hissworks

Really cool that you built this from scratch for so many major cities! I am located in Chicago but browsed SF and the list returned there looked like a logical categorization of events & things to do.

Re: your question of whether to pursue the project, my thoughts from the perspective of someone who works in the tourism & travel industry.

Collecting and aggregating event listings is, as you note, time consuming. It can't all be done by crawl/scrape. Curation is an important factor here, and so perhaps you tailor the product to the perceived needs of a specific type of end user.

First user type that comes to mind: those of us who maintained Facebook accounts for the event listings/invites, but have all but fallen off of Facebook over the years due to... everything else that's wrong with the product :)

I'll say this, too — Airovic is entering a space where your number one competition is Google. Google orients its event listings geographically, around a "place," and I think your opportunity is to orient around people and their preferences.

To that end, another competitor here is Spotify for concerts — much as I hate to admit this, as a retired "Cool Person," I'm generally made aware of bands I want to see touring in my area first by Spotify, and then by social and local media.

That said, in identifying and meeting the needs of a narrower band of users, you may find that emphasizing curation and personalization could position your product as a more useful method of discovery.

They've been separate entities for years. The Onion under Univision became more of a digital production house. Editorial staff was always distinct. I presume that the handful of people leaving are writers, and they'll need to staff up around operations.

Really neat application of the data. I'm the Director of Marketing at a mid-sized destination marketing organization (DMO) represented on your map (Aurora, Illinois -- we're actually a terrific place to visit in winter!). Curious to learn more about the variables used to deploy the "best time" pages and get a sense for where you'd like to take this further.

Due in large part to its size, Texas is actually the only state in the United States that's susceptible to every type of natural hazard.

Source: Worked in marketing for a P&C firm, compliance wouldn't let us publish a blog post on the topic.

Closing up shop as a marketing strategy is interesting as a high-risk/high-reward last ditch effort.

If under a particular set of circumstances, the most viable path to attracting eyeballs is to go under, it could be really effective to give potential users a "last chance" and then pivot to a new name.

I really don't want to turn off 2FA even temporarily.

What would a workaround for this look like?

How do avocados fare as a substitute?

Thanks for the insights. Sounds like a fair procedure.

Curious to hear more about what you found cool about their communication methods. I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm surprised how inefficient a lot of Big Corp communication methods can be, especially those with a field/regional organization. Inclined to agree that knowledge radiates outwards, but tinkering with ideas about how to best receive feedback inwards and what are the most effective methods of radiating that knowledge. Easier said than done.

I'd assumed that cities like Chicago with relatively old/dense/complex infrastructure would pose a tremendous challenge to a project like Google Fiber. Happy to have assumed incorrectly, but it does seem a significant jump from mid-sized metros like Provo/Austin/Kansas City.

What was the inspiration for launching this?

I'm having trouble creating a new site for myself right now because I'm embedded in a career that would likely frown upon a) sharing trade secrets, even though that'd be the only compelling professional content I can think to write and b) sharing my personal views on any number of things (+ I don't want to just write an online diary like it's 2002 and I'm livejournaling all my feelings).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is wonderful and an inspiration and I'd like to know the origin story (really).

edited to add: PLEASE create a LinkedIn profile for Princess Penelope Pricklepants.

From the article:

"Even if one of the parties is dishonest and deviates from the protocol, that person cannot learn anything more than if x = y."