SXSW 2012 is sneaking up on us; believe it or not, it’s just around the corner. As you may know, Austin’s music/film/tech conference attracts big names, tons of press, and notable companies each year — geeks flock to the event just as they do for CES. On the tech or “Interactive” side, there’s a lot of hoopla and way too much media coverage, but some interesting startups do still manage to emerge (or at least solidify their reputations) at the festi-conference each year. Foursquare and Twitter, to name two, both owe tips of the cap to SXSW.

Those traveling to the festival always start early, as hotels fill up fast. And since these conferences will cost you a bit more than a ticket to Burning Man, many of the more adventurous souls look for accommodations that are cheaper (and more exciting) than that offered by some measly hotel. Naturally, it’s a big time for the hot peer-to-peer accommodations rentals space — in other words, for startups like Airbnb, Wimdu, 9flats.com, Crashpadder, and iStopOver — to name a few. The latter, for example, has already booked all of its available rentals for SXSW. (While Airbnb still has some openings.)

In a piece of news that may just be relevant for SXSW attendees this year, today we’ve learned that the aforementioned and Canadian iStopOver, which lets people rent out their extra space and offer travelers local experiences at affordable prices, has partnered with a lesser-known startup from Austin, called GuideHop, to “help change the way people experience new and familiar places.”

Just as Airbnb and its ilk have taken off, there’s been a lot of excitement around the broader social travel space lately (see Semil’s post for some examples here), and GuideHop has been hoping to get in on the action by offering a service that enables locals to post their own guided activities for those curious “experience seekers,” who’ve traveled from afar — joining Gidsy and Sidetour in that regard. Both GuideHop and iStopOver’s services allow locals to post their available rentals and experiences for free and are designed to let hosts and guides make a little extra cash by sharing their favorite activies and spare homes and bedrooms — and finding those willing to pay for the home (or the experience).

The partnership, the GuideHop team says, is designed to give customers a full integrated peer-to-peer experience, where anyone can plan an expedition by finding a place to stay through iStopOver, and discovering nearby activities with GuideHop.

Though iStopOver hasn’t created nearly as much noise as Airbnb or clones like Wimdu, which raised $90 million last June, it still offer over 80,000 properties in 92 countries, so it’s a big strategic win for GuideHop — and a vote of confidence.

The Austin startup, which launched in October, has grown fairly quickly, and now has a total of 679 activities (ahead of Vayable, which launched six months prior). However, at this point, it is mainly focused on Austin, and hopes to take advantage of the SXSW bump when the circus comes to town, offering attendees an opportunity to get out and see the sights under the guidance of some knowledgeable locals. What kind of local activities, you ask?

Activities posted thus far include “spelunking to an art gallery,” exploring east Austin’s urban farms, a ride with a scooter gang, a bike coffee tour of Austin, etc. etc. (More on how GuideHop works here.) How can you say no to spelunking and art galleries?

There are a million ways to find local activities, but GuideHop hopes to capitalize on the growing buzz around peer-to-peer marketplaces and social travel. Partnering with the big p2p rental marketplaces is a great way to reach a broad audience, without having to deal with quite the same drawbacks. Hopefully iStopOver is just the beginning.

The startup is currently raising its initial round of funding, so check it out and stay tuned to see if they come out the other side with some traction. And obviously, having the mythical “jackalope” of travelers’ folklore in their logo also helps their street cred significantly.

As Chris Dixon rounds out his interview with Hashable founder, Michael Yavonditte, SXSW serves as a springboard to discuss the power of thinking small, when thinking about launching. Yavonditte relates Hashable’s experience at SXSW and puts it in perspective.

Speaking to the topic, Dixon says, “I have come to kind of believe in the lean startup thing, where you just kind of iterate and you iterate” continuing with, “people put way too much weight in … launching.”  Yavonditte offers similar insights, and notes that building a lean startup does not equate to thinking small. The two also have a meeting of the minds when it comes to the power of the press. It is an amplifier for both the good and the bad.

Check out the full discussion in the video above.

In the final segment, Yavonditte answers Dixon’s “rapid fire” questions. Yavonditte tells Dixon why startups fail and dishes the best piece of advice he has been given. “Hire great people and pay them whatever you have to pay them” he says.

Watch Part 1 and Part II of this interview, or prior Founder Stories interviews here.

Local Q&A startup Hipster has raised $1 million in seed funding from some prominent angel Valley investors including Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Lightbank, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Max Ventilla, TechStars David Cohen and David Tisch, Google’s Don Dodge, Paige Craig, Ludlow Ventures, Lerer Ventures and others.

