At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) in Austin, Texas, this weekend, the trendiest new technology that will reportedly dominate the hip-and-happening digital-culture bash this year will be – ‘location’; with geo-location start-ups ruling the roost!

The conference will apparently serve as a strategic playing turf for a host of fledgling geo-location services – chief among them being Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Where. com; which are largely being increasingly being embraced by smartphone owners for the purpose of socializing as well as playing games.

Most of the geo-location apps, which are being widely used in location-based social networking, make use of GPS on a mobile handset to “check in” the surroundings the users may be in and to announce the location to their friends.

In fact, not only the startups, even big tech conglomerates, including Google, Apple, Facebook. Yelp, and others, are showing increasing interest in geo-location services, which are fast-becoming a novelty in the social-media arena – more so as it is a potentially-addictive way to remain connected with friends, and as Facebook photo tagging, link-sharing, and quiz apps, are becoming fairly commplace.

Noting the fact that venture capitalists are pouring in money for geo-location apps, Keith Lee – the CEO of Booyah, the maker of a location-based social-gaming iPhone app, in which Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested $9.5 million – said that this year’s SXSWi is a conference “of location.”