Take lots of business cards with you, and keep a fine Sharpie handy so you can note down important information on the back of each one you take. You’re likely to meet lots of people and forget what conversations you had, so little reminders can make all the difference.

More hints, and links, over on the Lanyrd blog (and thanks to Sophie for linking through to us). And if you want to keep an eye on Lanyrd, they have a dedicated twitter feed for Austin… @LanyrdSXSW.

That’s assuming we’re looking out for something new to pop up – many people forget that Twitter and Foursquare had a few years at SXSW to cement their “overnight success” tag. Given that, there might already be a victor in the App Stores and Marketplaces of the world… Eventbrite.

If you look at the huge number of parties and events being organised at Southby (especially during Interactive) you might notice many of them using the Eventbrite events and invite website. Which means if you’re being smart and signing up to a bundle of parties, your Eventbrite account has tickets and timing filling up your profile. What better way to have them close with you that through Eventbrite’s own smartphone application – giving you a personal guide to SXSW and QR codes to replace all your tickets?

Available right now for iOS (with a promising “Coming Soon” for Android), it might not be flashy or catch the headlines, but Eventbrite might just be the app to have at SXSW.

Marvel has been making a big push to move into digital comics. They launched Marvel Digital Comics in 2007, which was really the first major digital comics program around. And yes… there is an app for that, on both iOS and Android.

While I am excited to be there as I am all for comics, my ComicCon friends they seemed to be a little prickly that Marvel is going to a non comic event to do a big announcement. Let me tell you it started a very heated discussion over digital comics versus traditional that made me regret even mentioning it. Personally I think it could be a great platform to make an interactive innovation announcement.

To borrow a roller derby term I am fresh meat for SXSW (this year will be my first to finally attend!) so I find myself wondering how the traditionalists see a comic incursion to the Festival. Is this blurring the line between the festival and the plethora of comic cons a little too much? Or is it just another example of how many different aspects of our lives are touched by interactive media?

Among the 21 companies that have already been announced are Bazaarvoice, Whale Shark Media, All Web Leads, Cosential, Rackspace Hosting,Teksystems, and SpaceTimeStudios. The event is billed as a place for “talented professionals can easily connect with the best tech jobs and career opportunities – all in one centralized location at SXSW.”

The event runs on Friday, March 9, from 11am to 5pm and on Saturday, March 10th from 12pm to 5pm, with a Happy Hour sponsored by WhaleShark Media on Saturday from 5pm to 8:30pm. Registration is not required, but they ask that you register so they know how many to expect.

Check out the their site for more info. And spread the word!

HATCH is a pitch competition at the SXSW 2012 Startup Village for startups with revolutionary ideas. Fifteen finalists will be selected to present their business plans to a panel of corporate, angel, and venture investor judges in front of a well-connected SXSW audience on March 11th, 2012 in Austin, TX. The event, presented by Houston Technology Center, is geared toward tech startups with an interesting or disruptive product and strong growth potential.

If that sounds like something you want to do, then www.hatchpitch.com is your next stop – but do note this is a pay to pitch opportunity, and this is far too short a blog post to go into the ethics of paying, pitching, presenting, and powerpoints. If you’re just grabbing the popcorn from Whole Foods, then head to the Startup Village at SXSW on March 11th.

Over to Kevin:

Five minutes. One live microphone. Your stories.

Every year since 2000, attendees of SXSWi have gathered to tell stories. Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Blogs. Fray Cafe has been there before them all. This year, the legendary evening of true personal storytelling returns to Austin. The only ground rules: your story must be true, it must be about you, and it can’t be a plug for anything.

Here’s how it works: Anyone can attend. No badge required. You show up and listen. If you wish to tell a story, add your name to the sign up sheet. We get to as many as we can before 11. Past tales have included: Marriage Proposals, crimes committed, faces fallen flat upon and great triumphs of will. You know, that whole all of the human experience thing.

Does this sound like an evening well spent? Audiences for 12 years at SXSW have thought so. Join us. You’ll be glad you did.

We’ll be there – and I’ll be asking very nicely if I can tell another story. I’ve been behind that microphone every year since 2006 (BTW Kevin’s the only storyteller that’s managed every single Fray - word).

It goes something like this (long time Baby! fans, it’s okay to get something in your eye).

Far too many to list here, so we’ll go for Lego George.., because everyone loves Lego. If you want to explore the rest of the nominees, head over to the full list.

