Each year, some of the most talented folks in the music, film and interactive industries converge on Austin for SXSW. It's pretty much Mecca for us creative types and often the place of origin for the year's next big thing.

Enter the cool kids at Carrot Creative and their client Jaguar USA.

They outfitted a new Jaguar XJL with video cameras and then filmed an ecclectic mix of smart, savvy, and creative people taking a ride and talking about the things that most excite them. The result is Backseat Stories, and it's reminiscent of "Taxicab Confessions," but with more innovative thinkers and fewer tranny hookers.

It's a damn good way to show off a car that doesn't involve test tracks or closed course simulations. It's also an excellent example of branded original content that people might actually want to watch—something unique and entertaining that they can't get anywhere else.

There's even a backseat performance by Jamie Scott of Graffiti6. Enjoy!

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and we're the cyborgs people she studies. "The minute you look at a screen, you're in a symbiotic relationship with the device," Case said. And that's what makes us cyborgs.

Case, co founder of Geoloqi kicked off her SXSW keynote Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface by digging deeper into the tools the cyborg uses. Today, tools are extensions of the mental self, not the physical self. This tool, this extension of the mental self changes and evolves all the time. Today's tools from smartphones to computers are devices that Case thinks of like the Mary Poppins bag. They're larger on the inside than on the outside. If you were to take the information these devices contain and place it into the physical world, the amount of information is astounding. Case said she's concerned by this because it's all ethereal. It's not information carved into stone like the Egyptians did.

Our cyborg brains are different too. We have hyperlinked memories where we need to find a certain email to remember the information we need. The computer becomes our external brain and cyborgs become the paleontologist searching for information. On top of that, there are now endless obligations in the ways we communicate across email and social media. Artist Nick Rodrigues demonstrated this in his "Email Garden," an installation where grass grew each time he received an email over the course of a week.

Welcome to the world of information jet lag where each communication medium has its own set of acceptable response times. On Twitter, it's quick. Text messages are...

I may not be the best cook, but I am always down for a good meal with great company. When viewing the list of panels for this year, "My Robotic Kitchen Planned This Dinner Party" immediately caught my eye. We all know technology helps make our lives easier, but I wanted to learn how it could make cooking for an entire PARTY of people so easy I'd even be willing to do it.

Panelists Will Turnage, VP of Technology & Invention @ R/GA, and Mike Lee of Studiofeast, famously known from serving the 6 course meal served on the L train, wanted to answer and solve the problem of why people don't throw home made dinner parties by developing a program or application. Three reasons they explained for people's hesitation to host were lack of knowledge, organization, and effort.

The program they are looking to release (hopefully soon) answers those conflicts we have all gotten into with cooking for a group. A few include over-use of an ingredient during preparation then attempting to proportionately balance the rest of the recipe and providing a week long preparation schedule for the entire meal listed out by day and hour. (We all know it's a joy baking a hot cake an hour before the birthday party begins -  and then figuring out how to ice it!) The program they are developing will also provide gluten free alternatives to any provided recipe.

Their program is tentatively called "Food.You.Me" and will...

Few brands come close to the passion around Harry Potter (something BFG knows quite well given our client work with Warner Bros). That passion has taken the form of digital communities and fan fiction sites that were created and embraced well before the term "social media" was coined. Today's SXSW panel Potterize It! Sharing The Magic Of Fan Culture featured the early creators and contributors to these sites, Andrew Sims formerly of Mugglenet, Heidi Tandy of FictionAlley, and Melissa Anelli of The Leaky Cauldron. A Harry Potter fan and social media librarian, Lisa Bunker, also offered her perspective on the Harry Potter fandom and what other brands can learn.

Bunker posed a relevant question for the marketers in the room, "Does fandom have a trick or two?" She went on to say that it shouldn't be about having a trick. It's about getting back in touch with why the brand is there in the first place and what they're trying to achieve with consumers. Connect with the passionate dreamers, she said. And remember that passion can't be manufactured. To have a fandom, that passion has to be real and authentic.

In the case of Harry Potter, some of the brand's fans are moving on to other fandoms. They're not necessarily abandoning Harry Potter but they're taking that passion, that sense of community and what they've seen around fan-created T-shirts, bands, and all kinds of materials and they're applying it to other entertainment properties. Panelist Sims is the perfect example of this. He's moved from Mugglenet on to a new project,  

It's time once again for that early March tradition -- SXSW. I'm still on the plane but I can almost smell barbecue in the air and taste the abundant breakfast tacos (or maybe I'm just hungry).

BFG will be taking part in the madness that has become SXSW Interactive and we'll be distilling each day's highlights in a series of blogs and live posts over the next few days. Stay tuned here or follow along on Twitter with BFG's official presence, Content Analyst extraordinaire Brian Brunskill, or of course yours truly.

Brian and I will be joined by BFG super designers Justin Wolfe and Kevin Tasley.

See you in Austin this week or on the Interwebs!