It works like this: Once a user has downloaded the PayDragon app, he or she can add items from a vendor’s menu simply by scanning a QR code. Which is great, except that I hate QR codes. And I’m pretty sure everyone else does as well.

That’s why it’s good that PayDragon not only has the QR capabilities, but also enables vendors to create menu listings in the app itself, and allows consumers to add and delete menu items without having to scan anything at all. Frankly, this is the more likely use case for most consumers when they go about choosing what they want to eat from their offices or other locations anyway.

Once an order has been placed, PayDragon bills you automatically, using one-click payment from a credit card you’ve entered into the app. Once it’s on file, there’s no need to re-enter credit card information or pay with cash once you arrive at the vendor’s location. Simply show up and pick up whatever you ordered.

To show off the app at South by Southwest, PayDragon partnered with eight different food truck vendors in Austin. During the promotion, users were encouraged to download the app and order with it. If they did so, they’d also receive additional goodies at no extra charge.

Some food truck vendors already have these types of apps available. Curry Up Now, my favorite Indian street-food vendor in San Francisco (hooray Tikka Masala Burritos!), has an app that lets you place an order, skip the line and go straight to the payment window. And some major food retailers — like Chipotle, for instance — let you do the same. But each has its own individual app, which isn’t entirely useful if you’re not sure what exactly you want.

And there’s no guarantee that those apps will have great workflow processes built in for the staff at the food vendors and trucks. Eric Silverstein, owner of The Peached Tortilla, one of the apps that partnered with PayDragon for its SXSW app promotion, said that the web-based backend for PayDragon was much better than the branded app his truck currently uses.

However, few small vendors have the money to invest in building new apps or updating the ones they might already have. For those without the resources, being on an app like PayDragon also has the potential to get exposure for vendors who don’t have their own apps.

All that said, PayDragon faces an uphill battle against serious competition from major players in the mobile payments space. Square is trying to simplify purchasing with its own suite of mobile applications. On the business front, it has improved its product listings and management for vendors through its Register product, while also enabling seamless payment for consumers with Card Case. And PayPal just launched new small-business and consumer apps along with the release of its PayPal Here card reader and apps that let users transact business with either a credit card, cash, check or even in-app payments.

PayDragon was born out of PaperLinks, a mobile QR code startup focused mostly on enabling ad- and marketing-campaigns for brands. But it’s extending that technology out to consumers and small businesses. The startup is backed with funds from YCombinator, SV Angel and the Start Fund, among others.

For a demo of PayDragon, check out the video below from the App.net mobile showcase:

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So far, Tiny Review has only been available on the iPhone, and it’s pretty much a free-for-all — users have gone beyond the basic review functionality to use the app as an all-purpose meme generator. But what if Tiny Review were open to all through an HTML5-based web app? And what if it targeted the South by Southwest crowd specifically?

To answer these questions, the tiny startup team behind Tiny Review has ported the app’s functionality to the web, with a meme generator called TinySX focused solely on the intricacies of SXSW, or what they call “Geek Spring Break.” The idea, according to cofounder Melissa Miranda, is to “take a real event with real people, and see what memes emerge.”

It’s a lot of fun, and early entries have been pretty interesting. So grab a photo and play with it yourself.

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There are a few common use cases that the Highlight team wants to tackle heading into SXSW, according to CEO Paul Davison. They include:

• “I just met you and want to talk to you and look at your profile and see what we have in common.”
• “I just met you and had a great conversation and want to keep in touch somehow.”
• “I’m sitting in a talk and want to browse and see who’s around me.”
• “I’m at a party, and want to know when my friends are nearby.”

When considering how to meet the needs of those users, Davison & company thought about what it could do to more immediately show when users came into contact with each other. Hence, the new “now” description, which lets users see who is around them at any one time. It also tweaked the time stamp to let users know when the last time they were in proximity of one another was.

The highlight app also added a search feature, so users can more immediately gather information about those they’ve met — taking care of that first use case. As for enabling them to keep track of one another, the app now gives users the ability to “highlight” each other — that is to tag someone in a sort of “save for later” list.

Highlights are public by design, meaning that you can see whoever has highlighted you, and they can see who you’ve highlighted. Davison says it’s akin to bookmarking someone you’ve found interesting, which also allows you to keep tabs on exactly when and how you met. It’s also, in his mind, a kind of public endorsement of the person that can be seen by others.

