Tag: all tech considered

Fest Rest
For about a month and a half, starting at the beginning of February and ending less than a week ago, my whole life was pretty much South by Southwest Interactive.

The festival takes place in Austin every year and for the last two has been growing at a rate of more than 35 percent, year-over-year. Like smartphones and apps, it’s become one of those things that only becomes a bigger and bigger part of my job. It’s not just a national tech story that publications like Wired, CNet, The New York Times and others pay attention to, it’s a local story for us. And as the lead reporter on it for my paper, I get really, really competitive and territorial about our coverage. It’s probably the only time of the year that this journalistic bug hits me, where I turn into one of those guys with the hat with “PRESS” on it and bark things out like, “You’re not gonna scoop me, ya out-of-towner, see?”

The “See?” is probably unnecessary.

But it really does take over my life for a good while. I turn down freelance assignments and other offers to do stuff with, “I can’t. South by Southwest.” We coordinate a schedule of babysitting help for my wife with the explainer, “South by Southwest.” When I go to get a bite to eat at a restaurant and they ask what I want, I say, “South by Southwest.” Then they bring me back a soggy sandwich and I wonder if perhaps I’ve gone too far.

What is the festival? I don’t really know anymore. It was once a funky, centralized festival for CD-ROM producers, digital artists and people dabbling in online porn (“dabbling” is a good word for that, don’t you think? It’s dirty-but-not-quite-dirty-sounding).

Today, it’s a massive social media event, a place where start-ups try to get a foothold with early adopters and a place where huge companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their brands in front of bloggers, top Twitterers and the press.

For me, personally, it’s the hardest I work all year on any one project. It’s also the only time of the year I have a free pass to stay out as late as I want for a whole week and to really throw myself into coverage.

I won’t bore you with the play-by-play because I pretty much did that with Twitter for a whole week (and then some) to the point where I wondered if one more post with the hashtag “#SXSW” was finally going to drive my friends away for good.

I took last Thursday and Friday off after the fest and am scheduling some vacation time soon. You’ll see why below.

Here’s a lot of what I wrote in that blaze of pre-festival, mid-festival and post-festival activity.
- The Monday that the festival ran, I did a piece with NPR on trends at the fest. We recorded it via Skype from the press room of the Convention Center (which was much more convenient than going to the studio where we usually record).
- Before the fest, I did a profile of 4chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole that ran in our Insight section and covered the actual keynote. I also profiled SCVNGR chief ninja (and founder) Seth Priebatsch, who ended up doing a great job on his keynote.
- On the Saturday of the fest, I had a story/essay run about so-called “Social Media Gurus” that featured a photo of me that all my editors found very amusing. I just tried very hard to avoid making eye contact with the photo. Overall, I thought it turned out really well. It’s a piece my editor and I have wanted to get into the paper for a while.
- I also wrote about the backlash against the festival in 2010 and how Interactive is dealing with growing pains and emerging as a huge social event. (2011 would eventually prove a lot of this even truer). I was surprised to see that piece pop up on Techmeme.
- A Tweet I posted about Apple’s surprise pop up store became a Twitter top Tweet, featured on the front page of Twitter.com! (It wasn’t even linking to a story I wrote. Our great real estate writer Shonda Novak covered that.)
- We covered a ton of panels, posted lots of photos and just did a lot of write-ups on the fest programming.
- Post-festival, I wrote about how it grew to more than 19k attendees and how SXSW Interactive can be fixed for 2012 (not that it’s broken).
- At the fest, I was in videos for Access PR and Gen Connect, being interviewed about SXSW Interactive.
- I created a Flickr set of some of my SXSW photos as well as the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, where I was a judge. I’m still tweaking pics and putting more of them up.
- I shot a video of Trey Ratcliff’s amazing downtown Austin photowalk. Bonus was that I got to hang out with Jackie Danicki, a long-time Internet friend. You can also see a video I shot of an IBM Watson demo and a stand-up I did wrapping up the fest embedded below.
March 23, 2011
In which Robot Companions are discussed on national radio

On Monday, I was on NPR talking about seniors and new technologies that allow them to live at home longer and (in theory) more independently.

Or as independently as you can live with a house full of sensors and tracking monitors recording your every move. But then, that’s part of the whole discussion.

The blog post includes the embedded audio and links to some resources. You can find a link to the audio segment (and a transcript soon, I think) of the discussion here and a separate lead-in story that contains some of the more interesting reader/listener comments.

As in a segment we did last year about the elderly and tech, the subject of robots came up again. I’m not sure if my use of the phrase “Robot companions” seemed reassuring or extremely perverted. Both, I hope!

August 24, 2010
Bar tab apps and e-mail in the cloud

Rick Orr, co-founder of the company behind the 'TabbedOut' app. Photo by Ralph Barrera, Austin American-Statesman.

A feature we started in the Statesman to feature mobile app creators in Austin appeared again in Monday’s paper. This one was about ATX Innovation, Inc., which makes an app called “TabbedOut” that allows you to open and pay off a bar or restaurant tab from your phone. Neat!

Also on Monday, I did my first NPR All Tech Considered segment in a while. It was about companies like Google and Microsoft racing to offer cloud-based e-mail and other services to government agencies and city governments like Los Angeles.

Here’s the blog post with the audio embedded and the page for the segment itself from All Things Considered.

