This sponsored post is produced by UKTI.

The UK is at the forefront of technology and creativity in Europe, with a wealth of business opportunities. It has a dynamic, entrepreneurial climate, attracting talent from across the EU and beyond. UK Trade & Investment is looking for one of the USA’s most promising innovative technology companies to introduce to the UK’s vibrant tech community.

Tell us why your company is ready for a UK Global adventure.

The winner will be invited on a tailored business trip to the UK , including a Premium Economy flight sponsored by Virgin Atlantic Airways.

• Spend 3 days in the UK and open up your business to global opportunities.
• Receive advice and mentoring from business specialists who have helped hundreds of USA businesses go global.
• Meet & network with world-class investors, incubators and companies.
• Starting in London, discover some of the UK’s tech hubs, the most vibrant and innovative in Europe.

Entries must be received by March 31 2013. Click here and register to enter.

Restrictions apply. Trade promotion only. Full terms and conditions can be found here.

Some of the reasons to choose the UK to help grow your business:

• The UK is rated as one of the easiest countries in Europe to do business.
• The UK has world-class universities and a proven research base.
• The UK has the lowest barriers to entrepreneurship in the world and a low rate of corporation tax – just 21% by 2014.
• The UK is a global transport hub, with more than 20 international airports and the Channel Tunnel.

Photo by Jason Hawkes.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Tyler Arnold is co-founder & CEO of SimplySocial.

“Dude you gotta go. It’s like GOAP (Geeks on a Plane) x 1,000. You’ll love it.”

With that note, Antony McGregor Dey (founder of link.me) convinced me to go to South by Southwest (SXSW) a mere four days before the start of the Interactive portion of the conference. And having missed the hugely popular event the last two years, I didn’t feel like missing out on a third.

I never quite understood the value of going, nor did I have any expectations. I figured I had little to lose — although tickets, as you can imagine, were a fortune. That said, there are some things I wish I’d known heading into my first South by. So, below are some helpful tips for first-time SXSW’er:

Lesson #1: Flight and accommodation will be expensive.

Most of the tech world descends upon Austin for a single weekend a year and the city certainly makes the most of it. Flights and hotels are expensive, so just be prepared to pay the piper.

Hilariously, I was able to finagle last-minute accommodation with Kiip.com, a company we’re co-located with in San Francisco. They had done their SXSW planning properly by renting out a house months before.

But the house was full, so, they offered an air mattress — In a tent, in the garage.

Lesson #2: Take what’s given to you. You’ll need it.

Growing up in Alaska, the juxtaposition of “tent camping” at a tech conference actually sounded exciting. Being in a garage instead of outside in the rain (which I’ve done too many times) was a luxury I could appreciate.

It turns out that a dark and quiet place like this was the most appealing thing ever after 20 hours of South by mingling. As a friend described the experience, “SXSW is just all of Silicon Valley concentrated in a single place, with Vegas mixed in.”

Upon landing on Friday, I exited the airport to stand in the one-hour taxi line. The line was just a fact of life as floods of techies break into the city.

Lesson #3: You’re a guest, and there’s a lot of you.

Despite the crowds, you don’t have to stand in line at SXSW  to have fun. There are always plenty of events going on, and some of the best ones fly under the radar. However, when it comes to transportation, it isn’t always easy to get around.

It’s also worth noting that there are lots individuals with a hell of a lot more money than you. One late night had the Kiip crew and I looking for a taxi in the rain at 5am. We felt we were being generous offering $30-40 to be driven a mile up the road.

A group in front of us offered $100 instead, for a shorter journey.

Wow.

Lesson #4: SXSW is all about spontaneity.

I arrived in downtown Austin with a group of friends at an event going on in the middle of 6th Street, where a lot of the action takes place. For the first 30 minutes, I wondered what the heck I got myself into. Why was I here? I was over thinking things. I hadn’t had a game changing moment within the first half hour and it felt like… a waste.

Soon enough, we were up and mingling with the crowd and I began understanding the value of SXSW. I started running into executives at top-tier companies, getting feedback on our product, and meeting tech luminaries that also live in the SF Bay area.

I started collecting business cards, planning follow-ups, and eventually began looking for the next thing.

Lesson #5 Serendipity can be engineered.

Saturday was somewhat of a blah day. After a late start (it happens), I didn’t make it into downtown until 2 p.m. I was told you didn’t need a badge to network, so I never ended up getting one. I think the only time I would participate in the actual convention center events was if I was involved with a panel, but I’ll withhold judgement until I get to cash in on that experience.

After meetings and dinner in the city, I headed over to the Four Seasons. As I sat down, two gentlemen instantly invited me into their conversation. They both lived in the city, and after swapping backgrounds (“What do you do?” is asked more here in a weekend then everywhere else in a year) they introduced me to their friend Susan.

Susan, awesome as she was, ended up inviting me to the Founder’s Fund event on Monday night. I got to meet Peter Thiel.

Thiel, Facebook’s first investor and PayPal co-founder, has been someone I’ve looked up to since before I had a driver’s license. Equally great, however, were some of the people he surrounded himself with. I had a chance to chat with a number of individuals working to drive changes in education, aerospace (SpaceX), and healthcare.

Even as I settled into my seat on the bus to the Founders Fund party, one guy next to me was thanking the woman he was sitting next to for “getting (him) on NPR today.”

“This is the right crowd,” I thought to myself.

Those two people turned out to be Dylan Tweney of VentureBeat and Laura Sydell of NPR.

Lesson #6: There are two main segments to SXSW: The Casual Crew and The Partiers.

The SXSW magic really came alive when it turned a blah Saturday into an invitation to socialize with some of tech’s greatest names. Networking at the Four Seasons made me realize there are two distinct groups that come to Austin: those who network and those who party.

The Four Seasons crowd certainly seemed like the casual networking group and yielded a lot of interesting connections. Others, however, just descend on Austin to unwind from work and party with colleagues.

Both groups have their place here. I’ve always been more a networker by choice, so I let a lot of the “Vegas-like” parts of the event pass me by. Both the Vegas and spontaneity pieces were highlighted for me when one night, at the Kiip house, I saw Coolio (#gangstasparadise) making spaghetti after performing at their party earlier that evening.

This type of stuff only happens here.

Lesson #7: Value the intangible.

A number of individuals have asked me, “What did you get out of SXSW?” The answer, after having a number of experiences (not all outlined above), is hard to give.

First off, it yields a lot of great relationships. As a people-oriented entrepreneur, I value those connections greatly and don’t underestimate the value they could provide in the future.

There’s sort of a Burning Man/TED-like quality to SXSW. There aren’t a lot of hierarchies, gate-keepers, or egos that prevent you from reaching the key contacts you want to talk to. You can brainstorm ideas with top minds in tech. You can discuss journalism with correspondents from NPR. You can pitch your product to huge customers. It’s casual, it’s easy, and it’s fun.

Will it result in business? I don’t know — ask me in 30 days.

Will it result in investors? I don’t know — ask me in five years.

Will it results in friends? I don’t know — ask me in a lifetime.

But it certainly doesn’t hurt. In today’s digital world there’s so much noise. More emphasis is placed on relationships and key connections with folks you know. Trust is more monetizable now than ever before. People want to work with people they trust, and meeting them here is a great place to start.

Tyler Arnold is cofounder & CEO of SimplySocial, founded in October of 2011 with the idea that every organization should be empowered with the tools they need to tell their own story on social media. He previously founded Purlize and Tyler Systems. He has spoken at numerous events, including TEDx, and in 2011 won the Small Business Administration’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

top photo credit: Lotus Carroll via photopin cc

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Tapping the vast potential of U.K. entrepreneurs and the UK business environment  is General Assembly, a New York-based global education network that last summer opened up its first office in London.

The organization, in partnership with UK Trade & Investment, wants to connect  up entrepreneurial innovation by offering people classes, events, talks, and workshop on topics like  business fundamentals, data analysis digital marketing, mobile & web development, and design. Some of the classes include things like tutorials on how to get better SEO, an introduction to Adobe Photoshop, and even how to break into the digital music industry.

