The South By southwest festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, has become one of the trendiest spots to enable emerging trends in personal technology gain prominence.

It was the SXSW Interactive conference where social-networking platform Twitter first gained prominence in the year of 2007.

The 17-year old, fast-growing South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference was the place where Twitter first came to prominence in 2007.

Two years later in 2009, New York startup Foursquare used the festival to popularize the concept of smartphone location check-in services.

2011 is no exception. Several startups and trends are using the SXSW Interactive for 2011 to make their debuts. The list of new technologies includes some digital music services that allow users to store music on the Internet "cloud," in place of mobile phone or PC. Next-generation search engines such as Moodfish, where a user can type in how he/she is feeling and the search engine finds the most appropriate entertainment nearby.

Twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Rosenberg, the co-founder of New York-based Fast Society, said, "We're the new rock stars." His Fast Society is an innovative mobile service which lets clusters of people to communicate concurrently via a text-message-based system.

More than two thousand acts were played on ninety states at the SXSW from Tuesday through Sunday.