You know what’s scary? Forgetting the awesome people you meet! Also, killers in the shower and monsters under the bed. And, being eaten by a giant space bug. Or, finding out that Satan has fathered your baby. Or, a shark that is genetically engineered to be smart enough to find you and eat you. Or backpacking in Eastern Europe. Or, cavediving (okay that never really sounds safe). Or, being a hotel caretaker in Colorado. Or, shining a flashlight on your face while wearing a woolen cap. Or, babysitting. Or, answering the phone.

I know, this list has now creeped us out, too. So please, enjoy your candy corn and mini-chocolate bars and be assured that it’s totally safe to go back in the water. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SKY?!?

Boo.

Apparently May launches Event Season for the tech/social media crowd – there’s so much to do!

From TechCrunch Disrupt to Blogworld Expo to Internet Week – and everything in between – you’ll likely be meeting tons of awesome new people in the next few weeks.

Ditch that pile of biz cards, and use Hashable to exchange contact information instead. We automatically tag everyone you meet with location and date so you can find them later – and we’ll send you an email with a list of everyone you met at the end of each week to make follow-up easier.

For those of you with iPhones and Androids – be sure to get your apps downloaded ahead of time!

And for those of you Hashing it up from Twitter – we’ve created a whole slate of event tags to make things even easier. Any time you Tweet with someone using any of the following tags – Hashable will pick it up. By using these tags from Twitter, you can sort your contacts in Hashable to find the people you met at each event:

#tcdisrupt – TechCrunch Disrupt
#BWENY – Blogworld Expo New York
#pzs11 – Personalization Summit SF (May 26)
#iwny – Internet Week NY (June 6-13)
#omsmin – Online Marketing Summit – Minneapolis (June 6-8)
#wwdc – Worldwide Developers Conference – San Francisco (June 6-10)
#socialCrush – Social Crush – Wilmington NC (June 7-8)
#dbrand – Digital Brand Camp – Dallas (June 9-10)
#sesto - Search Engine Strategies Toronto (June 13-15)
#140conf – 140 Character Conference NYC (June 15-16)
#e2conf – Enterprise 2.0 Conference – Boston (June 20-23)
#shrm – SHRM Annual Conference – Las Vegas (June 26-29)
#SMD – Social Media Day – Global (June 30)

#rww2way – Read Write Web 2Way Summit NYC (June 13-14)
#srconf - Social Recruiting Conference – London (June 30)
#wiec – Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference – Milwaukee (June 7-8)

Happy Hash-ing – and Happy Event Season everyone!

– Team Hashable

SXSW is a conference – and so much more. It’s a festival, an event series, a maze of incredible people speaking on fascinating panels; a party juggernaut; a giant meeting place for swarms of ‘professionals’; a launch pad for new products, new faces, and new ways to combine your branding with delicious tacos; the locus for sponsored runs, impassioned meetups, impromptu pool parties, pre-parties, post-parties, VIP parties, BBQ parties – and very few pity parties, because everyone is having too much fun and learning too much and has too many awesome events to attend.

Thrown together in one giant be-badged mass thronging inside the convention center and outside in the Austin sunshine, each of us has the opportunity to connect with colleagues, mentors, friends and partners – many of whom we are meeting for the first time. Ask anyone who’s been to SXSW what kind of connections they made, and inevitably you’ll hear a story of a random run-in of two people from different cities who bonded over Iron Works or Iron Cactus, the Hilton pool at 3 p.m. or the Hilton Lobby at 3 a.m., being enthralled by Bruce Sterling or, um, somewhere on Sixth Street hurling. The point is, SXSW is a teeming, swarming petri dish for new relationships.

That, of course, is where Hashable comes in. Hashable is all about connecting – there for that first #justmet through all the subsequent #coffees, #meetings, #drinks, #ranintos and #majorhangs that track a connection from passing to permanent. So, with that in mind, we descended on SXSW with our hardy hometeam of full-time Hashers and killer farm team of Hashable Evangelists to totally hash you up.

And wear matching t-shirts.

Mayhem and awesomeness resulted – thanks to an amazing userbase, an energetic team and an outstanding group of friends, partners and supporters from our NYC homebase (East Coast represent!)! All of which we have tried to capture in our Official Hashable SXSW Infographic and in the following photographic smorgasborg.

Some housekeeping: A few of you got rewarded for that, and we ain’t talkin’ Hashcred. We promised to bestow upon our 3 top users each an iPad 2, because shiny toys are fun, and people like prizes. And since there was a sort of tie – we ended up awarding 4! Congratulations to Joyce Sullivan, Jeff Hoffer, Obie Fernandez and Ryan Matzner! We like you.

