Originally published on Mon March 11, 2013 8:40 pm
Everywhere you walk in downtown Austin, Texas, new names compete for the attention of the tens of thousands wandering the SXSW Interactive festival. Which of this year's emerging ideas and brands — MakerBot, Leap Motion, Geomagic — will break into mainstream consciousness? Here's a quick rundown of the conversation topics in coffee lines, and some notes on appearances and panels that caught our attention:
If you've had wrist and shoulder pain from clicking a mouse, relief may be in sight. This spring, a new motion sensing device will go on sale that will make it possible for the average computer user to browse the Web and open documents with a wave of a finger.
The Leap Motion Controller is on display at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, for the first time. It's one of the most talked about startups at the conference, where some 26,000 people have gathered to see emerging tech companies.
An Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission official carries closed ballot boxes to be counted in Mombasa.
Credit Ben Curtis / AP
An electoral worker at the National Tallying Center reads a newspaper headlining the problems in the vote counting and tallying process in Kenya this week. Election officials had to count the ballots from the nation's presidential election by hand after abandoning the electronic tabulation system.
Credit Ben Curtis / AP
Voters queued for hours across Kenya as old-fashioned paper ballots had to be rushed to polling stations.
It was supposed to be the most modern election in African history. Biometric identification kits with electronic thumb pads, registration rolls on laptops at every polling station, and an SMS-relayed, real-time transmission of the results to the National Tallying Center in Nairobi.
Ambitious? Of course. Only 23 percent of the country has access to electricity.
Here's the challenge: Build a rocket engine. Don't worry, you don't need much.
At the SXSW festival in Austin on Saturday, startup companies DIYRockets and Sunglass are launching a competition to create 3-D-printed rocket engines with open source (read: free) technology.
