Attendio - Event discovery service that brings events of interest to your Calendar, Email or Mobile Phone

Posted on April 3, 2007 at 6:32 pm

Have you ever had that experience where you met a friend and they told you that the Blue man group show last week was awesome and wondered how in the world you didn’t know about that? Or maybe you’re out with some friends at dinner and you finish up by around 7pm and want to know if there’s anything going on in the city?

Right now you’d have to call up 10 buddies and see what they’re up to or you’d have to get back to a computer and search for events in your city off Google. But that’s a pain and different web sites might have more info on particular interests than others, so if you’re looking for local music gigs, you may not find it on a site that’s listing events for tourists. Well, that’s where Attendio.com comes in.

This site is pretty cool. We all know about RSS feeds, right? But how about an RSS feed that integrates with your Google or Outlook Calendars (and others too) that provides you with a constantly updated list of events in your area customized to your interests? That’s what Attendio does. Once you get to the web site, it automatically detects your location (so if you’re on a business trip in Dallas, it’ll figure that out automatically when you connect and get your events going on in Dallas) and you simply have to choose a category that interests you (Music, Family, Sports, Comedy, Arts, Film, Tech, Business, Social, etc) and type in a keyword that narrows down your interest category.

For example, if I’m interested in Music, I would select that category and type in Jazz as an interest. Now I’ll get a list of events that are related to Jazz music! Pretty nifty! if you don’t find any events in your area, you can find events by asking the “recommenders”, who are trusted people in your area who know what’s going on in the city. And to help grow the community, if you know an event that’s going down and it’s not listed, you can recommend that event to other local people in the area.

Another nice feature is the ability to send text messages to the service from your cell phone and get back a custom listing of events going on at that moment. Simply send the SMS to “Attend” and type in “Now”! And it’s so popular that even Microsoft is promoting it as a service that can be used with Windows Vista Calendar to spice up your day!

Here’s the event added to my Google Calendar, any events I add later will automatically show up in my Google Calendar now!