“What makes the U.K. particularly attractive as a tech hub is its strong infrastructure as well as its legacy across multiple industries,” said Matt Cynamon, director of General Assembly Europe. “As a result, the talent being attracted to the entrepreneurship community posses a strong knowledge base in fields like finance, fashion, media, advertising, and design.

“The combination of this rich history of talent, decreasing barriers to entry in technology, and the UK’s international diversity, make it ideal for the creation and emergence of new businesses,” he said.

General Assembly’s main goal is to break the current model of education by offering people less of a prix fixe menu and more of a buffet that allows you to put whatever you want on a platter.

Cynamon said in the U.K. office’s first year alone, it’s taught over 300 classes, turned over 100 skilled practitioners into teachers, and launched 12 long-form training programs — numbers that the group expects to double in the coming year.

To meet this growing demand for General Assembly’s brand of education, the group is reinvesting in London by opening up a brand new campus. It will also increase its efforts in the U.K. by helping both startups and big companies connect with General Assembly graduates.

The group is also launching its first truly global program March 25, according to Cynamon. The program itself involves a 12-week, all-day web development program that will take a group of 60 complete novices from New York, San Francisco, and London and transform them into full-fledged, junior level web developers.

Ease of doing business is a key  element of the UK Government’s regulatory and policy frameworks. The UK’s business friendly environment combined with the support available from UK Trade & Investment ensures that if you are planning to enter the UK and European market you will be able to get your business up and running quickly and easily.

“We plan on repeating the program regularly and growing it to include locations like Berlin, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Los Angeles,” Cynamon said. “Our ambition is to meet the increasing demand for quality web developers in the U.K. as well as across the globe.”

Find out how the UK can help your business grow.

Image via General Assembly

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Musemantik was busy promoting the latest version of its innovative cloud service, Musicflow, at SXSW last week when we caught up with its founder, Maciej Zurawski, to shoot the video below.

Musemantik is passionate about transforming digital experiences through its innovations in music creation, technology and delivery.

MusicFlow is Musemantik’s online music production service. It enhances the experience delivered by user-generated media content, such as videos, slideshows, photos, and casual games with custom music soundtracks. It provides high quality, immersive music that adapts to the mood and feel of every moment of the content, and seamlessly fits the duration and flow. It serves independent creatives including media producers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses, individual creatives and other music consumers. Media content creators can get instantly tailored music with much less trouble — and time — than by using traditional sources for music accompaniment.

In the interview below, Zurawski gives credit to Scotland’s excellent graduate and university base for contributing to the company’s good start. The UK business environment is supportive to startups and is rated as one of the easiest countries in Europe to do business, as well as being at the forefront of technology and creativity in Europe, with a wealth of opportunities. It has a dynamic, entrepreneurial climate, attracting talent from across the EU and beyond.

Find out more about how the UK can help your business grow.

Little Riot is a Newcastle, UK-based startup that makes one of the more intriguing hardware products we’ve come across.

It’s called Pillow Talk, and it lets you hear your long-distance loved one’s heartbeat.

So, it’s like an iOS/Android-powered baby monitor for adults. Weird, right?

Here’s a video showing more about how it actually works:

In a word, you and your special someone each wear a wristband, which picks up your heartbeats. The wristbands then transmit that heartbeat to a speaker inside a pillow, via a smartphone app, so you can lay your head on the pillow and hear your lover’s actual heartbeat, in real time, from far away.

Little Riot founder Joanna Montgomery got the idea while working on a degree in interaction design at Dundee University in Scotland. Her project proved so popular that she started a company to turn it into a marketable product. It hasn’t always been easy, as she says, but she’s making her dream into a reality.

We interviewed Montgomery last week at SXSW Interactive to find out more about what makes her company work. She showed us a prototype and a 3-D printed mockup of what the finished product will look like (shown above).

“It just uses a light, and a sensor, and measures the change in density in your arm when your blood pulses,” Montgomery explained.

“I realized that existing methods of communication are very two-dimensional and they’re all screen-based… They all require active participation,” Montgomery said. “Whereas when you’re actually with someone, physically, you can come home and you can sit in the same room with someone and be connected to them but not have to actually engage with them.”

She’s a bit of an accidental entrepreneur. “It started as my university project, and then it got picked up by a technology blog, and quickly went viral on the Internet,” Montgomery said. “The reception’s been phenomenal.”

While she acknowledges the challenges of setting up a hardware startup straight out of university, she’s been helped by a very favorable climate for startups in the UK. According to the World Bank, it takes just 13 days to set up a business in the UK,  compared to the OECD average of 15 days.  In addition, the UK has the lowest barriers to entrepreneurship in the world and has the third least barriers to trade and investment in the world.

Montgomery also got help from UK Trade & Investment, which sponsored a number of events at SXSW aimed at highlighting UK-based companies and the investment opportunities in the UK, and which facilitated introductions “across the pond” for companies eager to expand their business globally.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Present.Me is a company that lets people give presentations — on PowerPoint — to anyone in the world.

It’s got a two-pane interface that shows the slides on one side, and the face of the presenter in a video stream on the other side of the screen, making it useful for businesspeople, teachers, or anyone who needs to do a show-and-tell remotely.

Founder Richard Garnett said they idea came about when he was working on a big merger between two companies. Unfortunately, he said, “the business that was buying the other business, they hated the other business, they didn’t want to be together, so we had to record the presentation.” After a week of work and great expense, they came up with an easier way to deliver presentations remotely.

We found Garnett at SXSW last week in Austin, on an overcast and rainy day that unfortunately reminded him a bit too much of his home in England. That said, the business climate in the UK is considerably better: According to a 2012 World Bank report, the UK is rated as the easiest country in Europe to do business and is rated seventh easiest overall in the world.

Furthermore, according to UK Trade & Investment, the UK has the lowest barriers to entrepreneurship in the world and has the third-least barriers to trade and investment. Not a bad place to start a company with ambitions to bring people together over presentations all over the globe!

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Why wasn’t there a standout killer app at SXSW in 2013? Does it mean that the cool event in Austin, Texas, has jumped the shark?

As a first timer at SXSW, I thought I’d find code hustlers showing off their mobile innovation chops. But creativity isn’t just about writing “killer apps” anymore. The App Store is chock full of creative apps already, inflated expectations have a history of being missed, and consumers have download fatigue. Some may even argue that the consumer mobile app segment has passed Gartner’s “peak of inflated expectations” and is in free fall into the “trough of disillusionment.”

Instead of the expected SXSW app bazaar, I found agencies, media and brands seeking to engage with mobile and social technology. The consumer internet has matured beyond the niches that defined past “winners” at SXSW, and it is now an established segment in which real brands are deploying real dollars. Companies such as Warner Bros. Entertainment, Condé Nast, OMD, Coca-Cola and Viacom (in full disclosure, Intel Capital works with these companies) were there to invest time into meeting and mentoring next-generation innovators.

Examples of such big media and brand interest in the emerging social and mobile technology landscape include the following:

Warner Bros. and Turner Broadcasting launched Media Camp, a startup accelerator for media innovations
Mondelez International (part of Kraft) presented on real-time marketing and its Mobile Futures accelerator
Viacom/MTV, Coca-Cola, and OMD offered up free office hours to up-and-coming founders.

On balance, this evolution is good news. But with it comes greater expectations about consumer engagement, insight, monetization and privacy. Attracting a lot of downloads is obviously very appealing, but companies now need to be prepared to talk about sustained engagement and articulate a clear vision for monetization. I thought there were two categories of companies that did this successfully in Austin: 1) marketplaces, and 2) devices coupled with services.

Great marketplaces can become platforms that facilitate business creation (think eBay a decade ago). Companies at SXSW in this vein included TaskRabbit, Sidecar, Lyft and HotelTonight. Each delivers real value to both buyers and sellers, by creating a marketplace where previously there was imperfect or inaccessible information, limited accountability and an inability to transact. Such disruption is coming to many segments via innovative, easy-to-use online and/or mobile apps. (If you can’t tell already, this is an area of keen interest for the Intel Capital team.)

