Eight-week old, UK-based startup uberlife, the new location-based, socializing app, launched their iPhone app at the South by South West interactive festival this spring, earning them a place in the press as one of this year’s must have apps.

CNET named uberlife as one of the “hottest new aps out of SXSW”, while the New York Times praised the app for helping users organize “pop-up hangouts” to get people together while in Austin during the conference.

Before and during the SXSW, uberlife’s userbase and usage increased by 50% as attendees of the event signed up to discover and join SxSW “hangouts” to meet and relax with cool new people outside conference sessions. Hangouts varied from post-session drinks to discuss topics like social media and design, to more casual hangouts like taco crawls, playing pinball and checking out bands.

uberlife CEO founder Sanchita Saha stated that “SxSW provided an incredible opportunity to debut our app and test it out live on the early adopter and influencer crowd at SxSW – we saw a lot of people having a lot of fun with it and the feedback was awesome.

“We’re also taking back a lot of learnings and we’re excited to feed this into our next iterations to keep making the experience better for our users.”

“It’s been super cool to see the different ways the app was used at SxSW, by speakers and bands, and the interest we gained from brands is something we’ll be looking to explore further.”

Social discovery abuzz at SXSW 2012

uberlife isn’t the only social discovery app that launched and generated a lot of buzz at SXSW this year.  Highlight, the serendipitous discovery app that brings people closer by alerting you if someone nearby, who also uses Higlight, is a friend of a friend, or a cousin of a friend, or if you have the same interests, also made a splash at SXSW.

Other social discovery apps worth your time are Sonar, a mobile app that pulls up publicly available information on Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, etc. and colourDNA, a new social discovery tool that makes it easy to find new things to enjoy in life, which just launched their iPhone app on iTunes for free.