As has been made abundantly clear to me over the past two weeks, just about every location-based service is planning big things for the SXSW festival , which starts later this week in Austin, Texas. A few of the players have already started rolling out small changes, such as aesthetic upgrades

One of the advantages of having a plethora of app directories for iPhone and Android devices, is the wealth of additional data that has emerged regarding users buying and downloading habits. Facebook-based app directory mPlayit has a few compelling stats out today that show that games are four times as popular among iPhone users than among the Android user base

Conde Nast has been working to fuse its fashion content with technology and social media.

There’s a very interesting op-ed piece in The New York Times today entitled Microsoft’s Creative Destruction . In it, the author details what he feels are the reasons that Microsoft has failed to innovate at the same pace as their competitors over the years. Big deal, right?

During flu season, one place to check for the level of outbreaks is Google Flu Trends, which extrapolates outbreak levels from the rise in flu-related searches. Today, it launched a more detailed view which maps flu levels across 121 cities in the U.S., including New York City , San Francisco , and Minneapolis .

Snapstream, a startup that makes a device that lets enterprises record thousands of hours of TV (from both satellite and digital cable sources) and search inside the recordings for keywords, recently launched a trending topics site for TV. Snapstream has released its top trends on TV for 2009, with the mention of “Twitter” used more often than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. .