Lanyrd (YC W11) launches session planner / coverage tracker for SXSW Interactive | Hacker News Reader

Lanyrd (YC W11) launches session planner / coverage tracker for SXSW Interactive

lanyrd.com

76 pointssimonw26 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

only on odd days of the week.

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 ;-)

No idea about millions, but I remember Simon saying something like it running happily at (IIRC) 60second intervals. Hopefully he'll elaborate.

Would love to learn more about that

Simon, would love to hear more about replicated solr. Did you roll this yourself?

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

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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

- Is there a list of these apps?

Plancast comes to mind.

http://www.plancast.com

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?

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!

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

On Lanyrd that session is http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scpxh/

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