After months of planning, a month of voting (and months of waiting for results), we have learned that our SXSW Interactive Panel “AI 2010: Wall-e Or Rise Of The Machines?” has been chosen for SXSWi 2010! The technology panel will cover artificial intelligence now and in the future, from high tech robots to content recommendation engines. Read our panel description here.

As you know, there were over 2300 panel ideas this year in Interactive alone! We are so grateful to be found in the crowd, and it is all thanks to you. Thank you to all for voting and supporting us in our SXSWi 2010 efforts!

We love going to SXSW every year to learn new things in technology, social media, and gadgets, so we hope to make this panel as informative and entertaining as any other panel we would want to attend. If you have thoughts on our panel, or think you could rock it as a panelist (or just know someone who would be awesome for this panel), let us know. We’re in the early stages of planning and would love to hear what you want to see for this panel!

We’d also like to congratulate those who have made it into SXSW so far and those who are still waiting to hear. The competition was tough this year, so I know the SXSW committee has their hands full, and there are still more panels that have not been selected yet. We’re crossing our fingers for those waiting to hear and congratulate our peers who will make SXSW great this year.

Thanks again for all of your support. See you at SXSWi 2010!

OneSpot friends, family, and visitors from around the Web — welcome to our site, possibly for the first time.

I’m thrilled to announce that OneSpot has closed a $4.2M Series A round of financing, led by Silver Creek Ventures. Existing investors also participated, including Mike Maples (former Executive VP of Worldwide Products at Microsoft) and Pat Horner (cofounder and former President/COO of Perot Systems).

This is great validation of the vision behind OneSpot: that the new values of Web media are to help audiences solve the overwhelming information overload on today’s Internet and to embrace the linked nature of hypertext and the incredible depth, quality, and variety of content out on the Web today; that a human editorial voice can provide perspective, context, and commentary to make the Web manageable and understandable; that technology is necessary for human editors to effectively discover, curate, and share the best content from around the Web for their audience; and that anyone with passion and an understanding of their audience can build a connection with them.

It’s been nearly 15 years since I launched my first Website, the Houston Chronicle’s chron.com, and I’ve seen Web media mature over the years from what was mainly an electronic copy of offline media to something that takes full advantage of the strengths of the new medium. For some time it has been possible to build a site that did a reasonable job of making sense of a large part of the Web for your audience — but only through superhuman effort and a large dedicated team of editors — and it was bound to miss something. OneSpot’s goal is to make the tools to curate the Web accessible to a much larger audience.

There are so many people to thank that helped us get to this point, not the least of which are:

• Our customers, who gave us confidence that we were on the right track;
• Our team, particularly our CTO Mason Hale, who left 8 years as Chief Technologist at frogdesign to follow my dream and make it his own before there was any money at all to pay for it;
• Our angel investors, who believed in the idea before there was much to show for it;
• Our formal and informal advisors, including Brett Hurt (who has joined our Board of Directors), Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg, Ron McCoy, Peter Rojas, Steve Vandegrift, Steve Waters, and many more;
• Our families, who put up with late nights and long hours — and will bear with us through many more;
• And to John Adler and the team at Silver Creek Ventures, who have already added immense value and will continue to do so in the years ahead.

To keep up with OneSpot and find out how you can get access yourself, apply for a free trial, sign up for our email newsletter, read our blog or RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter (onespot).

For more details, please see our press release.