shawnokeefe.com

Category: Speaking Engagements

  • Food+City

    Food+City

    From my previous innovation work with Fonterra and Lincoln Hub in New Zealand to Food for Thought ATX here in Austin, I find myself working more and more in the FoodTech sector. And for good reason. Whether the growing VC interest or the challenges of sustainably feeding our growing population (8.5 billion humans on the planet by 2030), there are a number of critical problems and exciting opportunities to create some significant real-world impact.

    Building upon the above experiences, I’m happy to announce that I’ve taken on a new role as Director of Innovation for Food+City, an Austin-based non-profit dedicated to food supply chain innovation. While some may be familiar with Food+City’s print publications, I’ll be heading up their Startup Challenge and helping to grow the program with the vision of becoming a full-blown innovation and acceleration platform. (I’ll continue the heavy-lifting to bring a hardware accelerator + makerspace to Austin, but I’ll be allocating much less time for consulting projects and other work.)

    The 2019 Food+City Startup Challenge is currently accepting applications through November 16. So if you’re involved in disrupting food systems, give me a shout to discuss how you can get involved. Startups can apply for a chance to win valuable prize packages, access to a special mentorship program, significant exposure at the Showcase next March during SXSW and more. I’m looking forward to being inspired by all the new ideas and transformative solutions from across the globe.

    On the subject of investment, I’ll be moderating a panel in a few weeks during Austin Startup Week (which runs October 1-5, 2018):

    Finding Investors for Your Food Company
    Wednesday, October 3, 2018 • 11:00am – 12:15pm
    The Refinery, 612 Brazos Street, ATX 78701

    Hope to see you there and/or geek out about the future of food in the not-too-distant future.

    Pictured above: Creative new signage for Food+City in collaboration with Post Oak Customs.

  • Smart People & Smart Cities

    I’m honored to head to Milan next week to speak at Wired’s Smart People & Smart Cities event. It’s shaping up to be fantastic with an intriguing lineup of speakers, a hackathon involving Audi / Enel / D-Share, a dance at the Museum of Science and Technology, workshops for families and much more. The hashtag to participate on Twitter or follow the action from home is #smartwired14.

    The current title of my talk is: “SXSW & Austin: The Internet IRL.” I’m excited to share some little-known facts about the evolution of SXSW and event design, some of Austin’s iconic street art, and what I see as playing the most important role in the future of cities.

  • Intersections

    My personal resolution for 2014 is to be less concerned with following trends, and instead focus on working towards sustainable changes in my life. I’m betting the year 2014 will include some big transformations and challenges (not to mention turning “the big four zero” later this year).

    With the above resolution in mind, I was honored to once again present at Eurosonic Noorderslag in January and participate in the BUMA Music Meets Tech jury.

    While developing my keynote, I decided to incorporate my resolution into my talk at Eurosonic. Instead of just sharing emerging trends, I looked at industry changes through a framework of intersections between different sectors and what ultimately would have significant impact in 2014. As history indicates, once consumers get creative with a developing technology, it starts to really take off in surprising ways.

    My slides (4.5MB PDF) showcased a number of topics of interest including 3D printing, micro-controllers, DIY Internet of Things, wearables, augmented reality, personalized medicine, citizen science and more.

  • The Importance Of, Part 2

    Come to find out the fine folks at DrupalCamp Austin 2013 recently posted videos of all the conference sessions, so I figured that I would archive my keynote here. Now with 23% fewer “um”s.

    I had a great time doing my “Phil Donahue impression” and interacting with the audience, and hopefully my mix of personal stories, industry insights and history of SXSW.com helped to inspire. In any case, my takeaways are listed below (if watching an hour and six minute long video is not your thing).
    (more…)

  • The Importance Of…

    Just a quick note that I’ll be presenting the Saturday keynote at DrupalCamp Austin this weekend. While it has been a little while since I hacked on Drupal, I’m very honored to be participating and sharing a bit of the SXSW CMS story. I’m planning to share ten insights from my personal journey into technology and my 13-year-long tenure at SXSW.

