South by Southwest (SXSW) Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals has launched the official mobile social networking and scheduling tool for its 23^rd annual event, beginning Friday, March 13. Powered by the Social Collective white-label conference software application, the mobile site integrates seamlessly with my.sxsw’s networking, messaging, and calendaring features. Open to registrants of the film, music, and interactive events, the site can be accessed by loading http://my.sxsw.com in to most mobile phone Web browsers, including BlackBerry devices, the iPhone, the Treo, and other handsets with modern Web-browsing capabilities.

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SXSW teamed up with the Social Collective to provide anywhere/anytime access to all the official films, music showcases, parties, interactive panels, and other events via my.sxsw. People who have with phones with Web-browsing capabilities can use my.sxsw’s lightweight and highly optimized mobile Web experience. People who do not can still build their personal schedules using my.sxsw via a full-blown Web browser and then use the provided iCal synchronization to push events to Apple’s iCal, the Google Calendar, or any other iCal-compliant software, which then can be synchronized with virtually any mobile device.

Also, my.sxsw supports personal schedule export into Microsoft Outlook, which can be synchronized with many other types of phones, including BlackBerry and Treo devices. And in lieu of or in addition to using a mobile phone calendar, registrants can use my.sxsw to sign up for SXSW Alerts, which provide real-time schedule updates via SMS.

“We didn’t want people to feel that they needed to lug their laptops around at SXSW,” said Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of the Social Collective. “Nearly everyone is already going to be carrying some sort of mobile device, and we didn’t want to leave anyone in the dark. So if you have an overachieving ‘smartphone,’ you can use my.sxsw through your phone’s Web browser. If your phone is more of a C student, you can probably still synchronize your calendar using iCal, Google Calendar, or Microsoft Outlook. If your phone is more of the ‘beauty school dropout’ variety, at least you can still use SMS.”

The launch of my.SXSW’s mobile experience will make finding contacts, great events, and the locations of the different venues simple, quick, and portable. With the Social Collective’s modular design, enabling the mobile version of the hosted software was easy and painless. The resulting mobile Web application carries the SXSW trademark and brand, just like the rest of the integrated social networking, messaging, and scheduling features of my.SXSW.

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