in the lab, which I found quite interesting: whenever I read about fMRI studies that target some particular type of mental activity/behavior, I try to imagine how the subject could actually carry out the activity given the constraints of the MRI apparatus. So it was interesting to see the setup of the experiment.

Action Method Online

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Action Method Online by Behance

I recenlty discovered a project management system called the Action Method by Behance, a company that designs organizational products for creative professionals. The Action Method is an organizational methodology, similar to the popular GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology created by David Allen. Since I am not a user of the GTD method, check out this informative review at 40tech.com comparing the Action Method to GTD. Behance offers a line of paper products for offline use away from the computer (I recently purchased this nifty journal for notetaking), a cloud-based web application called Action Method Online (AMO), and an iPhone app for mobile use.

For the past couple of years, I've been using two applications to help stay organized:  a task management app called Things by Cultured Code and journaling app called MacJournal by Mariner Software.  One of the first things that caught my eye about AMO is that it essentially combines these two functionalities into one unified system, which is appealing. Although Things allows you to attach notes to a specific task, you can not create text entries associated with a project.

But the most striking thing about AMO that makes it so appealing is the design:  it is simple, elegant and functional, and ultimately very intuitive. Behance seems to have put a lot of careful thought into the optimal way to represent the multifaceted structure of project data. Projects are intrinsically hierarchical:  project area > project > task. For a given project, you can accumulate various types of information in the form of notes, links, and attachments. There is also a temporal/historical element: tasks have due dates and projects have milestones. Finally, there is a social or team component: projects can be shared by multiple people, each of whom can delegate tasks to (or accept tasks from) others on the team. 

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New Year's Resuscitation

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One of the reasons I started a blog a year ago was to have a central repository to collect ideas and chart out personal projects. But sometime early last summer, my inspiration faded away and most of my projects that I was trying to juggle fell by the wayside, and so naturally my motivation to keep this blog going died out. 

Staying organized and actively pushing projects forward has always been a challenge for me. I find it very difficult to keep a balance between my job, exercising, trying to have a social life, and working on personal projects. And when I get to a point where the balance is tipped, and one or two areas dominate over the rest, I find myself stepping back and evaluating priorities and trying to regain my footing. So, lately I’ve been exploring time/project management tools (e.g. like Action Method Online) and organizational tools in general (e.g. things like personal list aggregation such as for books), and so will be writing several entries in the coming days and weeks about my findings.

I will also try to review some of the highlights from last year, such as my time as an instructor at the NKS summer school, or my trip to Montreal. Also, I have a few new project ideas up my sleeve that I will be exploring here in the future.

 

Mathematica Cookbook

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Last week, O'Reilly published a new book in their Cookbook series called the Mathematica Cookbook, by Sal Mangano. It's by far the best book I've come across for learning about advanced programming techniques in Mathematica. Most books on Mathematica focus on aspects like symbolic algebra, symbolic and numerical routines like integration, and plotting and graphics. Those features tend to be what students in universities are exposed to, and what academic researchers tend to be familiar with. The use of Mathematica as a programming language, with which one can build up complex functionality from interconnected modules, is much less common compared to these other basic uses, and when this functionality is deployed, it is typically done using procedural programming techniques with heavy use of Do loops.

But to truly take full advantage of Mathematica's capabilities as a programming language, one has to learn about its functional and rule-based programming constructs, and this book does a fantastic job of clearly explaining these techniques. I highly recommend to anyone interested in becoming an advanced Mathematica coder to carefully read the first five chapters:  1. Numerica, 2. Functional Programming, 3. Data Structures, 4. Patterns and Rule-Based Programming, 5. String and Text Processing. 

The Bitter End

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A few weeks ago I discovered this hilarious low-budget online sitcom called "The Bitter End". The episodes revolve around two brothers who find themselves sharing an apartment together after Bernard (the younger, aspiring novelist) decides to let Les (the older, fresh out of drug rehab) move in with him until he get's his shit together. Bernard has a crush on coffee shop waitress Eden, and is perpetually trying to take their relationship to the next level, but Les always seems to unintentionally impede his efforts. For more in-depth reviews, have a look at: tubefilter and alterna-tv.

Aside from being a pleasure to watch, I'm also drawn to this show because, being a fairly low-budget independent production, it has a certain tangible, real-life quality, that gives one the impression of being witness to the creative process as it unfolds. The sitcom grew out of an improv act at the Theatre Ste-Catherine in Montreal (where I'll be visiting in mid-July for several days, btw). It's interesting to watch the improv sketches online, which reveal the main elements of the show in a more primordial form. It's sort of analogous to being able to flip through an artist's sketchbook.