The other exciting highlight for me at SXSW was robust devices, as defined by their ability to interact with us. This year’s hardware was more about how we experience the app or device. Most impressive were Nike (FuelBand), Jawbone (Up) and Google Glass, as well as others like fitness devices FitBit, Basis and Pebble. These products gather data about the user, their surroundings or their behavior, and then via associated apps provide some insight. It takes context awareness beyond just finding friends.

So as we settle in this weekend and absorb all that we saw and did (beyond standing in line for the next hot Adrian Grenier band), what becomes apparent is that while no one killer app made headlines, many companies made the successful leap into the big leagues. Instead of being defined by an app or device, companies reached higher to create entirely new experiences for consumers and are helping reinvent marketplaces as we know them. To me, that’s a bigger innovation than most might realize, and I for one am looking forward to next year in Austin.

Mike Buckley is the managing director of the Consumer Internet Sector of Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment and M&A organization. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than $10.8 billion in 1,276 companies in 54 countries.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Banner ads are the grandfather of all online ads that have come since. But, unlike their descendents — targeted ads, text ads — they haven’t evolved when it comes to how they’re served up to internet users. A new London-based startup called OnScroll is seeking to change that — and reap hidden revenues in the process.

To visualize the problem OnScroll strives to solve, think about your average browsing experience. Let’s say you’re reading The New York Times’ website. You see some banner ads on the top of the page and on the sidebar. As you read an article, you scroll past some ads and reveal new ones.

But what if you didn’t make it that far down the page? The ad that was hiding at the bottom would still have counted as “served” based on the current system, and an impression would have been counted (basically it assumes your eyeballs saw it, even if they didn’t). The more eyes that supposedly see an ad, the more it costs to place, the more agencies and brands pay, etc. Given how many ads are NOT seen a year — due to scrolling, slow loading times, missing plug-ins, high bounce rates, etc. — the system seems fairly broken.

How broken? Very, according to OnScroll. So it’s drawing a clear line between “served ads” and “viewable ads” — a.k.a. the ones that were actually seen. The startup argues that an ad should only be counted as viewable if 50 percent of it is seen for at least one second. Given this, OnScroll reports that 54% of banner ads are never seen, totaling a staggering $11.7 billion in wasted annual ad spend.

“Advertisers and agencies have known about this issue for a while, but now as technology evolves we’re all seeing how much waste there really is out there,” says OnScroll Co-Founder Babac Vafaey. “Publishers who want big brands that usually advertise on TV to jump to their sites need to offer higher value. We can potentially monetize ads in areas where publishers didn’t even know they could.

Vafaey recently returned from the U.S. where he met with advertising agencies at SXSW. Slowly but surely, Onscroll plans to test the waters in the U.S. market.

“The U.S. is always ahead of the market when it comes to anything online and especially online advertising,” says Vafaey. “So in 2013, we believe this year will be crucial to industry stakeholders adopting a new metric for buying advertising and better advertising. We want to be a part of this.”

London, as it turns out, is an excellent place to launch an advertising startup. The UK is Europe’s largest mobile content market, with over $1.5 billion spent on mobile apps, content and services each year, according to data collected by UK Trade & Investment. It’s also Europe’s largest e-commerce market: 32 million UK consumers spent $117 billion online in 2012.

And as a global entertainment hub, London is second only to Los Angeles, with deep pools of talent in design and technical development. That means OnScroll is in a good position, geographically speaking, for expansion either into Europe or into the U.S. — or both.

Currently in private beta, OnScroll is a tool for publishers and agencies, enabling them to access analytics of user behavior, place their ads intelligently based on this data, and accurately gather impressions to report to prospective advertisers.

“Basically, we’re analyzing users’ behavior on a given page to the extent that we can determine the highest percentage chance of where and how an ad will be viewed,” says Vafaey. “Then we can actually measure how long an ad is being seen and give people a whole lot more information than they had before.”

Today, the team is looking at more hard work before the product is ready for prime time. Vafaey expects the private beta to yield promising results and for the company to scale up rapidly thereafter. He also foresees a funding round in the near future for the startup, which up to now has been privately backed.

“I come from the publisher end of the business, and advertising is often based all on perception — perception of value,” Vafaey says. “We want to put some insights behind this perception. As the advertising industry evolves and buying and selling ads becomes more automated, we want to help publishers and agencies dynamically place and price their ads.”

Note: You too can find out how the UK can help your business grow — first hand — by winning a business trip to the UK. To find out more visit: www.ukti.gov.uk/competition.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Swarmly founder Marco De Nichilo has built an app that lets you find out where the hot parties are — simply by seeing where people are, in real time.

It’s a deceptively simple idea: Everyone using the app shows up as a blue dot on a real-time map. Want to know where the crowd is gathering? Fire up the app, look at the map, and watch the little dots move around.

“More than that, we want to map the globe, in real time,” De Nichilo says in the video below.

Swarmly is based in Glasgow, and gives a lot of credit to Entrepreneurial Spark, an incubator in that city. He says the startup scene is really taking off there now.

The technology sector in Scotland is supported by a fine research base, an excellent graduate and university base and an innovative research-pooling approach. There are over 900 Scottish-based enabling technology companies and organisations, including world leaders in many key sectors.

We caught up with De Nichilo at SXSW, where he appeared to be having a great time meeting with potential investors, PR people, and press people. Check out the video below.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Tex. — We Are Pop Up is a startup that is working to match landlords with short-term commercial tenants.

For instance, if you are a retailer and want to rent a space for a pop-up store, or if you want to rent an office space for a week or two, We Are Pop Up can help you find the right space.

There really isn’t a business model for finding short-term commercial leases like this yet, so anyone looking for a short-term commercial lease has to resort to a number of complicated and inefficient alternatives, like Craigslist. We Are Pop Up aims to make a platform to lower the costs and increase the efficiency of the market.

Two of the founders are based in the U.S. but cofounder Alastair Moore is based in London. He loves the mix of skills, industries, and sectors in the city.

Check out the interview we did with Moore at SXSW below.

Find out how the UK can help your business grow.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

For South by Southwest, it’s kind of ridiculous that companies spent gobs of money on promotional materials, free booze, fancy parties, and advertising — and all of it was pretty much secondary to show-stealing meme kitty Grumpy Cat.

This was something New Yorker cartoonist, Too Much Coffee Man creator, and former Austin resident Shannon Wheeler picked up on while attending SXSW this week on behalf of ComiXology. Wheeler is helping the digital comic book startup promote its new “ComiXology Submit” platform, which allows creator-owned comic books to sell within its digital store next to big draws like Spider-Man, Batman, and The Walking Dead.

And as part of that promotion, Wheeler decided to create some short comics depicting the most popular panels at SXSW, as VentureBeat previously reported. ComiXology has shared his final two comics (above and below) with us exclusively, which are specifically about Grumpy Cat.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Tex. — UK Trade & Investment brought a score of companies from Great Britain to South by Southwest. We talked to every one (every one that was willing to stand in front of a camera, that is) to find out what they do, what the startup scene in the UK is like, and what they found the most inspiring about SXSW.

We’ll have more in-depth videos with a few of the companies soon, but in the meantime, here are some quick hits with a dozen founders.

If you couldn’t make it down to Austin this year, you can follow all of our SXSW coverage here. And make sure to join the Twitter conversation.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Texas — Kim Dotcom is the poster child for why the current set of copyright laws have gone horribly wrong, so naturally he made his way to the South by Southwest interactive show — sort of.

Dotcom is currently being prosecuted by multiple governments, including the U.S. which is trying to extradite him over his role in facilitating piracy and copyright theft through now shuttered cloud locker service Megaupload. So since he can’t  just hop a plane to the States for a quick keynote, Dotcom decided to answer questions via a Skype video call that was projected on a large screen at the event.

If you could get over the fact that Dotcom’s face was basically the only thing you could see floating around above interviewer Charles Graeber of Wired (think Zordon from Power Rangers or the Wizard from Wizard of Oz, except more German) and the constantly spotty connection, the conversation itself was a fairly decent overview of most of the stuff you’ve already heard.

“Let’s not forget, the White House agreed with SOPA. SOPA was going to be the gift to Hollywood for helping the president win the election,” Dotcom said. “When that didn’t happen, they needed a backup plan, and that was Megaupload.”

