Keynote Speeches at SXSW Interactive 2009

Author Stephen Baker set to interview Nate Silver for keynote on Sunday, March 15

He first made his mark by figuring out new ways to analyze the performance of major league baseball players via a system for forecasting performance and career development known as PECOTA. More recently, he translated his incredible number-crunching talents to the arena of politics -- and his predictions of an Obama landslide proved amazingly to be accurate. SXSW Interactive is excited that Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com will serve as the keynote speaker on Sunday, March 15.

Interviewing Silver at SXSW will be veteran BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker, whose recent book "The Numerati" explains the growing power of metadata in today's society. Baker has written for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for his portrait of the rising Mexican auto industry. Baker is also the coauthor of blogspotting.net, featured by the New York Times as one of its top fifty blogs to watch.

Nate Silver photo courtesy of Newsweek

Virginia Heffernan and James Powderly Tabbed for SXSW Interactive Keynote on Monday, March 16

We're happy to announce that journalist Virginia Heffernan is scheduled to interview artist James Powderly at the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival, where they will discuss issues of new technology as art and protest.

Virginia Heffernan is "The Medium" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. She has covered the convergence of television and Internet culture for publications such as Slate and The New York Times. She has also served as an editor for Harper's and Talk magazines. Heffernan has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard and in 2005, she published a comic novel with Mike Albo called, "The Underminer."

James Powderly is an internationally-known artist, technologist and co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab. As a research fellow at the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab, he helped to develop open source tools for graffiti writers and activists, such as LED Throwies and L.A.S.E.R. Tag. He is currently working on the Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. Powderly recently gained attention for being detained at the 2008 Summer Olympics while attempting to debut a work titled, "The Green Chinese Lantern."

Anderson & Kawasaki Set for Keynote Interview on March 17

The SXSW Interactive Festival is very excited to announce that Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of the best-selling book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More," will be part of the Keynote Interview on Tuesday afternoon, March 17. Anderson's new book covers the growing importance of pricing models that provide no-cost content, products and services to customers. "Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price" is scheduled for release in the summer of 2009.

Interviewing Anderson will be Guy Kawasaki, the managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an an early-stage venture capital firm. His newest venture is Alltop.com, a website that functions as an “online magazine rack” with the latest from a wide variety of news sources and blogs covering “all topics.” A former Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Kawasaki is also the author of nine books (including “Reality Check,” “The Art of the Start" and "How to Drive Your Competition Crazy,") as well as a columnist for Entrepreneur magazine.

Chris Anderson photo courtesy of Wired Magazine. Guy Kawasaki photo by Bryn Colton.