SXSW Day 3: Learning another language

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photo[2].jpgBy Rob Meldrum, innovation director, Naked Communications, UK

My mind was blown today. In fact, I’m surprised I’m even able to cobble this blog post together. There were also some ‘meh’ talks and one that was so badly put together that I walked after ten minutes. It doesn’t matter if you have a celebrity asking the questions, if you fail to prepare your discussion properly it is going to be terrible.

 

Not the best speaker, but an amazing man, was Dean Kamen. Inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist and all round nice guy I was impressed by his vision for providing clean water, power and wifi to the developing world. And it’s not only a vision; he’s gone and done it. The way he spoke of how he convinced the CEO of Coke to help him deliver his water purification machines around the globe was nothing short of remarkable.

Educating our children in technology and science has been a prevalent theme at this year’s SXSW. Kamen’s work with his organisation First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was inspiring. Getting children excited about science and technology is not an easy task, so turning to sports and entertainment stars to help promote and bring to life his vision has been a stroke of brilliance.

 

But this was just for starters. The highlight of the day for me was always going to be Stephen Wolfram’s session; I was excited. What would he talk about? Would he be giving us a demo of anything new? Am I going to be able understand any of it? He launched straight into his company’s new tool: Wolfram Language. He fired up a window on his laptop and got straight into it. Within seconds he’d created an instant cloud-based API, published and ready to go. He explained: “everything in language is just a symbolic expression. And once we’ve captured that knowledge (within Wolfram Language) there’s a zillion things we can do with it”.

 

And then he furiously coded all sorts of weird and wonderful examples right in front of us. Some of which worked. And some of which didn’t. Even Stephen Wolfram is susceptible to the live demo curse.

 

He finished his hour by suggesting: “in the future there won’t be lots of computers. Everything will be made from computers”. A hugely talented, highly intellectual, slightly crazy genius. And if you hadn’t guessed already, it was Wolfram that blew my mind…