9 SXSW Interactive Sessions Everyone Should Vote For - Now!

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals - the giant confab of interactive, music and film in Austin, TX, in March, 2013 - is currently working on some 3,656 panel proposals. Which ones actually happen depends on how many votes they get. Here are nine panels that deserve your support.

The voting closes on August 31st at 11:59pm Central Daylight Time, not much time to review all those choices. To check out 3,656 sessions in 36 hours, you would need to cover about 101 sessions per hour, or 1.7 panels per minute (PPM). And that doesn’t leave time for eating, sleeping or anything else.

To make your job easier, we waded in and identified nine can’t-miss panels that deserve your support, based on these four criteria:

1. Is the topic technology related?

2. Is the topic approachable?

3. Is the content unique?

4. Are the speakers/panelists reputable?

Vote early and vote often, whether or not you plan to make it to Austin in March. Click on the headline to vote for the ones you like best.

What You Will Learn: This session will share how brands, producers and advertisers (both big and small) can leverage social TV to target and engage with current and potential customers. For people just interested in what’s around the corner, this session will provide plenty of insight into the future of social TV that is sure to keep the wheels in your mind turning for days.

Speakers: Sam Decker of Mass Relevance, Olivier Delfosse of FremantleMedia Enterprises, and Mike Proulx of Hill Holliday

What You Will Learn: This session will teach you how to leverage social data to improve your personal and professional life. For example, you will learn how to use data to monitor your friends so that you know exactly what to get them for their birthday. You will also learn how to figure out what the opposite sex responds to in an effort to improve your “game.”

Speakers: Adam Schoenfeld of Simply Measured and Matt Thomson of Klout

What You Will Learn: This session will share what neuroscience has uncovered about social behavior and teach you how you can apply these neurological principles into the design of your site and your online community.

Speakers: Yumio Saneyoshi of Google and Mimi Kao of University of California, San Francisco

What You Will Learn: This session will discuss the development of a photography meme titled, “Texts From Hillary” - including how it unfolded and the impact it and other memes have had on how we tell visual stories.

Speakers: Kira Pollack of TIME Magazine, photojournalist Diana Walker, Stacy Lambe of Buzzfeed

What You Will Learn: In this session, Nadia and Chrystal will share the five guiding principles they continue to use to build and maintain their online community of over 16 million members.

Speakers: Nadia Hussain and Chrystal Chan of Polyvore

What You Will Learn: From marketing and going paperless to accounting and contact management, this session will teach you how to get the most out of your Evernote account.

Speakers: Lindsey Holmes of LCH Business SM & Tech and Josh Zerkel of Custom Living Solutions

What You Will Learn: This panel will share how networking has evolved and empower you to leverage the new trends to maximize your network and reap the rewards.

Speakers: Stephanie Agresta of Weber Shandwick, Porter Gale of Porter Gale, Inc., David Hornik of August Capital and Shira Lazar of What’s Trending

What You Will Learn: This panel will take you into the future and demonstrate what 3D printing makes possible - including the impact it will have on manufacturing, design and creativity as we know it.

Speakers: Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine and Peter Weijmarshausen of Shapeways

What You Will Learn: This panel will help you cut through the common myths surrounding blogging and outline a comprehensive, actionable blueprint you can implement immediately. Have a question that wasn’t answered? Be sure to ask the panel for help. 

Speakers: Mark Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich, and Stanford Smith of Fluency Media

BONUS: The following three sessions are proposed by SAY: Media, ReadWriteWeb’s parent company. You may want to check them out, too:

1. Adapt or Die, Jane Pratt’s Publishing Evolution: Featuring the one and only Jane Pratt, documenting her journey into digital publishing and what she has learned along the way.

2. Addicted to Mobile, The New Cigarette: Doug Grinspan and Jeremiah Zinn of Viacom reunite to uncover what makes mobile devices so addicting.

3. SocialX : UX :: Users : Users: SAY: Media social mastermind Ted Rheingold on how to design for the social experience.

Have other sessions you like? Share them in the comments below!

