

Lanyrd (YC W11) launches session planner / coverage tracker for SXSW Interactive - simonw
http://lanyrd.com/blog/2011/sxsw/

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benwerd
Lanyrd is my favorite startup of the last twelve months (aside from the one
I'm working on, natch). It's well built, intelligently designed, incredibly
responsive to its users, and has helped me discover a bunch of events I would
otherwise have missed. It's what Upcoming should have evolved into.

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kmfrk
I love what you're doing here: creating a centralized, universal interface for
all kinds of sessions. I _hate_ the way 95% of people "organize" their event
information.

I hope Lanyrd gets enough traction to fix that.

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simonw
Thanks - we're very keen on providing permanent, archived URLs for things.
Conference websites have a terrible habit of going offline after 11 months so
they can put up the site for the next year's event.

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simonw
We're using an interesting combination of replicated Solr, Redis and MySQL for
the core sessions-your-contacts-are-attending feature, I'd be happy to expand
if anyone is interested.

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Fjslfj
That would be very interesting. Does it get updated in realtime and scale to
millions of users?

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bbryant
only on odd days of the week.

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Swannie
On even days it works in the future, and scales to 1000/i/ users. SimonW, well
connected with the timelords, or Harry Potter... not sure which ;-)

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alper
Damn, I wish I was going this year when the program is finally in a format I
can make sense of!

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Swannie
Nat & Simon, if this is the sort of site that you're putting together for
_free_ for SXSW, I'd love to see what you'd put together for another big
conference that paid you guys ;-D

Should be even more awesome-er when you've got the location details hooked
into the sessions - at the moment it's still a bit crazy ("Oh, I want to go
see this and this, they are 10mins apart... but are they on opposite sides of
the city?!").

Plus I'm waiting to see what the SocialTies app looks like when that
launches... another Brighton tech couple... awesomeness!

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mickdarling
I love it, and I didn't even need to tell it the session I was speaking at, it
just knew and told me I was speaking at that session once I logged in. The
'official' SXSW event calendar has always been clunky even as they upgrade
every year.

P.S self plug: <http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/sctmq/> In one of the new venues
at the Hyatt across the river.

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jlees
I'm less interested in the sessions (I can read a conference guide!) and more
interested in the parties, networking events, flashmobs, etc. Where to be and
who to meet. Have you guys thought about this angle?

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simonw
Yes - we thought about it pretty extensively, and in the end decided to stay
away. There are literally dozens of startups trying to help people navigate
the SXSW party scene, including big, well resourced teams like Foursquare,
Gowalla and Facebook. We figured we could have the most impact by focusing on
sessions, speakers and coverage - all things that are baked in to Lanyrd's DNA
- rather than trying to become yet another networking tool in a crowd of
networking tools.

~~~
jlees
Fair enough. I think people pay special attention to the SXSW party scene,
too; but a general solution for all events would be pretty interesting.

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JimEngland
This looks great. The "recap" email after SXSW with videos, photos, etc from
the sessions sounds interesting...how often does Lanyrd send these types of
emails?

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simonw
These will be the first we've sent! We've been planning a single follow-up
email a week or so after any event you attend highlighting coverage for a
while now, so we're using SXSW as an excuse to build the feature.

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JimEngland
Sounds great. A key section to this email could be showcasing the sessions I
actually attend (which is often quite different than what I RSVP for!). Will
there be any check-inesque functionality for sessions?

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simonw
We're hoping we can convince people to go back and mark themselves as
attending on the sessions they actually did attend.

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danw
_"The infamous party scene is already well addressed by an abundance of other
startups."_

\- Is there a list of these apps?

~~~
JonLim
Plancast comes to mind.

<http://www.plancast.com>

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rokhayakebe
I like this startup just for the simple fact that they are constantly putting
it in front of people, and they also seem to have something interesting
everything they do. But can someone tell me how you pronounce the name?

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simonw
Thanks.

It's pronounced "lanyard" (well, lan-yerd) - like the thing you put around
your neck with your badge hanging from it at a conference.

A surprisingly large number of people (at least surprising to us) have told us
they don't know what a lanyard is!

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zackattack
I highly recommend everyone attend this talk:
<http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7538>

~~~
natbat
On Lanyrd that session is <http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scpxh/>

