These companies, which include consumer and e-commerce businesses, have just enough capital to keep going, for now. But they aren’t growing fast enough to raise more financing or secure a big “exit” through a sale or by going public. In Silicon Valley, they are often called “zombies.”

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Co-founder Brandon Ballinger told AllThingsD that his company has two big strengths: First, it uses machine learning to detect user behavior patterns — one million of them already — that correlate with fraud; and second, it’s made to be easy to integrate with any existing website via free APIs.

After that, customers pay ten cents per user per month for every user beyond 5,000.

Ballinger noted that because it’s standard practice to hold online stores liable for fraud — as compared to offline, where banks often cover fraud instead — this could potentially be a very big business.

In testing, Sift Science has observed all sorts of interesting phenomena. For instance, people who register to buy something with a Yahoo email account are twice as likely to be fraudsters as the norm. Meanwhile, people who register with an AOL account are half as likely as the norm to attempt something fraudulent.

Ballinger had previously developed similar in-house systems at Google to detect malicious advertising. He and co-founder Jason Tan started Sift Science in June 2011, and participated in the Y Combinator program later that year. They now have a team of nine people in San Francisco.

Sift Science has been in testing with companies including Airbnb, Listia, Affirm (Max Levchin’s new startup) and Uber. Customers can either use the service to block transactions in real time or to flag them for review before they’re settled.

Standing in the Starbucks line at the tail end of my last day in Austin, I’m not happy. I’m tired and somewhat underwhelmed by the tech-focused things I’ve seen during South by Southwest’s Interactive sessions. My feet hurt like hell. To top it off, some jerk accidentally steals my iced Americano.

And then it happens — a “South By” moment. The jerk, whose name I learn is Andy, returns with my coffee (already half-sipped), and we start chatting as the barista makes our new drinks. Turns out he went to college with my colleague Liz Gannes, and is a now an employee at a major tech company I’m interested in. We exchange numbers, and promise to meet for coffee at some point after the conference. And then he asks the usual question that bookends every SXSW conversation: “So, what parties are you headed to tonight?”

Moments like these are fast becoming the value of South by Southwest Interactive, once considered a premier place to discover the latest trends in tech, and the companies that will define the landscape of devices and the Web in the years to come.

Instead, many make the trek from Silicon Valley, New York, and other tech hubs for the chance to meet like-minded people, perhaps wander in and out of a few panels, and network, network, network.

“I have one friend who comes to South By exclusively for the parties, without going to a single panel,” said Nick Tommarello, founder of the Y-Combinator-incubated startup WeFunder, who was attending South By for the third time. “I come here to hang out with all of my friends.”

The parties are indeed something else. Venture capital firms rent out entire restaurants off Austin’s Sixth Street thoroughfare, offering open bars and top-tier music acts. Big-time Internet companies like Twitter host rooftop ragers, with throngs of people waiting around the block to get in. And then there’s the Path party, the highly exclusive, not-so-secret shindig that’s been thrown by the social startup for the past few years. It’s become so difficult to get into that even its own investors were rumored to be turned away at the door.

Make no mistake — this is where the real work of South By is done. Young, nerdy engineers and slick biz-dev types hop from one party to the next almost systematically. Partnerships are forged, secrets are traded. And the hosts use the occasion to attract promising talent, each party offering a glimpse into the “good life” after recruitment.

“The budgets for some of these things that I’ve seen are insane,” one Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who preferred not to be named, told me. “They just keep getting crazier and crazier.”

As a result, fewer startups use the occasion to launch significant product updates and releases at South By, in fear of being drowned out amid a sea of loud marketing noise, raucous parties and ridiculous publicity stunts.

“I’ve seen no apps that I really care about here,” said Matt Ceniceros, director at Austin-based marketing company PulsePoint group. Indeed, it’s almost a complete 180 from last year, when apps like Highlight, Banjo, and other location-based discovery apps gained much buzz — some would call it hype — at the conference, and then failed to take off in the months that followed.

Even larger companies like Facebook held only small, informal gatherings targeted mostly at members of the press, with no significant product launches. Twitter took the opportunity to treat many of its ads and media brand partners to a night of fun, but had little to say in the area of news.

“We felt there was way too much noise and distraction for the press at SXSW to choose this as a effective launch venue,” one startup employee told me, who preferred that I not name her, as her company was still in ‘stealth mode.’ “This was a good call,” she said.

Instead, companies like hers found it better to meet reporters and potential investors for drinks, or perhaps a chance introduction in a hotel lobby bar. Even for writers — people like me — it’s a time to meet new sources, VCs and startups, with the aim of formally catching up after the conference is over.

Later that evening, Andy from the coffee line ends up texting me. He’s at the Mohawk, an outdoor bar and late-night music spot, and wants to know if I want to join him in wandering around to different parties later in the evening. With just 12 hours before I have to catch a flight back home to San Francisco, I tell him I’ll be meeting him shortly.

