What’s Hot At SXSW

Every app has to start somewhere.

For Twitter and Foursquare that start came at South by Southwest, a festival in Austin, TX. that features interactive elements, film and music.

Tomorrow marks the end of the interactive portion of SXSW, making now a perfect time to look back on what sites around the web are deeming the “must-have” apps of this year’s event.

There’s a lot of buzz about Highlight, which notifies users of other people nearby with similar interests.  I suppose that’d be useful if you are in desperate need of a new friend.  To me, it’s bordering on creepy.  I downloaded it to give it a whirl but kept getting the same error.  And don’t stare at “highlight” for too long in the picture on the right.  It’s nauseating.  Other location-based apps including Ban.jo, Glancee and Sonar have been hot topics as well.

Vibop 2.0, an iPhone/iPod Touch-specific app, is a lot of fun.  Think Instagram for videos.  You take either a fresh video or video that you’ve had saved, upload it to Vibop, give it a theme and some text and you have a personalized movie to share.  In the spirit of “The Artist” I turned an old video of my dog running around like a lunatic into a silent film.  It’s short but you can get an idea of what the app is capable of.

Speaking of Instagram, an Android prototype of the popular app was also introduced at SXSW.