SXSW Interactive 2007

• Speakers
  • Limor Fried - MIT graduate in EECS
  • Phil Torrone - senior editor at MAKE mag
• People build all sorts of cool stuff
• This movement of making things parallels the open source software movement
• How does the open source software movement relate to hardware? How do you OSS physical stuff?
• Open source CAD design using SketchUp make OSS hardware or stuff possible to release to the public
• Limor releases her creations under Creative Commons license
• Open hardware
  • The Linksys W54G router project is a key example of how popular hardware has been opened up to user tinkering
  • The Roomba floor robot’s API was opened and people started using it for all sorts of different purposes than vacuum cleaning
  • The Green Phone is an open linux based cellphone that is open all the way down to the device drivers
• The two enjoy all types of electronics hackery
• Showing example of a cell phone jammer made from readily available components
• Audience member calls him and gets blocked on screen

Hellonline has another great writeup on Limor and Phil’s keynote conversation.

Kathy Sierra’s presentation was incredible. She is such a great speaker. I took some notes on her keynote but honestly couldn’t keep up with everything she said. Her speech was mostly on the idea of interacting with users like they are human. Her books all follow these same lines. Her Head First series taught me Java, and did so in a way that I actually enjoyed, which is a rare quality for a technical book.

A few things in her presentation caught my attention. She had a very good slideshow to compliment her talking points and always had something interesting on screen. She occasionally threw in gratuitous pictures of puppydogs, I think, to make the following slide sink in more with the audience. The actual content of her speech was making your apps more human, and not doing so in the way most marketers think. In absence of being able to have the computer interpret human-interactive things like facial expressions and gestures, she says, your app should have ways to let users become passionate, not just proficient, at using it.

Thats her keynote in a nutshell. I probably didn’t do it justice; it was the best speech I’ve heard so far.