sxswi

After three days on the road to get here from San Francisco, the coach full of "buspreneurs" I've been traveling with since early Tuesday morning has arrived for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival--historically abbreviated as SXSWi--and the chance to vie for the title of best startup created on the fly on the highways of America.

Counting those aboard sister buses from Chicago, New York, Miami, and Cleveland--as well as on a second bus from San Francisco--about 160 entrepreneurs have crisscrossed the country building all kinds … Read more

I woke up on Monday morning to about two dozen text messages, and none of them were really for me.

Rather, they all came from two separate group messaging accounts set up through a start-up called GroupMe, both of which had been created in the prior few days specifically to corral people before the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival--part of the broader South by Southwest music and film festival--kicks off Friday in Austin, Texas. One was a posse of New Yorkers trying to coordinate carpools to and from their Thursday and Friday flights. The other was a group … Read more

Microsoft will be formally launching the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, IE9, at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) on Monday--an interesting place to launch, given that the Austin, Texas, geek fest is packed full of the hordes who have long since ditched Internet Explorer for the decidedly hipper pastures of Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.

The new browser, which had its first and only release candidate land in users' hands in early February, will fully launch to the public at 9 Pacific time that night. In a blog post, Internet Explorer senior director Ryan Gavin described the … Read more

Group messaging service GroupMe launched a big upgrade last week, timed to occur right before the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, the biggest event of the year for digital start-ups looking to make it big. But that wasn't enough: GroupMe today launched what co-founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht call "version 2.1-more-thing" in a nod to the famed Steve Jobs line.

What's new this time? Instead of making groups invite-only, groups can now be "joinable" through solicitations on Facebook and Twitter. There are also some smaller tweaks, including avatars alongside … Read more

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: a couple dozen coders and geek entrepreneurs step off a shiny, high-tech bus at a barbecue joint in Texas.

But a joke it's not. It's a scenario that will likely play out this week on the Startup Bus, which is, yes, a group of a couple dozen coders and geek entrepreneurs riding a shiny, high-tech bus through the Lone Star State from their hometowns to the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW Interactive) in Austin, Texas, part of the broader SXSW music and film festival.

This is no ordinary bus … Read more

Editor's Note: This is the second installment in a series about start-up Fast Society. Click here for the first part.

NEW YORK--The nightlife-heavy East Village neighborhood can, in fact, be very quiet and unassuming in daylight.

On this Saturday afternoon, for example, you'd never know that there was anything going on at White Noise, a bar hidden behind blacked-out windows in the space above a discount liquor store. Inside, it's Gilded Age excess meets glam rock sleaze, with black chandeliers holding red light bulbs, black vinyl couches with fake gold trim, and floor-to-ceiling velvet drapes framing dark … Read more

A barely launched start-up called Beluga, one of several looking to dominate the suddenly hot again group messaging market, announced today that it had been acquired by Facebook.

The company, which had drummed up a moderate amount of hype, was unlikely to sell so early. But it's not that much of a shock that Facebook swooped in to snap it up: Beluga's three co-founders are former Google employees, and were likely appealing to Facebook as the company looks over and over again to fill its product and engineering teams with entrepreneurially minded people by buying their start-ups. What … Read more

There's still well over a month to go before South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), the yearly convergence in Austin, Tex. of tech-industry minds, the start-ups who want to be noticed by them, and the marketers who want to reach them. But like Christmas decorations appearing in stores prior to Halloween, promotional campaigns centered on the party-heavy festival are already kicking off. Really.

With in the past year or two, an increasing number of those campaigns have featured brands that have absolutely nothing to do with digital media, but who see the SXSWi crowd--the sort that likes to boast it … Read more

Austin, Texas, and New York will be among the first cities in the U.S. where the Chevy Volt plug-in electric vehicle will hit the road.

General Motors is expected Thursday to announce that a first run of 8,000 cars will be made available in a handful of cities, The Detroit News reported Thursday.

The announcement is expected to come from GM CEO Edward Whitacre, who is set to address the Austin Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

The Volt is, of course, GM's heavily hyped plug-in electric vehicle that will potentially get 230 mpg. It can power from … Read more