Opera at SXSW 2008

My colleague Erin Robbins wrote her report, as did Charles McCathieNevile, our Chief Standards Officer who spoke on this year's Browser Wars panel (which he discusses in his post). Check out the following articles:

It's a Wrap! by Erin

South by... by Charles

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Here are a few thoughts of my own:

There were so many different events, panels, tradeshow booths, and parties going on, all at the same time, there was no way to see and attend everything. As such, everyone's SXSW experience is different, which I think comes through when you read our various reports.

Once again, I'd like to thank our volunteers who joined us in Austin. Doing Opera-related work every day I was at SXSW meant that I didn't have the opportunity to attend any of the other panels, so I'm glad Phred, Jim, and John were able to blog about them for us. I hope you, the readers, were able to get a sense of SXSW Interactive's general vibe (though the party atmosphere is something that has to be experienced firsthand, I think).

I could write a hugely long post about everything we did at SXSW, but that would be tedious, so here are my personal highlights:

• Giving away free coffee to SXSW Interactive attendees
  
• Having an amazing booth with our logo projected on a wall, really huge for everyone to see
  
• Having great stuff to give away to people visiting our booth (beer koozies, pins, stickers, and three styles of Opera shirts!)
  
• Talking with a ton of people, and seeing them amazed by Opera's innovative, powerful, and time-saving features
  
• Installing Opera Mini on people's phones, giving them full access to the real Web on the go
  
• Meeting die-hard Opera fans (both new users and old timers who've been using Opera for years)
  
• Meeting well-known My Opera members for the first time in person
  
• Watching Charles make the Opera-faithful proud (and winning new users) at the Browser Wars panel
  
• Helping to host the Rock Opera party, which had great bands and a really cool DJ
  
• Hanging out with Opera staff coming to Austin from Mountain View, Los Angeles, Florida, Oslo, and England
  

More pictures can be found on our SXSW photo album here: SXSW 2008

Also, we've updated http://www.opera.com/rock/ with a summary of the Rock Opera party and more photos for your enjoyment.

Other links of interest:

SXSW: Browser Wars Become Browser Peace? Not Quite Rough transcript of the Browser Wars panel on AppScout

SxSW '08 Redux via Epistolary Rumination The post-panel blog post by Arun Ranganathan, who moderated the Browser Wars discussion

SXSW Podcasts The Browser Wars panel recording will most likely appear on that page eventually. The 2007 panel recording can be found here: Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields

This panel was my final one for the conference, and it was also the most technical. The panel chair—Patrick Sanchez, a systems administrator for Enspire Learning—began by outlining the technical features of the Wiimote. Those features, which I'm certain are familiar to most readers of this blog, are: a motion sensor, IR sensor, speaker, rumble, Bluetooth, and a few LEDs. While the device has a lot of functionality—panelist Chris Pittman of RFD pointed out that unlike the Xbox 360 or PS3, the Wii is completely open and hackable—there have not yet been many eLearning applications for the Wii. As an example of how easy it is to program the device, Pittman walked through a simple drawing app written in the Opera JavaScript API, and much of the discussion dealt with what applications might be possible with the Wiimote.

During the introductions, panelist Brandon Carson of Sun described why he got into eLearning. According to him, when he started at Sun their education apps were of two types. On one extreme, the user was completely passive, just viewing materials (like videos). On the other, the user merely clicked through "slide-junk." After some research, he found that most of what they were doing wasn't working because it wasn't tied to performance or business outcomes.

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Here are some snapshots from the early hours of the Rock Opera party.

From outside Stubb's

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My favorite find this year at SXSW has been the Brain Machine display at the Make/Craft booth.



The contraption consists of a pair of glasses with LEDs that blink in your eyes, together with a set of headphones. The lights and sound supposedly pulse at the same frequency as your brainwaves (or something; I'm not sure about the details). Whatever the case, the net result is that the device puts on a amazing light show inside your head. The maker running the display, which has been packed every time I've gone by it, said that for some people it can generate hallucinations. The first time I visited the booth, one user was exclaiming loudly that she was seeing all sorts of interesting things while wearing the glasses.

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My first panel of the day was Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons. This panel was put together and managed well; the chair by Stephanie Booth, a web consultant and commentator who blogs at Climb to the Stars. She began the panel by asking each panelist to describe his- or herself using three tags before beginning the session. Booth (cat, Judo, people) did a great job keeping the panelists on topic, and she worked hard at keeping the early morning crowd engaged with the discussion.

The first question the panel tackled was: what is localization and internationalization? According to Brian McConnell (author, inventor, prankster), the Founder of Worldwide Lexicon, localization is taking an app and redoing the interface for another language. Translation, on the other hand, typically refers to translating the text of a website itself. Interestingly, sometimes entirely different groups work on these two tasks in the same company. Google's Kevin Marks (bibliophile, English, eccentric) then pointed out that internationalization is making sure your website can be translated—that is, working on the backend and design of the site, making sure that your design doesn't make assumptions about the language and culture of the audience.

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