Many of you best know Hipster as the startup that launched a thousand blog posts, having insane hype and a couple of acquisition offers before its SXSW launch. While Hipster’s initial launch page had over 10,000 signups in its first few days of existence, the startup’s actual user numbers for SXSW were at just over 4,000 for the entire three day period. Were you using Hipster during SXSW? I wasn’t either.

“We learned a lot during SXSW, it was ‘baptism by fire,’” Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow tells me. “One of my big takeaways from the event was that people tend to have a lot more answers than questions.”

Ludlow also has since then re-evaluated the company’s product strategy: Instead of launching city by city, Hipster will now be launching everywhere in the US at once, on both web and mobile. While he doesn’t reveal many product details, he emphasizes that the lessons of SXSW were hard won and won’t be forgotten.

Hipster is a small player in an arena dominated by Foursquare and Yelp, but Ludlow is undaunted, believing that each of them represents only 1/2 of the “local knowledge” problem:

 ”Foursquare is trying to become the go-to application to share knowledge when you’re out and about (with Check-ins and tips), yet provides a very poor web experience for accessing, augmenting, editing, or sharing this information.”

“Yelp is great for browsing local content on the web, but doesn’t provide a good method for submitting knowledge this knowledge when its freshest in your mind (namely, while you’re currently at a location.)”

In order to further carve out a small but strong position in the local space for Hipster, Ludlow plans on using the new financing to double the team (going from three to six) and to move the entire operation from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

When Foursquare upgraded its mobile app last March at SXSW, it added some excellent new features which made the popular geo app even more compelling. Among these is a revamped leaderboard which shows how many points you’ve earned in the past 7 days compared to just your friends (I know I check in a lot more now in the hopes that I can one day beat Fred Wilson). The other one is a new Explore feature that gives you recommendations of nearby places to eat, drink, and shop based on where you are and your friends’ past check-in behavior.

Now these two features, along with the information users get after they check-in, are available to outside developers via Foursquare’s API. That means that other mobile apps can borrow some of Foursquare’s game mechanics by showing users where they stand on the Foursquare leaderboard (which makes sense for apps which allow you to do a Foursquare check-in).

The Explore API could potentially become much more meaningful. As Foursquare starts to do a better job suggesting places to go, down the line it could tie its deals into those suggestions as well. Watch this space.

At this year’s overcrowded and overhyped SXSW conference in Austin, one of the few startups to break through the noise was group text messaging app GroupMe. How did GroupMe win SXSW? Grilled cheese. The company rented an outdoor food shack for something like $10,000 and turned it into the GroupMe Grill with free grilled cheese sandwiches and beer. The grilled cheese, says co-founder Steve Martocci in this episode of Founder Stories, was “an homage” to Phish concerts, where grilled cheese sandwiches are consumed in large quantities (watch the video above).

The GroupMe Grill became a meeting point for attendees of SXSW, and it was one of the places everyone was taking photos of on Instagram (one of the other “winners” of SXSW). Jason Kincaid stopped by and did this video. All in all, two million text messages were sent through SXSW groups during the week of the event.

GroupMe wasn’t the only text messaging startup at SXSW. Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, Textplus, Yobongo, and many others were also there in full force. Does all this competition worry the GroupMe founders? In the video below, CEO Jared Hecht says, “It lights a fire under our ass.” But the proliferation of all of these semi-private group texting apps says something about the “broadcast overload” problem on more open social networks where “conversations are sterile.”

Be sure to watch Part I (on how GroupMe got started) and Part II (on where group texting is going) of this GroupMe interview. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes. (Disclosure: host Chris Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective).

Color.com had more coverage last week than Charlie Sheen in the Bay Area and for that fact alone we are all grateful.

It is hard not to mention $41 Million pre-launch funding from Sequoia but Jason Calacanis of ThisWeekIn gets some very honest answers on why they did not show at SXSW and why Bill works in a bathtub. Seriously.

We are in a post-PC era my friends and Color.com’s concept of not asking for a password, address or phone number is very interesting. Thanks to ThisWeekIn.com and Jason Calacanis.

Give the interview a vist and as usual we would love your feedback. Bill Nguyen is an interesting guy
for sure.

As group texting apps like GroupMe gain popularity, people are using them to create ad hoc, private social networks among a handful of friends. But wherever people congregate online or through their mobile phones, brands will want to talk to them. Today, GroupMe is opening up its mobile group chat to brands in what is the first hint at it business model: Featured Groups.

Brands can create their own featured groups, which will show up as suggested conversation topics. When you and your friends create a group around those topics, they work like regular GroupMe chats, except you’ve also opted in to receive messages from the brand. These may include news, offers, marketing messages, or even VIP appearances by celebrities in your GroupMe chat. The first partners to take advantage of the new feature are Oxygen Media, MTV, Bon Jovi, Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival and Coachella. Oxygen will be creating suggested topics around its TV shows “Bad Girls Club” and the upcoming Paris Hilton show “The World According To Paris.” MTV is using it for “America’s Best Dance Crew.”