Like they did last year, Sliderocket is offering a free pro account to presenters, that will remain active until January 2013. (This is well after when the world is supposedly going to end.) Looking at the webpage, the pricing for this kind of account comes out to approximately $288.

As someone who is passionately opposed to death by powerpoint, the idea of something that is more web friendly, easily updatable,  and has nothing to do with what OS your computer is running?  Fascinating. I wonder if it keeps more people awake?

It’s not a complete picture just yet – the bulk of the Film screenings are still to be announced, let alone timetabled, and while the sessions for Music are in place, the showcase timetables are still being worked on.

Still, if you’ve not started your planning, now’s the time to crack open the diaries, calendars, PDA’s and smartphones to note down the sessions you can’t afford to miss.

Chiang is suggesting you put together a quick page on Eventbrite or Plancast, buy in some cupcakes, tacos and pancake batter, blog about the party and "boom", you’ve launched. For the record, his food prices are $80 in cupcakes, $20 in pancake batter, $150 in tacos… which is $250, he’s already over his budget!

There is some smart advice in here, but I thin that lo-balling a SXSW presence, on top of transport and airfare (even if you’re only staying one day and can skip the hotel) is not the best use of resources in the intense roller-coaster speed that is SXSW Interactive.

That said, Foursquare did not bad a few yeas ago with a big box of swag, giving it away if you could beat the dev team at a game of Foursquare – yes the real game, with a bal. Total cost? The swag, and a box of chalk to draw the game boxes on the path outside the Convention Center each day.

So there are ways to be cheeky and get seen without spending a fortune – and half the fun is seeing what people come up with for the Austin get together every year!

The full list can be found at Chinwag, but three that caught our eye here at The Baby! include…

AMEE (www.amee.com)
AMEE’s mission is to aggregate and automate access to the world’s energy and environmental information in order to drive measureable change to a low-carbon economy.

Net Communities (www.netcommunities.com)
Net Communities specialise in representing innovative US Media Companies in the UK in order to bring a wider reach and range of marketing solutions to UK and European Brand Marketeers.

PlayMob (www.playmob.com)
PlayMob are enabling charities to fundraise through games through their core technology, GiverBoard. GiverBoard provides a social and fun experience to fundraising via games and allows game players to keep a history of all the good they do just by playing games. GiverBoard is multi-platform and has already raised thousands of dollars for good causes globally.

You’ll find the UK Trade stand in pride of place at the SXSW Trade Show once we get to Austin. Until then, you can keep up to date with the news on Chinwag’s Digitial Mission site.

So what price can you get today, what will it go up to tomorrow, and how much do you save on the walk up price? It foes a bit like this…

We’ve deleted the original prices that you missed out on (after all, we don’t want to make your bank account upset) and if you’ve made the decision to go, you’d best head over to SXSW and get your badge sorted.

Moving away from Six, this year you’ll be heading to The Stage on Sixth (508 E 6) to pick up the microphone, on Friday 9th March. RSVP will be needed, but it’s free and via Eventbrite.

Available from Friday 9th through to Tuesday 13th, you just need to swing by 513 East Cesar Chavez Street by the Convention Center and borrow a bike – till the stock runs out.

I just wish they were (a) staying for music, and (b) hope that some of bikes will have a low enough cross spar that I can ride one in my kilt without being arrested…

And the vast majority of them will be flying home on Wednesday morning, just as SXSW Music is about to start, and I think that’s a shame.

Okay, it’s difficult to take another three days away from your work, but surely one extra day, to allow you to look at the musical world, the innovations on offer, the real world use of social networks, media delivery strategies, promotion, and everything else around Music is worth eight hours away from the desk?

If nothing else, taking in just bit a of SXSW Music is an experience, and life is all about experiences.

So if you have a chance, push for an extra day in Austin, grab a one-day pass for Music and see how the other side hang out.

Because it’s shaping up to be a great Interactive in terms of keynotes and talks. Baratunde Thurston was already locked in, but his recent activity with “Poor Black Kid” is going to make his opening keynote even more interesting and dynamic. Joining him at the keynote table will be Amber Case (a cyborg anthropolgist), Ray Kurzweil (who’s just smart in ways you would not believe), and Jennifer Pahlka (the exec director of Code for America).

Around 900 proposals have already been accepted, and the main SXSW site has grouped them (by the 13 campus sites around Austin, and therefore by a rough topic) for you to start planning a rough schedule for during the day.

And of course the parties – the major and official parties are locked in, from the traditional crush of Mix at Six and the Opening Party on Friday and Saturday, to the combined Film and Interactive Fusion Party (Sunday) and the Interactive Awards on the Tuesday.

