Salesforce's New Social Tools

Salesforce unveiled a long list of products Wednesday and highlighted big-name customers like General Electric and Virgin Airlines. The new services are built on top of Salesforce’s core software for managing customer relations and for helping sales and marketing teams be more effective.

Over the coming months, Salesforce customers will have the option of using Chatterbox for managing and sharing files with partners and customers. Chatterbox places Salesforce in competition with Dropbox, Microsoft’s SharePoint and Box, in which Salesforce is an investor.

Other services that will be available in the near future include being able to hold conversations with customers via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and to create and manage marketing campaigns on the sites. Salesforce will also release tools for gathering intelligence on sales leads from Twitter, blogs and YouTube videos.

Market Pressures

Salesforce is hoping all its new products will keep it ahead of larger rivals Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. With such heavyweights in its rearview mirror, Salesforce can’t afford to standstill. It needs to enter new markets in order to continue driving double-digit revenue growth.

The brass ring for all players delivering business software over the Internet is a $49 billion market that grew by 25% over last year, according to Forrester Research. Spending on social business software will grow from $800 million in 2011 to as much as $5 billion in 2016, according to IDC.

Companies Fear Public Social Networks

With so much at stake, Salesforce is pushing hard into the new social business frontier. But what the marketing hype doesn’t highlight is the risks that need to be addressed before customers rev up the vendor’s new services.

The danger of having employees say the wrong thing on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn is real. Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline learned the hard way when it paid $3 billion last year to settle U.S. government allegations that sales reps sold the company’s drugs based on claims not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Avoiding A Calamity

To avoid such catastrophes, analysts recommend a thorough training program for every employee that will be conducting company business on a public social network. “Implementing them (social business tools) isn’t that difficult,” IDC analyst Michael Fauscette, said. “The problem is the tools need to change your business processes and your company culture.”

Employees need to be prepared to do business under the company’s brand in an open environment. Policies have to be clearly stated on what information can and cannot be shared with customers or partners. Workers also need to be taught how to speak on social networks. They need to be aware that communications go far beyond the walls of the corporate office where they are sitting in front of a computer.

While email can also be used to mistakenly release intellectual property or private communications with customers and partners, information posted on a social network travels faster and wider. “You’re no longer shouting it out in the cafeteria, you’re shouting it out at the local mall where anybody can hear,” Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said.

Nothing Is Simple

There is no simple way to introduce new policies and procedures for handling social business and collaboration tools. Changing a company’s culture to be sensitive to the greater exposure will also be difficult. So make sure you are ready before you turn on Salesforce’s new products.

Think an elevator pitch is hard? Try selling your vision with a beer in each hand, balancing in the aisle of a train barreling north at 80 mph. That's exactly the challenge posed by Geeks on a Train, a veritable Nerd Express from Portland, Ore., to Vancouver, where passengers will "rethink business" among like-minded entrepreneurs and investors. 

The destination was Dealmaker Media's GROW 2012 conference, a summit of startup rock stars and wannabe-rock stars raring to pitch, invest and innovate their hearts out in Vancouver.

Sprinkled among the travelers were some stand-out personalities that had ample opportunity to shine in the close quarters, including Silicon Valley super angel Dave McClure; Scott Kveton of Urban Airship; Rick Turoczy, curator of the Portland Incubator Experiment and lolcat king Ben Huh, CEO of I Can Haz Cheezburger.

The final headcount was a raucous, adventuresome 100+ founders, investors, entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers and designers. 

In two packed Amtrak cars, the high-energy crowd buzzed with ideas, mingled in the aisles, donned fake mustaches, arm wrestled, pitched between cars, and told more than one joke at Klout's expense -- all while the train jostled north.

We tweeted it up (#GOAT), high spirits intact for the eight-hour ride, even when it was discovered that the train's beer supply had been sucked dry a mere two hours in.  

We pulled into Seattle about four hours in to scoop up the city's GROW-bound passengers (and, mercifully, to restock its beer supply) before rolling on to the Canadian border.

Hah. @benhuh planking the luggage racks on #goat. twitter.com/paulsingh/stat…

— Paul Singh (@paulsingh) August 22, 2012

One expertly executed planking (Ben Huh, naturally) and many, many trips to the bistro car later, the geeks were let loose in an unsuspecting Vancouver. For the next three days, they'll join up with hundreds more of GROW's attendees for talks, roundtables and networking events with speakers ranging from web commerce solution PayPal to Mountain View incubator 500 Startups, all aimed at making their companies leaner and meaner in order to survive a market that can turn on a dime. And since what happens on Amtrak stays on Instagram (and Twitter, and Facebook...), here's the evidence.

Stay tuned as we'll be judging GROW's sure-to-be-epic Startup Smackdown competition, in which a handful of fledgling startups speed-pitch on stage to a split group of investors and tech media, who in turn duke it out over which contenders are buzzworthy. We imagine it will be exactly like The Hunger Games, but with more venture capital at stake.  

Photos by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

Sergey Brin took the stage at the end of the keynote to do a surprise demo of Google's Project Glass. He warned that the demo "could go wrong in about 500 different ways," but then he turned to the screen to reveal his friend JT flying overhead about to jump out of an airplane.

JT was coming in live via Google+ Hangout over the prototype glasses. Brin and JT had a surprisingly natural conversation, with JT up in an airplane and Brin on stage at Moscone.

After riling up the crowd, the skydivers got Moscone in their sights. "Hellooooo, San Francisco!" they shouted as they leaned out of the open door, and then they jumped from the plane. The Hangout video was perfect. As the skydivers plummeted toward the ground, the video streamed in live.