Dotcom said he still plans to sue both the U.S. government as well as the  major movie studio who helped treat civil law violations like copyright infringement as if they were criminal charges, (having explained that the U.S. can’t extradite a criminal on civil charges alone, so they engineer new reasons.)

Other Dotcom shared during the spotty video call:

• Mega is moving full steam ahead, with 3.5 million users, over 200 million files uploaded, and more than 80 third-party developers using its API.
• Dotcom doesn’t believe the U.S. will attack him with drones, but he does expect it to use them to spy on him.
• The artist-specific cloud media digital store/service for artists, MegaBox, should be released in another six months.
• He’s OK with you making a movie about his life story and screwing him on royalties by uploading pirated copies to the web.
• Supposedly, Dotcom still has a relationship with most of the artists from his MegaVideo (but he only mentioned Swiss Beatz).

VentureBeat photo/Tom Cheredar

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Texas — At South by Southwest, every party had long lines of people waiting to get in, sometimes stretching the length of a block.

Every party except one, that is. I walked down the street last night past a Microsoft Windows event, which not only had no line, it was so empty that a staffer was standing on the sidewalk urging us to come inside.

Maybe Microsoft needed to hire a more exciting band. Half a block further down, and the sidewalk was crowded with young folks hoping to get into a party sponsored by some technology company. I’m pretty sure the headliner wasn’t Robert Scoble.

SXSW is an interesting mashup of a music festival, a film festival, and a geek fest. This was my first year attending, and I was a bit nervous, given that everything I’d heard about it made it sound crowded, noisy, and uncomfortable. But I’m leaving impressed.

Short version: Yes, SXSW is crowded and in many ways a dysfunctional event. No, there’s no real news. But it’s a great experience.

I did almost everything wrong, but found that this was, perversely, the best way to attend SXSW. I went to just one keynote (by Sir Tim Berners-Lee — he made an impassioned and inspiring case for open web standards). I went to just a handful of panel discussions. I spent almost no time on the exhibition floor. And I skipped most of the parties, which were too crowded and too loud to make conversation possible.

But what I did was spend time hanging out various places: The lobby of the Hilton, the bar at the Four Seasons, and Capital Factory (a well-situated coworking space with dozens of startups, excellent Wi-Fi, and a giant bean bag). I met people I had known before only through Twitter. I ran into people I knew only in passing and spent hours getting to know them better. I met excitable young entrepreneurs burning with a desire to change the world, not just make a pile of money.

In short, it was an inspiring, intense weekend of talking to people and building connections.

One friend joked that SXSW was the best place he knew to spend time with his friends from San Francisco. It did seem like San Francisco was unusually well-represented among the attendees, but, as he pointed out, when they come to SXSW, these people put aside their daily grind. They give themselves permission to ignore their email inboxes, and that means you can have a sustained, uninterrupted conversation.

SXSW is like a microcosm of the startup community.

A session on startup-community building crystallized the whole experience for me. The speakers were Lesa Mitchell, of the Kauffman Foundation; Marc Nager, CEO of Startup Weekend; Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures; and Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos. They talked about the challenges and techniques involved in building not just a single startup but a whole ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs, whether in Brooklyn, Las Vegas, or anywhere else.

At one point, the musician Amanda Palmer stood up from the back of the crowd to ask the panel a question about crowdfunding and whether it had changed the nature of startup communities at all. She’s an expert on crowdfunding, having funded an album through Kickstarter, and she recently gave a very well received TED Talk.

The question energized the speakers, who talked about how crowdfunding has helped decentralize and democratize the funding process. But more importantly, crowdfunding has given people a chance to participate in something bigger than themselves. You can’t successfully raise capital from a crowd of supporters if it’s just about the money — there has to be something more.

The same thing goes for startup communities.

“If you can inspire your employees through a higher purpose, something bigger than themselves … you can accomplish so much more as a company,” said Hsieh, who did exactly that with Zappos. “And I think the same thing is true about community.”

At SXSW, I saw that firsthand. Nobody came here to talk about how they were going to make money. It’s all about changing the world. That may be idealistic and unrealistic. But it’s a refreshing change from everyday life in Silicon Valley.

Top photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Digital comic book store ComiXology crashed today after Marvel announced its promotion to give away 700 issues for free through the service (and dispelling all rumors that Doctor Doom was responsible for the crash.)

The crash, while unfortunate for comic fanboys, should reinforce that digital comic book adoption is on the rise, especially considering ComiXology’s success with iOS in-app purchases during the past two years.

“We expected a high degree of excitement for the Marvel initiative –- and had believed ourselves prepared –- but unfortunately we became overwhelmed by the immense response. We’re still struggling to keep our systems up, said ComiXology CEO David Steinberger in a blog post last night. “The result is that you aren’t getting your comics when and where you want. We don’t like letting you down. Our teams are working around the clock to resolve these issues so that you can have the experience you’ve come to expect.”

The promotion was part of Marvel’s push to make a big splash at the SXSW interactive show in Austin. It was supposed to add to previously announced projects such as an iOS version of its Marvel Unlimited digital comic book subscription service and Project Gamma, which automatically syncs music while you read your digital comics.

ComiXology is at least having a sense of humor around the situation (for example, the tweet embedded below), and has been working around the clock to get all the kinks worked out to make the site work properly again. We don’t know when service will return to normal, along with the new promotion, but I successfully downloaded some comics this morning. And I believe the free Marvel #1 issues will be recorded to your personal library, even if they don’t download immediately.

Current status: http://t.co/y5QUaDSd73—
  (@comiXology) March 12, 2013

Dr. Doom image via Marvel Comics

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Popular video-sharing service Vimeo has opened up its previously announced “Vimeo on Demand” paywall to all of its Vimeo Pro subscribers, a move that makes it easy for anyone to charge people to watch or download a movie online.

Vimeo has already made a lot of moves in 2013 to continue setting itself apart from YouTube and other web video services. It recently acquired iOS GIF-making app Echograph to help counter the buzz of hot video-sharing apps like Vine. Vimeo also partnered with GenArts’ Vivoom app to make it possible to add filters and “Looks” to Vimeo videos. The paywall availability (which is being made in conjunction with the company’s presence at SXSW in Austin) will likely help with Vimeo’s reputation of enabling creative professionals.

Vimeo tested the paywall service this past winter by offering it for six different films this past winter to get it ready for widespread usage. Video creators are able to set the price, country-by-country availability, and the duration of streaming availability. Creators also have the option to offer the film as a high-quality MP4 download on top of streaming.

“This service is set apart from others because it is attached to Vimeo and all the technology it’s known for,” Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor told VentureBeat. “We’re excited about the interest people have expressed about using Vimeo a distribution platform.”

What’s so good about the Vimeo paywall is that it’s applicable to all kinds of content, including feature films, short films, TV episodes, and education videos. I mentioned to Trainor during our conversation that I thought the most innovative video distribution was happening from comedians such as Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari. Both comedians made a lot of cash by offering DRM-free copies of their latest stand-up specials without the hassles. Trainor agreed that comedians generally have been good at online distribution and that Vimeo could be an attractive place for more content like, particularly because it would take care of the hassle of creating a stable distribution platform.

“We’re not ruling out Hollywood deals, but this is open for all kinds of genres and types of content,” Trainor said. “We’re encouraged by the quality of submissions we’ve seen so far.”

Ideally, if the paywall service is a hit, it could help Vimeo generate more revenue. After fees to PayPal or credit card companies, Vimeo takes a 10 percent cut of the transaction and the creator gets 90 percent.

Trainor said Vimeo makes the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, but it also takes in cash from advertising deals and payment transactions. The paywall service falls under the transactions business.

One of the first projects out of the gate for Vimeo on Demand is a re-mastered and expanded version of It’s Such a Beautiful Day, a film by Academy Award-nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt. Vimeo will be showing the film today at SXSW. The movie will be available exclusively on Vimeo on Demand for a $2 rental or you can buy it for $6.

IAC-owned Vimeo was founded in 2004 and claims have to 15 million registered users and more than 93 million unique visitors each month.