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by William Griggs, a startup strategist who helps startups with their product, marketing and fundraising strategies. You can find more about him at TheStartupSlingshot.com or follow him on Twitter @TSSUpdates.

Austin image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch: Zynga

Zynga’s Mafia Wars, Farmville and Bubble Safari are enormously popular pastimes that helped define social/casual gaming. But faced with a changing market and an unpopular leader, can Zynga innovate its way out of the hole it keeps digging for itself?

Zynga’s climb to the top of social gaming didn’t take long. In 2007, Mark Pincus launched the Texas Hold'Em Poker app (now Zynga Poker) on Facebook. Within a year, he had acquired nearly $40 million of venture capital. A year later, Zynga reached 40 million active users on the back of Farmville, and an empire was born. Zynga went public in late 2011, and its stock took off, bolstered by strong performances from games like CityVille, Bubble Safari and Words With Friends. Since it peaked in March 2012 at nearly $15 per share, scandals and missed numbers have driven Zynga’s stock down to just over $3 per share. The company is now fighting to gain back the valuation, reputation and dominance it enjoyed just a few months ago.

Zynga’s biggest problems break down into four buckets. Some of them are Zynga’s fault, and others aren’t:

1. The Brand Problem Mafia Wars has a loyal following. So do Words With Friends, Hidden Chronicles and Pioneer Trail. They’re all Zynga games, but Zynga itself does not command any loyalty. Social gamers are interested in individual game, not the companies producing them. That’s how something like OMGPOP’s Draw Something could come out of nowhere in a matter of days. Draw Something scared Zynga enough to prompt it to buy the company for $180 million. You can only do that so many times before the well runs dry, and hot apps can die as fast as they grow. The only way to stay on top is to keep churning out new hit games. That’s a tough business to maintain and scale.

2. The ‘Book Problem Zynga and Facebook are tied together in a very unequal partnership. Sure, Zynga still dominates Facebook’s gaming channel, but there are plenty of other options for gamers, and Facebook is willing to test the waters. When Facebook made non-Zynga games easier to discover, Zynga’s business – and its stock – took a dive.

On a recent earnings call, Mark Pincus acknowledged Zynga’s Facebook problem, noting that “getting beyond the Facebook Web footprint through mobile is going to give us more growth opportunities.” In the long run, that may be the case, though monetizing mobile traffic has been notoriously difficult for everyone. In the short term, Zynga has to hang on to as big a piece of the pie as Facebook will let them eat.

3. The Bubble Problem Zynga isn’t the only social gaming company that’s disappointed. Electronic Arts' PopCap acquisition is also starting to look like a bust. Social gaming is here to stay, but it seems tremendously overvalued. Zynga was funded in a bubble, built its expectations in a bubble and now has to meet bubble-sized expectations in a world that’s made a market correction.

4. The Boss Problem Speaking of management, the former wunderkind at the top of the org chart hasn’t made a lot of friends. Despite all his talk about everyone being a CEO, Mark Pincus has always been known as a bit of a control freak. When he was on top of his game, everyone let it slide. Then it got ugly, and so did the public.

In late 2010, we heard rumors of stock option clawbacks where Pincus allegedly demanded that certain employees return their options or be fired. Then, when Zynga executives cashed out before the stock tanked (and while everyday employees remained locked up), Pincus became the target of a class-action lawsuit alleging insider trading.

Pincus doesn’t seem to care about the common employee, and when you make video games for a living, your employees are your only real asset. That helps competitors to swipe your best talent and makes it really easy to mock you in videos like this one from Kixeye (language not suitable for work):

Mark Pincus, CEO: Mark Pincus is a smart guy, and he gets social media, having founded the push news service Freeloader and the social network Tribe Networks. He’s also not afraid of bending the rules to make a buck. In addition to the stock clawback, Pincus admits to dumping spyware on his users' computers to turn a profit:

I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, f*cking, now. Like, I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business…So control your destiny. So that was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable.

Pincus got the company this far by being ahead of the curve. His challenge now is coming up with a way to stay there as the industry becomes more commoditized.