It was as exhilarating to watch the demo go off perfectly as it must have been for the skydivers, who glided to safety on the roof of Moscone as we all watched breathlessly.

The devices used in the demo were prototype Project Glass glasses with a touchpad on the side, a microphone and small speakers, and they had a gyroscope, accelerometers and a compass for location awareness.

Brin announced the Google Glass Explorer Edition at the end of the keynote. It's available for preorder exclusively at I/O, only for U.S.-based attendees due to regulatory obstacles. It will be sold for $1,500 and will be available "early next year."

It uses a sideways-swiping stream, making for a magazine-like browsing experience with the same bold photo views available on the smartphone app. The Google+ tablet app also includes a casual, lean-back interface for video Hangouts. Gundotra updated the stats on Google's social layer: 200 million users have upgraded, 150 million log in monthly, and 75 million go to Google+ daily.

Gundotra also unveiled the new Google+ Events, a long-awaited feature that will make Google+ a more useful replacement for some of Facebook's most important features.

Invitations use bold photos Google calls "cinemagrams." It integrates completely with Google Calendar, and it doesn't require email recipients to use Google+. But for Google+ users, invitations unfold like physical invitations right in the stream. It uses the Google Calendar integration to see if you're available before you RSVP.

During the actual event, Google+ Events go into "party mode." Anyone at the party who takes photos in party mode will be able to automatically upload their pics to an album for the event on Google+. Photos stream in in real time for people watching on Google+, and there's also a slideshow mode that still fills instantly as pictures are uploaded.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

At Google I/O Wednesday, Google took the wraps off of Google Q, a mysterious, spherical, Android-powered computer for home entertainment and software designed by Google from the ground up. It doesn't stream media from another local device like Apple's AirPlay. All its content comes from the Google Play cloud.

It plugs into the best speakers and TVs out there using optical outputs. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC for connectivity, as well as USB ports "to encourage general hackability."

Nexus Q allows for social streaming of music. Friends can add their own music from Google Music to the device, so anyone in the room can DJ the party straight from their phones. The Nexus Q will be available for pre-order on Wednesday for $299, starting in the U.S.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

At Google I/O on Wednesday, Google and Asus revealed the new Nexus 7 tablet. It has a seven-inch, 1280-by-800 pixel screen. It runs the new Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and it is built for Google Play and its new movies, TV shows and magazines announced at the same time.

The new Nexus 7 is the first Android device to ship with Google Chrome as the default browser instead of the old Android browser. There is also a new YouTube app and an impressive Google Maps app with Google+ Local that lets you browse for local places to visit. The interior views of restaurants, bars and other businesses are now hooked up to the device's gyroscope, so you can pan around and check the place out. "It's just like being there."

The Nexus 7 is available today starting for $199, along with a $25 credit for the Google Play store.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

A new feature in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean called Google Now builds on Google's new Knowledge Graph search, which recognizes the things, people and places you're searching for, and pulls up a card full of informative answers. The voice search also worked quickly and more reliably than Apple's Siri in the demo, coming back with concise, accurate answers with images and additional information on the screen.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

Barra introduced engineering director Dave Burke to demonstrate the new features of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. He showed off Project Butter, Google's effort to make the transitions and animations in the operating system run at a smooth 60 frames per second everywhere.

A new feature in Android will be what look like responsive widgets. Users will be able to manage home screen space by dragging and dropping widgets and having all other widgets and icons on the screen make space.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean now has offline voice typing, using the same speech recognition that Google uses in search, even when you're not connected. It recognizes U.S. English in the initial release, and more languages are coming soon. The live demonstration was impressive. It recognized natural speech, and in one accidental, impressive flourish, it auto-corrected a word it misheard once it figured out what made sense in context.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

Vic Gundotra took the stage Monday to open the Google I/O Android keynote to excited applause and thumping techno music. "Thank you for betting with Google, and thank you for supporting us," he told the excited developers in attendance.

The first exec to take the stage was Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android. He provided updates on overall Android numbers.

Last year at I/O, Google announced that there were 100 million Android devices. This year, Barra revealed that the latest number is more than 400 million. Last year, Google was activating 400,000 devices per day. Today, there are over 1 million daily activations.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg/ReadWriteWeb. Creative Commons licensed.

Over 5,000 people have gathered at Moscone Center in San Francisco for the opening keynote of Google I/O. There's a disorganized horde of people - mostly white, mostly male - on the second floor, eager to get good seats upstairs, slow-clapping in anticipation. We're expecting new devices, big software updates and lots of Google-y statistics about user numbers. It ought to be a great show.

Strata is put on by O'Reilly twice a year and is held concurrently with Hadoop World in New York starting October 23. The basic pass is $900, but there are lots of add-ons and specialized tutorials. One of the keynotes is by Nora Denzel, who is Intuit's senior vice president for big data, social design and marketing. As in past events, there is a long list of vendors who will be participating.

StampedeCon claims its focus is "on the role of Big Data, its business value, potential cost savings, and Big Data use cases at Facebook, Nokia, Kraft Foods, Monsanto and more." It has more presentations from actual end users than vendors, unlike some of the other conferences. For example, Frank Cotignola, the consumer insights manager of Kraft Foods, will demonstrate how to use social media to research important brand topics and provide in-depth insights to new product development, segment analysis and broader topics that companies might not previously have had the funds to research. It is a single-day event on August 1 that is the least expensive of the conferences we've seen: A pass will run $250. (I'll also be speaking there.)

