Business Bytes
Jan 7, 2011

3 Must-See SXSW Speakers, Pt. 3

 

In this third installment of my South by Southwest (SXSW) speaker series, I chose to highlight Bruce Sterling, the closing speaker for the 2011 SXSW Interactive festival.  Sterling seems to be a go-to closing speaker for the festival as he also served in this role in 2007.  This comes as no surprise since he's a native to Austin and is respected for his opinion on the internet, technology and how they relate to society.

Bruce Sterling is best known as a sci-fi author, helping to spearhead the cyberpunk genre in literature.  He has written numerous novels, short stories, and non-fiction works.  He is also a featured writer on Wired.com with his blog Beyond the Beyond.  The blog is a combination of Sterling's opinion of current technology trends as well as projects he has in the works.  One of these projects is the book Written Images, an art book that will be printed in such a way that no two books are alike.  Sterling wrote the introduction to this new book, and similarly, no two intros will be the same.

Bruce Sterling's interest in history gives him a wide view of technology and how it affects us.  His interest in atemporality, which is how the future and the past combine, has led him to take pictures of real life examples of atemporality.  The visual aids on his Flickr stream really help to explain this idea.

I'm excited to hear what Sterling will speak about to close out the festival.  There is an element of surprise of Sterling because he has a plethora of information of our past, present, and future world.  I guess I have to wait until March to find out.

Curt is the CEO of Journyx, a resource and time management software company.


Curt Finch has more than two decades of software development and distributed workforce management experience. In 1997, Curt created the world's first internet-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt has a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. His book, All Your Money, is available on Amazon. @curtfinch