Ambient awareness, crowdsourced funding, and focused apps at SXSW Interactive

ETX Daily Up
The crowds at night on 6th Street during SXSW 2011 in Austin, Texas.

SXSW Interactive is challenging people to envision the future, and while attendees might have the future of technology in the back of their minds, their phones are zoomed in on a new breed of location-aware apps.

Technology bloggers and SXSW attendees are already buzzing about a swathe of new location-based and check-in applications that have arrived in apps stores just in time for the start of SXSW Interactive.

A new “ambient awareness” category of socially in-tune, location-based applications has taken the spotlight in the lead-up to the festival and a fight for dominance appears to be brewing between apps such as Banjo, Glancee, Highlight, Intro, Kismet, ntro and Sonar.

Unlike existing Foursquare-styled apps, ambient awareness apps help users discover friends, friends of friends or strangers who share similar interests who are in your vicinity. Highlight and Glancee both use your Facebook profile to help you make social connections and to find friends of friends. Banjo pulls in information from social networks like Twitter and Foursquare and apps like Intro and ntro focus on the business side of networking.

According to geo-location analytics tracker Geotoko there were more than 48,000 location-based check-ins at SXSW in 2011.  

Apps in the ambient awareness category are not the only exciting applications to follow at SXSW. Chad DeVoss, SXSW Interactive Festival Advisory Board member and e-Business Manager at Johnson Health Tech team, says that “we're going to see a trend toward focused applications. Pinterest and Instagram are not trying to do everything, just do a few things well. I think the over-arching theme we will experience at SXSW 2012 is ‘More and Specific.’"

Crowdsourced funding will also be a major trend at this year’s event says Wiley Wiggins, creative director for Karakasa Games.

Startups and new ideas are a large part of what SXSW Interactive is all about, but finding the funds to get such projects off the ground can be a much harder task. Bright minds in emerging technology have already started raising funds via websites such as Kickstarter, the self-proclaimed “world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.”

"This is the positive form of democratic creation that we aren't yet used to,” says Wiggins, “This new form lets us cherry-pick from a million ideas and send them in their purest form directly into production. The cultural gatekeepers and 'experts' will begin their slow sink into the tar pits of irrelevance, and the people who actually have ideas that they care about will bring them directly to the public. The death of the middle-man."

For more great ideas and SXSW trends, technology blog Mashable has put together a list of unmissable technology panels which you can find here: http://mashable.com/2012/03/06/sxsw-2012-panels/

SXSW Interactive is held in conjunction with the annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference & Festival from March 9-18 in Austin, TX, USA.
26th SXSW / 19th SXSW Interactive
http://www.sxsw.com