SXSW 2012

Imagine an app that could cut saturated fat from your diet. Or one that could cure gingivitis. Well, while technology has had a big role in making us more sedentary, it also has the potential to make us better informed, healthier and even more fit. In fact, patients are banking on this potential, which is why the AppStore offers more than 7,000 health apps for iPhone users alone. In this 60-min SXSW talk, Ina Fried of Dow Jones' All Things Digital sits down with Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini to discuss how people are navigating this new landscape by using technology, especially mobile tech, to manage their health and make better health decisions. Already there are apps for testing eyesight, tracking exercise and even helping diabetics manage their glucose levels. Vast online communities complement these mobile apps by letting patients share, inform, and support one another. But what's next? Technology also has the potential to reshape the doctor-patient relationship, transforming it from one characterized by irregular visits to treat illness to true doctor-patient partnerships focused on wellness. And what about online health care records we hear so much about? We used to have a better chance of seeing bigfoot, but today companies like Aetna are making mobile health records a reality. Is this is a privacy breach in the making or are their real benefits to having this info on the go? This session is sponsored by Aetna.

Vic Gundotra will participate in a fireside chat with Guy Kawasaki to discuss the Google+ project. Vic will share how the product has grown since the initial launch, some of the lessons learned and the challenges the Google+ team faced along the way.

The Lean Startup debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. This talk draws on stories and insights from the book, explaining the new science of entrepreneurship. Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counterintuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Bravo’s interactive late-night talk show, “Watch What Happens Live,” is coming to SXSW. Meet the on and off-screen digital mavens, including the show’s host Andy Cohen, Tom Colicchio (“Top Chef” judge), Lisa Hsia, Aimee Viles and Dave Serwatka. In Cohen’s SXSW Clubhouse, these visionaries will illustrate how “Top Chef 9” brought multi-platform storytelling beyond the linear screen. When Bravo embarked on their transmedia mission in the fall of 2011, they broke new ground with digital innovations and fostered a unique two-way fan/cast relationship. Dive deep with Bravo into their latest industry first and learn the return on investment for the network and for the fan. Through this soup-to-nuts presentation, discover why transmedia is the future of the entertainment industry.

”Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch…”,lyrics from Fiddler on the Roof about finding a perfect partner. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have someone to guide you towards what is a match for you, advise you in your career life, help you weed through the losers to find the fabulous ‘one’ that will make you whistle on your way to work AND whistle on the way home?
In Hunt or Be Hunted - How to get the Design Job you Really Want, you will be privy to the insights and success stories of three of the industry’s most respected representatives in their knowledge domains. You will also hear from a leading expert in the placement of designers. Each will relate real-world experience, guiding audience members through the maze of questions a designer has in this frenetic job market.

Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site.  Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site's links.

It's easy to get caught up with the horse races of Facebook versus Google or Microsoft versus Apple or record labels versus the Internet. But in nearly 30 years of covering technology I find that the major conflicts are those of philosophy, politics and power. You could almost view the past few decades as a spectacular cycle of fantasy novels with the Hacker Spirit as the protagonist and amazing supporting characters including Steve Jobs, Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Stephen Wolfram, Whitfield Diffie, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg (all of whom I've spent considerable time interviewing.) And as our lives are more intertwined with the giant digital shift, these conflicts are ever more vital. Here's an attempt to deconstruct a revolution--and point to what's ahead.

At the 2011 SXSW Interactive Festival, veteran IAC Chairman and media mogul Barry Diller implored the online community to rise up against proposed net neutrality legislation, in support of digital freedom and innovation. Join us one year later, on Sunday, March 11, to hear his latest insights on the current online content landscape, as well as his thoughts on where digital creatives should be focusing their passions in an insightful informative and savvy hour-long conversation with CNN Chief Business Correspondent Ali Velshi.

Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist and inventor who is most recently known for the launch of the computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. Along with the computational software system Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha has put into action some concepts Wolfram has been developing throughout his remarkable career, most notably documented in his book A New Kind of Science (NKS).

When money flows frictionlessly, good things happen. Good things for small businesses. Good things for consumers. Good things for the economy as a whole. The game layer and the mobile payments space are on a crash course, and it's going to be awesome. So awesome that it’ll force credit card interchange rates to zero and pump 50 billion dollars a year back into the economy. Sounds crazy, but before Al Gore invented the internet, we never imagined information would flow so freely. As soon as the friction was removed from information-transfer, a new economy emerged that changed the way we do business. The same is about to happen with money. It's just another medium of information, and it's high time to suck the friction out of the economy. There are two elements driving this transition to interchange zero 1) the technology that’s driving fees down (along with some far-reaching legislation thanks to Dick Durbin) and 2) the information inherent in payments that’s being leveraged to drive revenues up. Join Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja of SCVNGR + LevelUp for a fast-paced session on how a combination of mobile payment startups (even the ones being formed by big companies), The Durbin Amendment, and a tipping point in consumer behavior will completely change the way we think about money -- maybe even re-wire how our economy works.

