While there is still one day left for films and two days left for music, the interactive portion of Austin’s annual South By Southwest festival came to a close earlier this week. The event has seen a rising focus on technology. SXSW Multimedia was redubbed SXSW Interactive in 1999, but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that things really took off, with a 2006 keynote panel featuring the founders of Wikipedia and Craigslist, and a major boost in 2007 for Twitter. The microblogging network’s presence there that year was a defining moment for the company, to the point that some now mistakenly believed that Twitter was launched at SXSW.
The social media presence in Austin has only grown since then and it is now very much a defining focus of the yearly festival. Social media analytics firm SimplyMeasured has now gone through the numbers and evaluated the big winners at this year’s festival (via TechCrunch). Pulling together statistics in three categories, the company has determined which group messaging and mobile check-in apps were the most popular, as well as which mobile device was most widely used.
In the Group Messaging War category, which measuring the top applications by tweets, GroupMe is the clear winner, commanding 65 percent of the total users. Beluga trails behind at 22 percent, followed by Kik at 10 percent and Fast Society at 3 percent.
The Mobile Platform War is dominated by Apple products, with 74 percent of #SXSW tweets originating on an iPhone (60 percent) or iPad (14 percent). Google’s Android OS matches the iPad usage stat at 14 percent, trailed by BlackBerry (12 percent) and Windows Phone (1 percent).
The final category, the Check-in War, is unsurprisingly won by the popular foursquare app, with 65 percent of users participating in the location-based meta-game. The other three competitors trailer far behind, with Gowalla coming out on top at 22 percent, ahead of SCVNGR (12 percent) and Whrrl (7 percent).
TechCrunch also notes that Geotoko, another analytics company, further confirmed the foursquare win. Check-ins are broken down by app at 31 Austin locations, with more than 48,000 reported during the five-day period. Users of foursquare were responsible for 32,392 check-in, a considerable lead over Gowalla’s 8,030 and Facebook Places’ 7,545.
It will be very interesting to see how these numbers shift by this time next year. Windows Phone 7 has plenty of room for improvement, but it is also a relatively new release. And while GroupMe remains the popular choice for group messaging, the recent Facebook acquisition of Beluga will most likely result in wider use of that platform — or whatever its jointly launched successor is — by the time SXSW returns in 2012.
Are you tired of paying for streaming services you never watch just to get a phone plan feature you actually want? T-Mobile has good news for you! The carrier is rolling out new plans, called T-Mix, in early November to replace its old Experience lineup with a build-your-own perks system called Picks.
The benefits you choose vary from streaming and gaming to food delivery, AI, satellite service, and phone discounts. But if you are satisfied with your existing plan, you can keep it.
Merely days after the iPhone Duo hit the shelves, images of broken screens on the phone started popping up across social media. Until now, it’s been unclear what’s causing the line of defective pixels that appears vertically along the crease, as well as horizontally, on the phone’s inner display.
Apple has finally acknowledged the issue, which has shown up on iPhone Duo units owned by customers as well as demo units in stores. In a statement shared with Bloomberg, Apple says that not all iPhone Duo units are affected and that those that are tend to show the display fault early on. The company added that users who experience problems with their iPhone Duo display should contact AppleCare for a replacement.
Not long ago, Apple treated independent repair like an act of outright hostility. The Cupertino giant locked down parts with serial-number pairing, while repair tools remained firmly out of reach of anyone outside its authorized repair network. More importantly, the company waged a legal and lobbying battle against right-to-repair legislation.
I've covered enough of these fights over the years to know what a shift looks like. That's why what happened in October 2026 genuinely caught me off guard. The day the iPhone Duo went on sale, what may be the most mechanically complex iPhone to date, Apple pulled off a surprising about-face. It published teardown-style repair manuals for a handful of major components.