Last day in Chicago - we meet Kasia & Will

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Creative Bike parking

Trying to reach The Loop

It was St Patricks' Day and everyone and everything turned green -even the river...

Wil, Liam and Kasia

Time to go home after a very intense but interesting SXSW week in the US, learning lots of new things, meeting lots of new people and seeing long "lost" friends like Will and Kasia, which turned out to be living in Chicago now and saw that I was in town on FB (thanks FB!) So we had to meet up and it was like we had not missed 10 years - we continued our conversation like never before :-)
late at  night it was time to return home - a swift flight (and a good night sleep) later we arrived in sunny (and a bit cold) Amsterdam.

Chicago: skyscraper city

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This truly is one of the most beautiful cities that I know of... wow!

The day we got our iPad3

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As expected there was a bit of a line in front of the Apple store here in Downtown Chicago, but we just sat and had breakfast at The Omni. After breakfast the line was gone and we had our iPad (3/HD/?) in no time and were ready to play!

Room with a view

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Another Bike picture :-)

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And counting...

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Biking along Lake Michigan

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Skyline of Chicago

All the necessary ingredients

WTF? - Tyler what are you doing?

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OK - it turned only be a mannequin doll and a label which Tyler (of the GAP) is "checking out". He only wanted to help me because I wanted to have those pyjama trousers... (haven't found them yet)

The Water TowerThe real one

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The real one

The Lego one at The Water Tower Place Mall

The windy city is sunny!

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No I did NOT buy these Adidas

carrot ginger orange juice

We flew this morning very early to O'Hara and to our pleasant surprise the weather here is much better then in Austin :-)
It was also time to recover from our abstinence from our shopaholic addiction and go see all the stuff at the Golden Mile shops - O, yeh: and buy some stuff, and some more...

To kill a grackle - or not...

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Day 4 SXSW

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Thunderstorms in Austin

Interesting conversation with Jill Abramson

The queue for Al Gore and Sean Parker

Marijn is still Happy!

We  haven't seen any app, product or other service that we could say of that it THE HIT here in Austin. Lytro perhaps, Highlight maybe. But there are some things that are coming back in a lot of events and speeches.
Mobile of course, we are truly living in the post-PC area no doubt about that
Data is still strong
Streaming
Quality

The last two I find the most intriguing of the new developments and make me think more.
Streaming is not only media (audio/video) also FB timeline, twitter and what you have. We are moving rapidly towards a real time society where all kinds of streams will enter our lives. That is a radical change of the fixed way we treat most content up to now. Google's whole business model is based of fixed (searchable) content - and a lot of websites are build around that idea. Think of zomoto.nl or auto.nl or what have you. Maybe we have to rethink that.
Next is Quality. The quality of the content and the way we present that (UX) will be more and more important now that we have access to all the data there is. You already see that people will choose certain websites and apps just because they look nice. (wunderlist) So we have to pay even more attention to pixel detail and maybe step a little away from pure functionality focus and move to a more overall pleasant design. Let's see where that brings us.

Very striking: the struggle existing businesses still have with the new age. Publishers, traditional manufacturers, retail chains - they seem not be able to change.
What also doesn't change is the weather (RAIN!) and the admiration for Al Gore (a mile long queue - which Marijn and I decided to skip)

How to Survive a Robot Uprising?

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Daniel

I was at a really funny (and interesting panel about robots: when will they be a part of our live? (2016) and will they have a conscious? (yes)
I was most intrigued by Daniel Wilson, a doctor in Robotics (yes that is possible) who wrote tons of articles about robots. He recently wrote a novel which turned into a NYT best seller: “Robopocalypse” He was signing his book later and I got to have a chat with him about robots and his book.

“Robopocalypse” is a science fiction novel that takes place in the near future after a robot uprising where several characters from across the world tell their stories and eventually meet and come together in an attempt to fight back.  He had only written 100 pages when his literary agent sent that to some publishing houses and then someone in a publishing house, without him knowing it, actually sent those pages to DreamWorks. So DreamWorks just called him and said ‘we want to buy this. They wanted the story for what ever price, and right away, NOW. So Daniel got an amazing amount of money and only learned after the deal that no one else then Steven Spielberg wanted the story. “Robopocalypse” will on the big screen as a Steven Spielberg-directed DreamWorks movie july 4th 2013.... Only in America.

Daniel wrote the remainder of “Robopocalypse” while production of the movie was already underway. He ended up writing the rest of the book while they were doing their thing at the studio, he told me. Funny. :-)
Needles to say that I bought the (printed! hardcopy!) book and will read it on our way back home.

My first Lytro portrait

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Click anywhere in the photo to re-focus.

Day 3 @SXSW

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Marijn checking the schedule

Lots of people in the ACC

We are really busy from early morning till late at night trying to follow the interesting events that are going on at this conference. There are lots of mobile, social sessions that are of interest and also some specific car oriented ones. Today we had a session with Michelle Avary of Toyota Motor Sales - who shared their experiences with in car apps and what could be the future of these apps.
The apps are focused on:
safety & securtity
navigation
diagnostics
convenience (fuel prices / traffic etc)
entertainment

And for each segment there are specific requirements to meet and there is a policy of the car manufacturer. (e.g. level of involvement, type of app - in head set or external etc.) Leading developments are Ford Sync, Toyota Entune, Mercedes Mbrace, Hyundai Bluelink.
But it will take some time before we will have 1 standard. Even withing 1 car brand there are several different technologies and also between countries it differs. the car industry is also used to a very long development process (7 years) and model tunrover (7 years) and ownership (also 7 years)= total of 21 years! (compare with an iPhone which has a total turnover of one year).
So do not expect to see things moving very soon...