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HILL COUNTRY. Made in NY: Austin will celebrate New York based tech startups at South by Southwest on March 11 from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. at the Fast Company Grill at Cedar Door in the Texas Capital. The event will be hosted by Gust, and the New York Tech Meetup and will be attended by over 250 NYC based startups. RSVP here. You might even be able to get there in a real NYC yellow taxi.

GroupMe is also heading to Austin for SXSW to keep you connected to your fellow conference-goers. Start a group on the GroupMe SXSW landing page and get exclusive updates, news and a chance to win prizes.

Be sure to RSVP for the GroupMe Major Rager end-of-the-weekend celebration at Cedar Street Courtyard featuring DJ sets from the likes of COMA and Nancy Whang of LCD Soundsystem.

Pixable is going to SXSW with a special section dedicated to the interactive conference based on what's happening, where you should be and what's most popular "#SXSW Live Feed" is a real time stream of all #SXSW tagged photos on Instagram and Twitter and "#SXSW Popular" is a showcase of the most shared and liked pics.

PIIIIIING. Sonar, the mobile app that shows hidden connections to the people around you based on the information you publicly post online, is going to SXSW with an Android App in beta. And that's not all—new features are also live including a people tab, to show users whose around no matter what the venue may be, Facebook and Twitter location data integration to show more people with more context and the entire app has been reengineered under the hood for improved speed and power.

GIRLS. GirlDevelopIt now has over 2,300 members and will be on hand at SXSW celebrating women in tech with a totally unofficial All Girl* Dev Brunch. The nerdettes also announced that classes in San Francisco are open for enrollment.

*Boys allowed.

ISPs 4 U AND ME. KeyWifi, the disruptive little startup spearheading the effort to bring Internet access to all by sharing hotspots, came out on top at the Silicon Alley Battlefield event at the New York Entrepreneurs Business Network. Betabeat believes uninhibited access to information is a good thing, so it's nice to see KeyWifi win with a refined pitch after struggling to connect with judges at last month's Common Pitch.

TESTING 1-2-3. After over a year of beta testing, Broadcastr 2.0 is available in the iOS app store and in the Android Market. Broadcastr allows users to " find memories, insights, and enriching information about eclectic and everyday places on every continent on Earth." New features include imprived filtering options, a gallery view, curated story collections and more intuitive map browsing.

ADITUDE. Solve Media heard our prayers and has come up with a way around 30 second ads for online videos that are sometimes only half that length. With Solve Media's solution, viewers will be able to type a sponsor's message in a text box to bypass the commercial. Users will be less frustrated and sponsors will know that their message was heard instead of playing to nobody while the intended target is making a sandwich.

CHA-CHING. Covestor, an investment management company that basically lets users see the transactions of pro traders and copy their moves, is joining forces with SlashDeclare, a cooperative movement of financial services companies calling for fairness and transparency in financial markets.

Covestor’s Next Invest, a virtual conference, is set for March 20 and 21 where Charles Lewis Sizemore, of the Sizemore Investment Letter, will talk about "using content to build a money management practice."

LIFE COACH. "It is time for you to stop stalking your exes and start living your life!" proclaims LifeGunk, a startup that touts itself as "the world's first life-management network." LifeGunk allows you to maintain schedules, take notes, log goals on your calendar, and send yourself reminders. When you accomplish one of your goals you can even give yourself a checkmark. Sort of like Google Calendar—but more patronizing. LifeGunk is currently self funded. Investors—get in while you can.

45 RPM. Turntable.fm is rolling out new features including a private chat function, improved search and a guest list so you can see how else is is jimmying to your jams. Best of all, there's a new free iPhone app—gratuitous guitar solo goes here.

MAXIMIZE. Clickable just made some big expansions to their senior leadership team as they plan to continue their rapid growth as a platform that combines search and social across Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare, Bing and LinkedIn. Dave Fall joins Clickable as COO, David O. Smith as CRO, Sanjay Gupta as senior director of engineering and Brian Tucker as the VP of agency sales.

WORK FOR CHANGE. Gawker is looking for a new creative director with coding proficiency. Apply Here. Hyperpublic needs a web developer who's comfy with MongoDB, Javascript and JQuery. Throw your hat into the ring. Betaworks wants a senior backend engineer and architect for contract or full-time. Expertise in Python, Mongo and AWS is preferred. Tell 'em why it should be you. GetGlue, the social network for entertainment, has an opening for a senior product manager with 3-5 years experience and a social media presence. Apply here. Signpost, the "Google AdSense of local commerce," is on the prowl for a new publisher development manager. Strong business acumen and three years of marketing/sales experience gives you a good shot. Shoot. Work Market, a labor and HR management platform, backed by Union Square Ventures, is looking for a back-end Java developer, operations engineer, community manager and many other positions. Check 'em out here. Foursquare has internships for young, budding techies on the software engineering and community fronts. They've also got more than a few job openings. Check it all out here. And last but not least, Boxee wants to pay an intern on their product team. If you're based in NYC apply here.

