The SXSW interactive and technology programming has just ended and the music festival is getting underway. The interactive portion featured hundreds of panels inside the convention center. But much of the action, networking and fun took place in the streets of Austin. As MG Siegler wrote, maybe “people should just show up in Austin next year and not even go to the actual conference.” If you did that this year, here’s what you might have seen.

In between our interviews, we sent our TechCrunch TV videographer John Murillo and his Canon 7D out to capture the sights and sounds of SXSW – the food, beer, games, and parties.

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One of the most eagerly awaited movies debuting at SXSW this year is the Swedish production Press, Pause, Play. It’s an examination of both the benefits and the downside of the democratizing power of the Internet, featuring interviews with Seth Godin, Scott Belsky, Sean Parker, Moby and (blush) myself.

Press, Pause, Play got its world premiere on Friday night in Austin and yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down in the AOL studio with its two Swedish co-directors, David Dworsky and Victor Köhler. Both guys seemed liked they hadn’t had any sleep for about six months; both, I suspect, had been enjoying the delights of SXSW rather too much.

Video ahead.

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There are few things better than free beer. Mix that with melted cheese and toasted bread, and you have a combination that satisfies even the deepest of human desires. And they’re available just outside the main convention center at SXSW, both free of charge.

The food is being provided by GroupMe, the group messaging app that, along with competitors like Beluga and Fast Society, has received plenty of buzz in the buildup to SXSW. We swung by their food stand for an interview with cofounders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci (and to grab some food for ourselves). Tune in to learn how things have gone for GroupMe so far in Austin, why they chose to give away grilled cheese sandwiches, and adventures in Phish concert parking lots.

Oh, and sorry for calling it “South by”. I hate when people do that.

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It’s that time again: time to revel in Web 2.0! We’re teaming up with TUAW and Peel for our first annual SXSW Interactive reader meet-up in Austin. Meet the TC crew. Enjoy some TC chew (quantities limited). All this – and more – will be made available to you.

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Today’s SXSW keynote speaker is Seth Priebatsch, founder and CEO of location-based gaming startup SCVNGR.

SCVNGR has had a big week — on Thursday the site launched a spinoff service called LevelUp that combines some of the retention mechanics seen in location-based games with the steep deals offered by sites like Groupon.

Priebatsch, who maintained an apparently super-human energy level throughout his talk, discussed how many of the gaming mechanics seen in the virtual world will be applied in the physical world to create a so-called “Game Layer”. “It’s brand new and has not been built,” Priebatsch says. “The last decade was the decade of social — it took connections between friends, family, and coworkers and put them online. It’s called Facebook. The social layer traffics in connections.” Conversely, Priebatsch says that the Game layer traffics in influence — “It will influence where we go, what we do, and how we do it.”

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By now, even if you’re not at SXSW, you’re likely sick of SXSW. Why? Because every other damn tweet is about SXSW. I’m here, and tweeting about it, and I’m sick of it. But luckily Lanyrd has created the perfect extension.

Not at SXSW is an extension for both Chrome and Firefox that alters Twitter.com to remove all tweets that reference the conference. But that’s not good enough. So the extension also blocks tweets from all those Twitter users known to be attending SXSW!

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Today at a SXSW talk, Google VP Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk about location — mobile location, in particular. The theme isn’t a surprise since Mayer recently shifted her role from leading Google’s search team to heading their local efforts. Her talk was mostly an overview/demo of Google’s recent product launches, but it did include some new stats.

• Mayer revealed that 40% of Google Maps usage is mobile. And Christmas and New Years day had mobile usage of Maps surpass the desktop — which is a first for Google products. Google Maps now has 150 million mobile users. To put that in context, Maps for mobile had 100 million users in August of last year.



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San Francisco is a ghost town right now. It seems as if the entire city has packed up and headed to Austin, Texas for SXSW. The conference was too big two years ago. Then it got bigger last year. And this year it’s expected to be significantly bigger once again. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m scared.

