Flying cars, tracking chips: The near future, from SXSW

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption SXSW Interactive -- its a wrap! Jefferson Graham reviews the high points of the recently wrapped Interactive portion of the South by Southwest festival, from the robot protests, Merkatting and future talk, to those wild parties all over town.

AUSTIN —Where else but South by Southwest would you find reading squirrels, dancing astronauts and so many folks Meerkating?

These were just some of the many visual highlights for the fest known as SXSW, one of the major gatherings of tech influencers, movers and shakers. The Interactive portion of the three-week festival ended Tuesday evening with the Innovation Awards, highlighting breakthroughs in the areas of digital health, D-I-Y, security, transportation and wearable tech.

Unlike other meetups, like the Consumer Electronics Show and Mobile World Congress, which showcase new products, SXSW is about ideas, future talk and networking.

There's always the talk of the show—what's the hottest new app or web service? In past years that was Twitter and Foursquare, which both launched at SXSW. This year it was Meerkat, the live video streaming app that broadcasts directly to your Twitter feed.

"At South By, everyone's hyper-focused on what's happening here," says Charlene Li, the founder of analyst firm the Altimeter Group. "You get people talking, and it just gets momentum. This year it was Meerkat that everyone was talking about."

There were products on display at the SXSW trade show. But many were either futuristic apps (a new one to design your own shoes, coming in June), wild prototypes (connected art that moves up or down based on trackable indexes like the Nasdaq Composite or box-office reports), and re-introductions of new products that were already seen at CES, like Garmin wearable watches and WonderWoof, a bluetooth dog collar that tracks your pooch's whereabouts.

The most touted wearable product of the year, Apple's new smartwatch, wasn't there. Apple doesn't exhibit at other trade shows, and the watch won't be out until April 24. And Google's since largely discontinued Google Glass computerized eyewear was nowhere to be found, unlike past years.

Google Glass was originally touted as a peek into the future, where we all had connected cameras to our faces, but many people felt that was too creepy.

A different kind of future talk was on display in the panels and seminars.

This included how to use technology to keep away the grim reaper. "Aging is simply a technical problem with our genes," said Anthony Kaul of Victoria, British Columbia.

There was also talk of making the flying car a reality. A company named AeroMobil says it will put its vehicle on the market in 2017.

Back on earth, Li, whose new book "The Engaged Leader," was published this week, says wearables attracted the most talk at the show.

She sees getting "chipped," as the ultimate frontier—and that getting embedded with a chip could happen really soon—perhaps even before the flying car.

"You can chip your dog now, you can put chips under your skin for diabetes or a pacemaker," she says. "Technology has always been ahead of where we as consumers are comfortable using it. A lot of work has to be done, but sign me up please. I'm ready to get chipped."

And of course, after listening to future talk during the day and comparing notes over which new technology is the coolest, folks let their hair down each night at parties all over Austin, either hosted by companies like Pandora, Vevo, Funny or Die and Facebook, or on historic 6th Street, home to street performers and a seemingly unlimited flow of music and booze.

At its core, SXSW is about networking, says Sheila Marmon, who runs L.A.-based startup Mirror Digital.

"You have partners who come from all over the world that you didn't know they would be there, and then you bump into them on the streets of Austin," she says. "It's a fabulous place to network."

And those parties? People gravitate to them each night, "because that's you build a connection in an environment that's not in a board room, but just about having fun and dancing," says Kathryn Finney, who runs the Digital Undivided startup.

South by Southwest continues through the weekend with the music portion of the festival.

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