Drew Houston, CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, has led Dropbox's growth from a simple idea to a service millions around the world rely on – a modern day Network Effect. From the classic example of the telephone to today’s social networks, every so often a new medium grows from obscurity to ubiquity because the more people that use it, the more enticing it becomes. That nearly 60% of adults online own at least two Internet connected devices not only increases the capacity of sharing but creates a need for it. In this session, Drew will sit down with a well-known tech influencer to discuss how to take a need in the market and turn it into a service so fundamental to people’s everyday lives, that it encourages them to recommend and share it with everyone.

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson discusses her vision for the future of The Times in the digital age in a session moderated by Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith. Does Abramson's leadership at The Times present a blueprint for sustainability for the newspaper industry?

One of the great failures of any company - for that matter of a capitalist economy - is ecosystem failure. Great companies build great ecosystems, one in which value is created not just for a single company or group of industry players, but for partners who didn't even exist when the product or service was introduced. Many companies start out creating huge value. Consider Microsoft, whose vision of a computer on every desk and in every home changed the world of computing forever, and created a rich ecosystem for developers. But as Microsoft's growth stalled, they gradually consumed more and more of the opportunity for themselves, and innovators moved elsewhere, to the Internet. Internet innovators like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have also created a rich ecosystem of opportunity, but like Microsoft before them, they are leaving less and less on the table for others. This is a bad trend. Wall Street firms, which got their start trading on behalf of clients, then began trading against them, then created vast Ponzi economies to drain the value from entire segments of the economy are even more dire examples of this trend. But this crisis of capitalism goes beyond individual industry segments. For example, the race by companies to eliminate labor costs has been a short term profit win but a long term loss. Since the cycle of capitalism depends on consumers as well as producers, and consumers are less and less able to find employment, at some point, we're going to have to start thinking about how to put people to work, rather than how to put them out of work. At O'Reilly, we've always tried to live by the slogan "Create more value than you capture." It's a great way to build a sustainable business and a sustainable economy.
Andrew McAfee, author of "Race Against the Machine," will engage with Tim about these ideas, and about how rethinking the economy becomes even more urgent in the face of the trend he explores in his book, in which jobs are being outsourced not just to low-wage countries, but increasingly to machines.

My new book, The End of Business as Usual, will set the stage for a passionate and engaged conversation March 2012.

Designers of all kinds are key players in the game of change that so typifies the opening decades of the 21st century. Called on to imagine, build, guide, demystify, explain, provoke, enable and inspire, game designers deal daily in the currency of transformation—of places, practices, and perspectives. Play is a key strategy in developing a design practice that is agile enough to entertain a constant need for transformative thinking but substantive enough to throw its strategic weight around when needed. This talk will delve into a set of tasty truisms gleaned from professional game designers about what happens to play when approached from the perspective of learning. What they have to say will both surprise and inform.

The fastest-growing social media service in recent months is Pinterest, which describes itself as an online pinboard to organize and share things you love. Learn more about what the site is doing now, why it has grown popular in cities far away from silicon valley, and about the company's long-term goals in a conversation between Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann and entrepreneur/investor/blogger Chris Dixon.

This solo presentation from the founder / CEO of the Austin-based company Stratfor (as well as the author of the best-selling books "The Next 100 Years," "The Next Decade" and "The Future of War") will cover "Pseudo-togetherness" caused by social media and the true lack of solidarity. Friedman's talk will cover our current transition to spending more time speaking to more people (but with less substance), plus future of the human race transcending technology. Using examples with online dating vs the old ways of meeting people, this brilliant thinker will also discuss what society loses in our continuing embrace technology in the context of how we lost body language with the telephone.

Join Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka for a very inspirational keynote address and learn how your geek skills can transform the world for the better.

Meet chef, author & television personality Anthony Bourdain and the crew behind the award-winning series Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, who help Tony oversee the show’s social media presence.

The passionate closing remarks of this visionary thinker are a long-time tradition for SXSW Interactive attendees. Come hear what Bruce Sterling likes (and doesn't like) about the tech industry and the world at large in 2012.

artists to bring guitars, DI, Stools

Bruce Springsteen's artistry has drawn worldwide acclaim and honors. His recordings include time-tested classics of rock and acoustic-based albums celebrating folk traditions. His live shows are fervent celebrations of the communal power of music. Springsteen keynotes SXSW in conjunction with the release of his 17th studio album, 'Wrecking Ball' and the kickoff of the 2012 Wrecking Ball Tour.