St. Louis will see another conference that isn't exclusive to Big Data but certainly will cover some of its technical underpinnings this fall with Strange Loop, starting on September 23. It is already sold out, but its previous sessions are well worth taking a look. We wrote about one session on NoSQL at last year's conference here.

Another Big Data conference worth checking out is mainly for government workers. It begins September 18 in Washington, D.C., and will cost at least $1,290 for a pass. Scheduled speakers include CIOs and CTOs from numerous three-lettered federal agencies, along with key vendor representatives.

And TDWI will be held starting July 29 in San Diego. It starts at $2,430 for a three-day pass and is run by computer publisher 1105 Media. There are numerous add-on tutorials and other pre- and post-conference sessions that can extend your Big Data learning experience to nearly a week and is co-located with a business intelligence conference, which seems like a natural combination.

San Francisco-based TourWrist showed off its iPhone and iPad app that can take 360-degree panoramic photos. In mid-May, the company plans to add features to stitch multiple panoramas together, similar to Google Street View. In addition, people can link their panoramas to Facebook profiles.

The panoramas can also be linked to brands, which is how founder and Chief Executive Charles Armstrong hopes to build a profitable business, with the free iPhone and iPad app driving buzz. Panoramic views of hotels, real estate and tourist attractions are only a few of the possible commercial applications.

"I find Charles' products to be visually stunning," Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, said on an investor panel after a string of demonstrations, including TourWrist. "Especially if you get to hold it and play with it, where you're just like blown away. He's accomplished something truly remarkable."

Despite the impressive technology, TourWrist requires some work to learn, which could make widespread adoption a struggle. The company also has to transition from a free-app maker to one that sells its technology to businesses.

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Arqball adapts that panoramic approach from photos to interactive video. The company's free app can create a 360-degree interactive video, using a a slow-moving ArqSpin spinner accessory - sold by Arqball. The user places an object on the spinner and takes a video of the object using an iPhone or iPad. Arqball hopes to get traction with consumers, and eventually sell the software to businesses for use in online retail. A new labeling feature should be attractive to retailers.

But Arqball, too, may not be easy enough to use to attract a lot of consumers. On the business side, the company must find a way to stand out among competitors. "The type of stuff that Arqball is doing will no doubt increase convergence on commerce," Jason Krikorian, general partner at DCM, said. "The question is really on how to make money."

While Arqball focused on futuristic interactives, San Francisco-based Daemonic Labs went old-school, demonstrating its Dabble application for creating digital postcards with the iPhone camera. After taking a picture, users create a card, add text and then pin the image on a map that can be shared with other Dabble users. In essence, the app lets people create and share photo journals.

While the app seemed to work well enough, observers questioned whether the features were enough to make Dabble stand out. "I find this notion about (saving) memories a little blurry," said panelist Claire Lee, head of the emerging business team at Microsoft. "There are a lot of people trying to do it."

There are plenty of things that we in the tech trade press - the general press, too - can learn from the science research community. Both groups formulate and test various hypotheses. Journalists try to find sources that agree with the hypothesis, scientists try to observe data to prove or disprove their theories. The two sides have very different aims, goals and approaches, but both are trying to find the "truth" in their own ways.

Mentioned during the session was the science news cycle that was part of a Jorge Cham comic, wherein a scientist's tentative findings are turned into a certainty by the evening TV news. We certainly need to do better at interpreting what a researcher finds before accidentally creating new "facts."
Comic reprinted by permission from "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham at www.phdcomics.com

The session explored how to make journalism more like science, and the presenters mentioned that journalists need to improve their work by using new tools - such as Storify- that include three key characteristics:

• Self-justifying, or useful to the journalist in helping us do our jobs better,
• Interoperable in a bunch of different environments, something that we can just plug into our blog, content management system or whatever, without a lot of programming or customization, and
• Easy to use, especially by journalists who aren't going to spend a lot of time trying out and learning new tools.

While the presenters didn't mention options beyond Storify, journalists already use a number of tools that fit their description, including RSS readers, site traffic analyzers and social media groups to track information and keep up-to-date on trending topics.

Finally, the duo mentioned three important aspects of science that journalists need to embrace, understand and work on improving:

• Being collaborative. Scientists take it for granted that they are working together to build a body of work. To help, there exists the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index that can be used to measure one's reputation and lists references from 3,700 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals across 100 disciplines.

• Being replicable, meaning you can see the methodology used and how we reached our conclusions. Scientists do this with footnotes, and while no one is suggesting that journalists start adding footnotes to blog posts, there is a need to do a better job of exposing journalistic methods and how a particular fact or quote was obtained. One effort used by a few news sites is Document Cloud, where you can check out the story's source materials merely by clicking on them.

• Being predictive. The panel mentioned the "Friedman Unit." Based on the writings of The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the Friedman Unit is the amount of time it takes for readers to forget a journalist's predictions. It's not very long. This gets at the notion that while journalists often fill stories with predictive claims, they seldom seem to return to them to see if things really did turn out that way - except perhaps in the occasional end-of-year wrap up piece.

Journalists - and society - could use a prediction tracker to hold us more accountable, and see how our prognostications have turned out. Politifact does this on its website by reporting on Obama's various promises, as shown in the screengrab below:

Science and journalism are both about observing the world and using those observations to understand how the world will be in the future. What journalism can borrow from science is the requirement to better track how well our observations actually perform at helping us understand and predict what's likely to happen next.

The dream for connected cars is to make them 'smart'. Internet connectivity could do things like optimize fuel, predict your travel route on-the-fly and enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. But as with other car manufacturers I've spoken to recently, the main focus for Ford right now is providing a state of the art infotainment system. So it wasn't a fancy V2V system that Ford wanted to show me at SXSW, but improved internal acoustics inside the vehicle and a simpler UI for MyFord Touch.

