What is the next compulsively addictive app to come out of Austin’s festival, though?  This year, there wasn’t a clear winner I was told I must have, although there were certainly a number of startups and apps that were making a splash.

Twine to be Anointed the New King of Bookmarks
There were a disproportionate number of startups and apps that caught my attention this year. The first is one you’ve probably already heard of – Twine. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick and Nova Spivack were virtually inseparable in the press room for at least two of the three days I spotted them in there. While it was interesting to peek into the very thorough process that Marshall engages in to write a story, what was interesting was finding out firsthand what was next with one of the web’s most quickly growing web-based bookmarking utilities.

On the technical side, there were a lot of interesting updates, like that it is able to extrapolate context and meaning from bookmarked pages through the use of their new ontology authoring utility. More interesting to the mainstream watchers from the sidelines is the graph he published alongside the article showing Twine’s impending pathway intersection with Delicious.

MoonToast: The Return of your Braintrust
Although the buzz on the floor for this service probably wasn’t as palpable as the buzz for Twitter a few years ago, MoonToast is the clear winner of the crowd choice award, at least by my judgement. Just about everyone I spoke to had a chance to look at it, understood it, and thought that it was both marketed and put together correctly.

If you haven’t had a chance to check it out as of yet, it’s pretty much Google Answers on steroids. If you’ve never used Google Answers, it was a marketplace where you could put bounties on hard to answer questions from specific niches, and receive a qualified answer.  Whenever you felt the question had been answered properly, the bounty was paid, and you were given the opportunity to tip.

The marketplace operates very similarly, except it affords the user other channels of communication, whether it be direct chat, audio files, image files or video.

Beyond any programmatic and presentational improvements Moontoast has made on the project, they’ve also a commitment to growing the community of answerers personally.  If pressing questions are being posed and no one in the community is qualified to answer them, the company goes out to seek the expert so that the need can be satisfied.

I sat down with just about the entire Moontoast team to talk about their approach and their project, and was even further impressed with their idea.

Financial Services: Going (far) Beyond Mint and Quicken
I was approached by more than a few Web 2.0 style financial services companies at SxSW – they’re definitely the hot new startup type. They don’t typically rely on ads for their monetization model, although high traffic sites can add to their revenue by slapping some on.  They also have the added benefit of having very intimate access to your financial data, which is pretty helpful for behaviorally targeting offers to the user.

The first company I spoke to was one by the name of Rudder. I met them in the press room at SxSW, though they were also exhibiting on the main convention floor.

Rather than tackling it from a “here are some pretty charts and graphs” perspective, they act as automated financial planners.  They work to work out a budget based upon the automated discovery of your debt, your income and your expenses.

JustThrive attempts the same task, but with the goal of gearing this information to a younger demographic. Rather than present information in the raw and often confusing dollar amounts and projection graphs, they convert the data to units of commonly used goods and services.

For instance, rather than presenting the information like: “You have $100 after bills to spend on whatever you choose,” they’ll instead say “you have four visits to your favorite restaurant, or twenty visits to the coffee shop available.”

It’s a unique take, and one that will likely resonate with users.

The most common question I’ve recieved during and after the festival was “What was this year’s Twitter?”  It’s hard to call these the year’s Twitter, because frankly they don’t have the same viral and social aspects Twitter does.  Nothing really took off at the conference like Twitter did at 2006 (although Fourquare certainly tried).

I certainly do believe we’ll be talking about these four companies long after this year’s festival, and they’ve all made major splashes during SxSW.

Mark Rizzn Hopkins writes at Rizzn.com and Silicon Angle.

What Was SxSWi 2009’s Twitter? is a post from: The Inquisitr

He was gracious enough to sit down with me and chat on camera a bit about his news regarding the new Twhirl-like client for monitoring and updating Facebook status updates.

He covered a lot of the news and information you saw already in many of the reports about the product, including:

• Twhirl will be rebranding itself as Seesmic (they have a hard time as a small company maintaining two brands).
• That means you won’t be a Twhirl user any more, you’ll be a Seesmic user.
• They’re focusing almost half their staff on integrating the new Facebook client into the rest of the site experience.