More importantly, we had A BLAST – and happily traded sleeping for rocking some incredible panels, hash-ups, demos, low-key hangs and hard-core ragers. And – here is the photo evidence.

Some caveats – sometimes we were too busy Hashing to document accordingly. Blame yourselves for being so damn interesting. Also, since SXSW is such an unwieldy beast, and because we loved every event equally, we determined that the most democratic way to highlight the awesomeness of everything was to take a cue from our muse Rebecca Black and go by the days of the week. For us, SXSW began on Thursday – which, as everyone now knows, is the day before Friday – followed by Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday until one by one we regretfully boarded our planes, cars and Startup Buses back to the real world, left with fond memories, great friends and random bruises we couldn’t quite account for. Partying, partying YEAH!

If you want to see everything in one big gulp, go here. Otherwise, please enjoy this highly curated look at SXSW 2011. Yes, we love you back. Okay, go:

THURSDAY

TEAM HASHABLE descends on Austin, repping from the getgo on the NYC #NerdBird along with pals from Foursquare, the NYT, the Barbarian Group, Lucky, and the conveniently-named Mashable. Uber-Hasher Joyce M. Sullivan is also on board, the recipient of the first officially-bestowed Hashable sticker, unless someone else gave one out earlier.

Bright-eyed and hashy-tailed, our A-Team reported for duty and fajitas at the Iron Cactus, loading up with margaritas, guacamole and a fetching assortment of Hashable t-shirts. We can’t even begin to describe the love and appreciation we feel for our Hashvangelists, who fanned out across the city of Austin and truly rocked it. They are: Jacob Brody, Vanessa Chester, Seth Elliott, Katie Felton, Jeremy Fisher, Joseph Haslam, Whitney Johnson, Kellee Khalil, Jesse Middleton, Natalia Oberti Nogura, Trevor Owens, Reece Pacheco, Yan Tsirklin, Alexis Tryon and Ricky Yean, with an assist from Hashable Fellows Zeb Dropkin, Kathryn Minshew and Sam Rosen. Go team!!

As CEO Mike Yavonditte hashed everyone up, CMO Emily Hickey pounded a few #beers, VP Biz Dev (and organizational genius) Jane Kim distributed t-shirts, Director of Engineering Todd Coleman hovered over his laptop between bites fixing bugs and UX Jedi Oz Lubling lounged insouciantly against a railing, the Hashvangelists cavorted amongst themselves, beginning those lifetime bonds that are often helped along by several rounds of drinks. Aw. As far as we know, none of them made out. With each other. And that is all we are going to say about THAT, Joseph Haslam!!

We were all so innocent then. Little did we know what was in store. If you want to see more about THURSDAY, go here.

FRIDAY

Up and at ‘em, Hashers! We were badged up and ready to go, some of us fresh from the Hashable Taco Truck™ on Brazos street. Oh yes, we took care of you.

We took our Hashing seriously….

…after all, Hashliness is next to Godliness:

The first day was for getting our bearings – getting the lay of the land at the Convention Center, rocking some panels, checking in at the Foursquare/Pepsi Max lot, figuring out where we were sleeping later. The first night wrought a cavalcade of parties strewn across town, from Stubbs to Momo’s to Ignite at the Austin Music Hall – but as any hardy SXSWer knows, all roads eventually lead to the Driskill. Team Hash was there, lookin’ tough.

You don’t want to meet VP Product Teddy Jawde and Director of Products Dave Sebag in a dark alley, you know what I’m sayin’? Okay – if you’d like to take a deeper dive into FRIDAY, see here. Gotta have my bowl! On to…

SATURDAY

This was a big day – in addition to crossing the bridge for panels, celebrating fabulous women at Digitini, presiding over a Sausagefest…panel, indulging in some branded Grilled Cheese from our friends at the GroupMe Grill…

…we had our Main Event: THE HASHABLE OASIS PARTY. Meant to be an intimate affair for chilling and chatting, 200 of Hashable’s best friends and closest colleagues came out to enjoy some great conversation (and power networking) with our Table Hosts like Andy Weissman, Jason Calacanis, Mark Suster and Naveen Selvadurai. Was it fun? Decide for yourself:

….maybe just a little. By the end of the night, we were clean out of t-shirts (wow, you loved those sexy little gray numbers!) and hashed to the max. Just kidding. YOU CAN NEVER BE HASHED TO THE MAX! But seriously, it was a stupendous night, and a great excuse to make all our friends come to us. We felt very lucky! And hungry. We repaired to the Iron Cactus afterward for a nibble, and there may or may not have been tequila shots.