TELL ME A STORY... ABOUT THAT BAGEL SHOP: Broadcastr, the location-based storytelling social network from Brooklyn-based Electric Literature, drops its Android app at long last today. You can now stream nearby stories as you walk through the city using GeoPlay--and New York is possibly the only city where the number of stories is dense enough to do that, so take advantage.

THE OTHER CROWD-SOURCED FUNDING NETWORK: A platform for crowdfunding which is not Kickstarter and which is not based in New York has partnered with President Barack Obama's Startup America project. "As part of the Partnership, IndieGoGo has agreed to offer Startup America Partnership member companies and entrepreneurs the opportunity to raise $30 million of funding at a 50 percent discount on campaign fees. IndieGoGo will also feature Startup America campaigns on a newly created Startup America Partner Page and provide resources on crowdfunding techniques."

SPEAKING OF KICKSTARTER, THOUGH: They're hiring for a customer service representative to talk to backers, creators and other community members about their issues. "Short of someone crowdsourcing a buyout of Kickstarter, these guys are in it for the long haul and looking for an outstanding addition to the team," writes Graham Siener in the NYC Startup Digest Jobs newsletter. So you're saying, Mr. Siener, that Kickstarter won't be outsourcing its customer service to Bangalore anytime soon, or just that the company isn't planning on imploding? Anyway, that job sounds megasweet.

LIMITED TIME ONLY: One of New York's most hackerish start-ups, 10gen, is matching donations to the HackNY hacker internship program's Kickstarter project for the next seven days.

WINGED HACKATHON: RedBull is sponsoring a hackathon this summer. "From July 7 - 10, 2011, a soon-to-be-disclosed location in NYC will be turned into the ultimate hackerspace and serve as the laboratory for Red Bull Creation. For 72 hours, you'll be thrown  smack into the middle of a marathon of high stakes innovation... On the final day, the event culminates in a live exhibition and show for all of New York to see. One catch: you won't know the build topic until the first tick of those 72 hours. You want a shot at the glory? You've got to qualify first at www.redbullusa.com/creation."

EDTECH HACKATHON: There is one this weekend: Hackthink, an "ideating and hacking competition to reimagine tech and education," at Pivotal Labs, sponsored in part by Shapeways.

Paris Hilton with Broadcastr co-founder Scott Lindenbaum.

Broadcastr, the audio social network from the bookish start-up Electric Literature, just inked a deal with Oxygen Media.

Oxygen and Broadcastr plan to inaugurate their partnership with exclusive content on the augmented reality app, narrated by Paris Hilton, as she shares her 10 favorite places around the world with fans of “The World According to Paris.”

The service has been growing steadily since it launched publicly last month. There are now more than 7,000 audio clips mapped on Broadcastr, the company told Betabeat, and 40,000 "active users," unique users who spend five minutes or more on the site.

This deal is huge for Broadcastr, co-founder Scott Lindenbaum told Betabeat last night, because Oxygen will be promoting the service on air.

Oxygen is also working with another New York start-up, sponsoring group texts via GroupMe. Will watchers feel overwhelmed by the social medias?

Disclosure.

You don't know the man, but he lives in your city. He's telling you a story. It's about the time he was waiting on Barbara Walters and accidentally whacked her in the face. "I hit her right on the bridge of her nose. Right on the bridge of her nose, with a heavy, heavy salad plate."

The story is about a minute long. Then it's over. You're at Columbus Circle now. The boyish voice of MTV host Andrew Jenks starts telling you about the time Dennis Rodman was late for a CNN appearance. You can see One Time Warner Center from where you're standing. You walk to the corner of Central Park, where an actor's voice starts precisely enunciating the history of the nearby Maine Monument, "The sculptural program figuratively represented America's new position as a dominant world force," he says.

The voices in your ear are from Broadcastr, a collection of brief stories mapped across the world. The Brooklyn-based startup hit the Apple App Store last week, giving users a new way to access the 6,000 or so stories uploaded already through Broadcastr.com. You can now listen to the recordings as you move through the city, your phone feeding you stories based on your location, your interests—sports, history, travel--and what stories have been highly rated by other users.

