It’s been about 12 hours since the final session of SXSW Interactive 2013 and I think I’ve got about 20 key themes garnered from the four days of sessions I attended. Obviously that is way too much to share in an AdNews article. Here’s three that I’ve picked out:
The proliferation of new hardware
All across SXSW Interactive there were companies focused on the physical world not just the virtual. 3D printing alone was covered in 10 separate sessions. Scott Summit shared his 3D printed bespoke artificial limbs while Makielabs had a business printing virtual avatars to create dolls. 3D Systems had even printed a drone plane that could take off and land by imbedding circuitry into plastic. The starting price of $1500 for a home 3D printer is low enough and the quality high enough for home production of household items to be a real possibility. Elsewhere, Ouya were lauded for their $99 TV gaming console on Android that launches in June. Google did a talking shoe with Adidas and heavily promoted Google Glass. New hardware was everywhere.
Debunking the purity and equality of big data
In the world of big data legendary US political analyst, Nate Silver showed how more data is in many cases is creating more inaccurate decisions. This is because we continually confuse random relationships (the noise) with real cause and effect (the signal). Elsewhere in big data, academics working in the field of geo-data showed that 97% of digital map makers are male, 96% of contributors to open map platforms are male and that wealthier neighbourhoods spit out more data than poorer ones. They also showed that women are significantly less likely to give away their location in social platforms like Twitter, hence reducing their geo data footprint. The result of this? Huge inequalities in the amount of data about certain areas and imbedded bias within the data itself. This means our insights from geo data may be wrong and that we are basing decisions thinking we have comprehensive, accurate information when we only have limited, inaccurate amounts.
Pain Points
The best new businesses start by finding unique dissatisfactions in a market. Norman Winarsky, vice president of Stanford Research Institute’s commercial ventures team called these dissatisfactions “pain points”. For Winarsky and his team to invest in a startup, the core business idea must satisfy a real and significant problem in a market and then articulate a compelling way to solve it. For example, the virtual assistant Siri was created to find a zero click solution for mobile phones because 20% of people were lost with each click getting to a site. Stanford sold Siri to Apple for hundreds of millions of dollars. This idea of finding real dissatisfaction was also driving the creation of travel services like Desti and Airbnb. It was motivating NYC entrepreneur Cindy Gallop to build makelovenotporn.com and successful music service Pandora to keep innovating successfully. Starting with a pain point provides a mission for the founders and staff, a focus for innovation and is more likely to result in real revenue for businesses, as it is the founding idea of the business has a real human need at its heart.
Jeremy Nicholas
Chief executive
BMF