Digital Mission, Round 5, starts this week. That means I’m off to join over 17,000 of the world’s Interactive/Digital industry folks at SXSW for Digital Mission to SXSWi ’10, together with 40 of the UKs hottest Digital Media businesses. Sam, CEO of founders/organisers Chinwag explains more:

The group includes around 90 people, and there will be other UK companies over in the US for the event as well, making the UK the biggest country group outside of the USA and Canada.

South-by, as it is known to it’s friends, does an amazing job of bringing together the digital media industry (and, yes, social media is a subcategory of that 😉 ). I’ll be posting photos on Flickr and blogging on the Digital Mission blog throughout the event, and you can follow the DigitalMission on Twitter for real-time updates. The full list of companies is here:

Amberlight Audioboo Blueleaf Digital Brainient Codegent Codility Cube Interactive Face Group FreshNetworks GigLocator Howard Baines Illumina Digital KMP Digitata Likecube Little World Gifts Littleloud Mendeley Mobilized MOFILM Moonfruit MusicMetric Nsyght oneDrum Orange Bus PageDo Pixeco Plug-in Media Qhub Rummble Silence Media Skimlinks Slicethepie Smidgn SubHub TweetJobs UberVu Vibio Videojuicer Wolfstar WorldTV

I am looking forward to getting to know each of them, and sharing the wonders of SXSWi as we head through a packed agenda of events focussed on understanding and engaging with the US market. Newspepper will be there, so expect video updates from Hermione Way – they’ve already put together a trailer:

Digital Mission 2010 from Newspepper on Vimeo.

Many of the companies met up for a pre-event mixer last week, slideshow below, which gave people the chance to get to know each other before we head over to Austin Texas. Digital Mission really is a team event, and over the last couple of years it has been amazing to watch a strengthened network of hundreds of digital businesses emerge here. While the attention might be on London, the companies are from all over the UK, and watching them support each other to become international players has been, and continues to be, a real privilege.