Pittsburgh Ventures

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and attracts leading digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs. The event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology.

I attended this conference this week and sat in on countless intriguing panels, met many interesting people, ate at every BBQ joint in downtown Austin, attended some awesome after-parties, and picked up on some key trends.

So much I could cover here, but I will share 3 key trends and 3 anti-trends I came away with after the 5 exhausting days.

1. Twitter – 100% of attendees used Twitter. The service is powerful. At SXSW, Twitter replaced e-mail, SMS, and Facebook as the main communication vehicle. I just read that Twitter has grown from 475,000 to 7,038,000 users from Feb ‘08 to Feb ‘09 – 1382% growth!

2.   Location-based services – examples: Brightkite, FourSquare, Loopt –  It was often stated at SXSW that applications that have wide adoption at this event will be known in the larger population in a few years. Twitter, for example, was first used at SXSW in 2007. Everyone was using these services to constantly update other with “where I am”, what I’m doing”, “where are the best panels, parties, etc.”. No more privacy…people don’t care.

3. iPhone is becoming a game console that rivals NintendoDS and SonyPSP. The iPhone app store had 500M downloads last year and reached $1B in sales in 2008. Interesting stat – 70% of all mobile internet traffic comes through iPhone or iPod Touch.