This year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, was far more muted than recent years. The annual tech, music and film festival has become a worldwide affair, with over 30,000 official attendees taking over Austin.

Big brands naturally followed the crowds to Austin, resulting in “peak SXSW:” Lady Gaga netting $2.5 million from Doritos… for her performance in 2014.

That was a pivotal moment in SXSW’s history. It officially marked the top of the global hype cycle.

Thankfully, this means that the festival has returned somewhat to its more approachable roots. Big brands have scaled down their involvement, leading to breathless press coverage of the ‘bubble bursting.’

While we won’t go that far in this article, the upside of this retrenchment is a focus on community, intimacy and a deeper focus on issues that matter. For those of us in travel, the uncertain macroeconomic environment continues to be the most pressing near-term issue.

Amidst this inescapable undercurrent, the festival also offered a longer view into some key areas of interest for the industry: biometrics, blockchain and the future of transportation.

The biometrics of customer service

Travel is an inherently emotional industry. We both benefit from, and are challenged by, the emotions that thread through the traveler experience.

When Your Internet Things Know How You Feel was a session by Pamela Pavliscak, founder of futurist firm Change Sciences.

Pavliscak posits that the future of connected devices involve empathy, all derived from facial recognition software. Yes, your devices will someday be able to detect your mood!

We’ve seen some basic experiments in this space in travel, such as British Airway’s mood-based Happiness Blanket.

The future of these sorts of empathy-driven devices means that customer service can be much more nuanced.

Flight crews can sense moods; security teams can lock in on a specific indicators of stress; voice systems can prioritize calls according to tension. In Pavliscak’s packed session, she points out that the basics of this technology is too focus on bare biometrics: heart rate, skin temperatures, etc.

There lacks an inherent humanity and creativity to understanding the way this technology could improve human interactions, telling the Austin Chronicle:

“When we think where we are with our understanding of emotion, so much of it comes out of literature and the arts, and that’s something that isn’t a voice in the development of our technology.”

Takeaway: Consider the traveler first, and then work back into the technology from the humanity of the experience.

The biometrics of storytelling

Biometrics took the stage in another compelling session, Biometric Social Storytelling on Mt. Everest.

Storytelling is a core part of the travel marketing playbook. The concept of integrating biometrics into story is fresh and compelling. In this particular example, climbers Cory Richards and Adrian Ballinger summited Everest without any extra oxygen.

Fewer than 200 people have ever accomplished this before.

The duo decided to deliver a more comprehensive view into the experience, using not only social media but also live GPS and personal biometrics. In discussing the experience, Ballinger says:

“It was great to see our progress improving in terms of time and to see our heart rates improving and dropping. And also picking up things, like when we’re being stupid and letting our heart rates spike to 165 for 10 minutes instead of at 140 where we should be. Certainly that data is interesting for us to see.”

The story was shared as part of a social network for athletes called Strava.

Many segments in travel benefit directly from the increased interest in adventure travel, as well as more mainstream trends such as the growth in travel for marathons and other fitness-based events, like Tough Mudder.

Takeaway: Consider what other elements of a story interest your target market. Develop those components within your marketing campaigns to deliver outsized results through better engagement.

Beyond bitcoin: Blockchain technology takes off

Back in 2013, this author pointed to the growth of bitcoin as a key trend. The technology premise behind bitcoin, known as the blockchain, has spawned dozens of other cryptocurrencies.

The blockchain has gone mainstream, especially with banks and other entities looking to make blockchain a more fundamental piece of the enterprise environment.

The topic was heated at SXSW, prompting long lines and packed rooms. Many of the most vibrant discussions extended far into the enterprise. The world’s largest companies are taking notice of the interest around blockchain technology.

The likes of IBM not only blogged about this outsized interest, but invested in a booth devoted to blockchain on the SXSW tradeshow floor.

Startups are emerging to provide ‘blockchain as a service,’ essentially creating distributed ledgers for things as diverse as documents and physical assets. Peter Kirby, the founder of one such startup, Factom, explained to The Austin Chronicle why so many businesses have started to pay close attention to blockchain technology:

“Blockchains add transparency and accountability to any record-keeping system. A bank is just a giant stack of records. A digital currency is just a giant stack of records. A government is just a giant stack of records.”

Takeaway: the fundamentals of blockchain as a distributed ledger are more popular than ever. In complex industries with distributed supply and demand, such as travel, the speed, accuracy and security of blockchain could change everything.

The (near) future of transportation

There are no flying cars to be seen in Austin, at least not yet. The focus really is on the near-term future of transportation.

Especially on how smart cities can provide the infrastructure necessary to streamline movement and help transportation companies of all kinds be more efficient.

A Tale of Future Cities explored a broader understanding of all interconnected devices in an urban setting, including planes and even smartphones. The rise of the megacity, with populations over 10 million, makes this discussion even more relevant.

Match these two trends to the growth in point-to-point air travel served by long-range single-aisle jets, and then the conversation turns to seamless connections across transportation types.

Panelist Joshua Kauffman, from VC firm Wisdom VC identifies the missing piece in this narrative of connected transportation: the home. If consumers are not connected to the city directly, then the promise of a living infrastructure is diminished.

“The next phase of artificial intelligence assistance ins our homes will evolve from being seemingly finite in their scope to eventually becoming the consciousness of the structure. Knowledge will truly saturate our lived environment. We’ve been dreaming of collaborative and reactive environments for decades, and they’re about to become real en masse.”

Takeaway: The in-home voice revolution might seem silly at first glance. But the Amazon Alexas and the Google Homes of the world may become the primary way that consumers plug into to the connected infrastructure.

What’s your brand doing to be prepared for that potential outcome?