Hangtime Looks To Be The Watercooler For Events At SXSW And Beyond

OK, so maybe we said it would be hard for an app to break out at SXSW this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying. One startup called Hangtime, from serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob, is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond. It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among your friends and distance among other factors. When you open the app, you can use Facebook to find friends and pull in hundreds of events. You can say you’re “interested” in going to them by clicking a button in the app. The idea is to get people to interact without necessarily committing to going to something. “People don’t necessarily know what they are going to. Nobody likes to commit,” he said. “So we had to make it lightweight and make it super easy for people to share things with each other, but not commit.” In Hangtime, there’s a way to say you’re publicly interested in an event, and then there’s a way to privately share an event with a friend. “That creates this bifurcation,” he said. “It’s a lightweight way of saying that you’re interested in something — but behind the scenes.” Hangtime follows a long line of events-related startups like the now-defunct Plancast and another startup Sosh that try to help people figure out what to do on nights and weekends. Jacob says that other events startups might have just been too early on the market. “The biggest mistake in the past in the core event discovery space was that we had a data problem,” he said. But he said now that social platforms like Facebook have solidified, it’s become a nicely centralized source of data. In fact, the issue now is that there’s too much data and there needs to be better personalization and recommendations, he argues. “A hallmark of these mobile applications is that they shouldn’t require work,” Jacob said. “They shouldn’t require you to enter in things. You have to give people a good experience out of the box.” To get that, Jacob used a pretty ingenious seeding and testing strategy. The company bought ads on Facebook targeted at colleges in the Midwest, such as the University of Missouri-Columbia and others in Arizona, Nebraska and Alabama. They want to see if they could remotely seed an app on

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