Want to know what companies really stood out at South by Southwest? Scroll down.

Just like every year, SXSW was a big, crazy cluster of startups jostling for attention. But this year, we decided to turn the social media noise into an asset. Our #WinSXSW contest, powered by our friends at Fandrop, asked would-be SXSW champions to give us their 30-second pitches on video, and to answer two quick questions about the high and low points of their entrepreneurial journeys (also in 30 seconds or less).

Then, we asked those startups and their friends to share their video pitches via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest. Every share counted as a vote.

At the end of the contest, we’ve awarded winners in several categories, based on who got the most “votes” via social media.

The editorial team of VentureBeat also picked our favorite. And the illustrious panel of investors we recruited as judges have their own picks (a tie, in that case).

The winners get a ton of cool prizes, and we’ll be following up with every company below so they can pitch their ideas to the team at VentureBeat. We’ll also help them with introductions to a few key VCs.

Investors who helped out in various ways on this contest included Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures), Josh Elman (Greylock), Arif Janmohamed (Lightspeed Venture), Ajay Agarwal (Bain Capital Venture), Salil Deshpande (Bay Partners), Scott Raney (Redpoint Ventures), Brian Ascher (Venrock).

Check out the winners below.

Best Overall: Citybot

Citybot is a mobile application that acts as an intelligent city planning guide.

Best Mobile: Dealflicks

Dealflicks is an online service that helps you save tons of money on movie tickets and concession snacks. It’s sort of like a Priceline for the movie business.

Best Seed-Funded: FarFaria

FarFaria is a iOS app that provides interactive storytelling for young children.

Best Bootstrapped: Jobhuk

Jobhuk is a job listings site that focuses on referrals and recommendations to give the best results for bother job seekers and employers.

Best Product Video: Sharewave

Sharewave makes it easier for startups to organize information visually for their investors.

VentureBeat Pick: Cloudability

Cloudability helps companies with cloud-based services optimize their spending by providing analytical reporting on usage.

Investors’ Pick – tie: Cloudability and FarFaria

and

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

The Creative Finder is a network for creative professionals, such as photographers, illustrators, and designers. We caught up with the Singapore-based company last week at SXSW in Austin, where it was launching its newest product, Imgembed.

Imgembed is a simple tool for uploading images and tracking their use. People who want to use the image (for instance, on a blog) can do so easily just by clicking the little “embed” button, as seen in the screenshot above. That gives you a code to put on your own blog or website. The photographer’s name will automatically be included with the image, so bloggers don’t have to hassle with typing that data in separately (and image owners can be sure that others won’t use their images without attribution).

If someone wants to use an image without the embedded attribution, they can pay the creator a small amount. The amount you pay depends on how many people actually view the image; The Creative Finder takes 30 percent, and the rest goes to the creator.

“Many people just use an image without putting the name of the photographer under it. So with Imgembed, we make it so easy to use, and it’s totally for free, that people … no longer have any need to steal images from Google Images or anywhere on the Internet,” says founder Alex Goh.

Watch the full video interview with Goh 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.

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.

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.

The #WinSXSW crew just spent five days at South by Southwest shooting interviews with 126 different up-and-coming startups.

Every one’s a winner, of course, in our hearts. But in the cold light of reality, only a few rise to the top of the popularity contest we call #WinSXSW. (VentureBeat is co-hosting the contest along with Fandrop.)

By now, you know the rules: Companies give 30-second answers to our interview questions. We post the videos on WinSXSW.com. Then you vote on the pitches you like the best, by sharing those videos through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn. The winners are those companies with the most votes at the end of the contest, but we also picked daily winners for each of the days of SXSW Interactive.

So far, more than 50,000 people have visited the #WinSXSW site to view videos or cast votes.

The winner for day three was Citybot, a mobile app that helps people plan trips and map out their itineraries. (Vote for Citybot on #WinSXSW here.)

And for day four, the top vote-getter was Jobhuk, a crowdsourcing platform for referring potential hires and hiring new employees.

(Vote for Jobhuk on #WinSXSW here.)

Since SXSW Interactive is over, we’re not interviewing any more companies. But you can still enter if you want — we just created a new category, for “Best Product Video,” and all you need to do to enter is register and then upload your own product video.

And there’s still time to vote on your favorites. Voting ends on Friday, the 15th, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, and we’ll announce the winners on March 20. Check the full list of #WinSXSW entries to see the current front-runners in each category.

Oh, and by the way, there are real prizes, including cash and services worth more than $100,000, plus introductions to top investors at A-list venture firms, and the possibility of coverage on VentureBeat.