The app also added a new pane for managing activity, user profile and settings, and to see who you’ve highlighted and who has highlighted you. It also adds an ultra-easy way to “pause” Highlight, or to disable the location tracking portion when it doesn’t need to be in use.

Davison told me that preparing for SXSW is like preparing for the future where everyone has Highlight installed. To meet that challenge, the team has been tweaking settings to limit the number of notifications that users will receive, especially in a place like Austin during the busy show, where a ton of tech-heads will be congregating. It’s also trying to reduce battery drain, which has been a major issue for early users.

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After registered SXSW Interactive attendees exceeded the number of their Music counterparts for the first time last year, SXSW organizers expanded the Interactive conference to 14 venues across downtown Austin, Texas. The new format allows the conference organizers to create “campuses” based around major themes (such as “Convergence,” “Culture, Science, and Play” and “Future of Work”), but it adds a new layer of confusion for attendees who have to hustle across town to get from session to session.

GigaOM is representing hard this year: Our writers and analysts are speaking on panels about SOPA, new careers for online journalists and more. Without further ado, here is the GigaOM SXSW 2012 roundup:

Saturday, 3.10 (12:30–1:30 p.m.): SOPA Media Coverage Dissected

Stacey Higginbotham moderates this panel, which includes Brian Stelter (New York Times), Jake Bialer (Huffington Post) and Kim Hart (Politico). She will be discussing the inherent conflict of interest between journalists and the major media outlets they write for, especially as it pertains to online and print coverage of the SOPA story.

Sunday, 3.11 (9:30–10:30 a.m.): The Connected Company – An Inventory of the Possible

GigaOM Pro Analyst Stowe Boyd joins Gordon Ross (Dachis Group), Dave Gray (OpenRoad/ThoughtFarmer) and Megan Murray (Moxie Software) to discuss the future of work from a company’s perspective. Boyd will draw on his experience as a futurist and his interest in social tools.

Monday, 3.12 (5–6 p.m.): Web Originals – Television’s New Guinea Pigs

Ryan Lawler moderates this panel, which looks at how some television broadcasters and celebrities have successfully launched original Web series and what these new formats mean for the future of TV. He will be chatting with Lisa Kudrow (yes, that Lisa Kudrow), Brian Terkelsen (Starcom MediaVest) and Marc DeBevoise (CBS Interactive).

Tuesday, 3.13 (11 a.m.–12 p.m.): New Career for Journalists – Online Video Producer

Chris Albrecht, who has served as a writer, product manager, creative director and just about everything in between at GigaOM, will join Emily Calderone (Slate.com), Kyle Ryan (The Onion/AV Club) and Meredith Arthur (CHOW.com) as they discuss their own career paths and trajectories and what led them away from writing and into the world of online video journalism and production.

What notable panels and sessions are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments below.

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Highlight CEO Paul Davison

Your phone now knows who you are, where you are, what you are doing and even who you might want to see. Thanks to services like Facebook, background location data, and the fact that all your friends now have smartphones, those devices can act as beacons, sending out information about us in the hopes of connecting with other likeminded individuals. At South by Southwest this year, all of those things are coming together in several apps that will make it easier to strike up a conversation in a roomful of strangers or figure out if this is the bar you want to spend the next hour in.

Highlight, which is one of those apps, is on fire right now, and CEO Paul Davison believes the holy grail of smartphone-assisted serendipity in now within our grasp. There’s value in knowing more about the people around us than we do today, according to him. Of course, Davison wasn’t the first entrepreneur to preach the serendipity gospel, but he’s the latest in a string of startup founders whose raison d’etre is raising awareness of our immediate surroundings and the people we share them with.

Nowhere will that be more evident than this year’s SXSW, where a growing number of app makers will attempt to draw connections between friends, acquaintances and even perfect strangers in proximity to one other. In addition to Highlight, there’s also Glancee, Ban.jo, Sonar, Uberlife, Localmind and Glassmap, all of which have either recently launched or updated their apps to help make real-life connections between users based on their interest or social graphs.

Highlight is the early leader of the pack, and in some places it’s already considered to have “won SXSW.” But let’s be clear: Highlight is not about meeting people, Davison says. It’s about being able to walk into a room and know the people you share friends or interests with. What you do with that knowledge is up to you, but it’s not meant to be the starting point to some sort of pickup line.

Tell that to the cynics, who question whether or not the world is ready for that type of knowledge being shared. Sure, it sounds cool to those of us who live in public, tweeting about our breakfasts and posting drunken weekend photos to Path. But what’s in it for the common user?