Broadcastr also offers up service content, comedy and audible art. At Columbus Circle Fountain, musician Geoff Dugan has planted an ambient composition incorporating bass strings with the sounds of the city.

Broadcastr launched in private beta in December, aiming to fill a missing dimension in the social media landscape. We tweet, we blog, we post photos to Flickr and video to YouTube, Broadcastr's pitch goes, but what about our voices?

Broadcastr was founded by Scott Lindenbaum, 26, and his business partner Andy Hunter, 38—two poetry-reading, coffee-swilling, fiction-writing "M.F.A. kids," as Mr. Lindenbaum puts it.

The pair runs Electric Literature, an online literary magazine, and the offshoot Electric Publisher, which produces iPad apps for books.

"Our mission is to bring narrative into the digital age," Mr. Hunter said. "So we were thinking about using mobile phones and using GPS in some way. Maybe having someone like Jonathan Lethem write a story that refers to 30 different locations in Brooklyn and have people be able to walk around and once they get that location, it triggers that part of the story to play."

Then one day Mr. Hunter was walking through the East Village, looking at the flyers advertising bands, poetry slams, lost cats, guitar lessons—the usual messages staple-gunned to telephone poles. "It just hit me that instead of curating from the top down, what we should really do is allow people to use their cell phones to call in stories anywhere they are," he said. Users would simply record a short audio clip and pin it to a map.

They raised something in "the low six figures" from some of the Electric Literature investors, Mr. Lindenbaum said, and have been working with a Bulgarian development shop. And that's how the M.F.A. kids found themselves building a social network.

Mr. Lindenbaum and Mr. Hunter actually have experience in the whole social media thing. Electric Literature used Twitter to publish a story by author Rick Moody in 140-character bursts, which gained them more than 150,000 followers. They're also behind the YouTube video, "Can a book save your life?" in which a marksman shoots a gun at the top ten books of 2010 and at a Kindle, which reaped more than 65,000 views in less than a month.

But this time, rather than using social media as a promotional tool, they're repurposing it altogether. They're trying to create a new kind of social media.

"How do you take oral storytelling, which is like, the oldest, probably most out-of-fashion form of storytelling," Mr. Lindenbaum said, "and give it a new life? Bring it back to the popular conversation, put it into pop culture?"

Broadcastr was seeded with more than 3,000 stories from comedians, artists and writers, as well as the New York Parks Department, Fodor's Travel Guides and The National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The startup has about 30,000 active users, they said, and about 2,000 of those post content. The stories are spread across the globe but there is a concentration in New York, where the founders hope the app will get traction first. "We want this to be the spring of Broadcastr," Mr. Lindenbaum said.

Their timing is excellent, with Foursquare and other location-enabled apps already on the up. Broadcastr's challenge is to capture that momentum, and do it before anybody else. A few similar apps already exist (like Voxora, a New York hacker side project), and Foursquare could easily add audio clips to check-ins the way it added photos at the end of last year. "The longer we wait, the less of a chance we're going to have at the exact moment it needs to be delivered," Mr. Lindenbaum said.

Broadcastr became available in the App Store a day before South By Southwest, and an Android app is coming soon. The website will continue to be in public beta for a while as the bugs are ironed out, hopefully before the start of the tourist season. Then comes the full-court press: street teams, band tour diaries, guerilla promotions, more partnerships, and a social media blitz.

The app will also market itself. One of the goals with Broadcastr was to make it "super shareable," in Mr. Lindenbaum's words. Users can follow individual broadcasters, rate broadcasts and embed them on other sites. Eventually there will be Twitter-esque features such as re-broadcasts and third-party apps.

People seem to love the idea of Broadcastr. But without a critical mass of users to listen to stories and add new ones, it's sure to flop. "Just having the tool is not enough. You need the army with you," Mr. Lindenbaum said.

People use Twitter to talk about the news, create inside jokes, have conversations, make art and foment revolution. Something similar could happen with a lightweight and flexible app like Broadcastr. It could also become the primary outlet for the hours of recordings sitting on hard drives at universities and other archives. Only a tiny fraction of the 60,000 American voices recorded by StoryCorps have made it onto NPR, for example; the rest are at the Library of Congress.

It could just as easily be relegated to the ghetto of still-popular but decidedly second-tier services like Posterous and Myspace, or be buried in the social network graveyard with Bebo and Yahoo! 360. But there are 8 million stories in the naked city, give or take, and Broadcastr is worth a listen even if it captures a small fraction.