Top photo: Snapr/Flickr

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

Millions of startups (well, at least hundreds) hit Austin, Texas (gently, with love) at the same time (almost) trying desperately to get our attention (tough task) and eventually yours (even harder).

To help, we’re running the VentureBeat #WinSXSW contest every single day, with millions of dollars in prizes (total lie), massive street cred (in Austin and Afghanistan), and free beer for life (in our San Francisco office on Thursdays and Fridays when the moon is full the night before the tide is high during leap years, not transferable to dependents).

Two of those startups — just two — rocked days one and two more than all the rest, and they are the first winners of #WinSXSW. They are Deverge and Dealflicks.

Deverge is a fairly stealthy startup from New York focused on tech and comedy that raised over $150,000 on Kickstarter. They tell their story better than we do:

And Dealflicks is “Priceline for movie tickets” that focuses on getting “butts in seats” in movie theaters. The company has taken about $400,000 in seed capital, and here’s their pitch:

Congratulations to both Deverge and Dealflicks!

Oh, and by the way, there are real prizes, including cash and services worth more than $100,000.

Want to enter? The contest is still open as long as SXSW is open.

Here’s how.

photo credit: JamesJam 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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Voting begins today in VentureBeat’s and Fandrop’s #WinSXSW contest.

Enter now — and tell all your friends to start sharing your entry — for a shot at fame, fortune, and a chance to pitch some top investors.

We’re proud to announce a new incentive for entering: Dan Scholnick of top-tier VC firm Trinity Ventures has agreed to take a look at the winning pitches. Scholnick has a robust portfolio, including New Relic, Aryaka, and Cloudscaling. If you win, we’ll make introductions and you take it from there.

(A score of other investors are offering their expertise to the #WinSXSW contest. Check the site for the details.)

We’ll highlight the winners on VentureBeat, of course as well as invite them to pitch us at our San Francisco or New York office.

And did we mention that there are over $100,000 in prizes?

Check out the #WinSXSW website to register and vote, and to find out where and when you can catch our video crew.

The rules are simple: Go to WinSXSW.com and sign up. Then look for the #WinSXSW video crew at SXSW (check the site for our schedule), or tweet at us using @WinSXSW and the hashtag #WinSXSW to set up a meet. Give our camera crew your 30-second pitch, and we’ll post it on the website.

That’s all you get: 30 seconds to make your case.

Then the fun begins. Get your friends to share your 30-second video pitch via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest. Every share counts as a vote, as long as you do it through the #WinSXSW site. Whoever has the most votes on March 15 wins.

Good luck! And we’ll look for you at the show.

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.

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

Only a handful of TV brands have wildly loyal fans that essentially buy whatever products or services that affiliated with it. Think Oprah or NASCAR, and probably the one that’s the most fun — the WWE. That said, it’s really to their benefit to come up with a way to harness all the social activity from their stars into a single stream.

And that’s where Echo’s social platform comes in. No matter where a pro wrestler decides to spend their energy on the social web (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Vine, YouTube, Tout, and so on), Echo captures it into a sole pipe using one of its social apps that a brand like WWE can integrate into its main website.

“We’re building on the WWE brand itself instead of diluting it,” said Echo CEO and co-founder Khris Loux during a panel at SXSW today that included heavyweight champ John Cena and EVP of creative for WWE Stephanie McMahon (and daughter of WWE founder Vince McMahon).”We’ve been evangelizing how to integrate social into TV, but it took someone like the WWE to really get it and just run with it though.”

The move actually makes a lot of sense because having a ton of actively tweeting superstars adds a ton of value for Twitter, but very little for brands like the WWE if it can’t entirely direct where your attention is going next.

Cena is perhaps the best test case for why a company would want to leverage all its social activity into a single place, as he has 14.5 million Facebook fans to the NFL’s 7 million. And when he shares something about a particular product (whether it be an unofficial endorsement, mention, or even a ridicule), his fans respond. With Echo’s help, he has been able to push his social sharing to critical mass across all social networks since his fans are probably looking at the WWE’s social stream and responding using their social tool of choice.

For instance, Cena explained that he was wearing lots of bright colors to the ring, which led fellow WWE champ The Rock to call him out as a “Fruity Pebble” — and sending the term trending on Twitter for the first time ever. Post, who makes the Fruit Pebbles cereal, contacted the company about doing sponsorship.