It’s time to get to work.

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Instead, Mr. Goldberg tapped Tiger Global Management LLC, an investment firm run by Chase Coleman, an East Coast native and protégé of hedge-fund guru Julian Robertson. In January, Tiger helped lead the $444 million equity portion of SurveyMonkey’s $800 million recapitalization.

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Here’s how Visual Revenue works: When an editor is deciding on the layout for a page, Visual Revenue uses data to predict how well a story will do given its placement, includes a number of automated tools like switching between headlines until it finds the most effective one, and tracks performance.

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Cloud Elements: Based in Denver, this company of 12 employees specializes in making cloud applications work together. When the other option is to hire a bunch of programmers to write a bunch of custom code to get two or three or more cloud applications to play nice together, this company has designed a growing list of pre-built integrations.

GeoStrut: While not technically a digital company, this company fascinated me with its carbon fiber lattice designs that are used in the construction of, among other things, wireless towers. Carbon fiber isn’t a new material, but GeoStrut has perfected a way to mass-produce it. It’s getting a lot of incoming interest from companies in India and elsewhere in the developing world where wireless infrastructure construction is likely to boom. It’s based in Lindon, Utah.

Lendio: Based in South Jordan, Utah, Lendio is basically a matchmaker for small businesses looking for commercial loans. It helps small business owners find the right loan from the right kind of institution — a bank, credit union or other source. It’s not a lender, but makes fees on the referrals.

MobilePulse: Ever wished you could hire someone to evaluate all your wireless plan device options and tell you which one was best? Imagine having the same problem for a business, where you’re managing a fleet of hundreds if not thousands of smartphones, tablets and the like. Denver-based Mobilepulse has a software-as-a-service product that measures, compares and diagnoses mobile performance. It uses a client application that gets installed on all of a company’s devices, and monitors performance for analysis and reporting. Over time, you get an idea of your plan’s performance, and can later compare it against different plans from other carriers.

Here’s something new going up on GitHub: Starting today, the latest version of documents from Series Seed, a basic set of documents for companies working with early-stage investments, will be up on GitHub, too.

No, it’s not software code, but the fact is, said Ted Wang, the Fenwick and West lawyer behind Series Seed, it’s pretty much the first place that companies look when they evaluate people they want to hire. “When my clients are evaluating people, they look at GitHub. It’s sort of replacing the resume,” Wang told me.

Wang, of course, is the well-known lawyer who has guided companies like Twitter, Facebook, and has advised companies that were acquired by Google, Zynga, eBay and others from their earliest days.

Wang created the Series Seed documents in 2010, and since then several major venture capital funds, including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, among others, have agreed to use them as the basis of their own seed-stage investments.

As the costs to start a company have come down, it no longer made sense to have more than 100 pages of legal documents to sign and review.

Now the documents themselves will be available on GitHub with all that implies. Discussion about changes and tweaks will move to GitHub and off private email chains and comments on the Series Seed blog. But it also means that other people can take the basic version of Series Seed documents, change the bits they don’t like and upload their own.

“I think that would be great,” Wang told me. “All the time, I hear from people who like the documents, but don’t like a few little things they’d like to see changed. Now they can create their own.”

(Update: I made some minor changes above in the description of companies advised by Wang.)

“The same way antivirus and firewalls protect, someone needs to protect your cloud,” CEO Olivier Amar told me earlier this week. “We’re that firewall.”

The idea is surprisingly viral. When at the beginning of 2012 the company invited users to get the year off to a fresh start by checking their permissions, 150,000 signed up in a matter of days. All it was? A simple HTML page that had direct links to the application authorization pages for Facebook, Twitter and other sites.

In the past year, MyPermissions has added all sorts of useful stuff, like browser extensions and iOS and Android apps, monitoring and alerts, and the option to disconnect all applications in one fell swoop.

So, I, for instance, can see that MyPermissions has flagged 13 applications that access my inbox or contacts, 175 applications that have 24/7 access to my info even when I’m not using them, and 164 applications that access my content or files.

At that stage, 40 percent of MyPermissions users opt to remove all apps at once, according to Amar. “We get comments all the time of people telling us ‘I had no idea.’”

But all that authorization information is only for Facebook. For Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox and other systems, the only option is still to click through to visit those sites directly. MyPermissions has a lot left to do.

To that end, the Tel Aviv-based company now has $1 million in funding from Lool Ventures, 500 Startups, 2B Angels, Plus Ventures and Robby Hilkowitz.

Banking on transportation as the great equalizer of the week-long music, film and technology conference that starts next week in Austin, Texas–namely, the need for every attendee to get from the airport to the conference and dozens of venues–a handful of startups are offering new services or extended existing ones in their quest to woo early adopters as users, and (they hope), ambassadors.

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Now, the recent graduates of Carnegie Mellon University’s business school work for the world’s largest home-improvement retailer, Home Depot Inc.

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