Yahoo has built a number of applications for the iPhone (and even a custom one for the iPad already), but with all the buzz about location-aware services they haven’t yet felt the urge to optimize its own Upcoming service for the mobile platform.
Enter developer Nik Fletcher, who has spent about a year developing one dubbed Happening to “scratch his own itch”. Version 1.2 is available in the App Store right now (iTunes link). It’s essentially the Upcoming app Yahoo should have built – and at the very least they should have made it easier for the man to develop it for them. → Read More
If you’re going to leave your job at TechCrunch, you better have a good reason. I think Mark Hendrickson actually may have had one.
Hendrickson left TechCrunch in March. After about two years of writing and doing development for TC, he got the startup itch. He formed a company, Worldly Developments, and along with co-founder Jay Marcyes is now ready to unveil their project: Plancast.
As you can derive from the name, Plancast is a way to easily broadcast your plans to your online social circle. But a better way to think about it may be as a “Foursquare for the future,” which is how Hendrickson often describes it. The main idea is that while many people use Foursquare and similar location-based services like Gowalla and Loopt to share where they are, Plancast is about sharing where they will be. → Read More
Andy Baio, blogger on Waxy.org and co-founder of Upcoming (acquired by Yahoo back in October 2005), yesterday evening announced the release of Kickstarter.
This is an online platform that enables just about anyone to raise funding from interested individuals. Basically, Kickstarter took what Sellaband is all about and applied it to a wider variety of projects, i.e. not only to discover and fund upcoming bands but anyone who does something creative (think designers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, etc.).
At launch, the service is restricted to people who are invited to the service, but you can sign up here to be notified when that changes. → Read More
Any event based site is basically a social network – they are designed to allow interaction among friends to coordinate virtual or real world activities. The venerable Evite is still the king of online event coordination. None of the recent startups (renkoo, socializr, mypunchbowl and the deadpooled Skobee) have presented much of a challenge. And none of the event aggregators/search engines, including upcoming, zvents or eventful, have managed to dominate their space, either. So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not. St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc. Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself. The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc. The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly. See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped → Read More
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