“There was a little bit of a learning period, when we had to explain that, yes … The Rock is saying that to make fun of me. But at the end of the day, everybody is going to buy your cereal,” Cena said, adding that his picture was the first to replace Fred Flintstone in the history of the sugary breakfast product’s existence.

WWE has also utilized Echo’s platform to create interest across the social web on a more permanent basis by starting its weekly Monday Night Raw event a half hour before it hits the TV broadcast via the company’s mobile apps. Think of this as sort of a pregame show for “Monday Night Football,” except since its pro wrestling, three separate cable networks aren’t devoted to roundtable discussions about what to expect that night.

So, not only is the WWE able to capitalize on new sponsorship and advertising revenue via the mobile app broadcast, but it’s also getting its fans more engaged.

The WWE said it’s mobile app offers the most active second screen experience in the U.S.

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.”

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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.

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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

South by Southwest Interactive, an annual rite of inspiration, information, barbecue, booze, and #humblebrags, starts tomorrow.

As hipsters descend upon Austin, Texas, a huge flood of tech startups will be angling for attention. How do you rise above the noise? We’ve got a way: Enter our unofficial, awesome, tongue-in-cheek, yet very practical #WinSXSW contest, hosted by VentureBeat and Fandrop.

The rules are simple: Go to WinSXSW.com and sign up. Then look for the #WinSXSW video crew at the Austin Hilton, every day from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Central, or tweet at us using @WinSXSW and the hashtag #WinSXSW. Give our camera crew your 30-second pitch, and we’ll post it on the website.

That’s all you get: 30 seconds to make your case.

Then the fun begins. Get your friends to share your 30-second video pitch via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest. Every share counts as a vote, as long as you do it through the #WinSXSW site. Whoever has the most votes on March 15 wins.

We’ll be writing about the top startups right here on VentureBeat. In addition, we’ve lined up some great prizes, including cash and services worth more than $100,000.

So get your startup registered! Look for us at SXSW — and may the best company win.

Find more SXSW coverage here.

Photo credit: David Berkowitz/Flickr

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.

John Boitnott is Senior Account Manager at Viralheat

Whether you think of it as some sort of bloated travesty, or what some call the Super Bowl of technology gatherings, SXSW is in no way like what it once was just 5 years ago.

Former Austin resident Anne Ahola Ward knew it well. She’s now an internet marketing specialist in San Francisco but was there when SXSW Interactive barely filled a quarter of the convention center exhibit hall.

“I started working for my first dot-com as a designer/developer in ‘99,” Ward said. “It was a very disorganized group of people speaking about technology and philosophy. Nobody announced it or what they were doing, sometimes there didn’t seem to be a moderator. Only a very small crowd showed interest locally. In the early days, SXSW Interactive gave us techies a homecoming (dance) and a summit where great minds would meet. SXSW interactive lost its momentum after the dot bust.  I remember offering tickets to people and they’d just shrug and say “so what.” None of my friends wanted to go.”

Every geek’s SXSW story is different. The first time I ever saw the festival, or Austin itself for that matter, my old boss flew me out to interview for a job right in the middle of the music portion back in 2008. I took a day off work, flew all the way to Texas from San Francisco and arrived in the middle of the concert and party sponsored by the company (still one of the biggest parties at SXSW). I went back stage, wearing a suit and expecting some kind of formal interview. My soon-to-be boss walked up, laughed, and said, “Good God man get changed into something more casual!” A quick change of clothes and stop by the bar later, I was interviewing for what would become my job for the next year and a half.

How could I not leave behind my stagnant office job for a life of travel, music, fun and happiness that the party represented — with SXSW as the backdrop. I knew if I took the job, these types of scenes would be a part of my future. It was intoxicating. Through a half a dozen social media jobs since, I’ve come back to Austin every year.

Things obviously changed as the years went by. In 2007 came what Anne calls “the colossal splash of Twitter,” when the site truly became a communication tool for hundreds of geeks who had primarily only been using the likes of AIM or ICQ. Things were about to change rapidly in the coming years, to the point where the entire festival has now become overshadowed by the once-tiny Interactive portion. As hundreds of tech companies, large and small, realized SXSW was a perfect place to market themselves, the atmosphere of the whole thing changed.

One of the biggest official festival events, TechKaraoke, is no more because of what some people call too much “SXSW Inc.” The ever-growing price of tickets, the lack of hotel rooms and sheer mass of people clogging the streets during Interactive, have not only obliterated the “dot-com” feel of the early aughts, but have caused some people to give up going altogether, or to not buy tickets to the actual conference. Instead, many folks attend the parties, and nothing else.

