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I moved my company to Austin from NYC a year ago. Not one event have I been to where Gowalla was mentioned.

I'll second that. Gowalla was in Austin in name only. Zero presence at any events, no penetration of the startup networks. They moved to Austin from Dallas, I hear, at the behest of investors.

It's interesting how many startups are based here yet Gowalla got the huge press whenever Austin was mentioned. I wonder why this is - is it because of the Foursquare competition initially? Because they launched at SXSW and were a local company?

No clue why they got all the attention.. but @mattt has gotten involved in the community here and there. I've run into him a few times at @damon's Friday Night Hacks.

In terms of other startups, we have Other Inbox, Infochimps, WPEngine, and a number of other things that are relatively quiet. In terms of "big" players, we have Facebook, Evernote, Zynga, some of Sony's game dev (DC Universe Online started here), and Ebay/Paypal is moving in. OpsCode and Mozilla both have lead evangelists here too.

And there are probably dozens of things I'm missing..

Disclosure: I'm a Developer Evangelist for Twilio and based in Austin.

What company and where in Austin? (There's no info in your profile or comment history). I'm always looking to meet local entrepreneurs.

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