The annual SXSW (South by Southwest) music festival in Austin, TX is the biggest and best new music showcase in the world.

They’re always at the cutting edge of new technology to make it more accessible – last year they set up a shared iTunes playlist which anybody with a wi-fi laptop could listen to whenever they were online, like at a coffee shop between bands, for instance.

This year they’ve taken the big step of setting up a BitTorrent file of 750 songs (2.6GB) which is out there for anyone to download. One song from each of the top 750 tipped bands playing at SXSW this year. On top of that, they’ve released their own iPod application, which allows you to scroll through the acts playing each night by venue and time, then select any of them to play their sample track. Amazing, and all for free.

Wired News have the full scoop and all the appropriate links.

The newest Powerbooks include an accelerometer, to sense if the laptop is dropped, park the drive heads, and prevent damage to your hard drive. That accelerometer, by definition, must be able to sense any and all movement in three dimensions.

So …

If you were to find a way of taking the data from it, you could then use that info an any way you like. You could tilt your laptop to control it. Flick it to the left or the right to switch applications. Tilt forwards and back to scroll a webpage. And so on …

Outright genius.

Here’s the man who’s already coded a proof-of-concept. Here’s an article by Matt at Interconnected which gets the imagination flowing in the right direction, and here he waxes lyrical about the potential this specific haptic interface holds.