Highlight quotes from SXSW

I have about a million things to post on between ETech (last week) and SXSW (where I am now), but here are some of the things I heard. I promise much more content as soon as I finally get back home.

Warning: these were from my hurriedly-scratched notes on a hipster PDA. We'll have to wait for the podcasts to get these quotes exactly accurate, but they're close.

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From a keynote with Jason Fried of 37signals:

"Not everything needs a software solution. Sometimes the human brain is the solution. I can capitalize my own words and decide when something is a bullet point."

"Learn to do the development yourself. You'll be forced to build something simple because you don't know how to do the complex stuff."

"Hire curious people. Even if they don't have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything."

"Make it up as you go along. You're in a much better place to make a decision when you're in it, than when you're planning."

When questioned about whether the 'no-planning' notion was a nice utopian vision, but not practical in larger development worlds:

"I think it is MORE utopian to think you can plan everything in advance."

"We don't use functional specs... we use stories."

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From the guys from skinnyCorp, the wildly innovative and community-obsessed minds behind Threadless, the third (I think) largest T-shirt company in the US. We're talking 60,000 shirts a month.

"Community replaces advertising."

"The community could kill Threadless... we don't think they will, but if the community thinks we deserve to die, we probably deserve to die."

"It's not like our idea to make stickers came out of some big marketing plan. One day someone said, 'Let's make stickers cuz that would be awesome.' so we did."

"We turned down Urban Outfitters, because if we put our shirts there, then we'd just be one more cool shirt on a rack of other cool shirts. There would be no story and no community. Then our work becomes just cloth and ink, and that's not why we did it."

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From a session on polling data and other forms of research on what people are doing online. I was too far back to have any idea which person was speaking:

"'Google' is the number one search term on Yahoo. 'Yahoo' is number three."

"A washing machine manufacturer was shocked that they started getting fan mail. We found the online discussions where people were talking about it, and followed the narrative. We discovered that much of the discussion was around ways to challenge the machine by taking it to the limits. People would post the extreme things they were trying to do with it..."

"'Music' is very, very important. It's the number one search used by 13-17 year olds. 'Sex' is number two..."

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Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List (millions of users each month)

"Tivo will save democracy."

"It's the patriotic duty of all of us to skip political commercials."

"Bad people are early adopters."

"As more and more good and trustworthy people are now coming online, the crooks become an increasingly smaller percentage of the online community."

"We expected to have problems in the political forums, but it turns out we have a lot more problems in the pet forums..."

[Jimmy Wales joked that there are more fights over the pet-related topics in wikipedia than in the Palestine/Israel topics. He wasn't laughing though, so it may not have been a joke...]

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Dr. James Bower, neuroscientist, during the "Serious Games" session:

"Are you over 15 years of age? Then you have no idea what's going on."

on the ethics of corporate sponsorship that involves content:

"Which is better -- a 30-second TV commercial trying to get kids to buy some super sugary cereal, or an interactive module where kids learn how cereal is manufactured?"

And perhaps the creepiest thing I heard all week, from an army guy in the same session:

"We've ported the army game to XBOX and Playstation, and we're using it for recruiting purposes, to reach younger ages."

more to come...

[tag: SXSW]