Forbes contributor Mark Fidelman featured OurCrowd among a list of the top 5 most important new companies to know from SXSW. Read the list online here or below.

The 5 Most Important New Companies You Need to Know

From: Forbes.com

By Mark Fidelman, contributor | April 2nd 2013

After a month of burning up airline fossil fuels, I’ve finally landed in a place that I can tell you about some of the hottest new companies to watch. I saw most of them at Summer Camp for Hipsters or as the more civilized call it – South By SouthWest (SXSW).

Anyone that has ever attended SXSW understands that it’s like high school flipped upside down. Where bullies are knocked down, jocks can’t keep up, and the cheerleading is done by the attendees.

Big companies attending seemed to have a form of imposter’s syndrome as if they had expected SXSW to be incongruous with business but it was business that was incongruous with SXSW. And for some strange reason – it all worked.

For me, I didn’t want to like SXSW but it hit me like a sucker punch: hipsters and attractive women with tattoos carrying iPads, CEOs in robes and networking parties with earsplitting music. I’ve almost forgotten about the long searches for taxis and long walks to venues. It was consistently inconsistent and that was a good thing.

I only saw a few presentations because there seemed to be a meeting, a party, a Bryan Kramer dunk tank – or whatever in the path to my destination. I did manage to see Jure Klepic, Debra Kaye and Ekaterina Walter’s ominous, “Secret Dangers of Online Influence Marketing” for which they described a cautionary approach to influence marketing. Apparently not enough Klout scores were sacrificed by Twitter to appease the gods, thus resulting in their decision to make even more unimportant people important.

But I had made the pilgrimage to SXSW for the sites, the sounds, and the startups. And the best place for that is in the Austin Convention Center. Its exhibit hall was unremarkable, just like any other exhibit hall – except that it was utterly remarkable.