    My talk is currently entitled: “The Importance Of…”

    However, I always enjoy working with a few alternate titles for my own sake and amusement. Those currently are:

    “Institutional Memory and the Future of Content”

    “Get Off My Lawn: You Kids Don’t Know How Good We Have It Now”

    That last one is my favorite.

  • heading to the netherlands

    Just a quick announcement regarding an upcoming speaking engagement…

    Eurosonic Noorderslag I’m honored to be heading to The Netherlands for the first time in January to kick off the Interactive programming at Eurosonic Noorderslag.

    Eurosonic Noorderslag is proud to present the first keynote speaker for the Interactive part of the conference: Shawn Michael O’Keefe, South by Southwest, Inc, Interactive Festival Producer. In the second weekend of January, O’Keefe will give his opinion on the emergence and future of music tech businesses in the music sector.

    Very much looking forward to it.

  • back to the futur en seine

    Just a little video archive of my recent 20-minute presentation at the Futur en Seine conference in Paris, now with 73% more jet lag:


    Shawn O’Keefe – Le Futur de la création by Futur_en_Seine

  • across the pond

    Just a quick note that I’m in Europe this week speaking at a few conferences…

    The first will be a 20-minute presentation and Q&A on next-generation crowd-sourcing tomorrow at Futur en Seine. (My first experience building a presentation with Prezi, which we used for the SXSW Interactive Awards in March — and so far I only have very nice things to say about it.)

    Presentation in Prezi

    Building Collaboration Frameworks for Success
    From design competitions to raising capital to event programming, the innovative and controversial concept of crowd-sourcing is impacting all sectors of digital industry. Learn how to avoid exploitsourcing and appropriately build a collaboration framework for your community that leads to success for all parties involved.

    Next up will be a trip to Germany for c/o Pop and the C’n’B convention. There will be a SXSW-focused panel and reception on Thursday evening, then I’m honored to be joining a group of conference organizers on Friday for a panel session called “International Networks III: Conferences – Networked Out?”

    So if you find yourself in Paris or Cologne, stop on by and say hello (or “Bonjour” or “Guten Tag” as the case may be.)

    Now to put the finishing touches on that presentation.

  • somewhat recently

    This is the time of year when, for better or worse, almost all my time and energy is focused on planning SXSW — which I dare remind myself is only three weeks away. In an effort to better archive my activities, I wanted to take a moment and share some recent media before my brain turns to complete mush…

    » My “Who Gives A *!%# About Typography?” rant at Ignite Austin about Rock That Font.

    » An archive of my January 24th appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show in NYC.

    » A brief article I put together for TalentZoo titled, “Look Into the Future With Collaborative Frameworks” — inspired by my panel session at the MTO Summit in D.C. with Toby Daniels and Michelle Bruno.

    » An archive of my live chat with cohort Kelly Krause and Omar Gallaga from The Austin American-Statesman about SXSW Interactive.

    » And finally, I have a new post up on Rock That Font about The Hold Steady’s latest effort, Heaven is Whenever. Thanks to nicest-guy-in-Austin Christian Helms for sharing a bit about his creative process.

    More soon. I promise.

  • slides from “the typography of the bicycle”

    The Typography of the Bicycle

    Last May at WebVisions, I gave a 5 minute presentation entitled, “The Typography of the Bicycle.” The idea was to take a similar journey of discovery as with Rock That Font, but instead of album covers, explore the typography of some of my favorite bicycles.

    The hilarious part is that right before jumping on the stage, I realized there was no clicker available to control my slides (they were to be auto-advanced in the traditional Ignite format) — and I had waaaay too many slides for the allocated time. As a result (and at approximately 7 seconds a slide), the presentation turned into a bit of a crazy and fun rant.

    In any case, I’ve received a few requests for the slides, so I finally got around to digging them up.

    (The names in the lower right corner of each slide are Flickr usernames — make sure to explore each of the photographers’ amazing work).