Friday will be the start of the annual South by Southwest festival, a week of presentations, meet-ups, parties, barbecues and hallway talks about the ever-evolving start-up industry and the technology world.
The New York Times will be filing dispatches from Austin, Tex., where the conference takes place. We’ll be on the ground, keeping an eye out for hot new services and applications, ducking in and out of panels and various shindigs and generally reporting on the scene from our usual headquarters, the Bits blog.
In addition, we’ll also be resurrecting our New York Times SXSW Tumblr, where we will funnel a sampling of impressions, reactions and spot observations from the ground. I’ll also be posting quick-hit reactions and photos on Twitter, Instgram and Vine.
In years past, certain apps and services have bubbled up as clear crowd favorites, including GroupMe, a group messaging app; Foursquare, a location-based social network; and even Twitter, in its early days.
Hugh Forrest, the director of the interactive portion of the festival, said the breakout theme might be a bit more abstract this year.
“Space is hot again,†he said.
There are roughly 15 panels on space exploration, he said, including a keynote talk from Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, on Saturday. In addition, Bobak Ferdowsi, the Mohawk-hairstyled NASA engineer who became a viral hit after photographs of him celebrating the safe landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover gained fans around the Web, will also be there.
Mr. Forrest also anticipates that hardware, especially ! 3-D printers, will be a big-ticket theme and topic of discussion around the weekend. And he highlighted a talk featuring Cody R. Wilson, a law student and the head of Defense Distributed, a collective that is dedicated to open-source blueprints and schematics for 3-D weapons.
Julie Uhrman, the founder and chief executive behind Ouya, an Android-based gaming console, will also be a keynote speaker. Mr. Forrest also expects that data, particularly issues dealing with privacy and security of personal information, will be a much-discussed topic.
This year is a draw for big names in the tech world, who are joining the pilgrimage to Texas to mingle with the everynerd, including the Russian investor Yuri Milner, Esther Dyson, Tim Berners-Lee and Shaquille O’Neal, the retired basketball player turned social media maven./p>
There are several applications vying for the eyes and taps of those in attendance, including Albumatic, a group photo-sharing app; Highlight, a people discovery service that made its debut last year but that hopes to woo more users this year; Tinder, the location-based dating service; and Sidecar, a ride-sharing app that is offering free rides to and from parties for attendees of the interactive festival.
Although it’s not yet clear which app â€" if any â€" will be a breakout hit of the weekend, one thing is certain about this year’s conference: It will be much leaner than previous years.
Mr. Forrest said the growth of the interactive part of South by Southwest was slowing. The number of people roaming the grounds of the event leapt more than 25 percent in 2012 from 2011, swelling to 24,569 from 19,364. This year, Mr Forrest ! expects a! round 27,000 attendees, about a 10 percent bump.
In addition, organizers trimmed the numbers of panels and the amount of programming to make the schedule of the week’s events more manageable for conferencegoers.
“The object each year is to be better, not necessarily bigger,†he said.
