Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Conferences More Social

Re:Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Con... by holman on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @01:30PM (#2966386)

Lanyrd is one of those weird sites that I expect never to work because of how hard it is to consolidate content, and yet it always works. Glad to hear that things are going well for them; without Lanyrd I'm not sure how I'd sort through conferences.

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Re:Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Con... by simonw on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @01:33PM (#2966394)

Thanks very much. Lots of people ask us how we scrape the data... the answer is we don't, it's all added by our community (the only exception is the schedules for larger events such as OSCON, which I sometimes import in to the site).

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Re:Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Con... by tstyle on Wednesday September 07, 2011 @06:30AM (#2969041)

I'm impressed by how you've able to crowd source data collection to the users. Does the site contain gamification elements that reward and encourage community contributions?

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Re:Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Con... by simonw on Wednesday September 07, 2011 @08:34AM (#2969283)

Not exactly - we're cautious of adding scoreboards / points etc because they can very easily distort the site, resulting in people gaming the system to increase their score rather than adding genuinely valuable data.

Instead, we've focused on getting the right incentives for people to add data. Speakers add events to fill out their speaker profiles for example, and attendees do it to track the events they've been to (you sometimes see people include conferences attended on their CVs, so this is actually a useful tool even for non-speakers).

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Re:Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Con... by amirhhz on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @06:25PM (#2967545)

Indeed. Even though Wiki(pedia)s are now everywhere in people's online lives it's always a pleasant surprise when the execution is done right for something like Lanyrd to succeed.

Nice work, Simon and Nat!

Edit: spelling.

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