SYNC is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car's dashboard and steering wheel. It launched in 2007 and now there are 4 million Ford cars in North America with SYNC. The latest evolution is called MyFord Touch, a fully integrated "cabin tech" system. Ford has not only been a leader in car infotainment systems, it has also adopted the software paradigm of iterative upgrades. At the end of last year it announced free upgrades for MyFord.

The Latest MyFord Touch Upgrade

Sitting inside an inert 2013 Ford Escape car parked in the muddy grounds of Stubb's BBQ in Austin, SYNC Design Engineer Ryan Dauzet told me about the latest performance upgrade - which will go out to 300,000 MyFord Touch customers.

First, an improved UI to the system. Dauzet pointed to a cleaner design, which only shows "the most critical pieces," and fonts that stand out more. Voice navigation now extends to "almost every aspect of the infotainment system." He also noted "snappier" responsiveness, meaning quicker screen transitions. Finally, support for more computing devices - including tablets.

Ford's cabin tech era began with the audio-controlled SYNC. In the 2013 Ford Escape, the entire audio system of the car gets an upgrade. It's now a 10 speaker audio system, developed by Ford and Sony. The set-up also features HD Radio and something called iTunes Tagging, which is a one-click method of tagging a favorite song that you hear on the radio.

Like other car manufacturers, Ford's app ecosystem is in its early stages and has relatively few live apps. The developer platform is called AppLink and currently offers 7 apps - including 6 for iOS and 4 for Android. Typically most early car apps are online radio services like Pandora and Stitcher; which is the case with Ford too. However, like General Motors, Ford invites developers to apply to build new types of third party apps.

I asked Dauzet what type of apps we can expect to see in future Ford vehicles, in the post-infotainment era. He replied that in 3-4 years we should see vehicle to vehicle technology come to the fore. The aim will be to make cars safer, for example by enabling cars to talk to each other about road conditions and any hazards.

Given that Ford has the highest market penetration so far with connected cars, let us know in the comments if you drive one. If so, what's been your experience?

There were only about 15 people at the Smart Homes Meetup at SXSW, which took place in a meeting room at the Hilton Austin. Ironically, the air conditioning didn't seem to be working. Not much smart technology in this room, I thought, mopping my brow and pouring myself a glass of iced water. But as I began working my way around the room, I discovered plenty of human smarts among the handful of Smart Home companies in attendance. I also found out that many of these startups are focused on home security. Turns out that's where a lot of the initial commercial activity is happening around the Internet of Things - where real world objects are connected to the Internet.

Adam Beguelin was one of the smart startup founders I met. He already has a successful track record in Web 2.0, having sold his video search startup Truveo to AOL for a cool $50 million in 2006. Beguelin's latest venture, Sensr.net, is a cloud-based video monitoring service. Using relatively cheap webcams, users can monitor video footage of their homes (or anything else) over the Internet.

Those humble beginnings led to a fast growing business. Sensr.net is currently processing about 1.1 terabytes of data per day and the service is growing 15% every month in active cameras.

With the tagline "watch your stuff," Sensr.net continuously monitors and archives data from its users' webcams. The initial use case is a kind of DIY home surveillance, enabling users to watch out for suspicious or unusual activity in their home or office. If such activity is detected, Sensr.net notifies users immediately via text message or email.

The business idea is compelling for Sensr.net: professional video surveillance is expensive and Sensr.net is a low cost alternative. For the user, they just need to buy a webcam or two ($100-200). For Sensr.net, it's low cost to run because of cloud computing - which these days is relatively cheap. Also, Beguelin informed me that Sensr.net has a 20% conversion rate from fermium to premium users (plans range from $3-29 per month).

While home security is the driver for Sensr.net, Beguelin is also hoping to tap into another current trend: the Social Web. Beguelin figures that a lot of interesting or fun footage is among the 1.1 terabytes of data being uploaded to Sensr.net every day, so why not enable users to share it with friends. So like almost every other online service nowadays, Sensr.net connects to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking sites. In the words of Beguelin earlier this year, "Sensr.net is about security, but also socializing your network camera."

How Sensr.net Manages 1.1 Terabytes of data Per Day

How does Sensr.net manage so much data? The company was founded in 2009, so it already has years of video on its servers. Beguelin told me that Sensr.net is smart about how it stores data, because it only saves about 1/10th of the video that is uploaded. That's about 100GB for each 1.1 terabyte it uploads every day. Sensr.net aims to keep just the good bits, by scanning an hour's worth of video footage and saving only a few interesting parts. In Beguelin's words, the software "summarizes videos and picks the right frames" to keep.

For example, if a webcam is monitoring a garage, most of the time nothing will be happening. It's just video footage of a garage door. However if a car enters the garage, that is an activity that Sensr.net will save - for later viewing, in case it becomes relevant later.

Future plans for Sensr.net include implementing face detection technology and branching out into areas such as storing home-made family videos. It will also publicly release an API (currently in alpha).

I'm impressed by the market opportunity that Adam Beguelin is already exploring - mixing home security with cloud computing. With a hint of Big Brother too, which may cause Sensr.net problems if it becomes very popular. Regardless, I'm intrigued by Beguelin's willingness to experiment and pivot if necessary. Who knows what Sensr.net will eventually become, because one senses that home security is just a foot in the door for the company. Plus, with a name like Sensr.net, the company has in-built flexibility to go into other areas. My spidey senses are tingling with Sensr.net, it's one to watch.

