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As the Interactive portion of SXSW comes to a close, here’s a recap of all the great things our team spotted and wrote about over the past few days.

“Immersive Labs Spotted as SXSW”

Immersive Labs is a technology vendor with whom we have a great relationship.  They work in digital out of home media, integrating the ability to analyze the audience of a video screen and serve up relevant content.

“Wellness and Technology with Aetna CEO”

Ina Fried of All Things Digital and Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, discuss wellness and technology, highlighting technology’s ability to enable preventative care and the benefit these technologies for insurance companies.

“Fred the Shred”

A look into outputs of hack-a-thons, including Fred, the shredder with personality.

“MIT Media Lab at SXSW”

A recap of the MIT Media Lab’s SXSW session, including a discussion of one of our favorite products Affectiva and the insight from chairman Joichi that, “over time, the amount of information in the world tends to exceed the ability of even the largest organizations to do big things on their own.”

They also showed off an installation that graphs Facebook data on a globe and can be moved by user gestures via an Xbox Kinect.  See it in action here: “Take the World in your Hands”

“PepsiCo Digital Signage”

A look at the innovative digital signage used by Pepsi in the PepsiCO Central lounge, including content on transparent screens and a dashboard updating social mentions of SXSW in real-time.

“AT&T Mobile App Hackathon”

AT&T held a competition for teams of developers to earn prizes and money for creating a mobile app.

“The Decline of Apps?”

With the evolution of new JavaScript platforms and HTML5, mobile web experiences can rival native app experiences in terms of functionality and design.  Additionally, these platforms allow reach across a much greater variety of devices than traditional apps, giving companies more bang for their development buck.

“Smell-O-Vision for the 21st Century”

An exploration of new technologies that activate all five senses.

“Taps For NFC?”

A recap of a session debate about the probability of NFC adoption.

“Net Present Value of Future Self”

A discussion of how consumers use real-time data looked into when real-time feedback is best and when other forms or timing of feedback might better suit the user.

“Isis Consortium’s Heavy Presence at SXSWi”

A look into Isis Mobile Commerce Application, a mobile payment technology, that is to be integrated into 95% of POS systems in the near future.

“Virtual x Physical”

Notes on a session that discussed the meshing of the virtual and physical world, including app-enabled accessories and augmented reality location-aware games.

“Fulton Innovations Discusses Wireless Power at SXSW 2012”

Fulton Innovations, a company we’ve been interested in since CES, displayed the future of wireless power, demonstrating their technology that uses electrical induction to liven up packaging and wireless charge electric vehicles.

“Timehop Takes You Back To The Future at SXSW 2012”

Timehop, the service that sends daily emails recounting what users did exactly one year ago on their social networks, showcased a Delorean replica from the movie Back to the Future.

“Valuable Visualizations”

TaskRabbit’s Head of Business shared with the SXSW “Start Up Village”  the lessons he has learned working for a start-up, including the importance of data analytics and visualization.

“GE Unveils ‘Social Fridge’ at SXSW Using Grandstand Platform”

The GE Garage showcased interesting ways to connect to people at events using social media in novel ways, including the Social Fridge, which required 10 people to check-in before literally unlocking the door and giving free beverages to those who participated.

“Kinect Boxing Bots”

For the SXSWi opening party, Microsoft showed of the potential of Xbox Kinect hacks that allowed party-goes to control boxing robots with their motions.

“ ‘FutureShop’ SXSW Panel Discusses QR Codes and NFC”

A discussion of NFC and QR codes that reinforced the fact that technology cannot change consumer behavior on its own, but that marketers have to deploy the technology in ways that really solve consumer problems.

“Brand as API”

A look into a presentation that discussed the idea of a Brand as API, in which the presenters urged brands to make themselves and their apps more flexible, allowing and encouraging consumers to interact more with the brand.  Includes a link to the presentation slideshow.

“Bold Frontiers of Gesture”

A panel discussion about Kinect hacking, featuring the Kinect Robots from the opening night party.

“The Future of Money”

A panel of VCs and startups discussed the future of mobile payment, agreeing that while complete NFC adoption is still a few years off, there is a huge opportunity for mobile payments.

“Tag, We’re It”

A discussion of current uses and best practices around QR codes and NFC.

“Get Out Of My Memes, Get Into My Car”

A presentation from Audi asserting that automobiles will become the “5^th screen” and a roadmap of Audi’s digital integrations.

“This Is Your Sojolife”

A look at Sojolife, a start up that helps people to connect at events via wireless enabled USB keys.

“Hitchery a Ride”

Startup Hitchery showcases a game that makes a cute and fun use of augmented reality in a scavenger hunt scenario.

At the SXSW trade show there is a booth for a startup named Hitchery. They are officially launching here this week, and their platform is a cute twist on AR scavenger hunts. Their world is populated with cartoon hitchhiking kids. Each one has a destination to which they are going. Using their app, you can find them and see them with an augmented reality overlay on your device camera view. You can see where they’re going, and if you’re headed that way you can virtually pick them up and then deposit them in a new location. Then other players can find them, do the same and help move them along their way.