It’s important that there be clear privacy controls, and that this type of information exchange be all opt-in. But more importantly, the value exchange has to be clear to users. Let’s face it: the early adopters will buy in, at least to a certain extent, because that’s just what early adopters do. But for the average Joe to waive his right to privacy, there usually has to be a good reason to do so.

So what is that reason? In the long-term, Davison says the technology will help reduce the friction that exists in real-world communications and introductions. San Francisco, he says, is a city of 800,000 strangers. But what if you walked into a cafe and knew that there were three people nearby who have friends in common with you? Or that you share a favorite author with someone in the next seat? What if you know you’ve met someone before, but can’t quite place his or her face? By being able to check Highlight — or some other app like it, you can re-kindle that connection.

It’s not for everyone, but it’s difficult to keep a true believer down. The most impressive thing about Davison as Highlight’s CEO is that he has an unbridled enthusiasm for unlocking this future world he expects we’ll all soon live in. For him, it’s not a matter of if, but when our portable electronic devices will begin silently telling others about us before we say a word. And he doesn’t just want to be on the bleeding edge of that cultural shift — he wants to help make it happen.

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What? They have sessions?

Many Davos participants rarely, if ever, attend even one [of the sessions]. Instead, they float around in the slack spaces, sitting down to one arranged meeting after another, or else making themselves available for chance encounters, either with friends or with strangers whom they will ever after be able to refer to as friends. [The New Yorker]

At SXSW, people will spend weeks across every conceivable social network convincing you to come to their panel (and, thus, justify the cost of their attendance). Just don’t expect those panel pimps to return the favor. I meet a good percentage of people who never go to any of them (aside from whatever panel brought them to Austin in the first place). Looks like Davos is the same way.

The eternal search for the new hotness

Another admonition: no matter how much you do, you will always have the sense that something else, something better, is going on elsewhere. On the outskirts of town, three men are hunched in the candlelit corner of a pine-panelled Gaststube, discussing matters of grave importance. You may think you don’t care about such things, but the inkling burrows like a tapeworm. The appetite for admittance can become insatiable. [The New Yorker]

The conversation from every party, panel and pathway to and from SXSW boils down to this: “What are you doing next?” The obsessive quest to attend the next hot (fill in the blank) is exhausting — and almost laughable if people weren’t so stupidly serious about it. The sense that the grass is greener even influences apps heading into the event, where polls, predictive apps for parties and even the insane use of group texting, as happened last year, all help play into what I think of as the anti-Zen of attending a conference.

You go because everyone else goes

Davos is, fundamentally, an exercise in corporate speed-dating. “Everyone comes because everyone else comes,” Larry Summers told me. A hedge-fund manager or a C.E.O. can pack into a few days the dozens of meetings—with other executives, with heads of state or their deputies, with non-governmental organizations whose phone calls might otherwise have been ignored—that it would normally take months to arrange and tens of thousands of Gulfstream miles to attend. [The New Yorker]

As for many industry events, people hit SXSW because they can catch in one place a huge subsection of the corporate, media and venture capitalists that they need to talk to. SXSW has grown in the last few years from having a very small venture capital and big corporate presence to almost being overrun by big-name businesses sponsoring parties. And the VCs? Back in 2004 or 2005 a few showed up, but since about 2009 they are everywhere (except at the panels, see point 1) searching for the new hotness (see point 2).

It’s just like high school!

There are as many Davoses as there are perceptions of Davos. Schwab might use the term “stakeholders,” and the stakeholders may be partial to the word “silos,” but another term that springs to mind when you are there is “cliques.” There is a tech crowd, a finance crowd, a media crowd, the spouses. (The annual meeting this year was merely eighty-three per cent male, in part because the W.E.F. imposed a quota.) A certain ferment occurs where the cliques overlap, but as often as not they pass in the night. [The New Yorker]

SXSWi has gotten so large in recent years that it now has separate venues for media, tech, film and a variety of other tracks at the event. What was once a decently sized show in the convention center has sprawled to 15 venues around Austin, which requires the use of a shuttle to get around. So like tends to stick with like. Which is a shame, because it’s when different groups interact that the most interesting events occur. Thankfully, there are still the parties.