At this year's SXSW, I attended a showcase of the latest Chevrolet cars and infotainment technologies. A lead brand for General Motors, Chevrolet had a huge corporate presence at SXSW. But it was the extension of infotainment to backseat passengers, using 4G, that attracted my attention. As I noted when profiling the latest BMW infotainment systems, up till now these technologies have been focused on providing information and entertainment to the car's driver. But at SXSW, Chevrolet showed a conceptual in-car infotainment system that can be separately controlled by the backseat passengers.

Developed by General Motors subsidiary OnStar, the prototype system will provide Internet access via the Verizon 4G LTE network. It enables access to streaming content from a home computer or via services like Netflix.

Passengers in the back seat can control their entertainment via screens mounted on the headrests. Up to 4 simultaneous streams can happen at one time inside the car. For example, a backseat passenger can have a Skype conversation with a friend while the other person in the back seat can watch a movie. Theoretically, this heavy use of bandwidth will be accommodated by Verizon's 4G network.

I spoke to Nick Pudar, OnStar's vice president of business development, about when we can expect to see this backseat passenger technology in production. We also discussed the future of in-car technology.

According to Pudar, the backseat technology is still in the proof of concept phase and there is no timeframe yet. However his personal opinion is that we'll see this technology arrive in 2015.

In the current era of in-car infotainment systems, the smartphone is the hub for connectivity and apps. The biggest challenge for all of the car manufacturers is how to safety implement Internet technologies inside the car, given that driver distraction is a major risk.

Txting in the Car? You Shouldn't Now, But You Soon Will Be...

Pudar showed me a prototype Android app that demonstrated how GM is designing for safety. The app enables you to txt inside the car, usually a big no-no for drivers. In developing this app, Pudar explained that OnStar had to figure out how txting should work inside the car. They decided that the app should either allow the driver to respond using voice, or it should auto-respond on your behalf.

The app knows that you're in the car and so these controls are activated automatically. For example if you get a txt while driving, if you have auto-messaging turned on then it will send one out. Something like: "Hi, I'm in the car right now, so if this is urgent please call me instead." Or if you prefer, the app can read the txt out to you and you can respond using voice controls.

The future of in-car infotainment systems will see more apps like the Android txt prototype. At CES in January, OnStar announced that it will make its API (application program interface) available to selected third party developers.

RelayRides, a peer-to-peer car rental service, was the first example of what can be done with the OnStar API. The API allows RelayRides customers to remotely access a car with their smartphones - such as locating or unlocking the vehicle.

Pudar told me he's confident that OnStar's API will result in innovative apps from third party developers in the future.

As for the backseat technology, when it eventually arrives it will be a welcome addition to families - a big target market for Chevrolet. I'm more excited though about future third party apps for Chevy and other brands. That's where the true innovation in car infotainment systems will happen.

"Would you like to drive it?" asked Rob Passaro, Head of BMW AppCenter, as we finished up our in-car interview from a suburban street in Austin. I'd been admiring the BMW 650i convertible from the passenger seat, particularly the state of the art infotainment system that was the subject of our discussion. But I didn't need a second invitation to get behind the wheel! "Oh, I should tell you," I said as I lurched the sleek black vehicle out into the street, "I'm used to driving on the left."

I had made it my mission to check out car infotainment systems at SXSW Interactive. Most of the major car manufacturers were present at the trendy Internet event. A couple of them made a big marketing splash. General Motor's Chevy division had a a showcase at Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop in Austin and its Catch-a-Chevy taxi service was well used. Meanwhile its US competitor Ford threw an electronica-fueled party at Stubb's. Others, like BMW, were relatively under the radar. Which gave me the opportunity to drive a BMW, in order to check out its latest technologies.

What all of the current generation of car infotainment systems have in common is that they are primarily driver focused, with entertainment and navigation the main features. Music in particular is a common application, featuring third party music services like Pandora and Stitcher. In my discussions at SXSW with representatives of Chevy, Ford, BMW and Audi, I discovered that future systems will broaden to include passenger infotainment, advanced car navigation and Internet-enabled automation.

The Evolution of iDrive

BMW's infotainment system is called iDrive. The iDrive LCD panel sits quite high on the dashboard and is controlled by a knob on the center console (next to the gear lever).

iDrive allows the driver to use audio and communication services, plus advanced navigation. The controller knob is designed to be used with one hand and without taking your eyes off the road. Voice controls are also available.

iDrive has been around for over 10 years. The first generation, based on a Microsoft operating system called Windows CE for Automotive, debuted in September 2001 with the BMW 7-Series. It had limited online functionality at the time, but full Internet access arrived in 2008.

The current model iDrive has a built-in browser service called BMW Online. The browser is where drivers access information like Google Maps, business news and online weather updates.

Apps for BMW

BMW Apps is where third party apps come into the car, via the iPhone. Stitcher, the online streaming radio service, is the latest addition and was announced during SXSW. There are only three other third party apps so far, all of them music services: Pandora, MOG and Aupeo.

Although BMW only supports iOS at this stage, Passaro told me that support for other platforms is in development.

You can use Facebook and Twitter inside a BMW, via a custom built BMW app called BMW Connected. This works by plugging your iPhone into the console, then a simplified UI displays Facebook and Twitter. One feature Passaro showed me is audio tweeting, enabling you to compose tweets (with optional location added via GPS) with your voice.

BMW Connected also features an RSS news reader, Last Mile navigation (for example, to find your car in a parking lot), calendar and Wiki Local (which reads out Wikipedia articles about nearby points of interest). BMW Connected was deployed across all BMW models in March 2011.