Sojolife is a startup with a product designed to form connections at events or any kind of large real-world gathering. Event organizers hand out the little Sojolife gadgets, which are basically special USB keys with wireless communication capabilities. Each one has a unique ID number, and they do not store personally identifiable information. When people at the event meet each other, they can simply tap their gadgets together and the gadgets record the interaction.

When they get home, they plug the gadget into their USB port and go to the Sojolife site. There, on an opt-in basis, they can identify themselves and add as much or as little contact information as they want. They can then see the people who they’ve tapped, arranged in a handy timeline, and if those people have also opt-ed in, they can see their contact information and reach out.

Below is a video of a company representative here at the SXSW trade show explaining the product:

This afternoon Anupam Mulhorta of Audi led a lively discussion on the automobile being the “5th Screen” for consumers. He went into some detail about the future of automotive interfaces and Audi’s vision in particular.

Audi’s latest in-car system features a touchpad rather than touchscreen controls. This was to avoid smudging and other usability/brand issues they saw with the latter kind of interaction. They have 3G built into every car with a hotspot that can support up to 8 devices.

The car navigation system uses Google Earth fixed to satellite view. Audi feels as though it would be off-brand to show “cartoons” rather than 3D satellite imagery. There’s a built-in browser that pulls in location-aware data. This includes voice search, with results made location aware. The example Mr. Mulhorta gave was if the driver said “I’m thirsty!” the vehicle would search for beverage options nearby. In addition, they have limited data feeds from credit card partners, so not only do they know where gas stations are, they know what they are charging for gas in real time and they have a sense of whether they carry diesel or not (for certain Audi models that need it).

Mr. Mulhorta went on to describe the ecosystem of connected cars as “chirping” data points, broadcasting valuable information such as traffic conditions into the cloud. The aggregate of all of these cars producing all of this data could produce not just interesting in-car experiences but perhaps some out-of-car experiences as well.

On the subject of advertising, Mr. Mulhorta indicated that consumers have shown great resistance to having overt ads pushed to their vehicles. But they do throttle search results depending on the state of the car. If the car is in motion, many text-heavy search results are deliberately suppressed. So if they could do that, does that mean they could start selling preferencial placement in search results and map overlays?

Although Audi has no plans to implement this sort of system and even in a limited extent make money off their in-car experience as a media channel, there is third-party equipment like TomTom that already does this. One might wonder whether every car maker will be able to resist this temptation or not. And for those who do try to monetize their intimate access to consumers in a controlled environment, could the right user experience reduce resistance to these sorts of communications? If well-targeted and non-intrusive, could they be welcomed? Time will tell.

This afternoon in the Hilton, Cara Chirichella of Macmillan, Antony McGregor Dey of link.me, Kulveer Taggar of Tagstand and Daniel Switkin of Google to discuss the current state of QR code and NFC adoption, as well as best practices and future possibilities.

For QR codes, Mr. McGregor Dey gave two examples of failed deployments. One was the recent GoDaddy TV ads. QR codes don’t work well on TV because they are not on the screen long enough and people tend to sit too far away to scan them. Similarly, on billboards people tend to be too far away, and also link.me’s research has shown that many people feel silly scanning them in public. As an example of a good use case, they put QR codes on book jackets for selected published books. Scanning the code took the user to supplemental content relating to the book. In a sense, this content functioned as “DVD Extras” for the printed book.

Meanwhile, QR codes can be read by 200+ apps across all the major platforms, and these apps have been installed over 40 million times. In addition, there are plans for AT&T to build native support into some future handsets.

Mr. Taggar discussed a case study of an NFC campaign in India for Nokia. The Finnish device maker deployed 20,000 pieces of tagged collateral to mobile shops across the country in the hopes of promoting their handsets with NFC capabilities. Nokia used the Tagstand Manager to control where each of those tags drove to. The results were very encouraging; Nokia sold out of their stock of NFC-capable phones in India.

This afternoon at the Hilton Garden Inn, a panel of VCs and startups discussed the future of online commerce with specific focus on online payments. Two of the startups, WePay and Stripe (represented by Rich Aberman and Patrick Collison respectively), are online payments vendors. Fundly, represented by Dave Boyce, does social crowd sourced philanthropy and is an online payments customer who had a bad experience with PayPal and has since switched off of it.

Dan Rosen of Highland Capital Partners said that while we’re a couple years away from ubiquitous NFC, there is a very big future in mobile payments. An interesting point made by Mr. Collison of Stripe was that in physical retail situations, once you get up to the register you are pretty much committed to the purchase; the rate of cart abandonment is low. In that context, different sorts of checkout experiences don’t have a big impact on the end result. But online in the same categories people abandon carts at much higher rates, and the impact of friction in the cart experience makes an enormous difference. And that’s why these startups and others are all striving to use new technology and improved UI to make the payment part of checkout as smooth as possible and as affordable as possible for small merchants.

A special nod was given to Kenya’s “M Pesa” initiative, which has enormous penetration into the Kenyan economy. It was given as an example of how innovation may actually be driven from the third world, where overcoming existing infrastructure and intertia is less of an issue because they don’t have much of either holding them back. Similarly, smaller merchants here will be faster to adopt and encourage new payment methods, since they currently pay significantly higher fees than larger players per transaction for merchant accounts.

Also discussed was the “iWallet” patent granted to Apple this past week, and how the launch of this functionality could be substantially disruptive.