Rachel Clemens, owner of Creative Suitcase, and her partners are preparing to launch a new venture at the South By Southwest Interactive festival that she hopes will turn some influential heads.

Clemens’ website SwapYourShop.com is an exchange program for creative professionals looking to trade homes and office space with people in other countries while working remotely for their current employers.

SXSW made sense as a place to introduce the beta version of the site because it’s a trade show for creatives from across the globe.

“Last year, the idea was born at South By Southwest, so we wanted to bring it back to where it started,” Clemens said. “Also, the audience at South By is our key audience.”

She’s not alone in wanting to impress that audience.

The number of businesses and products being launched during SXSW festivals in hopes of reaching the world’s top creative and technology makers and influencers is growing. Last year’s SXSW events attracted more than 31,000 attendees, with more than 24,000 visiting the Film and Interactive Trade Show.

This year, the interactive festival is expecting record-breaking attendance. It’s anticipating a 40 percent increase over last year, when it had 10,741 attendees.

“If you are a technology company or an entrepreneur or a startup looking to launch something, this is the group of your peers—of your Alpha nerds,” said Josh Jones-Dilworth of Austin, Texas, public relations firm Jones-Dilworth Inc. “Some succeed and some fail, but there’s the potential for [a new technology] to be taken up by Web-savvy influencers and start skyrocketing.”

The opportunity for exposure that a SXSW launch offers is too good for many companies to pass up.

“To be able to launch in that environment and get noticed and get that initial traction is an extraordinary opportunity,” said Bart Bohn, director of Austin Technology Incubator’s wireless and information technology incubators.

Historically, SXSW wasn’t recognized as a place to launch companies, but Twitter broke that mold, said Aaron De Lucia, senior vice president of public relations firm Porter Novelli’s Austin, Texas, office.

Now there are examples of so-called geeks catapulting previously unheard of technology into mainstream popularity.

The success of Twitter at the interactive festival in 2007 and the traction gained by Foursquare and Austin, Texas-based Gowalla at last year’s festival have helped further SXSW’s reputation as a launch pad for tech businesses and products.

Although SXSW is becoming known as a place for launches, there are also risks, De Lucia said.

“As much as it’s a great venue, it can be a risky one,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen. Are you going to have a huge AT&T iPhone outage? That just basically buries your news.”

Since Twitter, “the dominant question has been: Can that happen again?” De Lucia said.