Ten of Thousands of Technology Lovers Head South to Austin Texas

Margie Newman describes the event as "a sea of Mac-toting, smartphone-obsessed, new media snobs on a mission to know what is straightway." Ms. Newman is a public relations professional in Washington D.C. She made her third trip to the South by Southwest festival this year. We spoke with her by phone at the festival.

South by Southwest Interactive has seen the successful launch of several products. It helped push Twitter into mainstream popularity in two thousand seven. In two thousand nine, a company called Foursquare launched its mobile networking service at the festival. The service lets friends tell other friends where they are by "checking in" using a mobile application or a text message. Foursquare's owners say they however have more than six and a half million users around the world.

Margie Newman says quick response codes are big news at this year's festival. The codes turn URLs and text into barcode-like images that can be scanned using a mobile phone or a QR code reader.

MARGIE NEWMAN: "It looks like a scanning device like when you're at the grocery store now it's a square. A lot of people aren't quite using QR codes for marketing just but in mainstream. Yet you're seeing a lot of it here. It's very hot this year." Cloud computing is as well expected to be a hot topic this year, as is group messaging. The five-day festival runs through March fifteenth. Hundreds of events are planned each day. They include speeches by some of the world's leading innovation industry experts, hands-on training workshops and many group discussions.

The VOA Special English Innovation Report

And that's the VOA Special English Innovation Report, written by June Simms. Transcripts, MP3s and podcasts of our reports are at voaspecialenglish.com. We're as well on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Steve Ember.