Nerds are welcome

He found it noteworthy that while the scientists were expected to present their ideas in terms that laymen could understand—“We’re expected to do science lite”—the economists and the financiers hadn’t indulged their scientific counterparts with any primer for the financial crisis or what was happening in Europe. This was, to his eyes, a sign that the scientists and philosophers were window dressing. “I never felt excluded,” he said. “But it suggests that ultimately this isn’t for us.” [The New Yorker]

And finally, here’s why SXSW is still worth attending. Davos may cater to the financier and business set, but SXSW Interactive is all about the geeks: the more into robots, programming or something equally esoteric, the better. I’ve sat through some hard-core nerd panels and seen some fantastic after-hours displays of geekitude. The conference also embraces new technologies and encourages participants to contribute. This can be beneficial, such as taking questions via tweet, or it can devolve into a mob mentality that’s ugly to see. But for now, SXSW is still about the web, and it takes the principles of interactivity and geek worship seriously.

Bonus reason: the food

While I’ve never been to Davos, I’m willing to go all-in at the baccarat table that the Swiss Tex-Mex won’t hold a candle to the creamy jalapeno sauce at Chuy’s, the Mexican martinis at the Cedar Door or the mole sauce at El Chile. Actually, if you’re coming from out of town, forget that last one. I want to eat there next week.

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SXSW 2011 photo by Brittany Ryan

Pack up the robots, your Apple gear and the Red Bull because it’s almost time for South by Southwest in lovely Austin, Texas. As a local tech reporter, each year I’ve tried to showcase a few of the hotter startups in the city for visiting VCs, executives and job seekers just in case you want to find a deal, partnership or new gig while down here.

So far, more than half of the companies on my previous lists (2010 and 2011) have “made it” in some way, either with an acquisition, more funding or big customer wins. That’s better than a dart board, so I figured I’d keep up the tradition. So without further ado, here are the 10 startups you should meet while in Austin.

Ambiq Micro: I’ve mentioned this chip startup before, but for those hardware hacks out there, it’s worth a look. Not just because it’s building a smarter, integrated-clock chip for sensors, but because CEO Scott Hanson delights in chatting up the hardware and technical details behind the Internet of things.

CommunityOffers.com: Everyone understands how Groupon can be a blessing and a curse for small businesses as a lead generation tool. CommunityOffers is trying to perform a similar service in terms of helping local businesses get new customers, but they back it with data collection on the back end that helps retain and reward loyal customers.

Gazzang: The seamy underside of our big data obsession is how most of our data isn’t well secured. Gazzang, led by experienced enterprise software sales executive Larry Warnock, wants to encrypt the data itself as opposed to the infrastructure on which the data is stored. Gazzang has raised $3.5 million, and already has several customers.

Ordoro: The guys behind Ordoro are out of the University of Texas business school and created inventory and order management software to help small businesses (or big ones) manage the still convoluted and manual aspects of shipping physical products ordered online.

Ricochet Labs: The company behind the popular QRANK platforms was formed in 2010 to create content for publishers. The news-style quizzes aren’t just for publishers though. The company is in the middle of raising a series A round to make advertising a compelling form of content, a must in today’s attention economy.

SubtleData: This is where the cloud meets the mobile world in retail. SubtleData offers a platform that provides a back-end loyalty and rewards service for merchants and app developers. It allows merchants to connect point-of-sale services through their mobile devices. This is a big deal for folks who want to run food trailers or small businesses that don’t want to buy a lot of extra sales software. Of course, now that Square has launched a similar Register service, SubtleData may end up being a buy for one of the bigger players that want to get in on this game.

Umbel: If, on the Internet, everyone is a publisher, then it makes sense to know your audience. Umbel calls itself an audience intelligence company. The stealthy company uses vast amounts of aggregated, real-time social data and hopes to become the Nielsen for the Web. It’s a tall order, so let’s see if it can do it.

Vivogig: Austin bills itself as the Live Music Capital of the World, and so it’s great to put Vivogig, an app that allows you to share and vote on photos of your favorite bands. It looks like they are going to provide a fan outreach and marketing site.

Wheel InnovationZ: A startup that is pretty stealthy, so this recommendation is more about the person than the product. Founder Srini Gurrapu has a lot of experience working with infrastructure startups and virtualization. The understanding is that the company is building an app store to help companies manage the trend of employees bringing their own devices in to work and working on things that aren’t corporate computers. Sounds vaguely like VMware’s Horizon, but it could be a lot of things.

Wide Open Spaces: If you know what Cabela’s is, then you should sign up for Wide Open Spaces, a Gilt-Groupe-style shopping site for the hunting and fishing set. It was formed in October 2011 and closed a small Series A in December.

Image courtesy SXSW, credit Brittany Ryan.

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