SXSW: Start-ups battle for mobile application downloads

[DVTimes]

You can almost feel a buzz on the fingertips of attendees shaking hands at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, Texas - one of the world's biggest networking opportunities for the web community.

A little micro-blogging site called Twitter launched here as a start-up in 2007 - and there are plenty of people attending this year who want to emulate their success.

The technology enthusiasts behind a myriad start-up companies have flocked to Texas this week for one reason: to get their applications on to the mobile phones of trend-setting early adopters.

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of Foursquare, a mobile application allowing users to "check-in" at locations, from cafes to concerts to office buildings, and send that information to friends also using the app.

Foursquare launched here in 2009, picked up 5,000 users in four days and is now a sizeable social media player, boasting some seven million users. Mr Crowley says there are few other events where start-ups can accelerate both excitement about their companies and growth.

"It's a great little laboratory for developers," Mr Crowley says.

"[For us] it's one of these things where it spread really quickly in four days of the conference. It has turned into a really good launchpad for start-ups because you have just the right amount of people that are in this early adopter community, and they're down there specifically not so much to go to the conference, but to go to the parties, hang out and socialise.

"And a lot of the tools that people are really interested in building are tools that allow people to go out and socialise."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12735762