#frontierlive

It’s that time of year again, when hundreds of individuals and companies begin vying for a spot on the stages of South by Southwest, one of the world’s most energetic forums for new ideas and compelling showcases for emerging technologies.

Last year, Jason took the stage in front of a packed room to explode the myth of publishing, and this year we’re aiming to send a Frontier army into Austin to explode more myths and expand more minds. You can help us infiltrate.

SxSW’s panel picker enables the public to vote for the speakers and panels they find most appealing, and we’ve got a strong crew of participants worth your thumbs-up. Click on any of the links below, create a quick panel picker username, and vote to your heart’s content.

Aaron Anderson: Communication Tips from a Hollywood Fight Director

Scott Wayne: The Cartography of Negotiation

Zoe Romano: What Running 2,000 Miles Taught Me

Jeff Hasen: The Art of Mobile Persuasion

Jason Ashlock: The Storyteller’s Dilemma

Jason Ashlock: Story Metric: The Most Important Analytical Tool

As an extension of their keynotes, both Scott and Jason run an exercise for audiences called Reinvent the Bookshop. An interactive innovation activity, the session prompts teams at tables to tackle a daunting challenge: how do you recreate one of the West’s most-loved--but rapidly-declining--third spaces? Under intense constraints, with cultural and economic trends aligned against it, can the bookstore be saved?

It’s a fun exercise, and inevitably results in dozens of fantastic and inspiring ideas that prove the exercise’s point about non-linear thinking applied to traditional constructs. (Jason regularly laments that Barnes & Noble leadership are never in the room to hear what real readers would like in a bookstore). But during a recent trip to Los Angeles, Ty and Jason stumbled into The Last Bookstore, which upended their thinking:

What if the bookstore doesn’t need reinventing? What if it needs un-inventing?

The Last Bookstore is a veritable temple to books. 10,000 square feet, most of it covered in print, ink, glue, string, board – it’s elemental bookishness. From concrete floor to soaring ceiling, the interior world of the Last Bookstore is only books upon books. Book sculptures float above the interior. Upstairs, a winding labyrinth reveals stacks of volumes. Book tunnels. Book prisons. Book walls and floors and windows.

The premise is compelling and the site’s success begs a larger question: Is the bookstore’s precipitous decline due to its failure to innovate, or its failure to remember? 

Drifting so far afield from its original intent, becoming a space packed with games and trinkets, toys and treats, electronics and distractions, the bookstore may very well have faltered because it failed to remember its distinctive virtue in an age of distraction: singular devotion to the tactile, the analog, the offline, the thing-ness of books. And the community that thing creates.

Scroll down for more pictures of The Last Bookstore. While you review, consider: what essential virtues of your work are in danger of being disregarded for the promise of the new – and how can you reclaim them?

You're a tourist in San Francisco. You want to take a guided tour but don't like the options at the Tourism Center. You could just use a standard guidebook, but don't want to visit only the predictable tourist highlights. You want off-road and offbeat. You want the true story of a place and its people. And you definitely don't want your face submerged in text when you're here to see and notice and watch.

Now imagine an immersive, hands-free audio tour read by Gary Kamiya, the author of Cool Gray City of Love: 28 View of San Francisco. An expert on the history of San Francisco--from 20,000 years ago to the present day--Gary injects his personality and perspective, taking you and your group of friends, or like-minded strangers, on a curated tour of the underbelly of San Francisco. A tour not replicated by any Frommer’s guide or local tour company. It’s unique. It’s personal. You start and stop the tour at your leisure. You take as much time as you need to complete the journey. Your iPhone stays securely nestled in your pocket, with your headphones in both ears. Or one. And when you choose to pause the tour, your friends--synced with you--have their tour paused as well.

This is Detour.com, an app company born from the mind of Groupon founder, Andrew Mason. Technology powering place-based, interactive, social experiences.

We met with Andrew after his keynote...

We could listen to Jason Ashlock talk all day. As the founder of Frontier Press, the next-generation publishing unit of The Frontier Project, and a former NYC publisher, we’re lucky to call Jason a colleague. 

In the early months of the global recession, when the publishing industry was anxious and contracting, Jason launched a literary firm from standing start. In a few years, it had become a known industry force. He packaged books for Hall of Fame athletes and Oscar-winning actors, for Pulitzer nominees and Grammy winners, for indie film stars and fledgling novelists. In the process, he honed his skills in narrative design and product development, and then pivoted to a new mission: break the book out of its ghetto. FrontierPress is how he’s chipping away at the wall.