Sxsw - SXSW Interactive Starts This Weekend

Break out the bikinis and beer bongs – SXSW has begun and with it, spring break is officially on.

Ok, so the technology portion of the festival (SXSW interactive), which kicks off the festivities, might be more of a geek fest than anything else, but whoever said geeks don’t know how to party, was just plain wrong! There might be more iPhones than beer bongs during this particular portion of the fest, but it’s still a big deal – one of the biggest tech events of the year, in fact. As such, there will always be critics. There’ve been a lot of people commenting that SXSW has lost its original intimate spirit lately and that expanding the festival has only made it worse.

Hugh Forrest, the SXSWi director was quick to object to those accusations in an interview with ABC News: "We have faced that criticism for a long while," he admitted, but stressed that: "I still think that what we focus on in 2013 is what we focused on in 2004: creativity and inspiration." According to Forrest’s numbers, there will be between 27 and 28 000 registered attendees at the fest this year, and that’s not even factoring in all of the visitors for peripheral events, who will probably round up the number to about 45 000 flooding into Austin, TX during the event. That’s a lot of people to please, and with everyone having their own opinion about what SXSW is and what it should be, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there are going to be some disgruntled attendees.