Top photo via Vimeo

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, TX — WayWire, the video startup that counts super-hero Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker among its founders, has confirmed to VentureBeat that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is one of its angel investors.

WayWire is a video service that basically wants to aggregate videos from multiple source and give its users the ability to sort those videos into their own channels based on a particular topic. For example, someone could create a “wire” for entrepreneurs, linking to various broadcast news sources from major media companies (NBC, Fox, etc.), web media companies (AOL), and user-generated videos (Vimeo, YouTube, Vine). The idea is that people can curate the news better than the main stream media, which in turn will abolish the practice of news organizations telling you what’s important everyday.

Booker accidentally revealed Hoffman as an investor during a panel at SXSW yesterday, which was first spotted by Reuters editor Paul Smalera.

Hoffman isn’t the only big name to drop some money into WayWire. The startup, which was founded back in June 2012, has raised $1.75 million in funding from a long list of high-profile angel investors, including Oprah Winfrey, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, music entrepreneur Troy Carter, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, and others.

With such a star-studded cast of investors, I’d think WayWire would have more pressure to ensure that its service was useful. However, both Booker and co-founder Sarah Ross told me that this isn’t much of a concern as they push full steam ahead with a new beta version of WayWire that will improve upon the alpha version that launched back in August.

Photo by Tom Cheredar

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Mass Relevance, a startup that brings calm to a crazy sea of social activity, is rolling out a new digital mosaic product today at SXSW that essentially builds an image using tweets, Facebook updates, photos, and even Vine videos.

You may have seen Mass Relevance’s platform and not even known it, as it’s been used several times to help manage the flow of tweets for broadcast television or streaming events, such as President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall. The company’s technology allows its clients to manage a list of questions sent to someone on stage or on camera, conduct polling in real-time, display a stream of the best social updates, and much more. In fact, Mass Relevance has even been powering the Q&A sessions at SXSW, which has netted the company compliments by nearly everyone on stage who has used it.

The new digital mosaic (called Dynamic Mosaic) integrates real-time social content from multiple sources — including content from Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, and Google+ – that automatically curates the stream of activity into something that’s visually pleasing and digestible to an audience. Brands that use the company’s new product have control over the experience, too. That means they can choose to flow sponsored and specific accounts to the foreground to promote messages, sponsors, and personalities. (Check out an example here.)

“Social curation and re-display is still very much a new frontier,” Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker told VentureBeat. “Social integration is typically approached in two ways:  1) Highlighting the content itself, for example a stream of Facebook posts and Tweets, or a photo wall of Instagram content, or 2) … not necessarily show[ing] the content itself, but rather visualiz[ing] how social conversations are trending by criteria like volume, keyword mentions, or geography.”

When I heard about Dynamic Mosaic, I immediately thought of a socially curated mass of content that would be displayed in the form of Abraham Lincoln, but apparently this isn’t the case with Mass Relevance’s new tool.

The mosaic flows from left to right, allowing about 2 seconds for photos to be paused and 6 seconds for automatically played vine videos.

The Dynamic Mosaic is the first platform to really show the market potential of Vine, the short-video social network that Twitter purchased a few months ago. Within days of the acquisition, Decker said, Mass Relevance’s platform was able to source, curate, and re-display Tweets in real-time that had Vine-embedded videos.

“What’s particularly interesting about how they are displayed within the Dynamic Mosaic is the way the experience automatically detects when Vine videos are embedded,” Decker said. “The motion of the experience will slow down to allow the video to play before streaming to the next piece of content — whether it be a Tweet, another video, or photo.”

Decker said there’s a huge opportunity for Vine:

“It’s more about the opportunity that Vine holds for major brands using the platform to create social experiences within their ‘owned’ digital properties. Now, major brands can leverage real-time video sharing gaining fast adoption within the market. The main difference between Vine and other social video clips is really the brevity — you’re only allowed 6 seconds. The short length of Vine videos force the user to focus on creativity with a less-is-more mentality. … What’s more, Vine is easily integrated into a platform and device where consumers are already spending increasingly long amounts of time — Twitter and mobile respectively. The sharability factor is high, as followers can quickly consume and amplify Vine videos throughout the social sphere.

One of the first clients to use the new Dynamic Mosaic will be IMAX, which is planning to show off a socially driven mosaic experience during SXSW’s Film Intermission party, with a video clip of its mosaic in action to go live tomorrow.

Founded in 2011, Austin, Tex.-based Mass Relevance has over 200 clients and has worked on many high-profile media properties,  including Marvel’s The Avengers, American Idol, X-Factor, 80 Plates, and The Voice.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

The UK is one of the hottest landing spots for overseas companies that want to make an entrance into the European Union. Why? It has an unparalleled combination of talent — and easy access to customers and clients.

Let’s start with talent — and that starts with education. According a recent ranking by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, UK universities took six of the top 10 spots among European universities for engineering and technology. Worldwide, in the same ranking, UK institutions took two of the top 10 worldwide spots.

The UK also attracts top tech talent from all over the European Union, as it’s one of the best places to start a new business. According to Doingbusiness.org — a site powered by data from the World Bank — the UK ranks seventh worldwide for the overall ease of doing business.

In addition, Tech City — a cluster of startups in East London — is a fast-growing hub for startups and the tech talent that comes along with them. Google has set up a campus in Tech City to engage with the start-up community, and U.S. venture-backed, high-potential companies like Airbnb and Yammer are based there.

But it’s not just talent: Companies come to the UK because of the ease of finding customers and clients here. As one of the world’s major financial capitals, London is where the world comes to do business.

And London is well-situated as a location for a company’s European headquarters, given its proximity to the Continent. London has many more European HQs for companies outside the EU than any other city in Europe, according to theEuropean Investment Monitor.

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) works with UK-based businesses to ensure their success in international markets, and to encourage the best overseas companies to look to the UK as their global partner of choice.

UKTI has professional advisers both within the UK and across more than 100 international markets. It’s got a variety of services to help startups and investors interested in the UK market:

1. Value Chain access
2. Roadshows for talent for corporations who need to recruit the best
3. Cluster knowledge: Where to find talent across the tech and design fields
4. University introductions: Who is producing the best grads and doing the most relevant research in UK?

We’re working with UKTI at SXSW to showcase the United Kingdom’s thriving start-up and investment scene via a series of quick hit video interviews with cool UK-based entrepreneurs and investors. If you couldn’t make it down to Austin this year, you can follow all of our SXSW coverage here. And make sure to join the Twitter conversation.

Photo credit: Anirudh Koul via photopin cc

FAKE GRIMLOCK is a giant robot dinosaur who is writing a book.

ME, FAKEGRIMLOCK, GREATEST ROBOT STARTUP DINOSAUR OF ALL, GO TO PUNY SXSW. HUMANS THERE FIGHT FOR ATTENTION IN GIANT CROWD ALL DOING SAME “UNIQUE” THING, DESPERATELY TRY TO MEET AND IMPRESS IMPORTANT PEOPLE, AND SPEND LOTS OF TIME DRINKING BEER WHILE HUNGRY, TIRED, AND BROKE.

JUST LIKE WORK AT STARTUP!

BUT ME NOTICE ONE IMPORTANT FACT.

MOST OF THEM DOING SXSW WRONG.

NOT FIGHT AND STARVE THING. THAT JUST PART OF DEAL. BUT REST OF IT? DO SXSW WRONG IS BIG WASTE OF MONEY. BUT NO WORRY! ME SET YOU STRAIGHT, TEACH YOU WAY DO SXSW RIGHT, SO IT ONLY MEDIUM SIZE WASTE OF MONEY!

HOTELS

THERE ONLY ONE WAY GET GOOD HOTEL AT SXSW. ON EXACT SECOND DATE FOR NEXT YEAR ANNOUNCED, JUMP IN TARDIS, TRAVEL BACK TO 2004, BOOK ROOM.

IF NOT HAVE TIME TRAVEL DEVICE HANDY, YOU OUT OF LUCK. CARDBOARD BOX IN ALLEY RUN ABOUT $4,000 PER NIGHT, AND STILL REQUIRE 2 HOUR TAXI DRIVE TO GET TO CONVENTION.

