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" AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 The highest praise I can give South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) is that it remains the only technology conference I look forward to each year. SXSWi is just one of three heady think sessions that occur over several days each March here (the other two are dedicated to music and film, not to mention beer and blogging). The interactive conference, which ended Tuesday, covers the intersection between design, social networking (real and virtual), gaming (real and virtual!) and consumer electronics. Perhaps not everyone who is a mover or shaker in new media comes here, but it sure feels like it. Plus just a dab of the ever-present venture-capital types, who at least have the courtesy at SXSWi to pretend they&amp;#039;re actually creative types.  Since so much is going on at once, it&amp;#039;s impossible to take in every talk or round-table discussion, but for those interested in the fringe of the commercial Web 2.0 world there was no shortage of perspective-widening discussions. Perhaps most insightful, for me at least, was a panel discussion on &amp;quot;The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming,&amp;quot; during which several notable producers and businessmen discussed the influence female gamers have on simpler titles (think Diner Dash, not Crysis). Somewhere between stereotypical housewives with free time and &amp;quot;power gamers&amp;quot; every bit as aggressive and reward-oriented as their male counterparts, a surprising new hybrid player has emerged in casual multiplayer online games designed for children. And they tend to be mothers discovering the games alongside their kids, then quickly becoming enraptured by maxing out on achievement trinkets late into the night. Don&amp;#039;t buy it? New research indicates that a whopping 38 percent of all gamers are female. Discussion, meanwhile, veered toward less gender-specific matters affecting the casual gaming market. Much of it is built around Flash-based games that can be hosted anywhere but don&amp;#039;t have a persistent meta-reward system like Xbox Live, so services like Kongregate.com are attempting to incentivize casual gamers with the same sort of achievement tokens\u2014the &amp;quot;epic mount,&amp;quot; \u00E0 la World of Warcraft\u2014as other &amp;quot;hardcore&amp;quot; multiplayer games. While intense guns-and-swords time-sinks aren&amp;#039;t going anywhere, some of the most innovative games of the last year\u2014from commercial offerings like Portal and Puzzle Quest to indie web games like Forum Warz\u2014were part of the casual, coffee-break variety in a market estimated at around $1 billion in sales. Twitter, the microblogging service that met its Internet hipster tipping point at least year&amp;#039;s SXSWi, was even more firmly entrenched, with most attendees gaining a general awareness of their friends&amp;#039; SXSWi experience by constantly monitoring their Twitter feeds. When some after-show parties began to fill too quickly\u2014an all too common occurrence at this year&amp;#039;s crowded conference\u2014frustrated groups would spin off from the long, outdoor lines to collect in impromptu &amp;quot;tweet-up&amp;quot; parties. I didn&amp;#039;t attend the Day 2 keynote with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg because it overlapped with other, more interesting talks, but I still had a good sense of its momentarily legendary devolution into farce\u2014Zuckerberg and the audience grew bored with the interviewer&amp;#039;s questions, causing the 23-year-old CEO to clam up and the audience to start heckling\u2014by monitoring other attendees&amp;#039; Twitter feeds. John Gruber of daringfireball.net and Michael Lopp of Apple gave a slow but inspiring talk about Apple&amp;#039;s design process and the importance of being able to say &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; to unproductive requests. (Requests which Lopp described as &amp;quot;pony requests,&amp;quot; as in, &amp;quot;I want a pony!&amp;quot;). At Apple, explained Lopp, his team has two separate brainstorming sessions a week: a first over a bottle of wine where his team blue-skies their vision, and a second later in the week focused entirely on planning to implement the now winnowed-down gems. Gruber visited logo designs of the past, including selections from the great graphic designer Paul Rand, pointing out the elegance of early IBM and UPS logos (as well as Apple&amp;#039;s iconic gently bitten fruit). He insisted that simplicity could have been muddled by listening to the whims of countless executives, which were stayed only by Rand&amp;#039;s infamous unwillingness to compromise. Gruber also noted that &amp;quot;better necessarily implies different,&amp;quot; something I remind my editors here at Popular Mechanics after I turn in expletive-filled copy. [Editor&amp;#039;s note: Expletives have been deleted.] The &amp;quot;Mobileactive&amp;quot; panel talk gave many exciting examples of mobile technology, specifically SMS text messaging, being used to distribute news about voting, policy information for candidates and even counter-information from entrenched governments, as when text-messaging inspired violence during Kenya&amp;#039;s recent election. Chris Muscarella of Mobile Commons (pictured above, second from left) underlined that SMS text messaging is only a part of a greater suite of awareness-building tools available to activists all around the world. With over half the world now in possession of a mobile phone, the short text message may not be the most advanced technology available for communication, but it is among the most widespread\u2014and that makes it powerful. A program called dialupradio.org was showcased; it allows users to create Interactive Voice Response-style information gateways without paying corporate prices\u2014useful, for instance, in disseminating medical information in developing economies. One of the last talks I attended asked, &amp;quot;Where Are the Black Tech Bloggers?&amp;quot; Some suggested that programming and design have become more economically favorable of late\u2014and thus more and more attractive compared to, say, the doctors and lawyers of the world. And while no quorum was reached per se, the sharp panelists, including Newsweek&amp;#039;s brilliant games and technology writer N&amp;#039;Gai Croal, made it clear that despite whatever barriers may impede the black community from engaging in the world of technology, lack of ability is not one of them. There&amp;#039;s always too much to take in for any one dude at SXSWi, but between gossip in the hallways of the Austin Convention Center or in one of dozens of bars staffed by friendly Austinites\u2014not to mention that barrage of multinode telepresence via friends on Twitter\u2014I get the feeling I wasn&amp;#039;t the only one spending part of my time looking forward to next year&amp;#039;s event. Long-time blogger Joel Johnson writes the Digital Clinic column each month for Popular Mechanics and is the geeky force behind Boing Boing Gadgets. He swears he wasn&amp;#039;t working in Austin this week.  RELATED STORIES \u2022 ANALYSIS: Indie Game Developers Will Shine Post-Halo  \u2022 VIDEO: The Tablet Laptop Apple Should Have Built   (Top row photo #1 by Martin Kliehm, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Top row photos #2-4 by Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Main panel photo by Joel Johnson.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2705/4254320/>