Brands… That’s it. Once again brands and Meerkat have dominated SXSW 2015. Today the SXSW trade show opened it’s doors to the press and interactive badge holders. The SXSW trade show fails to compare to the massive event that’s CES, but it gives small start ups the chance to get some exposure. A few booths were from established brands like Misfit, Capital One, and WPEngine. The others were small startups some only at the event to announce they were going to hit Kickstarter in a few weeks.
Day three has become a blur of the past days, and we’ve yet to see a stand out brand or break out app. Some may argue Meerkat is the break out app, but it’s not at SXSW in official capacity and was announced before the event. The big news around the app was Twitter purchased a competitor than cut off Meerkats access to Twitter’s graph. This in turned helped the app gain more traction with techies at SXSW who even had a meet up at the Mashable House today. While it’s the most talked about and popular app it’s not compared to Twitter’s or Foursquare’s huge boost from the event years ago.
Startups are just mingling with investors and trying to woo them, but in the coming weeks we could see some being funded with millions of VC money. This is what makes SXSW still valuable, and a key part of Austin’s startup culture. The parties for different companies continued today, but nothing particularly stood out as a must attend an event. I mainly attended the trade show, ate at the local food trucks, and dropped in on some cool panels.
Tomorrow will be our last day in Austin before we return to our normal lives, but the event will go until Tuesday. I’m looking forward to being at home, but I will miss the atmosphere the event has. It could be best described as a chill party all day, and this is vastly different from events like CES where people call it hell.
The images are once again attached below! Tell us in the comments below what you think is the breakout app or startup of SXSW 2015.