The show in it's present state still has that raw, pure form unspoiled by the ratings-driven demands of network television producers. Hopefully it will manage to stay that way for another season or two. 

Drawing is Thinking

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I've come across some interesting links recently that explore the notion of drawing as a meditative process and a way to enhance one's observational skills. "Drawing is Thinking" is a book by the graphic designer Milton Glaser. The book has a short introduction, followed by an interview with Glaser, and then the rest of the book is a sequence of small images covering subject matter spanning his entire career as an artist and graphic designer. He discusses the central thesis behind the book in this short video, which shows him drawing an image of Shakespeare as he talks. 

Another cool link is a pdf booklet by the artist Michael Nobbs, who also maintains a blog. It's written in a similar vein as "An Illustrated Life", gives helpful tips for keeping a daily sketchbook, and gives some useful references for followup reading.

Going the distance for creativity

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Yesterday I watched a thought provoking PopTech video lecture by Jonah Lehrer called "Creative Insights". Lehrer is the author of "Proust was a Neuroscientist" and "How We Decide". The central thesis was that looking at a problem from an outsider's perspective stimulates creative thinking and novel ideas. This resonated with me, as I've been thinking a lot about this idea recently (this relates to a couple of my blog posts from last week ("Creativity in Contradiction" and "NYC Sojourn"). I also found several related articles on his blog, "The Frontal Cortex."

He consideres three different aspects to being an outsider: 1) physical distance, 2) cultural distance, and 3) intellectual distance. He cites studies that have seen a correlation between creative problem solving and a perceived physical distance from some core aspect of the problem. For example, one study gave two groups of American university students the task of listing as many modes of transportation as possible. One group was told the task was conceived by researchers in Greece, while the other group was informed the task was posed by researchers from down the hall. The first group was able to come up with significantly more transportation possibilities than the other group. Lehrer discusses this idea further in a Guardian article as well as a blog post that references a related Scientific American article. What's intriguing is that not only does traveling help us widen our sphere of conceptual associations, but even simply thinking about distant places can help expand our thinking.

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Digital sketchbooks

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"Banana, ink/watercolor", page 1 of my watercolor sketchbook.

I've added a new Project section called Art, where I'll be uploading digital scans of my sketches. As I alluded to in a previous post, I've started keeping, actually not one, but two sketchbooks: one for pencil sketches and one for ink/watercolor sketches. So far, I've done one sketch in each book.

My motivation for posting digital copies is severalfold. Obviously, it serves the role of creating a digital archive of my sketches, useful in the event that a sketchbook is lost, for example. I also like the idea of allowing other people to look at my work, both for possibly getting feedback but also to hopefully provide inspiration to others to tap into their artistic side, in much the same way I have been inspired from reading "An Illustrated Life".  I'm also very keen on eventually exploring digital art techniques, and so creating a digital representation of my sketches is sort of the first step in that direction.

Interestingness curator extraordinaire

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On twitter, I have a feed (my "buzz" twitter list) of people I follow who tend to tweet links to interesting information (blog posts, articles, videos, books, etc). One person in particular is a wellspring of consistently thought provoking and artful content. Her name is Maria Popova but goes by the twitter name brainpicker, and describes herself as: "Interestingness curator & semi-secret geek obsessed with design, storytelling & TED." On this blog many of my posts will be commentaries following up on links that I syphon off of her high-throughput flow of interesting information. I'll make a special tag to indicate her has a source: brainpicker. 

NYC Sojourn

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"Urban Cambrian Explosion" (view from the MoMA courtyard).Over a week ago I traveled to New York City for several days for a respite from the daily grind and to seek out some creative inspiration and mental stimulation. I stayed at the Mayfair Hotel not too far from Times Square. Although it's a rather touristy area of NYC, I like that location due to its central location, and it's a short walk to Central Park. The weather was pretty nice during most of the trip, with plenty of sunshine. And I struck a nice balance between kicking around the city alone and hanging out with my brother, who lives in Brooklyn. I did a lot of walking and visiting museums, restaurants, and shops (art, books, clothes). 

Spending time in Manhattan has a way of giving my soul a boost of energy. The steady flow of people and traffic and the diversity of cultures, food, and architecture are endless sources of sensory stimulation. Traveling in general tends to set my creative juices flowing, often propelling me to revive my journal writing in order to capture the ensuing stream of ideas bouncing around in my head. It's very much in line with the notion conveyed in my previous post about how exposure to unfamiliar territory can stimulate creative thinking. 

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