More stories coming in the next few days! It’s been a strange few weeks and things are starting to feel like they’re going back to normal.

July 27, 2010
Something silly, something serious

'The Iron Man'

Last week, I asked my folks at NPR if I could do a blog post about how methods of holding your new iPhone 4 might sound really dirty. They asked, “How dirty?” It was a fair point. My list included things like, “FaceTime Fingering.”

Glark helped brainstorm some ideas with me and by the time we were done, the piece shifted into a photo gallery with photos by Glark and text by me. I think the result, “12 New Ways To Hold Your iPhone 4” turned out pretty great. It’s far less dirty than what I originally imagined, but given that this story was mostly told in photos, that’s probably a good thing.

Even more fun is imagining Glark in his home studio setting up lights and gathering props to do these. Or imagining his face, with an iPhone in his mouth, on the front page of NPR.org. He’s got full-sized images on his site. Wow! Check them all out.

Jared and Juanita Esquivel. Photo by Jerrad Henderson, American-Statesman
The other important thing from this week was a story that ran on the front page of today’s Austin American-Statesman. It took me a few months to write and, as with any long project, I went through all the states of hating the story, wishing I’d never even started it, and then, as it started coming together in the end, passionately defending it and wanting to make everything about it perfect.

That’s never possible, but this one, from my point of view, comes close. All the graphic and photo elements came together, almost all the pieces made it onto the online version and there were no last-minute crazy changes that needed to be made. It was as smooth an experience as I’ve ever had with a story like this. I’m pretty thrilled to have it finished.

I wrote a blog entry setting up the story and another one with lots of background and notes I couldn’t fit in the actual story (“deleted scenes”) if it’s a subject that interests you. I had no idea I was so passionate on the subject until I was pretty much done writing it all.

Bonus: the comments on the story are actually unintentionally hilarious, or racialtastic. Here’s one:

Yeah but you know how the economically disadvantaged, among other “classes” score on the TAKS. Maybe homie just don’t got the brain power to see that $70 for access for the whole family is cheaper than a net-capable phone in every hand. Plus I got idea that texting my posse is quite a bit more important than looking up some BS about getting a job or school. That’s uncool. The men in pookie’s gang just wouldn’t approve of it. Here the bottom line isn’t necessarily the bottom line.

Dude. Classic! The same guy made a “pork-n-beans” reference in another post. To be honest, I was expecting far, far worse in terms of comments.

July 4, 2010
Cup

It’s been a few weeks, but yesterday I was on NPR’s All Things Considered with a segment about how the World Cup is affecting Internet traffic, how to watch it online or on your phone and the debut of 3-D TV sports on ESPN.

The audio of the segment is here and you can see the blog post I wrote to go with it on the All Tech blog.

Apart from the fact that I don’t follow World Cup too much (especially now that they allow a million bees in the stadium), there was another little curveball with this segment: I was chosen as the guinea pig for an experiment. We did my half of the segment not in the KUT studio like we usually do, but with an app called “Report-IT” on my iPhone.

The app was able to connect to their ISDN line and apparently the sound was pretty good. The only thing I notice in hearing it back is that the room I was in sounds very echo-filled, but that’s the room’s acoustics, not the app’s fault. I could have switched to a sound-proofed room in my work building (yes, we have one), but the Wi-Fi connection I was using didn’t reach that far and when we tried it with 3G, the quality dropped considerably and there was too much lag.

The best part was talking to Michele Norris while an engineer instructed me to move the phone to different positions around my mouth. “Now hold it upside-down and away from you at a 45-degree angle, like you’re talking across the top of the surface of the phone.”

These guys know audio. It’s incredible how well they know what works and what doesn’t.

Not sure if I’ll be back on a regular schedule on NPR, but at least for this week I got to feel a little bit like a radio pioneer. (Or “test subject” or “guinea pig.” I’m fine with any of those.)

June 15, 2010
What was missed

The plan is to write more actual blog entries (and short, stray thoughts) on Terribly Happy now that the new site format is live, but I still want to keep the stuff I’m working on and things that are published/produced elsewhere appearing here.

I can’t stress enough how much of a pain in the ass it had gotten to be dealing with Blogger the last few years. Half the time it wouldn’t publish, other times it messed up my HTML on something simple like adding a link to a post. Uploading an image was a chore and it never formated things the way I wanted it to.

If there were reasons I moved more to posting on Twitter and less on Bloggystyle, it was those. It got to be like having to visit a bad neighborhood where you used to live for a necessary errand that you keep putting off.

Anyway, here’s some of what I would have posted last week if the site had been accessible:

On Monday, I was on NPR talking about Apple (seems like we’re always talking about Apple, huh?). Specifically, iPad sales, the Gizmodo situation and the perception that Apple might be getting a little bit of a bad reputation in some circles. Here’s the audio from the segment and the blog entry I wrote with links to stuff we talked about.

Also last week, I had a story in the Saturday paper about location-based social networks like Gowalla and Foursquare. The story didnt make it online, mostly because I broke down and expanded it into three parts on Digital Savant (at least I think thats why it wasn’t online). The Digital Savant versions also include tips from power users and a few other tidbits we weren’t able to fit in the paper.

Basically, it’s a primer on how to use Foursquare and Gowalla if you’re not already using them (or maybe you are and you’re a little lost.

You can find those entries here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

May 7, 2010