In addition, he talked a bit about his expectations of how this might transform the usage of Facebook entirely. He hinted here and off-camera that this is the thrust of their focus, and they really want to position themselves as one of the primary ways to access Facebook.

I think, given the addictiveness of Twhirl and Twitter, I think it’s a safe bet.

We also caught up a bit, since the last time we spoke, he was on his way to go visit then-President Bush.  He’s since steered clear of politics, but commented on the bit of disappointment he feels when politicians engage greatly with social media tools during campaigns, but not during the governance.

Mark Rizzn Hopkins blogs a Rizzn.com and Silicon Angle.

Loic Lemeur Explains the Future of Seesmic [sxsw] is a post from: The Inquisitr

While I wasn’t able to attend the SXSW conference on my own I know a couple of friends that were going to be there and so I figured that courtesy of the uStream embed that Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins (The Inquisitr man in the field) had on his page I would spend some time watching the goings on. Now it is pretty cool that we have things like uStream where we can watch live feeds of different meet-ups but in some ways I think we still have a very long way to go.

It is easy say that it is the spontaneity that makes these types of video streams fun and cutting edge but in some ways I think it contributes more to the amateurism of the medium as it stands today. One glaring problem I noticed was the sound quality which fluctuated between being totally absent to overly loud I spent much of my time with my fingers on the volume button for my speakers.

The one other thing that irritated me is not knowing the name of whoever was talking. It is especially bad if you happened to jump into the middle of a conversation. Would it really be so hard to add a little bit of professionalism by showing a quick overlay of the name of the person speaking. It’s not something that would have to be done all the time but come on anything is better than trying to follow a conversation and not having a clue who the person talking is.

uStream is really cool and having it as an option to be able to follow events like what is happening at SXSW is great but a little bit of professionalism in presentation sure couldn’t hurt.

Some thoughts about SXSW and uStream is a post from: The Inquisitr

What’s the future?  Is it Minority Report?  Is it The Matrix? Depending on which futurist you talk to, it could be one or the other (or both).

The panel I attended early Friday afternoon showed compelling evidence that we’re living in a world of Minority Report meets Cyberpunk – if the realities of those fictional worlds aren’t here yet, they will be in a matter of moments. Why, then, are we still amazed by the things we see in HP commercials and Microsoft concept demos?

Because they’re just on the edge of what’s possible, and because they reflect a polished presentation that doesn’t seem to mesh with the reality of how such innovation is happening in this world.

One of the panelists told a mind-blowing story about a company he’s working with that is literally creating working brain-jacks. He described the installation process in vivid detail. These folks drilled a hole into each human recipient’s brain, and inserted a spherical piece of glass, hollowed and filled with fetal stem cells. He said that the wiring was affixed to the stem cell glass, and when it was all sealed up, they allowed the connections to organically grow to the installed jack.

This is something that’s happening now, and while it sounds highly illegal (another panelist even said as much), it’s apparently true. The reality of innovation, though, is far less grotesque and needs very little invasive surgery.

Repeatedly, the efforts of Johnny Lee were brought up.

If you haven’t seen his work, you should.  He’s Minority Report style interfaces by simply hacking the Nintendo Wii.

I see a lot of these things come through my radar as I write about advancements in robotics at my blog. Sure, there are lots of interesting bots and developments that come from the big guys like Honda and Sony, but for each news story concerning the Aibo or the Asimo there are ten homebrewed projects that create near-military grade robots using home-grown parts.

The panel was very interesting, and there were more than a few riveting videos of filmmaker perceptions of the future using currently feasible technology, but the bottom line seemed to be that if you want to see the future, you need to look to the hackers of today.

Mark Rizzn Hopkins writes for Silicon Angle and his own blog Rizzn.com.

If You Want the Future, Look to the Hackers is a post from: The Inquisitr