Austin's South by Southwest festival is the place where Twitter and Foursquare both achieved their breakthroughs. Each year, tens of thousands of visitors descend on the Texas city for the festival, which runs for several days and features music, film and interactive events. This year, SPIEGEL ONLINE will also be presenting a number of events together with Hamburg's Reeperbahn Festival. The Hamburg Interactive Day will be held at the German Haus on March 9.

What comes next after the NSA scandal? At 12:30 p.m., we'll be discussing the diverse reactions to the NSA scandal . We'll compare public reactions in the United States and Europe and explore what the surveillance affair means for companies. We'll also explore ways to stop surveillance from getting even further out of control in the future.

Our scheduled guests include Joe McNamee of European Digital Rights, an alliance of civil rights organizations in Brussels, US net activist Elizabeth Stark, who works with groups including stopwatching.us, and Denelle Dixon-Thayer of Mozilla.

The regulatory nightmare known as Europe: At 2 pm., we will hold a panel discussion on navigating the red tape to found a start-up  in the regulatory jungle that is the European Union. How does a young company survive? Ali Jelveh of Protonet, Claudia Helmig of DaWanda, Jörg Land of Tinnitracks and Gunnar Froh of WunderCar will all be sharing their experiences.

Start-Up Pitch: Also on Sunday, Hamburg-based start-ups will be on hand to share their ideas with international investors. Hamburg start-ups can apply to participate in the competition here . The two winners will be flying together with the winner of the Startup@Reeperbahn Pitch to Austin. SPIEGEL ONLINE will moderate the panel.