But the good news is that an old trusty friend will be on hand to help us navigate the insane crowds: Uber. Yes, mobile app-controlled car service is heading to Austin as well for SXSW. But they’re doing it with a true Austin twist: pedicabs.

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Over the past week, there’s been a major dilemma in Geekland: what do we do on March 11?

You see, we’ve known for months that it’s the first day of the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. But last Wednesday, Apple announced it would also be the day that the iPad 2 officially goes on sale. The questions immediately began: do we keep our plans intact and head to Austin? Or do we hang back and wait in line for the iPad 2 at 5 PM? Luckily, Apple thought ahead.

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Now that it’s 2011 and we’re back in the swing of things, a lot of startups are already undoubtedly laying out their launch plans for the year. And while anytime seems like a good time around these parts, a lot of startups pencil in the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas as a good potential launching point. Why? Because it’s early in the year (early March), with a ton of people and hype, and a few of the most successful launches in recent years took place there.

You can always tell the most successful launches because the press the following year will say, “who is going to be this year’s ______ of SXSW?” The two most obvious companies that fit that bill are Twitter and Foursquare. (Well technically Twitter didn’t launch at SXSW, but that was definitely their coming out party in 2007.) And coincidentally, two founders of those two companies have taken to Quora today to both answer the question: What is the process involved in launching a startup at SXSW?

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Right before the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago, some of you may have read about SimpleGeo’s awesome location data visualization tool called Vicarious.ly. The site showed location information coming in to SimpleGeo from Austin in realtime, and included elements such as Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter. It was really interesting to watch in realtime, but it may be even more interesting in hindsight. Luckily, SimpleGeo has released a video to show the data over the span of just about a week (March 11 to March 17).

As you can see, Foursquare and Gowalla clearly dominate the data. This is in line with what we heard in the midst of the so-called “location war” between the two. It’s also kind of fun to watch the early hours of the morning when everyone is clearly asleep, and then watch as the data comes roaring back to life around 8 AM as festival-goers undoubtedly nursed hangovers to head to the convention center.

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We’re in the midst of full-on location war is raging this year at SXSW in Austin, Texas this year. But actually, someone has already won: AT&T.

Yes, despite my concerns, I’m happy to report that the network has been incredibly stable over the past several days. In fact, it’s the best I’ve ever seen AT&T’s network perform — anywhere. Over the past three days I haven’t dropped one call, haven’t missed one voicemail, haven’t been missed any text messages, and the data is flowing freely, allowing my iPhone to actually work.

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While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net.

Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast becoming one of the key places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South By Southwest—known also as SXSW—will be a debutant party for AOL’s new Seed form of journalism..

AOL has it’s hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party, according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Programming Director of Seed.

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We’ve talked a lot this week about the so-called “Location War” brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow. That war will happen, but actually, there are likely to be a lot of winners because a few of the location-based services should be able to leverage the exposure to gain usage after the conference. Those with real bloodlust should probably be watching another war: AT&T versus everyone in Austin on their network.

AT&T’s struggles to stay up last year are well-documented. CNN recently ran a piece about how AT&T hopes to avoid a similar fate this year. But actually, “struggles” is way too kind of a word. If you were at SXSW last year and happened to be on AT&T’s network — like, say, if you had an iPhone, like many festival-goers did — it was an absolute nightmare. You couldn’t make a call. You couldn’t send a text. Data? Ha. At a few points early on I seriously wondered if I had forgotten to pay my bill and AT&T had simply shut my phone off — except that it was happening to everyone.

AT&T has a funny word for the failure, they like to say “unprecedented.” As in, the usage of its network was at level previously unseen as a strong percentage of the over 10,000 festival goers (just the interactive part) were using iPhones. Well guess what? Word is that is year, there will be some 15,000 people there for the interactive part. As Samual L. Jackson’s character, Mr. Arnold, says in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts.”

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