Driver distraction is a big issue for car manufacturers. All of them work with government authorities to determine the regulations. Passaro told me that BMW "matches or exceeds current and future regulations" for driver distraction, which he said allows it to be future-proof.

The Future of iDrive

What's next for BMW's infotainment system? Passaro said that BMW is actively working with other third party developers. It has an SDK (software development kit), but it only gives access to selected partners. While entertainment - and in particular music - remains a focus for now, Passaro hinted at future apps based on productivity and location.

I asked what might BMW drivers expect in the future from their Internet consoles. Passaro replied that there will be more performance oriented apps, for example tracking data from the car and Internet (such as road data) to help improve driving. He also expects interesting things to happen when developers mix it up - for example entertainment plus location.

BMW's infotainment system has had usability complaints in the past, but it has since evolved into a solid, if unspectacular, Internet enabled system. The third party apps are limited to music at this stage, so - even after more than 10 years - one suspects that Internet connectivity in BMWs is still young.

(No BMW vehicles were harmed in the making of this story)

Although we eventually connected, the unreliable WiFi was one reason why neither Glancee nor any of its competitors took off at SXSW. The other main reason - which turned out to be a particular problem for the most popular one, Highlight - was that the apps drained your smartphone battery. I sat down with Vaccari to find out his reaction to the ambient location hype, his frustration at Highlight's Silicon Valley connections, and the disappointment many SXSW users felt with these apps.

Andrea Vaccari is a tall, cherub-faced 28 year old with dark hair. He's talkative and his eagerness to tell you about the product he created makes him a natural Silicon Valley entrepreneur. But like many in the Valley, he's an import. In 2006 Vaccari moved from his native Italy to live in the USA. Despite his friendly nature and Italian charm, Vaccari found it difficult to meet people when he first moved here. He also traveled a lot and wanted to find new ways to make friends and connections. This was his inspiration for creating a mobile app that enables you to meet like-minded people around you.

What Glancee Does; And Why Isn't Foursquare Doing It?

Glancee - like competitors Highlight, Kismet, Sonar and Ban.jo - is a mobile app that lets you discover who is around you at whatever location you're in. It does this mostly using GPS, which is also the reason for the battery drain. Through its API connection to Facebook and Twitter, Glancee can identify people around you who share interests with you. For example, you may be at your local cafe and discover that a fellow cafe dweller you haven't met before also loves literature. You can then send a message to that person via Glancee (maybe also wave at them across the room, although that would cross the freaky line). A new feature of Glancee, introduced just before SXSW, is a time-based diary of who was at the location before you. So you could try and connect with someone next time at that location.

These apps are slightly different from Foursquare, the market leader in location "check ins." Foursquare doesn't show you what, if anything, you have in common with others who check in to the same location. Glancee, Highlight and others aim to uncover those social connections. Vaccari did admit, however, that he's surprised Foursquare hasn't done this yet.

2009-2010: How Glancee Was Born

I first met Vaccari in Boston in mid-2009, when he was a research assistant at the MIT SENSEeable City Lab. At the time, mobile real-time technologies were coming into fashion. Vaccari was working on MIT projects such as WikiCity, which monitored cell phone traces in Rome and created visualizations from them.

Andrea Vaccari at SXSW 2012; photo by gui ambros

Even though he worked at an educational institution, Vaccari had an entrepreneurial pep about him. So I was curious, at the time, how he would go about commercializing the real-time cellphone data ideas he was researching. It turns out that Glancee was his answer.

Vaccari told me the spark of the Glancee concept came to him early 2010. Later that year, he went to work with Google in New York as a Software Engineer Intern. He tested out the initial concepts to Googlers, as a web page (not a smartphone app). He then started Glancee in November, with the idea of creating an iPhone app.

2011-2012: Ambient Proximity Social Location Apps (Or Something Like That...)

Glancee launched in June 2011, at O'Reilly Media's Foo Camp. It had 15,000 users at the time of SXSW.

Over 2011 and leading up to SXSW, Vaccari said that two key technologies evolved for Glancee: location and finding a good way to match people. With the location part, Vacarri claims that Glancee is more sophisticated than Highlight in terms of conserving battery power. He explained that with Glancee, the GPS is not always on and therefore it isn't a constant battery drain. GPS turns off and on in Glancee, depending on how active you are. For example if you've been in the same cafe for an hour, it won't constantly check your GPS. But if you're out and about, it will check the GPS more often. Vaccari said that it took two months to get their location technology right. Highlight, by comparison, is "battery heavy" according to Vaccari.

Highlighting Silicon Valley Connections

Glancee's main competitor, Highlight, only launched in January this year. Yet Highlight has gotten most of the attention from tech media and was more popular with SXSW users. The skewed media coverage has been a source of frustration for Vaccari all year, who came back to the subject a few times during our interview.

It's a fact of life that some products get more attention from industry influentials than others - particularly if they're backed by powerful investors (a.k.a. the Silicon Valley mafia), as Highlight is. But Vaccari has a point: Glancee launched 7 months before Highlight and is clearly technologically superior.

Vaccari got particularly incensed (or at least as incensed as an affable guy can be) by a favorable write-up that TechCrunch gave Highlight in early February. The article failed to mention Glancee at all. Vaccari left a comment calling the post an "advertorial" and bemoaning that "because we don't have connections in the valley it's impossible for us to get the word out about it." Although eventually TechCrunch and others did write more about Glancee, it's undeniably been an uphill battle for Glancee competing against the more socially connected Highlight.

Where To Next For Glancee & Ambient Location Apps?