SXSW Interactive starts on Friday March 9th, but expect the early crowds to arrive the day before on Thursday and set up camp in all the old haunts… which will be re-discovered as the new haunts by all those attending their first Interactive.

Perfect.

Submissions for the Interactive Awards end on Friday 18th Nov; Films need to be in on the Tuesday before that (i.e. the 15th); and if you were hoping to get your band in by now, whoops, because that was November 4th… last week.

And the other big deadline? The tickets. You can still walk up on the day to get your SXSW Badges, but if you want to get the next level of discount you’ll need to book ‘em by this Friday.

Thankfully the curse of the London cab driver won’t be hanging over ScreenBurn this year, but its move out of the Austin Convention Center to the Palmer Events Center on Barton Springs Road could be the making of ScreenBurn’s gaming thread as a major part of SXSW.

Or it could be that making it a fifteen minute walk away from the focal point will turn it into ghost town, we’re not quite sure yet.

But SXSW Interactive’s decision to go big in terms of panels, campuses and venues means that this isn’t going to be the only hike you’ll be making in March. Here’s hoping that you’ve packed some good walking shows (and you’ve broken them in). We wish ScreenBurn the best of luck as it grows up and leaves its parents… and we hope it makes a success of its new home.

 What I have always loved is the diversity of sessions and being able to be in one about photography one second, then go next door to listen in on the new world of non-profits and finally swing by a third to hear a case study about a successful transmedia storytelling campaign. A little something for everyone…

With the rapid growth forcing talks to be held at hotels spread all over Austin it is going to naturally cut down on these random bits of magic to occur. Instead we’ll bump into other people interested in the same topics as we are since we’ll all be at the same hotel together. This will lead to other great meetings for sure, but don’t we have enough fishbowls already?

There’s malice intended, but it’s a question that SXSW veterans always ask – how can the spirit of “the second year I attended South By” possibly be recaptured now the event is bigger, more people are turning up, and my hotel room is even more expensive? (Interestingly, no matter what year your first SXSW as, this line of argument is almost always the same…)

Chapman will  still be there though (and so will we). The sessions are an important part of the experience, but they’re not the only part of the experience. And that has to change every year.

So what do you think of the expansion of the panels and the campus model that;s been put together as the solution to the growth of Interactive

The next round of programming will be announced no later than Monday, December 19, 2011.

The list is here.

From their site:

In addition to studying the symbiotic nature of humans and machines as a cyborg anthropologist, Case is a user experience designer who focuses on mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, she founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding. She has been profiled in numerous publications such as Forbes and WIRED, and she was recently featured in Fast Company as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology. In addition to this acclaim, she has consistently been voted one of the top-rated speakers at SXSW Interactive.

Sounds verrrry interesting, this will be on the Baby’s “must see” list.

Keep checking back for more announcements as they come in!

A lot of people are going to be pretty nervous as October 24th comes around – we’ll have the first tranche of Interactive presentations announced then, and there are going to be a lot of people cracking open PowerPoint to get to work on their sessions (and everyone else will be on tenterhooks waiting for the second and third tranches.

While the main deadline for submitting to SXSW Film for presentation, the Late Submission Deadline is November 1st. Details of the increased fees are on the submission page for Film.

On the music side of things, you’ve just missed the Friday deadline for early submission to showcase at SXSW, so you’re going to have to pay an extra $10 as the fee goes up to $40. There’s a final-final deadline on November 4th to submit your music (only via SonicBids, details here). The first Music panels are announced, along with the first Interactive panels, on October 24th.

And for everyone else? If you’ve still to buy your ticket, the next price jump is on November 11th, which leaves some time to sort out your budget ahead of the big date? We’ll see you in Austin on Friday March 9th for a beer, and back here on The Baby! as we get ready!

Specs for the bike are:

Performance
Estimated MSRP $7,500
Top Speed 60+ mph / 95+ kph
Real World Range* 40 miles / 65 km

Motor
Motor Type Hub Motor; Permanent Magnet Brushless DC
Peak Motor Power 12 kW / 16 HP
Peak Motor Current 300 Amps

Batteries
Battery Type Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4)
Battery Life 2,000+ discharge / recharge cycles
Number of Cells 24 cells
Max Battery Current 160 Amps
Pack Capacity 4.6kWh
Pack Voltage 76.8V (nominal)
Recharge Time 5 hours

Looks like a great way to get around a crowded downtown during SXSW. Anyone want to chip in?

Check it out at their site.