“Basically, we’re working with brands where there are intuitive use cases,” says GroupMe CEO Jared Hecht. “Live events (people going to a music festival together), television shows (people who watch a series with a group of friends), and artists/musicians (me and my friends love a band).”

GroupMe first experimented with suggested group topics at SXSW, where people who created a SXSW group got a map and special info about goings on about Austin during the conference. Just before SXSW, GroupMe pushed out a major new version of its app for users. Now we are seeing the business side of that.

If you and your friends go to a concert or really like “America’s Best Dance Crew” (you know who you are) and you are creating groups around these topics anyway, now you might get rewarded with “insider” info, contests, signed merchandise giveaways, or maybe even a pop-in from a band or cast member. The only way these branded topics will work, however, is if they don’t feel like marketing. And that’s always been the case with social media. Brands need to try to have real conversations with their consumers. But as we’ve seen with Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media, that is easier said than done.

To save all 15 of you the effort of writing a response to MG’s “Saying ‘SXSW Is Over’ Is Over” post right now, the “Has SXSW Interactive jumped the shark” discussion has hit Godwin’s Law. That’s right someone has made a Hitler’s Downfall video where the Fuhrer shares his views on how much the conference has sold out as its scaled, thereby symbolically decreeing the “SXSW is Over” meme officially, yes, over.

My favorite parts:

“If you’re attending SXSW for the Pepsi Max booth, please leave.”

“Now this is just another excuse for marketing douches to get shitfaced at parties! Fucking Twitter got its start here! Now we’re supposed to get excited about an iPad 2 popup store. New Foursquare badges … Or a sponsored BBQ with people who could give a shit about creativity and innovation …”

“Look at us! We dress like the lesser-know members of Arcade Fire!”

“SXSW was about meeting the unpretentious people behind great tech innovations. Now it’s a bunch of self important Twitter celebrities, running around, looking for the next good party on their iPhones.”

“Oh look at me look at all the RSVPs I have.”

“The techies look down on the marketers. The marketers ignore the techies. And the hipsters look down on everyone.”

While the Interactive conference has probably suffered from the Eternal September problem ever since it was called SXSW Multimedia, going from hundreds to around 20,000 attendees means it is whole different (and mainstream) beast from now going forward. So was this year a tipping point? Well it’s a sign of the times we live in where a supposedly homegrown viral video created for the “Help Save SXSW from Marketer Douchebaggery” movement is itself prefaced by an ad.

Via: Here’s Some Awesome

So what comes after the future? I asked Bruce Sterling at SXSW.

But, for Bruce, the future is really the past. “I like narratives,” he told me, while explaining why the most “effective” futurists are good historians. So perhaps, using this logic, what comes after the future is history.

And Bruce is certainly an effective futurist as well as a good historian. Which is why when I asked him about today’s Internet obsession with “the social,” he riffed with dark euphoria about the history of socialism as well as what it’s like to be a 15-year-old kid with no knowledge of the past.

Check out yesterday’s interview with Bruce when he explains why hactivism isn’t compatible with democracy and what the difference is between gothic high tech and favela chic.

What Comes After the Future

“The Social”

The SXSW interactive and technology programming has just ended and the music festival is getting underway. The interactive portion featured hundreds of panels inside the convention center. But much of the action, networking and fun took place in the streets of Austin. As MG Siegler wrote, maybe “people should just show up in Austin next year and not even go to the actual conference.” If you did that this year, here’s what you might have seen.

In between our interviews, we sent our TechCrunch TV videographer John Murillo and his Canon 7D out to capture the sights and sounds of SXSW – the food, beer, games, and parties. SXSWi was a very fragmented event. In many ways, it was an 100-ring circus, with each participant having a unique experience. Share you own experiences and links to your videos in the comments.

In case you missed them, check out some of the interviews covered by TCTV:

• GroupMe’s founders at their grilled cheese stand
• Inside Zaarly’s RV van
• Keynoter and science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling
• Keynoter and star of “The Guild”, Felicia Day
• Snarky post and interview with Jake Gyllenhaal and the director of “Source Code”
• The directors of Press, Pause, Play
• Steve Jang on the iPhone app, SoundTracking
• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land on Search
• StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp
• Senator Al Franken on Net Neutrality and Facebook
• John Biggs walks the SXSWi trade show floor
• Meet the guy who bought the 1st iPad2 at the Apple pop-up store

We’ll also be releasing several more in-depth interviews on our weekly show “Keen On.”