Anton Olsen.com

Tuesday 2pm - Will Wright Keynote

I must start this by stating that I’m going to rush out and buy Spore the moment it hits the shelves. This game is as innovative as Sim City and The Sims were for their time.

Will started out with a great talk about story and plot development and the contrasts between games and film. The second half of the keynote was a live demo of Spore running on his laptop. It looked a lot more polished than the previous Youtube videos I’d seen to date and I really hope it’s ready for release soon. He gave no indication about when it would, but the rumor mill thinks it will be this fall.

The whole keynote is on YouTube in seven parts.

The podcast is here: SXSW.INT.20070313.Keynote.WillWright.mp3

Tuesday 11:30am - After Bust 2.0: Next Ten Years

We skipped out on this one when it became apparent the room was crowded and too warm.  Instead we went to Rio Grande for lunch and a mini margarita before heading to the Will Wright keynote.

Moderator: Lane Becker , Satisfaction Inc

Lane Becker  Satisfaction Inc
Michael Sippey   VP Prod,   Six Apart Ltd
Gina Bianchini   CEO,   Ning Inc
Eric Hellweg   Sr Editor,   Harvard Business Review
David Hornik   General Partner,   August Capital
Narendra Rocherolle   Co-Founder/Principal,   30 Boxes

Tuesday 10am - Browser Wars

It was very interesting to hear all four browsers battle it out in this type of forum.

Here’s the basic rundown. AOL didn’t say much, Microsoft wouldn’t say much, Mozilla said a lot but wouldn’t say a few things and Opera talked them all under the table.

They all pretty much agreed that the web is better now than during the last major battle in the war on standards. Microsoft admitted it had a way to go on catching up with the standards and FF talked about some recent progress in that department. The entire panel either agreed or didn’t quibble that Opera was the most compliant. They also unanimously agreed that it didn’t rightly matter since the majority of the web has been written with broken browsers in mind. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but twice as many of the top 100 sites are using strict mode now versus a year ago.

Moderator: Arun Ranganathan , AOL

Arun Ranganathan AOL
Brendan Eich CTO, Mozilla
Charles McCathieNevile CSO, Opera Software
Chris Wilson IE Platform Architect, Microsoft