Hey, over here! Yeah, you — the person who’s pretending to respond to work emails while trolling the Internet today for anything related to “Apple” and “iPad.” There’s something else happening this week: SXSW Interactive, where techies gather to share ideas and drink and flick their barbecue-sauced fingers over their smartphones as they rave about the next big app that’s going to connect them to the person … standing right next to them. AllThingsD will be there in full force, as my colleague Liz Gannes wrote. And it’s a good thing she did, because SXSW travel planning tends to be so haphazard that it’s hard to know if you’re going or not until it’s in writing. For ourselves, and for others who are heading down to Austin, we’ve put together the Essential SXSW Tech Toolkit for the five days of the festival. RSVP to All Your Parties With One App At Read More

If you’re anything like me (and hopefully for your sake, you’re not), then you tend to do things –scheduling, booking, and so on — at the last minute. For we Last Minute Scramblers, some highly usable services have popped up that not only allow us to book at the last minute, but receive deals while doing so. Here’s to rewarding bad behavior. You may be familiar with HotelTonight, for example, an app for Android and iOS that takes last-minute deals (discounts up to 70 percent) offered by hotels on their unsold rooms — and serves them to you via your smartphone. Well, another San Francisco-based startup thinks that there’s more to this whole last minute booking thing. Yes, from 500 Startups’ summer batch comes a new app, called WillCall, which wants to be the HotelTonight for … live events. (WillCall was one of Alexia’s seven favorite startups at 500 Startups Demo Read More

WillCall, the San Francisco ticketing app we profiled just last week, is taking down the velvet ropes and letting customers into its app starting Thursday. The app, which is free, is available now in the iOS App Store and via the web for Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. WillCall helps people who want to make last-minute plans, specifically what kind of concert or performance they want to go to. At first, there will only be a few events listed per week, mostly for smaller venues and independent artists. As an example, the first list of acts available in the app will be: Shabazz Palaces at Yoshi’s, VHS or Beta at Rickshaw Stop or theater piece Jesus In India at the Magic Theatre. The coolest part of WillCall — besides enabling poor planners and procrastinators of the world — is its attempt to capture the inherently social nature of concert-going. Users of the app will get a push Read More