The digerati are all in Texas for an extended weekend of partying, gaming, and strutting their stuff.  It's the South By Southwest Interactive festival, and don't let the good time vibe fool you: this is serious business.  As Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News writes:

The 17-year-old fast-growing South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference was the place where Twitter first came to prominence in 2007. It was the place in 2009 where the concept of smartphone location check-in services was first popularized by the New York startup Foursquare.

SXSW remains one of the most fashionable places to seek out the emerging trends in personal technology, particularly on the mobile and social web. Still, even some young entrepreneurs worry that the mushrooming event is losing its soul, as corporations and what Rosenberg called "the beautiful people" are drawn by the money and cultural interest behind the boom in online social media.

Read At South By Southwest Festival, entrepreneurs are the rock stars here.

So who are the entrepreneur rock stars at this year's festival?  Maureen Farrell, who writes about entrepreneurs for Forbes, has her eye on Hashable:

Hashable just launched to the general public a week ago, after five months of invite-only beta testing. Spend some time on Twitter, and you’ll inevitably find that those you’re following have #justmet or #raninto someone. (@Mikeyavo does all the time). The hashtag #justmet allows Hashable users to exchange business card information over Twitter. Using Hashable’s hashtag verbiage, users can introduce connections to one another or explain who they’ve reconnected with on Twitter. On the site, users can privately track meetings and connections. Over time, users could build out a comprehensive map of their personal and professional worlds.

The billion dollar question is THE question for consumer web startups these days. It’s a question you’re more likely to entertain if your startup is backed by venture capital investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Venture, an early investor in Foursquare, Zynga and Tumblr. Union Square Ventures led Hashable’s $4 million financing round in November 2010 and has been an investor since 2008 when Yavonditte founded Tracked, a competitor to Yahoo! Finance and Hashable’s predecessor. “Union Square and Fred Wilson are clearly the best venture firm in New York City by a mile,” he says. “I honestly don’t see another firm here. I can’t name another one. If they exist, they don’t have any cache with me.”

Beyond an investment by Wilson, Yavonditte has a proven track record as a CEO. He sold his firm, Quigo Technologies, a search engine marketing firm, to AOL for $340 million in 2007. His work at Quigo, he says, taught him that serious companies take time to build. “We’re five months into the development of Hashable. My last company took 5.5 years.”

Read Hashable: South by Southwest’s 2011 Breakout Company? here.