In the same events planning space as Plancast and Upcoming, Y Combinator-funded Lanyrd launches today after this weekend’s game changing news of Yuri Milner and SV Angel’s 150K investment in every Y Combinator startup. An IMDB for conferences, Lanyrd has the ambitious goal of becoming the one stop shop for all conference data by pulling in information from the Twitter accounts that you follow.
At first glance Lanyrd is pretty comprehensive. Whether past or future event, a Lanyrd conference page shows you a list of speakers, attendees, and trackers and their respective Twitter accounts as well as a list of sessions, a link to the actual conference page itself, the ability to save the event to iCal and Outlook, a link to coverage, separation by topic, related books, as well as permalink page which enables you to share the Lanyrd conference page with your friends (Whew!).
Upon logging into the site with your Twitter account you immediately see a list of conferences your friends are interested in and perhaps more impressively can view and edit your own conference profile page which presents the number of conferences you’re spoken at, other speakers at those same conferences, future conferences you are attending as well as view coverage and materials like videos audio and slides, using Embedly. Says co-founder Natalie Downe, “We want to make ourselves useful across all topics, and plan to be useful before an event, during an event and after an event.”
Lanyrd is pretty amazing if you’re a conference heavy-hitter and have heretofore have not seen all your conference attendance information in one place. Without having to buy a conference database, its data pool is pretty strong with over 1169 conferences added and over 1/3 of active users having made at least one edit to the site. There’s also an API and Javascript “Upcoming events” badges in case you want to bring back all that carefully complied data to your own site or app. A newly launched email feature brings your event info and updates to your inbox without even having to visit the site.
Founded by Django creator Simon Willison and his wife Downe after finding themselves stuck on their honeymoon in Casablanca with nothing else to do, Lanyrd aims to get you off the computer and “meet the people you follow on Twitter.” Says Downe, “Our success criteria is when someone goes to an event and meets someone they wouldn’t have.”
The two are excited about growing their audience and are especially psyched to have the added encouragement of the Start Fund investment. Says Willison, “It’s a pretty amazing deal, which is clearly designed to be hard to turn down. We’re treating the money as additional runway: We now have a full 18 months to focus on improving our product and building a business around Lanyrd.”
Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...
Lanyrd is a directory of conferences, events and speakers. Visitors can sign in with Twitter to see events their friends are attending or speaking at, submit new events, add talks that they have given and build up their speaker profile. Lanyrd is a Lanyrd Inc production by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe.
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