Zynga’s stock will not return to its peak for years, if ever. Its current franchises will likely hold onto a good deal of their market share, and the titles in the pipeline should perform well enough, but competition will eat into the company’s dominance. Within a few years, Zynga may still be the biggest social game publisher, but own a far smaller portion of a market valued far more conservatively than it is today. Unless it hits a major home run with one of its new initiatives (see below), there’s really no reason for anyone to acquire Zynga, so the company’s value will continue to float down to a point justified by its actual profit.

Zynga should continue to produce relevant, popular games, but to remain a power player in the social world, Pincus needs to win big with two moves.

First is his push toward becoming an infrastructure provider. This will be an uphill climb, and there’s no good way to lock in developers who become successful on the Zynga platform.

Second, and much riskier, is a jump into online gambling, a recurring theme that Pincus resurrected in July. Given the recent domestic troubles online gambling has faced, Zynga will likely be relying on years of Farmville sequels before gambling becomes a major revenue source.

Research In Motion: Amid Massive losses - more than 11 times worse than expected - the company has reportedly started pitching its long-delayed Blackberry 10 devices to carriers. And rumors are swirling that the company may do a licensing deal - or even a sale - with Samsung.

HP: The company reported disappointing earnings last week, with declines in computer and printing revenues - and an $8.9 billion loss on a $10.8 billion writedown. Reports that HP is creating a new division to take another plunge into the consumer tablet market did not reassure anyone.

Nokia: The mobile phone giant’s quarterly revenue and earnings exceeded expectations and it has reduced its cash burn rate, but the company lost money yet again and saw its debt ratings cut to junk status. And it still hasn’t cracked the U.S. smartphone market as it halves the retail price of its flagship Lumia 900 to $49.99.

38 Studios: No change

Barnes & Noble: No change

Sony: No change

Groupon: Groupon’s stock price continues to hit all-time lows as growth slows. T-Mobile USA: The company’s troubles continue to mount, reporting second quarter losses of 557,000 high-value contract customers, and a net loss of 205,000 customers. 

Netflix: No change

Electronic Arts: No change

Best Buy: After rejecting Richard Schulze’s takeover bid over the weekend, Best Buy hired Hubert Joly as its CEO. Joly is a turnaround mercenary who’s done good work in the past with companies like EDS, but whose primary experience is in the hospitality industry. Best Buy’s stock dropped 7% in an initial response.

Motorola Mobility: no change

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IBM Is Turning Watson Into A "Supercharged" Siri

IBM is working to turn its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer into the newest mobile device personal assistant. 

Dubbed "Watson 2.0," the system would be a voice-activated "supercharged" version of Siri, at least that's how Bernie Meyerson, VP of Innovation at IBM, described it to Bloomberg this week. We all know Watson is super smart - there are almost a dozen racks of IBM servers in New York that can back up that claim - but is he helpful? 

Adding the ability to sense and assess real-world input like image recognition, location data and voice recognition are a few of the tools needed to make Watson into something more than a the system more user friendly. To begin with, IBM will have to include some of its existing technologies, like image interpretation, into the system. It might also have to license voice recognition technology from a company like Nuance, much like Apple did with Siri. 

Despite the obvious similarities it doesn’t seem like IBM has plans to take down Siri; it wants to attract a different kind of user base: the corporate world, more specifically, finance and healthcare. 

Last year, IBM teamed up with Nuance to research the possibility of  using Watson's brains and Nuance's voice recognition technology to create a smart, fast personal assistant and fact-finding machine for doctors and nurses. In order to do that, Watson had to "learn" everything there is to know about a multitude of different medical topics. 

Last September, Watson began studying oncology through a partnership with health insurer, WellPoint. Researchers "taught" Watson in a backwards kind of way, feeding it answers to questions they had developed.  When a question is posed, Watson uses information it has already learned, then accesses millions of books and websites at 66 million pages a second, and then answers. 

The more it analyzes and is told which answers are right, the more accurate it becomes. Watson will not only tell you the answer, it'll show you why it's is right. This is promising, but it's already been a year and Watson isn't projected to be an oncology expert until 2013. 

