In March 2007, Twitter became the breakout hit of the South By Southwest Interactive when attendees used the service to discover hot parties and connect with friends at the festival. Two years later, Foursquare replicated the feat, introducing the world to the check-in and giving rise to location-based services. It was only natural that SXSW is the place where Twitter and Foursquare took off — the festival attracted a then-rare concentration of smartphones and the tech elite who used them, giving big new ideas a singular place where they could take root and spread when festival attendees returned home. In the wake of those successes, an optimistic tech world has descended on Austin, Texas each year in search of new breakout successes.
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