SXSW Accelerator Winners Include an API

Romin Irani, March 30th, 2011

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In terms of visibility, the SXSW Accelerator is among the most high profile awards that a startup can earn. Earlier this month in Austin, 32 companies presented at the awards in a variety of categories ranging from Entertainment, Social Media, Innovative Web Technologies to News. Our earlier coverage indicated how APIs were central to most of the offerings. One of those APIs took top prize in the news category.

The judging was intense, with all the companies presenting on day one. The original list was trimmed down to 12 by the second day, with each one of them competing for the top prize in their respective category. The winners in each of the categories were:

• News: Storify, a service allows you to create stories from what people post on Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook. It also has the Storify API to allow developers to create applications to access the stories and even create new stories.
• Innovative Web Technologies: Hipmunk, a flight search service that promises an easier experience to search for the right flights.
• Entertainment Technologies: Tango, a free mobile service that allows you to make mobile video calls. They have an an application for both the iOS and Android devices.
• Social Media and Networking: Popvox, a service that lets your voice be heard in the Congress. Search for a bill, support or oppose it and share your opinion with the Congress and world.

Our earlier story covers details on several other API-related startups that presented in the SXSW Accelerator. ReadWriteWeb has done a great writeup on the other finalists, too.