Notes from SXSW Interactive, Part 1: Welcome to the Internet World Capital

“They call it ‘nerd spring break’ for a reason,” one veteran conference-goer warned me shortly before I hopped on a flight bound for Austin, Texas and South by Southwest Interactive.

Part of a larger ten-day festival that also includes music and film, SXSW Interactive is something akin to a techie’s vision of paradise, replete with free beer, cheap barbeque, and nonstop Tweeting. Close to 15,000 technology professionals attend hundreds of panels, presentations, and keynotes spread throughout the Austin Convention Center and a constellation of nearby hotels over five days each March. The seemingly nonstop overlapping parties (both official and unofficial) start early and end late.

Over the years, SXSW Interactive has acquired a reputation for being at the forefront of technological innovation and theory. Futurist, design critic, and sci-fi author Bruce Sterling has referred to the festival as “the world capital of the Web.” It also has a reputation for launching the “next big thing” in social media. In years past, these have included Twitter and Foursquare (and much of the time, I felt like the only person there who wasn’t constantly on one or the other). This year, the mass texting app GroupMe emerged as perhaps the most likely contender for that title.

Not surprisingly, given the nature of tech culture, one of the main themes that reverberated throughout many of the discussions was how integral open source and open collaboration have been and will continue to be for solving emerging issues and complex problems in fields ranging from software design to medicine and healthcare to policy making.

Key highlights from this year’s festival included:

Internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe on renewable energy

It’s imperative to disrupt the energy industry, said Bob Metcalfe, a professor of innovation at The University of Texas. In other words, it’s necessary to “bring the Internet frame of mind to the solution of energy” in order to create a strong, positive, industry-wide shift towards renewables.

Metcalfe, the erstwhile co-inventor of Ethernet, views the matter as a network problem rather than a policy issue. To that end, he is examining the lessons learned from Internet growth over the past three decades and searching for ways that they could be applied to clean energy. He has dubbed his vision of worldwide limitless renewable energy the “Enernet.”

In his talk, he pointed to the Law of Accelerating Growth, a/k/a Moore’s Law (which forecasts that computing power will improve at a fast rate, doubling every two years, while simultaneously becoming less expensive) as being applicable to clean energy technologies. (Ramez Naam discusses this in detail with regard to solar power in a recent blog post on our site, Smaller, Faster, Cheaper.)

Like the Internet, the so-called Enernet would be decentralized, with breakthroughs happening in a wide variety of fields. Metcalfe gave the example of startup Sun Catalytix, which is working on commercializing technology developed at MIT to power individual homes via oxygen- and hydrogen-based fuel harnessed from grey water.

Change will occur gradually, Metcalfe said, and natural gas may provide the stepping stone to carbon-free renewables. Nonetheless, he invited the audience to envision a world where there is a “squanderable abundance” of clean energy—a scenario that lends itself to both steampunk-esque fantasia (when fuel is abundant and clean, space travel becomes much more feasible, he pointed out) and environmentally-concerned humanitarian urges (for example, designing machines that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or contaminants from the water supply without introducing any new foreign particles of their own).

Metcalfe expressed not only a great deal of optimism that such a shift will occur but also a strong belief that it will be achieved through private investment in innovative technologies rather than via top-down solutions. Like many entrepreneurs and venture capital investors, he sees free enterprise as being much more effective than government policies. Whether or not that’s actually the case, it’s notable that the packed audience generally seemed to take his side on that issue.

Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer on Top of the World

An energetic, gangly, Boston-bred 22-year-old (think Andy Samberg as Mark Zuckerberg on SNL), SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch created his first start-up at 11, raised his first million in venture capital as a teenager, dropped out of Princeton after his first year, and, backed by Google Ventures, recently launched what many in the media are portraying as yet another “next big thing.” In the same vein as Foursquare and GoWalla, SCVNGR offers location-based social games and challenges for smart phones, merging the “real world” experience with online interactivity. It also doubles a gaming platform whereby individuals and organizations can design their own games and challenges.

Bounding onstage in a bright orange Izod shirt and faded jeans, Priebatsch gave what was likely the most buzzed-about keynote presentation at SXSW Interactive.

The social layer has been constructed, Priebatsch said. It happened over the last decade, when the online experience emphasized connecting with people (via texting, Facebook, Skype, et cetera). During the coming decade, the focus will shift to the construction of the game layer—and gaming is geared more towards influencing and motivating actions.

“It’s all really cool and a little bit frightening,” he noted, adding that location-based social gaming is still in a very early stage. However, he asserted, its time is now. The challenge is how to construct it—and ensure that it is and remains open and accessible to all.

Next, Priebatsch addressed what he sees as the fundamental flaw in the current education system, arguing that the game mechanics in schools are poorly designed and thus hold students back. “Students are bored,” he said. “They’re not paying attention in large part because the grading system is broken.” At a very young age, learning for learning’s sake is replaced with the letter grade system. The end goal thus becomes to get as many A’s as possible—not to learn. It’s an artificial motivation, and students recognize this, so school becomes viewed as a chore. Priebatsch recommended replacing letter grades with a “level up” approach, whereby students move up to more difficult levels after acquiring a certain amount of knowledge in one area of a subject.

Later, after a discussion of some of the more commercial aspects of the game layer, Priebatsch shifted his focus to humanitarian concerns. Communal gameplay can be used to solve social and environmental problems, he said (a belief shared by fellow game designer and SXSW speaker Jane McGonigal, the director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future). Such games can bring together a large number of people from all walks of life to collaborate on problem-solving. He ended with a simple formula: Communal gameplay + communal discovery + complex problem = a slightly less impossible problem.

More highlights to come in Part 2..