SXSW Interactive Announces First Speakers

The intersection of technology and culture: Australian anthropologist Genevieve Bell is one of the first speakers announced for SXSW Interactive 2015

If you thought it was too early to start filling your SXSW Interactive 2015 schedule, you better update your calendar. The annual IT-in-culture gathering has announced the first wave of featured session speakers for next year's conference.

The opening salvo draws heavily on venture capital and start-up culture, with the first names from the hacking community and a name with crossover appeal for SXSW Film Conference attendees. Most importantly, four of the ten speakers are women, including one with serious hard engineering credentials – a strong message when tech conferences are so often easily dismissed as sausage fests. Featured speakers include:

• Australian anthropologist and Intel Fellow Genevieve Bell, a Women In Technology International Hall of Famer whose work centers on the impact of ubiquitous computing, and what forces shape research

• Former American Society of Civil Engineers president Dr. Patricia Galloway, the first woman to ever hold that post, and now working on Elon Musk's Hyperloop super-fast train proposal

• Nicole Glaros, managing director of Boulder-based global tech start-up accelerator Techstars

• Venture capitalist Bill Gurley

• White hat hacker Josh Klein, who turned heads with his research on turning crows into coin collectors. No, really.

• Elliot Kotek, editor-in-chief of the Association of Film Commissioners International's Beyond Cinema magazine, and also part of the Not Impossible medical crowdsourcing project

• Jessica Lawrence, executive director of NY Tech Meetup

• Evernote CEO Phil Libin

• Best-selling sales pundit Daniel Pink

• And finally car designer Franz von Holzhausen, currently heading up the team at Tesla

The festival has also just opened registration, not just for Interactive, but Film and Music here, at www.sxsw.com/attend.

SXSW Interactive runs March 13-17, 2015. For more info, visit our SXSW page, and follow us on Twitter at @ChronSXSW.