For all their growing smarts, our gadgets remain stupid. That was the message delivered to a room of the earliest of technological adopters at the South by Southwest conference yesterday by Genevieve Bell, Intel's director of experience research.

For more than a decade Bell has spent her days hanging out with consumers to find out how technology fits into people's lives. In that time computing power and the number of devices people own has soared - but our "smart" gadgets are still clumsy companions and new technology is no exception.

One example, said Bell, is that no one has yet bettered the remote control as a way to command a TV. Gesture and voice control, for example, are alternatives Intel engineers talked of building into their connected TV products, said Bell, who poured cold water on the idea.

"One of the things that remote controls do is manage fights," she said. A single, physical control device fits much better into the socializing and subtle power games elicted from us by a device that can show only one channel at once. "A voice recognition system couldn't know you didn't take the garbage out and had forfeit rights to choose the channel," she said, and wouldn't know who was in charge.

Power buttons could do with getting smarter, too. People go to extreme lengths to put themselves beyond the reach of the web and cellphone networks, for example by choosing their vacation spot carefully, rather than exerting will power and switching their devices off. "In the US there is a moral imperative to be connected, if you possibly can," she said, "devices aren't able to give us periods to be disconnected."

A final gap in the smartness of our gadgets is their inability to lie, said Bell, "these devices blurt out the truth unbidden." While researching connected television for Intel, she asked consumers around the world if they would like their TV to share a public feed of what they were viewing, for friends to see and to encourage social networking around shows. The reaction was uniformly negative. "It wouldn't know to say that you were only watching that show ironically," said Bell, "or that you only had it on because your girlfriend was over." The small lies careful omissions people use to manage their reputation and social lives are beyond even the smartest computing devices.

Summing up, Bell said gadgets will remain dunces for some time to come, despite advances in their ability to sense their context. "In the future we're going to face a lot of smart devices we've never seen before," said Bell, but they will still be dumb in ways that are very familiar. As she put it, "there doesn't seem to be a Moore's law for intelligence."

I reported earlier this month on a prototype laptop that has an infrared camera to track your eye movements, cutting mouse use and creating a more intuitive experience. Here at SXSW a startup just presented technology that could allow such techniques using a regular webcam, rather than the kind of specialized cameras built into that prototype.

GazeHawk has combined a suite of image recognition software that recognizes faces, estimates head motion and position in 3D, and follows eye movements. Those capabilities are combined with data from a brief calibration step where users look at specific points on their screen to identify where a person's gaze is directed to about 70 pixels, co-founder Brian Krausz told me, after pitching in a contest for new web technology firms.

As a startup, revenue is crucial for GazeHawk who right now are targeting web designers and advertisers interested in knowing know where people look on a page, and if their ads are being noticed. The startup pays people to have their gaze tracked on the site of interest (sign up here) and does it by using their browser to tap into their webcam. The photo above shows example results: a heat map showing where a person's eyes lingered.

Krausz said that he believed GazeHawk's technology could be used for gaming or other consumer applications, allowing eye tracking on existing hardware. However, that would require a certain amount of rearchitecting the service, which currently doesn't decode gazes from video in real time. "It could be done in real time," he says, "but we don't need to for our current application and that saves us a lot of resources."

The 9 month old company will soon get its technology working on the iPad, said Krausz. That could give designers of apps new insight into what works for users, and in the long term perhaps even a new control method to accompany the touchscreen.

The Guild may be the most famous TV show that's never been on TV. In 2007, Felicia Day, known for her role in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, began work on what they intended to be a TV pilot for a series about online gaming. When Hollywood executives didn't understand the jokes, she joined forces with producer Kim Evey and took it to the Web, posting brief monthly episodes and funding filming from her own pocket and fan donations.

Now that the Guild's fifth season is soon to launch, it's widely considered a shining example of DIY video success. Day went on from the first season's initial success to refuse to sell the show. Instead, she forged an unusual sponsorship deal with Microsoft and Sprint. The deal gives Day full creative control over her show, simply requiring that episodes premiere on Microsoft's video properties: the Xbox Live Marketplace, the Zune Marketplace, and MSN Video.


The Guild currently has more than 60 million upload views on its YouTube channel, and that does not include statistics on DVDs sold, or episodes watched through Xbox Live and other key distribution channels.

Speaking in a keynote interview yesterday at South by Southwest Interactive, a Web conference in Austin, Texas, Day argued that her show could represent the future of brand sponsorship.

"Why pay $300,000 for an ad that people are going to avoid watching?" she said, referring to technologies such as Tivo that allow people to bypass television ads. Why not, Day said, spend half that or a quarter of that to fund a Web series, which will provide quality content that people care about, and has the potential to expand to other media? (The Guild has expanded with a comic book deal from Dark Horse).

"I do believe that people think differently about [Microsoft and Sprint] because of The Guild," Day said.

The obvious danger is that a sponsored Web series could be perceived as an extended ad. "That's the problem," Day acknowledged. However, she believes that if brands find content that has a natural synergy with them and trust the creators to produce quality episodes, such a deal could be a much better investment than traditional advertising.

Day said, "Going in that direction is the more risky but the more long-term play."