SXSW 2017: Sound Waves From Berlin

If you took a look at our Twitter account a few weeks ago, you probably noticed that some of our Amsterdam and Berlin teams were at South by Southwest.

While Creative Director Christian Hanke hosted a panel on digital transformation in the world of sport (more on that to come), Edenspiekermann’s newest arrival Michael Wiesemann was on the jury for the German X Startup Pitch, offering his verdict on the best new initiatives coming out of the German market.

The German X Startup Pitch

Here are the German startups to keep your eye (and ear) on:

Holoplot

The jury’s overall winner, Berlin-based Holoplot, provide a wave field generator able to position audio in a specific space. With their magical 3D audio technology you could send an English audio track to one part of a conference audience, and a German one to another. In the company’s own words, their aim is “to inspire creative users to break existing limitations by designing immersive environments”. Sounds impressive.

And Holoplot didn’t just convince Michael and the Startup Pitch jury; they were also awarded the prestigious SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards’ Music & Audio Innovation prize for the best device or service changing and improving how we enjoy music.

Viorama, the company behind Splash App

Splash App was introduced at last year’s SXSW by Michael Ronen, a Berlin-based Israeli entrepreneur. The app enables users to capture their personal moments in VR, and, just a few months after SXSW 2016, Ronen’s company received funding to the sum of 2.5 million euros.

Since then the Viorama team have been busy working in Berlin on a Snapchat-like augmentation of personal videos, and aim to build “the platform for fast 360° sharing”. Keep an eye on them in the coming months to find out whether they can deliver on their promise to be number one when it comes to social augmentation for personal video.

picter

Developed by the team behind photography publication Der Greif, picter is a tool for both photographers and organizations: “A better way to manage photography submissions.”

As their background might suggest, the Munich-based team have plenty of industry experience, and picter has the potential to change the way photographers, organizations and publications work together.

It wasn’t all work though. Our team also had time to explore, meet some new faces, and attend talks (and BBQs, too).

The Top Talks

Start Over: The Next Age of Digital Media

“If you were going to build a new media brand from scratch, how would you do it?” This was the question answered by CEO and editor-in-chief of The Outline, Joshua Topolsky.

Launched in December 2016 with the ambition to be “The New Yorker for Millennials”, The Outline is more of a discovery platform than a feed-based site, and it has broken new ground with its design and revenue.

The design is mobile-focused, highly visual and graphics-rich, built around the action of swiping: “this is about the swipe, not the scroll”. The site’s navigation is inspired by Snapchat and Tinder, based on “cards” (with customizable templates), where swiping takes you to a new article and swiping vertically allows you to dive deeper. Revenue comes from full-screen, highly visual placement ads, a bit like traditional magazine ads—but for your phone.

Check out their innovative approach to storytelling on your mobile device: https://theoutline.com

But beware: it might burn your eyes, as Nieman Lab pointed out.

Storytelling in Design, with Anna Dahlstrom

According to Anna Dahlstrom, UX designer from Sweden, in every great story there's a bit of magic involved, and the same goes for experiences—or at least the experiences that work, the ones that deliver the right content, interactions, and notifications at the right time, and on the right device.

Anna drew on storytelling principles from film, fiction, and music, and applied them to the rather different contexts of UX design and business to show how we can bring a bit of magic to the work we do—and create better multi-device experiences for our users.

You can take a look at Anna’s in-depth presentation Storytelling in Design” on Slideshare if you’d like to find out more.

Interactive Keynote: Adam Grant

Professor at The Wharton School and New York Times writer Adam Grant gave a great speech on creativity, competition vs. contribution, and “a-ha” moments. See the full SXSW keynote video here (and this tweet offers a pretty good insight into his talk’s theme, too):

Your best idea is usually your second-favorite: you have enough distance to see the flaws and enough passion to fix them. #SXSW #Originals pic.twitter.com/nyarmMJgI9

— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) March 13, 2017

The cards we took with us went down pretty well on Twitter too:

No! No! No! 👌 #sxsw pic.twitter.com/n18y3uADIt

— Salvan (@salvanize) March 12, 2017

P.S. For folks who want to get the full content explosion, you should give the official SXSW Soundcloud a try, which features more than 480 (!) audio recordings of SXSW Interactive sessions. Enjoy!

Header image and photo from the German X Startup Pitch courtesy of German Haus / Initiative Musik, photographed by Dan Taylor.