INSTEAD RENT HOUSE! NO ONE THAT ACTUALLY LIVE IN AUSTIN STAY THERE WHEN SXSW SHOW UP. GET FRIENDS, PAY LOTS LESS FOR EMPTY LOCAL HOUSE CAN WALK TO CONVENTION FROM. THEN MAKE FUN OF EVERYONE WAIT IN LINE FOR TAXI BACK TO CARDBOARD BOX EACH NIGHT.

FOOD

TEXAS GOOD AT TWO THINGS. COOK DELICIOUS MEAT, AND TELL EVERYONE HOW GREAT THEM ARE. AT LEAST THEM RIGHT ABOUT MEAT.

HERE SIMPLE RULES FOR FIND BEST FOOD:

1. IF SOMEONE BLOW MARKETING BUDGET ON GIVE AWAY FREE FOOD, EAT IT. NOT MATTER WHAT IT IS. CAN DELETE CRAPPY APP THEM MAKE YOU DOWNLOAD LATER.

2. WALK 4 BLOCKS FROM CONVENTION IN ANY DIRECTION. FOOD TRUCKS JUST AS GOOD, HAVE 3,000% LESS PEOPLE IN LINE FOR THEM.

3. NOW WALK 4 MORE BLOCKS, LOOK FOR ANY SIGN THAT SAY “BBQ,” GO IN AND SIT DOWN. ORDER MEAT UNTIL FULL. OR EXPLODE. IT WORTH IT.

BATHROOMS

AT SXSW, FIND OPEN BATHROOM LIKE FIND STARTUP THAT ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY. GRAB IT WHEN HAVE CHANCE, YOU PROBABLY NEVER FIND ANOTHER ONE.

SAME RULE APPLY TO PLACE TO CHARGE PHONE. WHY NO ONE AT SXSW BUILD BATHROOM WITH INTEGRATED PHONE CHARGER? IT BIG MYSTERY.

SESSIONS

GO TO SESSIONS AT SXSW VERY IMPORTANT! THEM BEST PLACE TO SIT DOWN, CHECK TWITTER. BRING HEADPHONES, SOME SPEAKERS GET NOISY.

OTHER IMPORTANT TIP IS TRY NOT TO SIT NEXT TO JOURNALIST FORCED TO PRETEND SESSION YOU IN  MATTER. BITTERNESS IN THEIR TEARS BURN HUMAN FLESH, LEAVE NASTY SCARS.

THE HYPE

EVERYTHING AT SXSW IS GREATEST THING EVER THAT CHANGE WORLD ANY DAY NOW. THAT DAY IS PROBABLY NEVER.

THAT NOT STOP HYPESTERS FROM INFEST SXSW. THEM LIKE EVERYTHING TERRIBLE ABOUT MARKETING GIVEN HUMAN FORM. NEIL GAIMAN PROBABLY ALREADY WRITING BOOK ABOUT IT.

IF SEE HYPESTERS COMING, NO PANIC. WALK CALMLY IN OTHER DIRECTION. NO MAKE EYE CONTACT. ONCE THEM SMELL FEAR, IT OVER. YOU FLYERED, BRACELETED, AND PITCHED BEFORE HAVE CHANCE TO RUN.

PACK OF HYPESTERS CAN STRIP SELF-RESPECT FROM AVERAGE SIZE HUMAN IN JUST 14 SECONDS. NO LET THAT HAPPEN TO YOU.

MEETING PEOPLE

REAL REASON EVERYONE GO TO SXSW? IT FULL OF PEOPLE MORE INTERESTING THAN YOU (UNLESS YOU ME, FAKEGRIMLOCK). NO WASTE TIME, MEET AS MANY OF THEM AS CAN.

BEST WAY DO THIS IS TALK TO WHOEVER NEXT TO YOU. AT SXSW, THERE ALWAYS SOMEONE NEXT TO YOU. OR 300 SOMEONES. USUALLY IN LINE OF SOME KIND. AT LEAST ONE OF THEM INTERESTING.

WEAR T-SHIRT WITH COMPANY LOGO. OR CONVERSATION STARTING PHRASE, LIKE “WE JUST RAISED $30 MILLION AND ARE DESPERATE FOR ENGINEERS THAT DON’T SUCK.” IT MUCH BETTER THAN RELY ON SOCIAL SKILLS YOU PROBABLY NOT HAVE.

FIND THAT INTERESTING SOMEONE? TALK, THEN SEND FOLLOW UP EMAIL WITH PHONE. RIGHT THERE. IT 2013, ONLY IDIOT TAKE BUSINESS CARD. BUSINESS CARD SAME AS SAY “YOU ARE BORING, IN 30 SECONDS ME FORGET YOU EVER EXISTED.”

IMPORTANT PEOPLE

YOU PROBABLY RUN INTO IMPORTANT PERSON BY ACCIDENT, LIKE DAVID COHEN IN ELEVATOR. THEM USUALLY NICE, POLITE, WILLING TO WATCH YOU EMBARRASS SELF UNTIL THEM HAVE CHANCE TO ESCAPE.

BETTER WAY IS CONTACT THEM ON TWITTER OR OTHER SOCIAL THING, ASK FOR COFFEE. IF YOU NOT COMPLETE WASTE OF THEM TIME, THEM MIGHT SAY YES.

IF NOT SAY YES, TRY DIFFERENT IMPORTANT PERSON. THERE LOTS OF THEM. EVENTUALLY YOU FIND ONE THAT HAVE HOLE IN SCHEDULE MORE BORING THAN TALKING TO YOU.

THE PARTIES

THERE TWO KINDS OF PARTIES AT SXSW. BIG, NOISY, OPEN TO PUBLIC ONES WHERE EVERYONE GET DRUNK, AND PRIVATE ONES THAT EXACTLY THE SAME BUT YOU NOT INVITED TO THEM.

GET DRINKS, HAVE FUN, SLEEP IN WHILE SMARTER, MORE IMPORTANT PEOPLE HAVE MEETINGS OVER COFFEE NEXT MORNING.

THAT IT

NOW YOU KNOW EVERYTHING NEED FOR DO SXSW RIGHT. GO TO MEET PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT ONES. MAYBE LEARN SOMETHING IF ACCIDENTALLY FIND GOOD SESSION. AVOID HYPESTERS. EAT MEAT.

AND BE AWESOME.

FAKE GRIMLOCK is a giant robot dinosaur who gives startups advice on how to be more awesome. He is writing a book, THE BOOK OF AWESOME, and just launched a Kickstarter project for the book at South by Southwest. He always writes in all caps.

Editor’s note: You can also enter our #WinSXSW contest for a chance at fame, fortune, meetings with VCs, and over $100,000 in prizes.

Photo courtesy Fake Grimlock.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Film has borrowed a lot from comics in recent years, and now it’s returning the favor.

Marvel’s new “Project Gamma” (which, sadly, has nothing to do with the Hulk — at least not directly) aims to bring a cinematic level of music to the world of comics. Using s0-called adaptive audio, each comic will be infused with a rousing soundtrack meant to immerse readers in their stories.

(“Adaptive” is an important word here because people read at very different speeds. Slapping a rigid score on digital comics wouldn’t be particularly useful.)

It’s tough to describe the project in words, and not even Marvel’s promotional video (embedded below) does all that great of a job explaining it. Basically, the thing sounds like it will do to audio what Marvel’s motion comics did to visuals: make the reading experience more immersive and cinematic. (Although, I doubt this is something most comic readers are hankering for.)

Marvel hasn’t cleared up the big logistical questions yet, such as whether this a new platform or plugs into Marvel’s existing apps. Nor is the company saying when, exactly, the first Project Gamma comics will be available. In any case, expect to hear more from Marvel about the effort in the coming months.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, TX — While I’ve always believed  our lack of warp drive technology is what’s kept humanity from meeting the Vulcans, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said there’s another, more practical roadblock: rockets, specifically the kind you only get a single use out of.

Okay, he didn’t actually mention Vulcans, but he was very clear that the future of space travel depends on us being able to create a rocket that isn’t a zillion dollars and can be reused multiple times.

