The trip out to Austin took a little longer than expected. Thanks to U.S. border control I waited in line for an hour and half causing me to miss my LA to Austin flight by 10 minutes. It meant I missed out on meeting the people attending SXSWi on the flight that I’d looked up using Planely. Planely is a web based service that allows you to see who is on your flight. It’s social networking as you fly. They ask you to “Join the flying revolution” and follow these 3 simple points: 1. Register your flight. 2. See who else is flying with you. 3. Connect and sit together.

It was looking like I’d be stranded in LA until Saturday. Due to the popularity of SXSW every flight was full. However this lovely lady http://instagr.am/p/CI6Qr/ at the United Business Lounge desk had the bright idea of flying me to Austin via San Fransico. I arrived in Austin 8 hours later than expected but at least I got here in time for the opening on Friday.

SXSWi is a breeding ground for innovation and an opportunity for new digital start ups to launch. There are many apps and services vying for attention. Here are a few I’ve come across.

The group texting services are generating a significant amount of buzz. They all have variations on the group text service with some of them offering conference call facilities and location utility plugged into them. The main players include:

GroupMe which claims to be your real life network. It allows you to “start groups with the people already in your contacts. When you send a message, everyone instantly receives it—it’s like a private chat room that works on any phone”.

Fast Society are “Built to party”. They sponsored the drinks on one flight over to Austin so a planeload of SXSWers got free booze and as a result have spread the word out here in Austin. Fast Society claim to know that “coordinating and staying in touch with friends can suck, we make it awesome.” Their service works by sharing your message to everyone at once. All you have to do is text a single number.

Beluga is a free private group messaging service. They state “Group messaging made easy.” They want to help groups of friends stay in touch on the go.

All of these group text services are only available to those in the U.S. at this time so I couldn’t play with them on my Singapore based mobile but by watching the U.S. based guys in our group using them they were all simple and really useful. It will be a battle to see which one will win out.

Hashable could be the end of the business card. It allows you to sync up with people you meet by simply asking for their twitter handle. It then creates a record of where you’ve met someone and gives you a hash cred rating. Hashable describes itself  as “the ultimate networking app. We’re Hashable … we help you capture awesome moments and track your strongest relationships.”

Domainful is a SMS domain registering service. You simply sms to a number to register a domain in seconds. I’ve had plenty of domain name ideas whilst out at a bar or over dinner. This normally has a positive correlation with alcohol consumption. I get the feeling this service could end up costing we a fair amount of money. But I love its immediacy.

There have also been various apps to help organize your schedule at the SXSW festival.  Some of the more interesting ones have been:

SitBy.Us helps you discover panels and share where you’re sitting at SXSW Interactive using your Twitter friends list.

Lanyrd.com the social conference directory by Natalie Downe and Simon Willison. Has the aim of being the wiki of the conference circuit. It allows you to see which conferences your twitter followers are attending. It details what’s actually happening at the conference via twitter buzz about the speakers and panels.

And finally,  the music stuff kicks off towards the end of the week. The Guardian’s SXSW band tracker has captured the buzz around the upcoming music fest. It’s a chart detailing which music artists performing at SXSW are generating the most buzz online. Richie Hawtin is currently Number 1, closely followed by Asking Alexandria at 2 and Ellie Goulding at No 3. The band tracker is powered by Musicmetric a dashboard for the 21^st Century for the music industry. Musicmetric tracks and indexes data for 600,000 artists and over 10 million individual releases – all in real time. They launched a Online Buzz chart in Music Week in 2009, the leading music industry publication in the UK.  www.musicmetric.com

Tags: 2011, grant hunter, sxsw

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