Another problem is that Watson is too smart for a device's battery life. Watson uses the power equivalent of 6,000 desktop computers. That makes it too energy consuming to be a viable smart phone application. Meyerson says that the mobile version they are working on uses less power, saying, "The power it takes to make Watson work is dropping down like a stone." Addressing that issue could turn Watson into a leaner assistant to be used on any device. 

For now, "Watson 2.0" is still in testing phases, but it's on its way to moving from a server stack to something you can hold in your hands.  

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YouTube's "Gangnam Style" Viral Hit Portends Kpop Explosion

South Korean popster PSY’s “Gangnam Style” is an absurdist tour de force of a four minute viral video. It's also an object lesson in how YouTube is driving global culture. Now that kpop (short for South Korean pop music) has broken through to the mainstream, get ready for a whole lot more of it.   

Uploaded to YouTube on July 15th, Gangnam Style, by 34-year-old singer Park Jae-Sang,  has racked up 52.8 million views, collecting at least 2 million views every day since August 1. The video occupies the #2 spot on YouTube’s yearly chart, second to the infamous agit-prop film Kony 2012. 

Western press mentions of "Gangnam Style” abound, from France and Canada. The Atlantic “dissected” all the “subversive meanings” behind the song and video this week, and the Washington Post noted the “invisible horse dance” craze sweeping the media. Predominantly male (and not kpop friendly) redditors went gaga for Gangnam Style with the video sitting on the front page of the social news site on July 30. Gangnam Style even beat Justin Bieber as the most watched video on iTunes.

No other kpop song has seen this kind of global reception. Even Stephen Colbert’s fake feud with Rain in 2007 and 2008 did not bring Western success to the Kpop star. The song's words are very South Korean specific, referring to a ritzy neighborhood in the capital city Seoul.  The song wasn’t made for a global audience, and its reach has startled even PSY.

How did this happen? The answer isn’t just that the music video is ridiculous. Kpop has been creeping into the mainstream international market for years. YouTube has been instrumental in exposing the music to the global audience.

Because of the large fan base in Asia, any new music video uploaded to YouTube enjoys at least half a day on the video-sharing site’s front page due to high view counts. Today’s example is kpop girl group KARA’s latest video, sitting at the number 3 spot on YouTube’s music charts with 2.3 million views, right under “Call me Maybe” (which is under, you guessed it, "Gangnam Style").  

Not only do kpoppers use YouTube to stay on top of new hits (as it is nearly impossible to get the music outside of South Korea), kpoppers also make fan videos discussing the over-the-top fashion sense of kpop bands, unboxing videos of elaborate kpop merchandise, and English translation videos. 

The global success of “Gangnam Style” might very well change the musical, and cultural, landscape, especially if the Justin Bieber collaboration pans out. 

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After Instagram: 6 Alternative Photo Apps To Try

Editor's note: This post was originally published by our partners at GeekSugar.com. It's unlikely the public's love of Instagram will die down any time soon, but what if you just want to bring an app of fresh air to your smartphone camera routine?

Consider expanding your vision to other apps. Just like the photography service you already know so well, there are plenty of other awesome apps and communities for beautiful photos.

Let's face it — Hipstamatic was here first, and it remains the thinking woman's app since you have to decide which lens and film you want to use before snapping a pic. Much like real photography, you've got to know what equipment works best in your environment.

Visit GeekSugar for the full slideshow of Instagram alternatives for your app library.

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Weekly Wrap-Up: The Future Of Streams, Facebook's New iOS App, Why Topic Pages Are The Next Big Thing

The future of Twitter streams, Facebook's new iOS app, and why topic pages are the next big thing. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

One of the five reasons why Web publishing is changing is the emergence of streams of information, The Future of Streams: Twitter Looms As Biggest Obstacle.

Facebook released a completely rebuilt version of its iOS app for iPhone and iPad today, changing a fundamental aspect of the company's mobile strategy, Why Facebook Ditched the Mobile Web & Went Native With its New iOS App.

Chronological and real-time consumption of content just doesn't work anymore. It's time for topic pages to add a layer of organization on top, Why Topic Pages Are The Next Big Thing.

