SXSW's wacky ways to charge a phone (Photos)

AUSTIN, Texas -- The South by Southwest festival kicked off Friday, gathering together technorati, filmmakers and musicians. Throngs of people attended the sprawling event giving their phones some extra duty use with a deluge of tweets, Instagram photos and Facebook posts. This meant quickly dying batteries. Luckily, many companies thought of some innovative ways to solve that problem.

Festival goers flocked to this solar-powered charging station set up by the Sierra Club at the Southbites food truck emporium in downtown Austin. Despite the set up looking like gas pumps, there was only solar energy being pumped here.

At the SXSW festival, those folks left with no charge or an outlet in sight could tweet a screenshot of their dying battery to Mophie. The accessory company then came to the rescue by sending out a Saint Bernard dog equipped with a mobile charger in its neck barrel collar.

Who needs an official, branded charging station at SXSW? Not these two resourceful people. At a crowded bar, any empty outlet will do the trick.

McDonald's is a first-time sponsor of SXSW this year. At its official party on Saturday, the fast food giant had a set of power outlets on every table. I'm lovin' it?

Who wants an table full of ugly chargers? During one of Yahoo's SXSW presentations on Sunday, the company hid various types of chargers in some foliage.

With so many events going on at the SXSW festival, most people didn't have time to sit and wait for a charge. Capital One bank offered people free lockers where they could leave their phones charging and come back for them later.

This station, sponsored by the hotel company Aloft at SXSW, was aboard a vehicle that serves as a charging center by day, and a booze-filled party bus by night. (Pardon the photo being slightly askew -- that's what you get when you try to take pictures in a moving bus.)