SXSW - more relevant than ever - Telegraph It's something I hear fairly often. Ah, I'm skipping South-by-Southwest this year. It's not the show it used to be. It's lost its relevance. I've been going to Austin, the Texan capital, for its annual SXSW tech/film/music festival for the last three shows running, and while it's clear that the scale and organisation of the show has definitely changed since the early years, I'm strongly of the view that the event has never been more relevant. When I refer to SXSW, I am primarily talking about the interactive strand of the show. The film and music festivals are their own beasts, but it is at the Interactive part of the festival in 2007 that Twitter was first able to get proper traction, paving the way for an explosive growth and cult following that some argue made SXSW a victim of its own success. Since then, a string of other notable moments have taken place, including an awkward Mark Zuckerberg interview in 2008, an iPad pop-up shop in 2011, and the controversial fad launch of the app Highlight at last year's show. A lot of the people I know who have moved on from SXSW say that it has grown beyond its elastic limit. They say the organisers, fuelled by Twitter's success, have just been printing more and more tickets, making the panels almost impossible to get into without queuing for an age. They say the city feels overcrowded, making flights and hotels ludicrously expensive. They also say they don't do any real work in Austin, so it's a waste of time that would be better spent in the office. But while there is an element of truth in all of the above, SXSW still remains a vital part of my annual travel schedule for a very simple reason: I've never been to another show where so many influential, inspiring people from my industry let their guards down. At my first trip to SXSW in 2011, I was able to get more cards from prominent Silicon Valley investors than at all the previous events I'd attended combined. I brushed shoulders with the likes of celebrity investor Ashton Kutcher and met the first members of a key network of British entrepreneurs who were making a success of their businesses in the US. I made contact with key influencers in the mobile and technology industry, who until the show had just been names to me. Last year, SwiftKey sponsored Alcatel-Lucent's "Trend Lounge" at the Hilton, and that attracted a very significant number of mobile technology players. We threw a party there and got to know them all. Today, a year on, I call many of these people friends, and they go out of their way to help us with our business. So a year on, I'm about to attend SXSW where for once, I'll be one of the people on the panels. I'm talking at a UKTI event showcasing British entrepreneurs who've made an impact in the USA. I'll be analysing the app market alongside some key players who I could've only dreamt of sitting alongside two years ago. And I'll be catching up with many of my friends in the industry, looking for creative ways for us to work together. That's why SXSW is as relevant as ever - because in an industry that's at full throttle, everybody needs to let their hair down, and this event truly is the technology world's Spring Break. Joe Braidwood is the Chief Marketing Officer of SwiftKey, a British-language technology company that engineers the Android platform's global best-selling app of the same name.