“Reusable rockets are vastly important if you think it’s important that humanity span beyond earth and become a multi-planetary species,” Musk said to two very crowded ballrooms during a keynote at SXSW yesterday. “If you can imagine watching Star Trek, and if they built a new star ship after every trip? It’s pretty silly. And all the other transports we use — planes, trains, cars, bikes — are all reusable. But not rockets.”

Musk’s initial space project would have sent a platform-like greenhouse to Mars to (hopefully) eventually pave the way for humans to survive on the planet. He and his team initially nailed all the costs, the scientific process of making it actually work, how to send pictures of it back to earth — pretty much everything except for those asshole disposable rockets.

“The first idea I came up with was actually to do a philanthropic mission to send a greenhouse to the surface of Mars, with seeds of dehydrated gel that would hydrate upon landing,” Musk said. “You’d have this cool greenhouse, with green plants on a red background. That would be the money shot.”

Musk explained that the cost of disposable rockets makes space travel truly prohibitive for a large number of businesses to jump into the field. For instance, he said, the cost of the fuel and oxygen on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 spacecraft is .9 percent of the entire cost of the trip, while the rocket accounts for the rest of it.

The SpaceX chief exec also treated the audience to some newly released footage of the company’s fourth flight test of reusable self-landing rocket Grasshopper, which we’ve embedded below.

For now, Space X is making do with the one-off rockets to launch cargo ships into space via its Dragon 2 spacecraft, which recently had some problems docking with the International Space Station before the company called the mission a success.

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

As part Comixology’s effort to raise awareness about the creator-owned digital comics via Comixology Submit, the startup has teamed up with indie fan favorite artist Shannon Wheeler to illustrate the insanity that is SXSW.

A former Austin, Texas, resident, Wheeler is perhaps best known for independent comic book Too Much Coffee Man, but he has also gained attention for his work as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. (Also his comics are rad.)

Comixology has shared the first three digital web comics about this week’s SXSW Interactive exclusively with VentureBeat, and I must say they are both pretty accurate. (Especially the top one, which I’m fighting with right now.)

Check back soon for a few more comics from Wheeler.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Texas — SpaceX’s plans to build a commercial space port in Texas are likely to move forward, according to founder and CEO Elon Musk at SXSW.

The space port, which would be in Brownsville, Texas, would be the third such launch site for the company (with its other ports in California and Cape Canaveral, Fla.). Texas is at an optimal spot for launching into space, but Musk did say it was one of four that the company could end up building a port. Puerto Rico and Hawaii are also possibilities due to their nearness the planet’s equator and are still on U.S. soil.

“Because space travel is considered as a weapon of mass destruction, it makes it very difficult for us to go into other countries,”  Musk said.

While Musk did participate in a keynote at SXSW, the true intent of his visit was to meet with the Texas state legislature about passing new rules to protect the company from lawsuits related to its space launches.

“Right now Texas is probably the lead candidate, but we need legislation passed before we can move forward,” Musk said.

A decision about whether to set up camp in the state should be reached this year, with construction on the space port tentatively starting in 2014.

VentureBeat will have more details about Musk’s talk at SXSW later today, including his thoughts on getting humanity off the planet, NASA, and those asshole disposable rockets.

Photo credit: Tom Cheredar

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Travis Kalanick is a startup warrior who fearsomely defends his company against all who challenge it.

The CEO of Uber revealed the next stage of his battle plan while speaking at a Lean Startup event held by 500 Startups and Eric Ries at SXSW in Austin. Kalanick said he plans to quadruple the size of his staff in the next year, growing from 200 to 800 members, and continue global expansion.

Uber is a car service that books luxury taxi rides on demand from smartphones. The transactions are completely done through the mobile app, which helps get around the tangled web of transportation regulations.

While users love it, Uber has had to defend itself from day one. Cab services are heavily regulated in America, and many transportation agencies and city councils said Uber is illegal because it results in unlicensed cabbies to drive a taxi. Kalanick has fought for the right to operate around the country, facing challenges in California, Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago.

This week at SXSW, Austin’s City Council tried to shut Uber down, and Kalanick responded by offering the service for free. SideCar, another ride-sharing app, is doing the same. The municipal complaint is that services like these detract revenue from the city-licensed cab drivers, but efforts to uphold the hegemony of taxis are eroding as startups like Uber, SideCar, and Zimride/Lyft continue to acquire customers and enter new markets.

Kalanick his known for espousing the mantra of “ask for forgiveness, not for permission.” His company is now in 30 cities around the world, and he is fighting battles in half of them, although he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Competition is fun,” he said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012. “If there isn’t competition, what is the freaking purpose? Let’s have some fun and make the world a better place at the same time. You have to be fighter, you have to be a warrior, and if not, you should go do something that is a little less disruptive. I’m bringing it, I’m not sleeping. If the other guy is sleeping, I am going to kick his ass.”

Soon there will be 800 in his army, not to mention the thousands they shepherd around, to keep fighting the good fight — or in this case, the good drive.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Texas — There’s a direct line of descent from the NeXT machine, which is what Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web, to the iPhone.

“It’s basically the same machine,” Berners-Lee said, referring to the underlying BSD Unix core.

That was the beginning of a rapid-fire, enthusiastic, often technical talk about the history of the Web and the virtues of the open Web as a platform, here at South by Southwest Interactive, an annual conference/festival of geekdom.

His talk, “Open Web Platform — Hopes and Fears,” played to a large crowd, although the conference hall it was held in was only half full. (It wasn’t clear if the bleacher seating at the back was closed off or not, but only a handful of people sat there.)

Berners-Lee took the stage after an introduction by John Perry Barlow, who told about his first encounter with the Web in its earliest days, when it was still just emerging from CERN. Then, TBL — as he’s often called — talked extempore for the next 50 minutes without stopping.

The Web was open by design from the very beginning, Berners-Lee said.

“HTML, HTTP, and URLs: The idea was, they had to be universal,” he said. There were no restrictions on the programming languages people could use to generate Web pages, as long as they were compatible with the basic standards. And those standards were made to be familiar to people using already-existing standards. For instance, he put tags inside angle brackets so it would look familiar to SGML people. HTTP headers are similar to other communications protocols. URLs were made to be compatible with domain name system.

Berners-Lee made the system declarative (like CSS), not procedural (like JavaScript), following what he called his “principle of least power.”

“Procedural systems are powerful, because you can do whatever you like,” he said. But they’re less interoperable and shorter-lived; declarative systems tend to last longer because they’re more universally compatible.Incidentally, declarative systems are also more secure.

“If it’s a Turing complete system, you can’t limit it,” he said — and that can lead to security problems.

Berners-Lee spent the bulk of his time talking about the value of HTML5 and the Open Web Platform, and encouraging people to develop mobile web apps rather than native apps.

“It’s a powerful platform, because JavaScript is Turing complete,” Berners-Lee said.

“It’s got all the power of HTML5, like easily-inserted video, and in the future, easily-inserted conferences. … And it’s got the APIs,” for accessing hardware and other capabilities on the device, such as a smartphone’s accelerometer, camera, local storage.

“HTML5 is everywhere,” Berners-Lee said. It’s even being used in signs, like you might see on an electronic highway billboard or kiosks in airports.

“I wonder whether people will still continue to print stuff like this,” he said, indicating the backdrop behind the stage, “or whether the conference hall will just be pixels.”

One of the reasons the Web was successful, he said, is because it followed the basic openness of the Internet protocols that preceded it.

“When they developed TCP and IP, they did a wonderful thing, which is they completely ignored how it would be used,” he said. “They didn’t design it specifically for sending email messages, or for file retrieval.”

TBL takes his own shots at the crowd.

While he was being fitted with a microphone onstage before his talk began, fans started walking up to take pictures of one of the heroes of the Internet. Shortly, Berners-Lee turned his own camera on the crowd. From the stage, he aimed a small point-and-shoot camera back at the photographers in front of him, snapping pic after pic as they snapped him.

Before long, the crowd of photographers had at least doubled in size. People (including myself) were apparently unable to resist the meta-ness of the moment, photographing the Web’s inventor photographing them.

Then Berners-Lee started throwing stickers into the crowd. “Proprietary logos!” he called out. “Free proprietary logos! Use them however you’d like.”

