What happens when you mix 29 startups, 6 sponsors, a few hot models with a slew of photographers and camera phones, a mobile app smackdown, a delivering happiness bus, two connected venues and a few thousand people? One hell of a night with a lot of photos online to prove it.
Here’s a brief overview of the companies and festivities and a photo gallery with highlights from the night. See more photos from the event here. All photographs by photographer Liang Shi.
The Startups…
- Udemy – They democratize learning and publishing so anyone can learn or teach anything online.
- GotoCamera – Providing free and easy home, pet, and small business monitoring using web cams.
- BreakoutBand – Unleash your inner rock star, have fun, and win awards.
- Sphero – The world’s first robotic ball is controlled by your smart phone and boasts an open API for developers.
- NeighborGoods – Save money, live more sustainably and strengthen your local community by sharing goods and skills with your neighbors.
- Rootmusic – Their BandPage Facebook app allows musicians to interact with their fans, book shows, connect with labels, and more.
- Smartling – Through a cloud-based software model, Smartling provides an entirely new, automated method to translate websites and web applications into multiple languages.
- QONQR – The geosocial game that combines RISK, Farmville, FourSquare, and Starcraft, with a dash of WarGames thrown in for good measure.
- Exfm – The best way to find, organize, and share music on the web.
- Owni – A new media hub for investigative journalism in politics and tech supported by a huge community of bloggers.
- TwoChop – This content gamification platform enables partners to turn any content (text, images, music, videos, and data) into games.
- Flixlab – The fast and fun way to turn your videos and pictures into great movies to share with your friends.
- Roqbot – A social jukebox for your favorite bar or restaurant.
- TinyVox – Record audio files for quick and easy sharing.
- Metabeam – Metabeam apps deliver smart remote control, search, preview, social networking and more for Flash users.
- YAPPER – An online self-service for publishers to build their own mobile apps.
- GadgetTrak – GadgetTrak tells you where your laptop, tablet, or smartphone is and who has it and it has the ability to secure the data on it.
- MuckRock – MuckRock.com is the easiest way to request, analyze and share government documents, making politics more transparent and democracies more informed.
- Votizen – Provide tools for voters to communicate with their government officials, backed by the power of their voting history.
- Tango – Use Tango to make mobile free video calls to your family and friends wherever you are.
- Storify – Mix together Tweets, photos and videos to create dynamic stories that can be embedded anywhere.
- Kabbage – Kabbage provides working capital to the millions of online merchants that sell on marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.
- Crowdmap by Ushahidi – Collect, aggregate, and visualize geospatial data from on-the-ground sources with this crowdsourcing application.
- GazeHawk – Low-cost eye tracking service uses ordinary webcams to show you where on your site users look so you can optimize design/copy.
- Sifteo – Sifteo cubes are 1.5 inch computers with full-color displays that sense their motion, sense each other, and wirelessly connect to your computer for interactive game playing that gets your brain and body engaged.
- Compass Labs – Generate qualified leads and achieve brand engagement on Facebook and Twitter using Compass Labs’ precision targeted social ad solution.
- Portalarium – Bringing premium games to the social web across social networks, web browsers and both desktop and mobile devices.
- ViKi – A play on video and wiki, ViKi is an international video site for the best of world TV series and movies, translated in 100+ languages by a community of avid fans.
- DocumentCloud – DocumentCloud makes it easier for journalists to publish and analyze more document source material and keeps those documents available for future research, reporting and review.
Supporting Sponsors:
- LiveShare by Cooliris had a slew of photographers taking pics of guests with cowboy and cowgirl models, then displaying them on the walls around the event. One luck winner walked away with a new iPad2!
- Microsoft had three developers coding an app with the LiveShare API in a real-time mobile app smackdown. Video coming soon.
- Applications for Good brought a superhero to spread the word about how you could win $50K by building a a mobile app that benefits others.
- Ascentium contributed to the SXSW fun with their Hit it or Quit it mobile app, encouraging community participation throughout the conference. Their mini-kinect robot rings were a hit!
- Akamai shared info about how they can help small businesses as they grow to stardom, and also gave away a new Logitech Revue with Google TV to one lucky winner.
- GroupFlier was on hand spreading the word about free group text messaging with their easy mobile app.
