Events + Location: A Logical Combination

Here’s the dirty little secret about most events.

They actually happen in the real world.  They happen at bars, and coffee shops, and companies, and people’s houses, and event venues.  And all of those places have things like addresses, and latitude, and longitude.

(bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this)

I was a big fan of the now Yahoo! owned Upcoming.org back in the day.  It was an easy way to see what events my techie friends were planning on going to, and to see what was going on in San Francisco.  Now Plancast seems to have captured the imagination of the early adopter crowd.  They built a very nice, duplicate detecting, address appending tool to add new events, and made it really easy to subscribe to other people’s events.  Subscribe to people like Scoble and Dave McClure and you’re immediately tied into just about everything going on in Silicon Valley.  It’s like Upcoming in a newsfeed format.

But we’re still missing the real world tie in – that bridge that actually links my feet walking into the event, with the application.

I was certain that Plancast (see Chad’s gentle review) would give us this in time for SXSW… but apparently they missed the memo.  Seems like a big memo to miss.

But to the rescue, straight out of Brooklyn, comes Hot Potato with a pretty little app that shows you… wait for it… events nearby.

You can check in, you can comment, you can upload photos.

This is a powerful little app, and one that I will certainly be using as I walk around the venues of SXSW this week.

So where are you at Eventbrite?  Is anybody still working on Upcoming?  Will we see a quick update Plancast?  Are you paying attention Evite?  Meetup, I’m looking at you as well.

Events plus location make a lot of sense, and have the potential to provide a nice little social media, promotional boost to real world events (which is usually what the event holder wants).  If I see my friend checking in at that event, I am more likely to go than if I just see him on the Facebook RSVP.

Watch this combination of events + geo – there’s something there.