He was clearly enjoying his fame — and enjoying turning it on its head.

Some other nuggets from TBL’s speech:

• “Build platforms,” Berners-Lee exhorted the crowd. “When you build something big and complicated and powerful, it’s not a question of what you can do — it’s a question of what people can do with what you built.”
• “We really expected 3D to take off more quickly. It’s one of those things that is always just around the corner.”
• “We have the potential for every HTML document to be a computer — and for it to be programmable. Because the thing about a Turing complete computer is that … anything you can imagine doing, you should be able to program.
• “Tell all the kids you know … don’t teach them Microsoft Word. Tell them that you can do anything with a computer that you can imagine. And the reason it sucks right now is you haven’t fixed it.”
• Berners-Lee also emphasized the importance — and difficulty — of contributing to working groups on Web standards. He said if you can’t join a working group, you should find someone who is on a group like this, and buy them a beer, because the work is really difficult.

Looking back on the Web, Berners-Lee offered some perspective on what the Web means most to him.

“The kittens are great, don’t get me wrong,” he said — but he went on to say how much more he valued the Web’s capability to solve international, global problems.

“Remember, when you do that … keep an eye out, and spend a certain amount of time fighting for net neutrality, and fighting spying and blocking.”

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

It was only a matter of time before the quantified self movement and the photo-sharing obsession combined.

Memoto is a “life logging” camera that captures photos every 30 seconds. The company demoed the device at South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, hoping to generate interest and attract buyers for the small $279 device.

Candid photos often turn out better than posed ones, and disrupting a wonderful moment to capture it is not ideal. This tiny camera clips on a collar or a jacket, andyou can even wear it as a necklace. Photographers can then go about their day without the persistent need to photography and document everything.

The device includes a clock and GPS, and it works with an application that you can use to review the photos or watch a time-lapse video of a series of the image. Images are organized for you, and the archives are searchable by time and location.

“The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment of your past,” said a product description on the company’s website.

Memoto holds up to 6,000 photos (8GB) and comes with a year of free online photo storage, and the battery allegedly works for two days before needing a recharge. Right now, it doesn’t have social media integrations, although that is likely in the pipeline. The device does not have an off-switch or a way to delete photos, which of course raises security and privacy concerns.

People are constantly capturing data in this ever-connected mobile world, whether it is logging places they have been or tracking cardiovascular activity during exercise. It seems our generation is rabid for evidence of our own existence. Memoto’s Kickstarter campaign surpassed its goal by more than a factor of ten. The Swedish startup set up a $50,000 campaign and raised $550,189 from 2,871 backers. A group of European investors also contributed, bringing Memoto’s financing to almost $1 million.

Preorders are now available and delivery is estimated for April.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, TX — Rather than take time to explain in detail what his forthcoming book Without Their Permission is about, Reddit co-founder and all-star entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian decided to call his congresswoman about bad cybersecurity bill CISPA during his presentation at SXSW today.

Using the Contact Congress iOS app, Ohanian proceeded to ask a clueless congressional aide why Rep. Yvette Clarke — a ranking member of the Homeland Security subcommittee for Cybersecurity and Technology – *Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez hadn’t responded to his question about her support for CISPA last week. (The aide didn’t actually know what the bill was, and suggested he call back Monday morning, not understanding he was on speaker phone with hundreds of people listening in.)

“One of the advantages of living in a world where you can see what Kim Kardashian had for breakfast is that we have a new level of expectation,”  Ohanian said. “And if I can see what a total stranger celebrity is having for breakfast, shouldn’t I know what my elected official thinks about things? Shouldn’t I have that same level of entitlement? These people work for us. We hire them. We fire them. We pay their salaries.”

Ohanian’s talk covered a broad range of issues that centered around his time traveling through the mid-west talking to entrepreneurs, and finding out how they’re making communities better. The presentation kicked off with an extended trailer from the crowdfunded documentary “Silicon Prairie” shot during the bus tour.

“The next big change is going to come from the people you normally wouldn’t expect it from, and that’s going to happen through the Internet,” Ohanian said, which parlayed into a conversation about the struggles to keep the Internet free, accessible, and open.  And more concerning, he said, is the role Hollywood is playing on getting restrictive tech policy (like SOPA, PIPA, and now CISPA) passed by congress.

“It’s not Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, it’s Hollywood versus everyone,” Ohanian added.

While the talk itself was true to its description in the SXSW scheduling guide, I can’t help but think that these would be the same kinds of talking points that would help launch a political campaign — (say, for that congressional seat in Brooklyn for 2014?)

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

When it comes to 3D imaging cameras, such as those used in video games and for 3D printers, your options are kind of limited unless you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on multiple pieces of equipment. This fact alone makes the $1,800-$2,800 Lynx A Camera from Austin-based startup Lynx Laboratories all the more impressive.

“Really, it’s kind of stupid that nobody is making highly sophisticated cameras that can do more than one thing at a time, like with (camera-specific) apps,” Lynx Labs co-creator and CEO Chris Slaughter told me during last night’s startup crawl at SXSW. “We’re looking for the low-hanging fruit for people who want 3D imaging data and offering them a way to actually do something with it.”

The camera records all angles of a non-moving object and then displays it on screen. As you can see in the videos below, the team recorded a guy dressed in an iPhone costume who was sitting on a giant bean bag. Once the image was processed, you could see the dimensions of the costume and bean bag as if you were changing the viewing angle on a video game. In addition to object modeling, the Lynx Camera can also do motion capture (for use in games and animation) and scene modeling and can record for green screens.

The startup, run by six current students at UT Austin, already has a $150,000 funding grant from the university and a patent on the technology. Additionally, the team has raised $82,000 from a Kickstarter campaign that still has another nine days left before closing.

“The market opportunity here is just incredible,” Slaughter said. He explained that the 3D imaging tech alone would be useful for many industries, including healthcare, national defense, game development, shipping, and more.

Slaughter said the cameras can be produced in about two hours. The team currently has about 40 orders from the Kickstarter campaign.

Photo by Tom Cheredar

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

The UK has always been a hotbed of technical innovation — the world’s first computer was developed in Manchester and the UK’’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, without which most of the companies that are at SXSW would simply not exist. Now the UK is rapidly becoming a place where not just the innovators can excel but also the entrepreneurs can succeed.

You might not think so, given that most hot tech startups to date have tended to come from other areas: Silicon Valley, New York, and other parts of the world. But the UK government has focused a lot of its support measures on the tech sector and R&D activity, and that’s rapidly making a big difference to the startup climate here.

Whether that’s direct grant funding for new products and services, R&D tax credits, Patent Box legislation, or simply putting universities and companies together to foster more innovation, the UK government has a wealth of ways to support young tech companies.

Overseas tech companies are finding that the UK is a great gateway to the U.S. as well as the rest of Europe. Many companies are using the UK as a testbed to launch their services and see how they play with an English-speaking audience before taking them to the bigger U.S. and EU markets.

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) works with UK-based businesses to ensure their success in international markets, and encourage the best overseas companies to look to the UK as their global partner of choice.

UKTI has professional advisers both within the UK and across more than 100 international markets. It’s got a variety of services to help startups and investors interested in the UK market:

1. UKTI can act as a partner finder, helping you locate appropriate local contacts for likely partnerships.
2. UKTI can help U.S. companies plug into the UK’’s research community, both in Universities and Companies.
3. The Global Entrepreneurs Programme provides access to VCs and angels in the UK for start-ups.
4. London’s Tech City, a cluster of start-ups in East London, is the fastest growing tech cluster in the European Union, and one of a number of tech-related clusters in London and rest of the UK.
5. TSB can help startups with accessing UK research grants for product development.

VentureBeat is working with UKTI at SXSW to showcase the United Kingdom’s thriving start-up and investment scene via a series of quick hit video interviews with cool UK-based entrepreneurs and investors who will be at the show. We’ll also have plenty of other coverage of the news from South By, so if you can’t make it down to Austin this year, you can follow all of our SXSW coverage here. And make sure to join the Twitter conversation.

Photo credit: John Keogh/Flickr