The final Day!

At the final day in Austin we chose to focus on the trade show and discovering the new innovations and developments in the field of tech. As you can imagine there are a vast number of companies pitching at SXSW mainly from the vast Convention Centre Hall - if you study the poster carefully you can even see a familiar logo!





There was a lot of buzz around a company called Higi, a social networking tool that uses cloud-based technology to aggregate measurements of users’ body and lifestyle choices, which has spawned a community centered around the “higi Score,” an aggregated measure that represents their overall health status.

Personal interactions, like your relationship status, how many friends you have on Facebook and community engagements such as how often you send encouraging words to fellow users all count toward the score. Users can update their health stats via their smartphone, or at higi stations—which are now located in thousands of retail pharmacies—with their weight, BMI, pulse and height. Users can even upload photos of their meals for a calorie calculation. And to make it more interesting, members can compete in the higiSphere for high scores — topping off at 999 — or work together to improve their scores, since the amount of interaction you have with people impacts your personal number.

"It was the opposite of 'Field of Dreams, it was, if you come, we will build this," said Julie Uhrman, who needed $950k from Kickstarter and make her dream of an affordable, free-to-play gaming console a reality. She got it in eight hours -- and nearly $8 million more after that. She created Ouya, a $99 console that's shaped like a Rubik's Cube. It runs on Google's Android operating system and requires developers to offer a version of their games for free.

Makerbot is already one of the biggest names in desktop 3D Printing, and now the company is planning to expand into scanning. CEO Bre Pettis announced the arrival of the Digitizer this week. The scanner consists of a turntable upon which you can mount small objects that can then be scanned by lasers and be digitized into computer files. Easier than writing code from scratch, the new device could be joined with a suite of printers and filament fabricators to create a small-scale design studio in the home.


A San Francisco startup that created a tiny motion-sensing device made a big splash at SXSW, overshadowing major tech brands and scores of new applications with its promise of changing how consumers interact with their computers. Leap Motion Inc. wowed attendees with its "Minority Report"-style gesture recognition controller, which enables users to manipulate what's on their screens with a wave of the hand or lift of a finger. Looks like this could finally usher in the age of touchless computing.

Another Kickstarter funded tiny device called Memento was launched to lots of buzz at SXSW - in essence this wearable device captures a photo every 30 seconds via a 5 MP 8GB camera with a two day battery, an accelerometer, a compass, and a built in GPS. Apparently it is being sold with a subscription based photo storage service that organises photos in a timeline and show the best from the day / event. There is also a mobile app but no on/off button so you need to cover up the lens when you are in a compromising situation - I can't wait for the privacy crowd to get hold of this one!