SXSW

We’ve been out at SXSW Interactive in full force for the past several days to bring you the latest on the open cloud and other happenings from the world-renowned Austin tech festival.

SXSW Interactive 2013 featured five days of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders, compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, the SXSW Trade Show and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best in technology innovation that this truly international event has to offer. This year, Rackspace hosted the Open Cloud Experience at Champions Sports Bar in downtown Austin, which became the heartbeat of everything OPEN at the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival.

As the world becomes more high tech, the White House recognizes the importance of education programs to get Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) professionals in the workplace. The President is pushing for one million STEM graduates to fill this growing need.

At SXSW Interactive, there are dozens of panels, sessions, workshops, demonstrations and speeches to choose from. For this week only, even the local restaurants and bars surrounding the convention center are revamping their interiors to make space for on-site programming events.

During SXSW Interactive 2013, Rackspace has been spreading the word on the open cloud to the masses. And among our team of open cloud evangelists is the Rackspace Open Cloud Community. You can find the community team at Champions Sports Bar & Restaurant throughout SXSW. They’re here signing people up to join the community, answering question on open and cloud and handing out some really sweet t-shirts.

One device getting a lot of buzz at SXSW Interactive is the Leap Motion Controller, which allows you to control your computer with hand motions in mid-air. We first caught sight of the controller over the weekend at Drone Games, when one team used it to control their quadcopter drone with up, down and tilting hand motions. Today we ventured over to Leap’s demo tent near the Austin Convention Center. Since the device doesn’t hit stores until May, SXSW has become its public debut.

Forget moving towards a “paperless” world. Golden Krishna, senior designer at Samsung Innovation Labs, wants us to move towards a “screenless” one.

Over the weekend, there was everything from the new Leap Motion Controller to the Chicken Dance as teams from Rackspace and other companies competed in the Drone Games, a competition to hack Parrot AR Drones held in conjunction with SXSW Interactive.

During SXSW Interactive, thousands of technologists from across the globe come to Austin to find out about the next big things on the tech horizon, share their knowledge as technology thought leaders with others, network with like-minded geeks and reserve their nocturnal hours for some of the most stellar parties on the planet. Within this subset of technologists are the developers, who are creating and building the architecture, infrastructure and software that allows you to run things on the web today.

Stanford professor BJ Fogg delivered a talk at SXSW Interactive on Saturday called Why Tiny Habits Give Big Results. Dr. Fogg is a founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab and teaches a class on persuasion and behavior analysis at the university. His system and teaching has become quite popular with software developers and design experts; after all, a new piece of software is designed to change or modify a user’s behavior. I was interested in attending his talk because I had enrolled in his Tiny Habits online course in the fall of 2012.