The following is crossposted from SXSW’s blog

Knight Foundation will be back again in full force at SXSW 2012 as a participant in the Trade Show, the presenter of the Accelerator News category, and as a sponsor of the Future of Journalism track of programming.

Please mark your calendars and join us at the following events:

            March 8 – iMA Conference Key Note

            March 10 – Media Innovation Fair at Brush Square Park.

            March 12-15 – SXSW Trade Show

            March 12-14 – SXSW Accelerator

Knight is committed to seeing journalism to its best possible future. Over the past four years, we have invested more than $100 million in a Media Innovation Initiative. So far, funding has helped launch more than 200 community news experiments.

If you are a current grantee or a media innovator who is passionate about using journalism and technology to inform and engage communities, we want to meet you.

The recently announced News Related Technologies finalists in the SXSW Interactive Accelerator Competition are:

BuzzData Toronto, ON buzzdata.com BuzzData is the best way to share and collaborate on spreadsheets and other datasets publicly with the world or privately with a team or across an organization. BuzzData gives your data a permanent home so you see how your data gets connected with people, ideas, solutions and the bigger picture.

Funf Project Cambridge, MA funf.org Funf, the Fun Framework for Mobile Sensing is an extensible sensing and data processing framework for Android devices developed at the MIT Media Lab. Funf provides an open source, reusable set of functionalities, enabling the grassroots collection, dissemination, and sense-making of rich data about individuals, their devices and their environment.

Ushahidi Nairobi, Kenya swift.ushahidi.com Ushahidi develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping; tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. We’re a disruptive organization that is willing to take risks in the pursuit of changing the way information flows.

Ad Glue Sacramento, CA MacerMedia.com AdGlue is a revolutionary advertising platform. AdGlue advertiser’s instantly glue, or place advertisements, right next to the content they like. Those advertisements stay glued for 30 days. This simple idea empowers advertisers with the control they desire and rewards them with value they can actually see. AdGlue: engage advertisers.

Umbel Austin, TX umbel.com Umbel empowers publishers, advertisers and agencies with a deep understanding of audience engagement by leveraging vast amounts of aggregated, real-time social data. The knowledge and insights Umbel provides to clients translates into more effective research, planning and execution of media placement activity.

LocalWiki San Francisco, CA localwiki.org LocalWiki is the open-content, open-source effort to share the world’s local knowledge. In 2004 we started the Davis Wiki, an experimental project to collect and share interesting information about the town of Davis, California, editable by anyone, that soon became the most used media source in the city.

NowSpots Chicago, IL nowspots.com NowSpots is a cloud advertising platform that lets marketers bring their advertising to life with real-time social content. Brands have become publishers, creating content to get noticed. NowSpots lets them bring this content into their banner ads to get more clicks, attract new followers, and extend their social reach.

Crowded Comics New York, NY crowdedcomics.com Crowded Comics is democratizing the editorial cartoon — one punch line at a time — by pairing crowd sourced captions and opinions with professional, timely cartoons. We are putting the power of satirical public opinion into the hands of the people with our interactive, democratic, and even local, participant-driven forum.

Alternates:

Sensecast Bloomfield, NJ sensecast.com Sensecast empowers anyone to create touch-free interfaces for digital content using Kinect-like sensors. Our software not only drives interactive media in shared spaces but makes those spaces measurable with algorithms and reporting tools to gather privacy-conscious analytics anywhere.

FollowThis Stamford, CT followth.is FollowThis was spawned from the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership program launched in 2011. The service uses Semantic Web technology to let users follow specific articles on the web for updates and related news items. It blows Google News alerts away.

BookBrewer Boulder, CO bookbrewer.com BookBrewer makes it easy to create, publish and sell eBooksfor all major eReading devices and apps. Our new NewsBooks program helps journalists and news organizations monetize curated content and has recently been used by The HuffingtonPost and The Denver Post. BookBrewer is proudly bootstrapped in Boulder, Colorado.

– By José Zamora, journalism program associate at Knight Foundation