Full photoset from the Hashable Oasis Party here.

SUNDAY

OMG it’s two days after Friday!!! We’re not sure how she did it but CMO Emily Hickey dragged her tequila-soaked body out of bed and out to the Hilton for her 11 am panel, “The Five Startups You Meet In The Deadpool,” along with Charlie O’Donnell, Ben Lerer and Christine Herron. They were knowledgeable and helpful and the full-house audience was pleased. A really cute guy named Anson asked a question. Oh come on now, you noticed, too.

Sorry, no photo of Anson. Afterwards there were many things to be done – have lunch at the CNN Grill (you’d like award-winning free food in a state-of-the-art restaurant wired out the wazoo? Great, see you there), Get Sauced at the Ashton Pool for Conduit’s fabulous pool party, which evolved (or devolved) into a frothing, teeming mass of bodies in the hot tub; the incredible NYC startup-meetup at The Parish wherein 20 homegrown NYC startups demo’d like rockstars (hat tip to co-organizer Jane Kim); see Michael Cera play rock star at the Barbarian Group party at the Mohawk; get your hair teased back into the 80s at the Google/ACLU party at Maggie Mae’s, and wonder how you came to be at a Google/ACLU party; rock your butt off at the Power Plant at the Vimeo party; shake it over to The Phoenix for the Gary V pop-up party, just because; maybe chill with Ashton Kutcher at the Hangar. We didn’t see him but if we did we would totally have made the Zoltan sign. He would have thought it was sweet! Dude! People love to be reminded of their roots.
Check out more from SUNDAY here.

MONDAY

If you managed to survive Sunday, then congratulations – because Monday was the home stretch. Not only was it Pi day (3/14), for some of us (your hardy narrotor, Rachel Sklar – hello!) that meant helming a panel followed by a don’t-mind-if-I-say-so-myself AWESOME all-lady comedy show, sponsored by Funny or Die, UCB, Reboot, The Barbarian Group and, yes, Hashable, and held at the delicious and free-beer serving CNN Grill (oh yes, sugar, Mama hooks you up). Everyone surely loved their Hashable stickers on the table! I know, don’t call you Shirley. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the action at the GroupMe Grill and the Foursquare Court was hoppin’; Gary V was keynotin’; and on the 8th floor of the Hilton, pale startup skin was beginning to turn the faintest shade of pink. Just another manic Monday…or, should I say, major Monday – as in, THE MAJOR RAGER. If you weren’t at Hashable’s awesome Cedar Courtyard bash, thrown in conjunction with our friends at GroupMe, Daily Booth and Spin, then you missed some serious good times, especially since Team Hash let loose on the dance floor. And I’m not sure if you’ve seen Jane Kim dance, but woman’s got some MOVES. We were sad to miss the Big Boi concert, but our own big boy Mike Yavonditte kept us entertained by doing a 20-minute interpretive dance to “I Wanna Hash You Up” as the crowd screamed and young girls wept. Okay that didn’t happen. But it’s all sort of fuzzy. There were more tequila shots.

You get the picture. Go here to see more shots from the Major Rager – and please to enjoy this collection of shots from MONDAY right here.

Sometime in the wee hours, maybe 3 a.m., the crowd in the Hilton Lobby swelled to at least a hundred, probably more, and the 7th Annual Hilton Lobby Backstroke Competition was off. Team Hashable represented. Not to brag but we sort of killed it – our innovation of flinging off our flip-flops and rocking it barefoot led to an entire rematch, mostly because reigning champion Danny Newman was sore that I beat him. Just kidding Danny! Congrats on winning the second time, when I didn’t actually compete! And sorry ’bout your broken pinky. #HashFriendsForeva!

TUESDAY

Tuesday dawned. Technically, SXSW was still going, but most of the Interactive crowd had started the journey back. The crowds of iPhone-wielding startup types were slowly being replaced with tattooed and pierced music types, as the SXSW changeover began it inexorable march. Some of us stayed behind, grateful for a few days of unhurried Austin sunshine and free-flowing CNN Grill fare. But even the stragglers eventually had to leave Austin, tired and hungover and almost certainly about to come down with payback from an immune system abused. As we bid farewell, we looked back at that memorable few days and those amazing people we met – and looked down at our smartphones, because guess what? Hashable had them all stored, neatly geotagged and indexed and searchable for our convenience, so that we might hold tight to those new friendships fostered in Austin’s fair glow, and never let them go.

We got you covered, friend – it’s the least we can do. You showed us a damn fine SXSW. Thanks for the memories, thanks for the connections and thanks for the hashing – we’ll see you next year!

#fondly,
Hashable

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