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.

With the tagline ‘Nearby Events in your Pocket’, it’s easy to guess what the app is all about: it accesses the wide range of events listed on Upcoming, and lets you look up events nearby based on your location or simply by searching the database.

Once you authorize the app to access your personal Upcoming settings (which took an awfully long time in my experience), you can also use your iPhone or iPod touch to browse your saved events, RSVP to them in-app, see what your friends are planning to attend and more.

The app costs $1.99 in the U.S. App Store – we should note Yahoo offers a mobile-optimized website for Upcoming too.

Fletcher also told me an incredible story about his dealings with Yahoo to get the app cleared and live. Rather than recount the story, here’s his version of the facts:

So, in August last year (!) I decided to release the app publicly and dropped Yahoo an email (via their Developer site) requesting commerical API access for Upcoming. I heard nothing, however a friend put me in touch with someone at YDN. After chatting with YDN, they couldn’t find anyone at Upcoming to approve my use of the API – however aluded that they wouldn’t have a problem with me using the API – and confirmed the number of API requests per day I’d be able to use.

Towards the end of last year, noticing an increase in activity from Yahoo on Upcoming, I contacted them again and didn’t hear anything. I chased it again, and was able to make contact with their Community Manager. She mentioned their API request limit (half of that previously mentioned), however said that going forward if that was an issue we could discuss the rate limit. At any rate, they haven’t objected to my building the app and releasing it commercially. The only concern now is the API key hitting its (rather low) rate limit of 5,000 requests per day

Makes me wonder how Yahoo is going to act if the app becomes a major hit. If at all.

(Full disclosure: I’m a partner in a company called Oxynade, which has developed a similar solution for looking up nearby events from your iPhone (iTunes link), albeit mostly for events going on in Europe – the majority of events listed on Yahoo’s Upcoming are in the United States or the UK. You might want to give both a whirl.)

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.

Here’s a perfect example: On my main Plancast page right now, I see that Hendrickson, another former TC writer Nick Gonzalez, and current TCer Jason Kincaid are all going to spend the night in the woods together in early December. I don’t know why they’re doing it, but they’re broadcasting that they’re doing it. That’s something that you really need to plan a little bit for, so if I wanted to join (I would if there was a hotel nearby that I could stay in), I could do so and let them know with the click of a button.

But it’s not just about events that you need to plan for. In fact, it’s not really supposed to be about events. “We shy away from using the term “events” because we don’t feel it’s very appropriate for the scope of activity we’re trying to capture. While our users may be interested in posting more formal, organized parties and whatnot to Plancast (and we certainly encourage them to), we want them to also feel completely comfortable sharing more informal plans (getting drinks, seeing a movie, going to the zoo, traveling to new york for a week, attending a conference, etc),” Hendrickson tells us.

He goes on to note that there’s a real void in that particular area, and I agree. While services like Upcoming and Going allow you to broadcast future things you’ll be doing, they are very event-centric. If you’re just going to get a drink tomorrow night and want friends to join, it seems like overkill to create an Upcoming event for that, for example.

Likewise, Facebook and Evite allow you to make future plans, but both are still pretty formal and are based around the idea of the RSVP. With Plancast, you simply click on a friend’s event and if you want to tag along, you hit the “count me in” button, and you’re set. You can also comment on events, to get more information or share your thoughts on it.

The social graph of Plancast is also very simple. While you can sign up for a new Plancast account from scratch, they emphasize the idea of using with Facebook Connect or Twitter to sign-in and create an account. When you choose either of those, it’s easy to link up the other one (if you use both), to make for wide-ranging social graph. And that’s an important aspect to Plancast, the ability to broadcast these plans out. Once you add yourself to an event, it’s as simple as clicking on button to share it on Twitter or Facebook to let others know about it.

And the event creation process is extremely simple. Along the top of the Plancast page (above your friends’ stream) is an input box asking “What are you planning to do?” Clicking in this box reveals fields to enter the “what,” “when,” and “where” of the plan. The “when” and “where” fields are particular useful because upon entering something it will automatically look up both a date and a place that it assumes you meant. This helps avoid confusion — with the place in particular, as it uses Google Maps to show it on a map.

Going forward, mobile will be a key part of the service, Hendrickson says. He notes that they’re thinking about doing an iPhone app that can do things like alert you when you’re in the vicinity of a plan currently taking place or one that will be in the near future. He says that they’re also thinking about integrating Foursquare’s new API to create a service that offers the best of both worlds — what your friends are doing now and in the future. (It’s important to note, by the way, that while it may be described as ‘Foursquare for the future,’ Plancast has no gaming element…yet. Hendrickson is also thinking about that.)

Likewise, Plancast wants to integrate with the some of the calendaring services to make it easy for people to use no matter your planner of choice. Facebook Events will be a key part of this, as will Google Calendar (which recently started testing a more social element of its own). And there is a plan for an Plancast API so other services can import and use their data.

The Facebook integration is key for Plancast. The service was borne out of Facebook’s fbFund ’09 initial winners (its codename was Magellen at that point), and they’ve received a micro-seed round from that so far. The next step is to raise a proper seed round, Hendrickson says.

So how does Plancast build a business out of this? Hendrickson notes that they’ve already begun talking to venues about how Plancast could benefit them, such as getting people to organize events at certain places. The venues themselves may also be able to post Plancasts when they have specials coming up on a certain night, for example. This is similar to what Foursquare is thinking about, but again, for the future.

Currently, all plans shared on Plancast are public, but soon they will roll out a feature to allow you to share certain plans just with select friends, we’re told. There is also a plan to have friend groups/lists to futher make it easier to share plans with only certain people.

I’ve been using Plancast for several weeks now, and it’s a solid service and idea. Hendrickson and Marcyes have managed to keep it simple (which I appreciate) while adding functionality that differentiates it from competitors. The trick will be convincing people that they need to use yet another information sharing service in their life. But if I’m say, going to happy hour tomorrow and want to share information such as exact location, and time without going over 140 characters, while seeing who else is interested, this is a great solution. I do think this fills a need.

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.

Baio, who sits on the startup’s board and advised the company for the past 10 months, explains:

The model is simple: a project creator sets a fundraising goal, deadline, and an optional set of rewards for backers. If the goal’s reached by the deadline, then everyone’s charged via Amazon Payments and the backers get their goodies. If the goal’s not reached, nobody’s charged. It’s all or nothing.

People who start projects on the platform to get funded by others retain 100% ownership over everything, but need to find a way to give people an incentive to pledge (this can be anything, preferably related to the actual project of course). Kickstarter also doubles as a publishing platform where project creators can keep anyone or only their backers how the project is doing with text, pictures and videos.

When they reach their deadline with the desired funding, project creators receive 100% of the funds they raised, minus the fees that Amazon charges to process credit card transactions. Kickstarter doesn’t take a cut yet, but will likely start charging fees at some point, otherwise there wouldn’t be much a business model.

I very much like the name, concept and design of Kickstarter, but of course this is nothing new and only time will tell if the startup can make enough noise to stand out of the crop. Similar services include FirstGiving, PledgeBank and Mob Incentive.

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 Media.