It’s increasingly common for me to hear people saying that they are attending, but then qualify it as ‘without buying a pass,’” said Ward. “You don’t need a pass if you’re just pitching your ideas. The talent of the festival is all around you and they’re quite ready to get out of the convention center.”

To bring back some of the home-town vibe, Ward started a contest called “PitchMyHouse.com,” in which she gave out rooms at her 1970s Austin ranch house to geeks who gave her the best ideas for building awareness around her mobile marketing blog mobilefomo.com.

One of the festival’s formerly biggest sponsors, Techkaraoke, canceled their party this year because it is “too expensive to be an official SXSW event,” Ward said. “Their cancellation signals proof of this change. People are openly defying SXSW, Inc.”

Ward says the TechKaraoke cancellation was inspiration for her in trying to bring back a bit of the small town feel that was once a part of the festival, by starting “PitchMyHouse.com.”

“Hotel rooms in Austin during the festival are always in such short supply,” she said. “Pitchmyhouse.com felt like a return to Austin’s roots. SXSW used to be a meeting of the minds, where ideas would just flow. Now it has become a place to hawk your wares. The festival has lost that sense of community and spark of innovation. I wanted to mobilize a team of talented people and really have fun this year,” said Ward.

She may have done just that. Ward recently announced that the team from Funny or Die won the contest, and will be occupying the house. “I am so excited to be hosting some of the Funny or Die folks at my house. Their pitch was by far the best… Let’s just say the pitch is so good that I will not spoil it by sharing it here.”

Old School image via DreamWorks

John is Senior Account Manager at Viralheat, where he helps people utilize that company’s social media monitoring and engagement products. He worked as a journalist for 15 years for NBC and the Village Voice among others. He wrote for VentureBeat on a regular basis back in 2010 and ’11. John started using social media to help bring visitors to web sites back in 2007 and has been doing it ever since.

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.

There is nothing more disappointing than shelling out major money for an event badge, meticulously planning your agenda, and showing up to the event only to find all the sessions you were looking forward to are overbooked.

For attendees of the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, this has become a recurring disappointment. Last year, event organizers sold 24,000 Interactive badges, yet the keynote room only accommodated 1,500 attendees.

This has become a major thorn in SXSW’s side and a vocal frustration for festival goers who are actually there for the sessions, not just the parties — and there are more of us than one would think!

The problem is magnified as SXSW grows exponentially each year. Attendees often have to be in line an hour or more before the most popular sessions, yet all sessions are planned just 10 minutes apart. We are often left with two strategy options:

• Pay $1150 (the current price for an Interactive-only badge) to get into maybe one popular session and another lesser session a day, or
• Settle for a few less appealing sessions that may or may not be valuable to you.

SXSW Interactive has become one of the largest tech events in the world. Including free activities, the entire 2012 event had more than 300,000 attendees. But SXSW’s billing methods are prehistoric.

It might not be a silver bullet, but activity-based billing could surely help. You know those fancy badges with our pictures on them and drink tickets inside? Imagine if they came with RFID chips that could be scanned throughout the event to enable more pricing options.

Imagine this:

• SXSW allocates credits to be used for access to sessions. The more desirable the session, the more credits they require for entrance (a real-time marketplace). Pay a market price for only the sessions, shows, or screenings you attend. The most popular activities cost the most, while the niche sessions are a great bargain.
• Pay additional credits to reserve a seat at conference sessions.
• Corporate or volume discounts would be available for those who are using badges heavily.
• Earn credits for social activities like tweets, likes, upvotes, or shares that promote the conference.
• The pricing options are infinite and stand to deliver significantly more value than the flat rate badges. And don’t even get me started on the wristbands, which arguably have been declining in value since 2003.

There is enough flexibility in an activity-based billing structure that SXSW could bring in optimal revenue while ensuring customers don’t end up feeling frustrated by the fact that SXSW overbooks like a flight on Christmas Eve.

If the Interactive portion of SXSW doesn’t take action to address the situation, the competition surely will continue to do so. We’ll see continued growth of unofficial, private SXSW events (renegade technology sessions, speakers, “nerdvana” parties, etc.) taking place in Austin in parallel to the official fête — not unlike what we’ve seen increasingly happen with SXSW Music.

James Messer is co-founder and CEO of billing startup Transverse. Messer has spent more than 18 years focused on the telecommunications and IT industries with a focus on billing. He is also a big music lover and attends the SXSW interactive and music events every year.

Image credit: Alfie Photography/Shutterstock