When Plancast launched last November, it immediately put other sites like Upcoming, Dopplr, and every single e-vite service on notice. The “Foursquare for the future” has a simplicity that leads to a lot of social activity as we’ve seen over the past few months. And now that vision will get to flourish further with some seed funding.
The $800,000 seed round (which technically went to Plancast parent Worldly Developments) features an impressive investor list: SoftTechVC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. As well as individual angels, Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim, and Paige Craig. With the round, SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier also accepts a seat on Plancast’s board.
The funding comes at a great time for Plancast as the service has just completed its first iPhone app (due to be submitted to the App Store shortly), and hopes to leverage the upcoming SXSW festival in Austin, Texas to get more users on board. A couple weeks ago, Plancast launched a special SXSW page to make it simple for festival-goers to see all the events going on and note which ones they plan to attend. (There is also an area for those not attending SXSW.)
Plancast remains a two-person team, founders Jay Marcyes and TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson. With the money, they plan to do some hiring including developers and designers. Up until now, Plancast has offloading some work to contractors including former Pownce co-founder Leah Culver to build their iPhone app.
Previously, Plancast raised a micro-seed from fbFund last summer. The service has an API in the works that should be entering private beta soon. And after the SXSW madness, the plan is to implement more privacy features, we’re told.
Update: And check out the nifty new Plancast logo.
Congrats Mark – looking forward to what’s going to be happening in the future :)
Congrats Mark!
logo is major improvement over one they had before.
agree
yeah this one is very cool. hip little penguin
Just dropped in to say that the title of this article is really cool.
You want “on notice”? well here it is http://smi.sh/76dde , everyone seems to be pounding the same old drums. I really don’t have the time to explain why, you’ll figure it out. Great article though.
I don’t know why but (even though I trust Mozilla Firefox and Stop Bad ware) I don’t want to click on Cruz’s link.
thanks.
Pause to question—
Why do i need plancast when i can go facebook and do the same thing? Duh!
well they do connect now, which is very nice. personally i find plancast MUCH easier to use than setting up a whole facebook event.
That made me pause for a moment — i.e. I’m not sure I remember how to create an event in Facebook.
[scans for a minute]
Okay. Yeah. Not as easy as Plancast.
Besides, I’m not a follower like the first three comments. I understand wanting to create a company on the web, but if you are making applications that are extensions of facebook, that is pretty sad.
To the owner of Plancast: You don’t have to reinvent the wheel but you must make the wheel better not rounder. I would hope in the future you would brainstorm much better. Try this, start formulating your concept after the first 10,000 ideals. Solving problems can make you rich.
With Smish…you can take a trip and never leave the farm, so to speak. http://smi.sh/76dde
Hey “Cyd” —
The Plancast guys are getting pickup and traction from a large part because facebook events doesn’t work particularly well.
Also, if you look at the social architecture, plancast centers focus around the attendee rather than the event organizer — which is a pretty radical departure.
I’m not an investor or connected to plancast (although I am a user, and they bought me a drink last week at their SF event).
People who are based in Silicon Valley, get funding from mainstream angels like Jeff Clavier, and coverage on Techcrunch are the pretty much the textbook definition of early traction.
shhh. don’t wake the dog.
bonus points for cute penguin in logo
Congrats! Awesome, looks like we share some investors. Plancast has been a useful resource for our company to find developer events our community cares about, and frankly it is much less convoluted than Facebook events.
Can’t wait for an API so we can mashup Twilio with Plancast for SMS notifications about new plans nearby.
Cheers,
Twilio Team
Congratulations Mark!
Nice work! I’ve really been enjoying Plancast and this is purely from an end-user point of view.
I’ve found uses personally and for the company I work with, ONEHOPE Wine. It gives us an easy way to distribute the events and tastings we are a part of.
Looking forward to the API along with some server upgrades. RSS feeds and the website have been struggling today, basically rendering our events section empty :(
Thanks! And our apologies for the downtime today — we got a bit crushed under the weight of things, but we should be humming again for everyone.
“things” being techcrunch. :)
Boring!
Cute logo and all, but come on…
The FourSquare/Gowalla space was getting too crowded, so they decided to take it to the future?
This is so “me too”…
this really isn’t too much like either foursquare or gowalla. we called it “foursquare for the future” because that’s an easy way for others to relate – but the point is, this is for where you’re going to be in the future, gowalla and foursquare (at least for now) are about the present.
Haha that logo is dope. bad ass type and penguin man.
Yeah and facebook events really do lack a lot. People
never check them anymore
Congrats to Mark & team. BTW, Plancast threw an awesome party last week, that if you were on Plancast you would have known about. ;-) BTW, I love the little logo. Two thumbs up for Plancast service.
Congrats, Mark! I’m looking forward to seeing how the service develops. It’s been awesome to use.
sometime ago we launched a similar social calendar service which we killed in 3 months (plancast was actually a name we considered, but we ended up with “sociocal”). Granted, our implementation might not have been great, but i wonder now if our luck would be different if we had a few friends working for techcrunch
Congrats to Plancast. Its always tough to get seed funding. I’m glad there’s investors still out there that are willing to take a risk on startups. It’s amazing to see how soon they got funded being that they just launched back in November. PremierInterns launched back in October and we are still scratching and clawing to get some seed funding. Hopefully, Plancast can use the money to continue to grow. Congrats.
Congrats Mark…good to see some of the other fbFund companies making progress
Congratulations! We have already been using Plancast and it works great for getting the word out.
Looking forward to that API so that we may voice, SMS and IM enable all of those events!
Team Tropo
I agree! Plancast is super easy to use. If I ever want to find events that I should be attending, I go there rather than FB. And the integration w/ FB is worth its weight in gold.
Plancast is getting buzz, and deservedly so, and I hope that SXSW does even more for the team – they have really done a ton for SXSW events, with the custom page they created at http://plancast.com/sxsw. I studied buzz created by companies that are highly correlated with the term “SXSW”, and apart from the “big ones” like Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla, Plancast was the #1 of the newer startups (data here: http://marketiq.biz360.com/2010/03/sxsw-startup-buzz-creators/)
P.S. The new logo is really cute! I grabbed a bunch of penguin stickers at their party. Can’t wait to use them.
Great to see some funding hitting the events space. It’s time for an overhaul for sure.
I do not quiet see the value of Plancast.
Congrats Mark! Looking forward to using Plancast at SXSW this week :)
I agree! Plancast is super easy to use. If I ever want to find events that I should be attending, I go there rather than FB. And the integration w/ FB is worth its weight in gold.