While SXSW was a damp squib for Glancee, Highlight and the other apps, Vacarri unsurprisingly remains bullish. He thinks "social discovery" (his term for these types of apps) is a market ripe with potential.

One thing is for sure, no one has really cracked it. Foursquare isn't even in the social discovery game (yet), early proximity app Color never took off, and Glancee and Highlight still have technical and market challenges to overcome.

I myself am not a convert at this time, but I do see potential in this space. Do I want to meet more like-minded people as I travel and even in my own local cafes and places like the library? Sure I do! But I'll either need to become a lot more extroverted, or hope a lot of other people start using ambient location apps too.

Lots of the knowledge dropped at South By Southwest Interactive is vertical. In the sense that tech people use that word, "vertical" means focused on a particular market or problem and all its implications from top to bottom. Talks tend to be about the business of this or that, or the makers of one app will talk about how they did it.

A precious few talks are horizontal, though. They consider the challenges and opportunities in tech across all disciplines. On Sunday, Stephen Wolfram performed that role in his talk, "Computation and Its Impact on the Future." In his view, we're at the dawn of an age of computing that's as important as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, if not more so. Here are five key takeaways.

Nature Is A Computer

One of the first slides Wolfram showed us was an image of the output of his beloved rule 30. It's from his set of "cellular automata," arrays of cells with only two states that change state over time following basic rules. They demonstrate that you don't need a complicated program to produce fabulously complex bodies of information.

Wolfram thinks of computation as a new kind of science. Once you realize how well patterns of information describe the shapes and functions we see in nature, you start to see how the rules - or programs - that produce those patterns are fundamental. It might be that the whole universe can be described by one program. "Even among the first few thousand possible programs," Wolfram said," there are a few that are not obviously not our universe."

Once you observe the intricacy that can emerge from such basic functions as rule 30, the natural evolution of this complex universe begins to seem more possible. "This is nature's secret," Wolfram told us. Take life on Earth for example. Genes need only to encode the right kinds of simple rules to express amazing diversity. This Conus textile shell has a beautiful pattern reminiscent of rule 30.

Programming Is Easy

Fortunately, when you see things the way Wolfram does, that means programming is easy. Since simple rules can produce complex results, creating those rules becomes a matter of simply observing the world and understanding the way it operates. Science!

That's the thinking behind Mathematica the programming language Wolfram created. It powers Wolfram Alpha, the "computational knowledge engine" that takes users' natural language questions, assembles some Mathematica programs and computes graphical, interactive answers.

Mathematica is full of basic mathematical and scientific rules. They're the primitives of the language. While San Francisco software developers toil to write the best mobile photo apps from scratch, Wolfram demonstrated Mathematica to us on stage by writing photo filtering software off the top of his head with a few lines of Mathematica code.

How? All it takes is an understanding of the properties of light, graphs and digital image formats, and those are all baked into the language.

Data Are Good For Our Health

We can take the science of computation up a notch if we have more data. That's why Stephen Wolfram has been collecting personal data about himself for decades. He wanted to understand his patterns and habits better, so he started tracking his typing, emailing, phone calls, walking and more. He's started to apply his own tools to his personal dataset, and it has taught him some illuminating lessons.

But we'll take this much further in the future. Wolfram argues that computation on personal data is the future of medical diagnosis. The way medicine works now, we take measurements, compare it to the literature and produce a diagnosis. "Naming it is not the key thing," though.

The key is to understand the context of our health condition by watching our bodily trends over time. Then we can know on a personal basis how to react medically to a particular state. We can do that by constantly collecting medical data about ourselves and computing new solutions.

Computers Belong In The Classroom

It's easy to believe that the Internet is destroying our brains. You know, just like the calculator did </sarcasm>. Now that answers are constantly, instantaneously available, we don't have to keep them in our heads anymore. Conventional wisdom tends to assert that this makes us dumber, but Wolfram argues the opposite.

"Education today is based on the industrial age," he told us at SXSW, "not on our coming computing age." According to Wolfram, the power afforded to students by computers should take education to a higher level. Instead of rote memorization of facts and abstract rules, teachers can now give students increasingly hard real-world problems to solve. They have powerful tools at their disposal to do the math for them; what they need to learn is how to use them.

"You don't need professors to tell us generic facts," Wolfram said. "You need humans to apprentice to."

Humans Still Matter

To Wolfram, computation is as important a human innovation as agriculture or manufacturing, "maybe bigger." Yes, the whole universe might be computing all around us, but the human discovery of how to do it on purpose is a pivotal step.

The line isn't as clear between "intelligence" and computation as we'd like to think, Wolfram says. A simple rule that's computationally sophisticated could trick us. Wolfram doesn't believe in general artificial intelligence, only more computation specialized to our kinds of problems. Since we, too, are specialized for our own problems, we're improving ourselves by getting better at computation.

Wolfram talked about how, in times of historical upheaval, people tend to turn to the wisdom of the ancients to figure out what to do next. "For the future," he said, "I have this suspicion that we're going to be The Ancients." By reorienting our civilization around computing, we're on to something big, and it's still the very beginning.

Image 1 by Nonenmac via Creative Commons

Image 2 by Maksim via Creative Commons

Image 3 by Rling via Creative Commons

Image 4 by Quchen in the public domain

Image 5 via Stephen Wolfram

If the last few days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin are any indication, the technology and digital media industries have never been healthier. At least that's my interpretation of the vast amounts of free BBQ, booze, performances, parties, t-shirts, and toys that hundreds of brands and sponsors just fed us.

In a sense, SXSWi - though based in Texas - is a prototypical, successful Silicon Valley startup. It has made the right biz-dev partnerships, recruited the right people, and it's still even pretty cool.

