What app is winning SXSW?

SXSW kicked off on Friday, bringing folks in tech, film, media and music together for the annual festival in Austin, Texas.

Since the event draws an early-adopting crowd on the hunt for the next breakout hit, the fest has historically served as a launch pad for new apps to take off. Previous SXSW breakouts include: Twitter (2008), Foursquare (2009), Highlight (2012), Secret (2014), and Meerkat (2015).

This year, however, SXSW is shifting away from a place for startups to launch apps. Big tech companies focused more on branded *experiences* — from Snap's “Snap House” to Patreon's “House of Creativity.”

And politics came to the festival in a big way this year. Up-and-comers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke were there, and presidential contenders like Amy Klobuchar, Howard Schultz, Elizabeth Warren and John Hickenlooper all spoke at the fest.

Electric scooters also made a splash at SXSW, as they became the primary way to get around.

While the jury's still out on a hot new breakout app from SXSW this year, the winners of the festival's annual pitch competition were announced yesterday. Here are a few of the winning apps you should check out:

Tankee is the first gaming network for kids 🎮

Nebula Genomics wants to put all of you on the blockchain 😳

Supportiv is an anonymous support network 💬

Twenty Tables helps people find meals at local restaurants for $6 🍔

Healium uses VR to lower stress 😌

We're also keeping an eye on Traverse, a new immersive audio platform that will let you map your surroundings with AR. It's set to launch at SXSW today.

More SXSW

We asked 34 customers what Viktor does for them. Not one said chatbot.

They kept using words like colleague, coworker, team member. One CEO called it the glue holding their e-commerce business together, which is a lot, but also… you see why. It lives in Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so instead of jumping between tabs, you just ask for the thing. Pull Stripe against HubSpot, check Sentry alerts, spin up a campaign brief, build a landing page, send a report upstairs. It all happens there.

It has already hit top 5 on Product Hunt with 130 comments, is SOC 2 certified, and your data does not train models.

One user said it was the first time AI felt like a real coworker, which is either exciting or slightly concerning depending on your week.