THIS WAS the year when the gigantic South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference became a geekfest with a twist.

For many years, tech and media folks have been coming to Texas every March to feed their brains at panels and workshops, get first dibs on new innovations like Twitter (which was the hit of the 2007 event) and Foursquare, and network at parties and events at Austin’s many bars and venues.

The audience make-up ensures the focus has always been geek-heavy, but there was a different shine to the proceedings this year.

It was as if someone flicked a switch and realised that interactive could be pretty much about anything you care to mention, now that technology, the web, apps and mobiles are part and parcel of daily life.

Scan through the 22 different thematic strands to the conference including ones on marketing, branding, convergence, health, education, greater good and design and development, and it was hard not to be overwhelmed by what was on offer, with up to 60 different events going on at any one time.

Panels on why banks need to innovate, how social networking is changing advocacy and showing a role for Detroit’s media economy in reshaping that city rubbed shoulders in the hefty programme with more typical SXSWi fare like HTML5 hacking, visualising temporality and CSS implementation.

The hit-rate, though, is very high, perhaps a direct result of how SXSWi crowd-sources its panel ideas and themes. If a panel topic make the final cut, there’s also sure to be an audience for it.

A panel on brands, celebs and non-profits produced the factoid that Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong charity has flogged 72 million of those yellow wristbands and also provided sage advice on how to tap celebrities to promote good causes.

A town hall-style conversation hosted by two New York Times journalists teased out what part social media tools played in directing recent unrest in the Middle East and northern Africa.

Then, there were m\ore nerdy affairs like Left Brain Search = Google, Right Brain Search = X, with pundits from Google and Bing attempting to predict the future of search. Bing chief architect Barney Pell talked about how search would increasingly take in social connections, contexts, semantics and collaborative filtering, and there were mentions for Google Hotspot, Project Emporia and Moodfish.

SXSWi is, however, also very much about companies seeking to sell their services and products and find investment.

This year saw Enterprise Ireland showcasing at SXSWi for the first time with 17 Irish companies onboard. These included established names like Windmill Lane Pictures and Rothco as well as emerging companies such as Seevl, Trezur, Ticket Truck and Storyful.

The agency partnered with the IDA and Irish Film Board for the conference, which saw them hosting a booth in the trade show and providing financial support to the delegates.

Simone Boswell, Enterprise Ireland’s senior vice president for web, digital media and entertainment sectors in the US, says they chose SXSWi ahead of other conferences for a number of reasons.

“We’re trying to develop an offering which appeals to a wide variety of our client base,” Boswell adds. “We have growth in gaming, Web 2.0 platforms and SaaS. The show itself ticked the boxes of the diversity of the portfolio and we were surprised by the uptake with 23 delegates representing 17 companies.

“The perception for many is that SXSW is a music conference and festival, but it is becoming an important interactive launchpad for big and small companies. There’s no show that has the kind of cachet that SXSW has as a launch. A lot of SXSW veterans have reported back that there’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions which come out of here afterwards.”

For Mark Little, the RTÉ presenter behind online news curation service Storyful, SXSWi was about “getting to meet people I’ve been conversing with virtually through social media. There is also a very useful utilitarian aspect because we’ll be sitting in rooms with people who are talking about us and what we’re doing.”

"You have progressive American news organisations like the New York Timesand NPR who are doing things which are feeding off YouTube and Google and a million start- ups. SXSW brings them all together in a hotel ballroom or at a panel or in a bar or at a party," Little adds.

“It’s like the Olympics mixed with the World Cup mixed with the exclusive VIP room in some nightclub. It’s business, but it’s more than that.”

Storyful, which completed a round of seed investment last month and launched a public curation tool during SXSWi, came to Austin “looking for help with every part of our business”, according to Little.

“We have meetings with investors who we met a year ago and said come back when we have something to show. It’s that trade show aspect. People see that there are companies doing interesting things but they want to know who will be here in a year’s time. Secondly, there’s the thought-leaders and we want to show off what we’re doing to them.”

Little says SXSWi reflects the “the new reality” where “deals can turn on personality or a random encounter or a mention on a panel”.

“A few years ago, for a business like ours, it was about getting in front of someone and selling them something. Now, it’s about engagement. There is no way that a business can launch globally without that engagement. We’re very inspired by what’s happened here before with big names which are now ubiquitous.”

Game on: talk of the conference

If SXSWi had one meme to rule them all this year, it was gameification.

There was no big breakthrough like Twitter or Gowalla to take all the headlines, but there was much talk about how you could use gaming ideas and techniques to engage people in your campaign or service.

This also carried through to the keynote panels. A hyperactive presentation from the colourful Seth Priebatsch saw the SCVNGR location game service founder talk about “the game layer on top of the world”, with examples from Groupon and Foursquare of how the school system could be rejigged by a games developer.

Meanwhile, the man behind one of the mainstays of the internet’s wild west, 4Chan web message board founder Christopher Poole, is looking to go legit.

During an otherwise lacklustre presentation, Poole pitched his new venture Canvas, a message board where users could upload and remix images.

Poole thinks Canvas could go on to have more than 4Chan’s 12 million users and he’s already got cash in the bag from investors who previously worked with Google, Huffington Post and Delicious.