But it's also showing signs of distress - "scaling" problems, if you will. So in startup terms, it might also be a good opportunity to "sell" and expand beyond its current footprint, perhaps under the wings of a larger partner.

The Rise of SXSWi

SXSW Interactive started as a side project to the SXSW Music festival in 1994, called the "SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference". (Multimedia split off as a separate entity the next year, and became "Interactive" four years later.) It has rapidly grown in popularity and coolness over the past decade, especially the last 5-6 years, as it fed off the new Web boom, the rise of digital social networking, and more recently, the appetite of brands and agencies to reach the types of people who attend SXSW.

Attendance reflects its rise in influence. In 2007, some 6,500 people attended SXSWi. Two years later - the first year I attended, when things still felt relatively tame - it had reached almost 11,000 participants. Last year, it passed 19,000, triple the 2007 attendance. And this year, the conference expects "healthy growth" again, a rep tells me.

Over this time, SXSW Interactive has even become more popular than the music festival that created it - though that comes as no surprise, given the diverging fortunes of the music and Internet industries.

SWSWi As A Marketing Platform

One of the things fueling SXSWi's rise is its growing popularity as a place to launch and promote products and brands. SXSWi is often cited as the place where Twitter launched. That's not actually true, but it was the 2007 SXSW conference where Twitter saw a huge spike in usage. This helped Twitter catch on among the tech set, eventually leading to mainstream notoriety. And that has fed the belief that being the "it" startup at SXSW can catapult an unknown company into fame and fortune. Some now plan their business around it.

"We thought of South by Southwest as a deadline," Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley said in his keynote interview at this year's conference. (Foursquare launched at SXSW in 2009, and had a huge time at SXSW in 2010.)

"The same way you have a term paper that's due the Friday before the end of the semester, this was the end of the semester for us. 'This thing has to work on Friday so we have something to talk to people about while we're down here'. We didn't have any panels, we didn't have any business cards. There were no t-shirts or stickers. It was just, 'hey this is something we want to talk about and show people, to see if it's a good idea or not'. And then it just kind of took off."

But it was the marketers that were really out in droves this year, highlighting how SXSW's organizers have succeeded in bringing big business to the conference.

To give you a few examples of the excess, this past week, there has been a gala AmEx concert performance by Jay-Z, a massive promotional push by Nike - including a big, dark studio space and an outdoor sports facility - for its neato FuelBand exercise gadget, a restaurant re-branded the "CNN Grill," some sort of igloo-looking building for Nokia, huge parties thrown by every tech and media brand imaginable, and even a tasteless campaign to turn homeless people into Internet hotspots.

Things that would have seemed like stunts in 2007 - an actual foursquare court for Foursquare, or a grilled cheese sandwich shack for GroupMe - now appear as the calm among the chaos.

Austin at its Limits

SXSW is still fun, but it's also getting to be uncomfortable. The line to pick up badges was absurdly long. Many panels filled up well before they started, even those a decent hike from the main venue. I walked over to a hotel to see the one session I actually wanted to watch, about Lego's big comeback, and couldn't get in. Annoying.

The parties - the real reason SXSW became so popular, anyway - were similarly frustrating. If you aren't on the VIP list, or at least important enough to have been invited and quick enough to RSVP, you were often S.O.L. No longer a weekend of impromptu open-bar hopping if you're not plugged in.

Most hilarious/ridiculous thing about SX so far: people calling parties "over-subscribed." *shakes head*

— Libby Brittain (@libbybrittain) March 13, 2012

Austin is a great city, but it is proving its inability to handle these crowds. Hotels were supposedly sold out months ago, forcing many to stay in sub-par lodging or far from the center. And the city's taxi companies were not prepared to handle the increase in demand. Multiple times, a cab I was promised was minutes away simply failed to show up, including the one that was supposed to take me to the airport. The companies - I was regularly in touch with three - basically told me to get lost. (I made my flight, barely, with some creative bus routing. Thanks, Google Maps!)

This isn't going to become a smaller problem as the conference continues to grow. Sure, some of the money that SXSW pours back into the community - more than $167 million in 2011, the conference boasts - can go towards investing in more hotels, bigger cab companies, etc. But those won't be useful most of the rest of the year. It's just hard to put a lot of people in a small place for a short time without some pain.

Time to Sell?

After the last few days in Austin, I'm impressed by what SXSW has become, and many parts of the experience were rewarding. But I'm in no hurry to go back next year - the chaos factor edged out the happiness.

The SXSW festivals and brands are worth a lot. Hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps. There are many possibilities for growth. But with the city's resources - and the show's focus - already strained, expanding beyond here adds risk and new challenges.

It actually seems like a smart time for SXSW Inc. and boss/co-founder Roland Swenson to consider cashing out. Buy low, sell high, right? Surely some of the bigger media companies or ad holding companies - still in love with the show as a marketing platform - might be interested.

Then what? I'd take some risks, starting with a new "back to basics" conference, maybe not even in Austin, to take some of the pressure off SXSWi. South by Mobile in New Orleans? South by Design in Savannah? South by Southeast Asia in Singapore? I'd go. How about building out the SXSW media brand? Web sites, maybe even a TV channel?

Even if some of the original coolsters aren't coming anymore, it's unlikely that SXSW has peaked yet. And there is a real opportunity for "SXSW the startup" to do much more and continue its ascent. (It's already doing a SXSW "Eco" conference this fall.) But it could be trickier. If I owned SXSW, now's when I'd consider selling.

Also: SXSW In A Nutshell: Homeless People As Hotspots