Yesterday, 32 finalists presented at SXSW Accelerator presented by Microsoft BizSpark. in front of a panel of judges, and 12 were honored by being selected to present on Day 2. These 12 companies competed for the top spot in one of 4 categories.

It was an amazing two days of presentations - it was full of inspiring companies and new technologies. Selecting a winner surely was not easy, so a special congratulations to the grand prize winners at this year's SXSW Accelerator presented by Microsoft BizSpark:

* News Related Technologies: Storify
* Innovative Web Technologies: Hipmunk
* Entertainment Technologies: Tango
* Social Media & Social Networking Technologies: PopVox

Overall, the participants took their game to the next level. Presentations were very polished, and the conversation style of the Q&A conducted by Emcee Brad King was very engaging. But things got interesting very quickly when judge Tim Draper told Hipmunk, "I'm interested."

Sorting through and making sense of the overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet will become easier than ever before, thanks to innovations by the likes of Participatory Politics Foundation,
DocumentCloud, and
Storify.

What once seemed impossible is becoming possible, such as providing working capital to online merchants through Kabbage, conducting eye tracking studies with GazeHawk, and more relevant sorting of travel search results with Hipmunk.

The future of entertainment technology was on full display with Portalarium bringing a deeper, richer social game called Ultimate Collector,
Viki, who provides crowd-sourced foreign-language captioning for the world's movies and TV shows, and
Tango, making free cross-platform, cross-carrier mobile video calling available to family and friends wherever they are.

Social media and social networks is ever evolving and the finalists at SXSW Accelerator presented by Microsoft BizSpark showed where this category is headed with CompassLabs, who can effectively target social media content to relevant users, PopVox providing real-time legislative information with personal stories and sentiment, and
NeighborGoods, a community where you can safely share stuff with your friends and neighbors. NeighborGoods was also the recipient of the special Bootstrap Award, which is given out to the company that did the most with the fewest resources.

Hats off to the grand prize winners for a job well done. And, kudos to all participants, finalists, judges, emcees, organizers, and audience members for two exciting days at SXSW. Join us tomorrow for the third day of programming with the Music Accelerator and see some truely innovative technology that will undoubtedly drive the future of the music industry!

Contributed by Matthew Parente