At the annual Gartner Catalyst conference this week in San Diego, top companies like Genentech, Eli Lily and Northern Trust Bank shared some of the secrets behind their impressive app portfolios, How 3 Big Enterprises Are Building Their Own Internal iPad Apps.

Evernote signed a treaty with Moleskine Friday at the Evernote Trunk Conference, formally declaring a truce in its war on paper, Evernote & Moleskine Merge Paper & Pixels in "Smart Notebook".

In the past, content creators on YouTube couldn't make money from traffic coming in through tablets or smartphones, YouTube Finally Offers Mobile Ads .

PayPal’s new deal with Discover Financial Services may have just opened the door for the payment service’s users to pay for goods and services in seven million Discover card locations, but there are big questions whether this deal will really accelerate the future of mobile payments, Will PayPal’s History Derail Its Discover Card Deal?.

If Kickstarter met the adult-entertainment industry and they fell in love, this would be their child. Meet Offbeatr, a crowdfunding site for the adult community, Offbeatr Wants To Be The Kickstarter For XXX Startups.

Nikon just launched the first-ever Android-powered point-and-shoot camera. It's a smart move designed to make the company's line of consumer products relevant in a world of ubiquitous phonecams, Nikon's Android-Powered Bid to Change Mobile Photography.

Facebook said this week's problem, which had users sending and accepting friend requests they did not initiate, was a result of users using contact importer, What To Do To Keep Your Facebook Account Secure [Update].

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Facebook’s Updated iPhone App Aids Internet of Things

Buried in the details of last week’s update to Facebook’s now-native iOS app was a small bit of technology that could have potentially big impact on the future of the Internet of Things.

The technology is called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), an IBM-developed protocol for real-time messaging over networks with low power and bandwidth. MQTT is now under the hood within Facebook’s iOS app’s messaging features, part of Facebook’s efforts to pull in the features from its native Messenger app.

“We use MQTT to update notifications, messages, and bookmarks. At application startup, we walk the dependency graph and ensure that our MQTT service has started before we start listening for new notifications. Even as we add new features, our modular system ensures that our application setup happens in the right place, at the right time,” wrote Facebook engineer Jonathan Dann on the company’s engineering blog last week.

For Facebook app end-users, the immediate effect of using the push-driven protocol for the updated app won’t immediately be apparent, but it portends some potentially big features down the line.

In the short-term, however, MMQT is going to get a big boost in adoption cred from Facebook’s use. Messaging in the Internet of Things sector is still gelling around one standard implementation, as device manufacturers figure out how to get sensors and other micro-devices to best communicate with the Internet and from there the rest of the world. MQTT is one such protocol and tent.io is another.

Both MQTT and tent.io have very strong social media components, which may at first seem incongruous with the Internet of Things. But the messaging protocol that can handle social media messaging (as MQTT will do on the new version of Facebook’s iOS app) and messaging from hardware will be seen as a much more universal protocol. And in the world of standardization, that perception may be enough to win the gold.

Redmonk analyst James Governor sees Facebook’s commitment as a big win for MQTT.

“IBM has been seeking pervasive status for its message queue technology since I joined the industry in 1995. It looks like it just finally got there. I don’t want to confuse a protocol with an implementation but in a week when Dave Winer questioned the status of tent.io and app.net began its play for real time stream utility status I can’t help noting that IBM and MQTT.org are in the game,” Governor blogged.

Governor’s reference to Winer’s thoughts on the tent.io protocol is significant, since Winer is the inventor of the RSS newsfeed protocol.

“RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless. That’s what I say about specs. Show me content I can get at through the protocol, and I’ll say something,” Winer said on his own blog.

For Governor, Facebook’s investment in MMQT sets the content bar very high.

“Whether or not you like Facebook, there is now going to be a metric crapload of content flowing across MQTT. It just got anointed by Facebook,” Governor said.

MMQT’s anointment won’t mean much to average users - yet. But if the Internet of Things and social media development communities can rally around one protocol, it will be one big step towards the goal of getting people and objects communicating with each other more efficiently 

All thanks to Facebook.

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