The Lanyrd Blog: 2011
Speaking tips, conference news, site updates
How to share your 2011 conference plans
The holiday season is over; a whole wonderful year stretches before us! Could there be a more perfect time to start thinking about all the exciting conferences that lie ahead? And wouldn't it be even cooler if you could easily share those thoughts with your peers and friends? We think it would be!
Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges
Lanyrd's new JavaScript badges let you display the conferences you are attending, tracking or speaking at on your own website in a variety of interesting ways.
A new look for the calendar
We are proud to introduce some small but fabulous changes to your Lanyrd calendar page! You can now track and attend events inline and see your own events in a handy tab - and it's a fair bit snappier too!
Get Lanyrd conference recommendations by email
Now you can stay up to date with events your contacts are interested in even more conveniently — direct to your email inbox!
Lanyrd announces YC funding!
Very exciting news that we have been absolutely bursting to tell you all about for a while now: Lanyrd gets investment and support from Y Combinator!
Get Lanyrd in your Gmail inbox with Rapportive
We've built an extension for Lanyrd that lets you see the conferences your email contacts are attending in the sidebar of your Gmail inbox.
A new look for our conference pages
Some of our conference pages were beginning to strain under the weight of all the wonderful information you've been adding, so we've rolled out a fresh new design and some useful new features.
Lanyrd at SXSW Interactive
We're excited to announce the Lanyrd unofficial guide to SXSW Interactive 2011. Discover sessions from your Twitter contacts, track slides, video and notes and follow the conversation with a hash tag for every session.
Venues and rooms (and floor plans!) for SXSW Interactive
We've upgraded our unofficial SXSW session planner with venue information, maps, floor plans and more.
SXSWi grid view and iCal export
Our unofficial SXSWi schedule planner now sports a useful grid view and the ability to export to iCal, Outlook or even your iPhone.
See your contacts' event plans on Twitter.com with our new browser extension
Now you can get Lanyrd information about a person directly on Twitter.com! Install our new browser extension (for Chrome or Firefox) to see events people are speaking at, slides and video from talks they have given, and even which sessions they are presenting or plan to attend.
Fed up of hearing about SXSW? Block tweets from known attendees!
Are you fed up of seeing nothing but SXSW in your Twitter stream? Try our new browser extension which hides tweets from over 3,000 known attendees, as well as anything with the #sxsw hash tag.
Venues (and venue maps)
Have you ever found yourself completely lost on the way to an event? We certainly have. Today we're launching something that we think might help: venues and venue maps!
Session schedules in your calendar
You can now subscribe to event schedules in your calendar of choice. Stay up to date at the event with the schedule in the pocket where you need it.
Welcoming Sophie Barrett to team Lanyrd
Today we have a very special announcement (and for once, it's not a new feature!) We would like to welcome the super-wonderful Sophie Barrett to the Lanyrd team.
Introducing week notes
We’d like to keep you more up to date with what we’re doing at Lanyrd and some of you have helpfully suggested week notes (thanks BERG and Tom Hume). We’ll be posting up once a week to let you know what we’ve been up to and this is our first edition.
Snazzy new profile page design, with photos!
Is your profile page bursting at the seams? Trying to find someone at an event by squinting at their quirky Twitter avatar? Or are you a conference organiser trying to gather speaker photos? We have good news for you!
Week notes 2: Ferrets, bugs and eggs
It's been an another exciting week here at Lanyrd HQ. As you may have noticed we launched a significant redesign of our profile pages and a bunch of site wide improvements.
Week notes 3: How we built Lanyrd
Now that we're back in London, Nat and I have been getting stuck in to the local events scene. This week we gave two talks about Lanyrd, discussing our progress so far and explaining some of the underlying technology we've used to build the site.
Week Notes: Zoo-tastic Adventures
This week started off with an epic adventure at London Zoo, primarily to catch the otters during feeding time. We spent a lovely afternoon dashing around at great speed, peering at meerkats, waving at penguins and gasping at the butterflies.
Week notes: Web Fonts and the Woods
Another busy week at Lanyrd HQ. Some exciting non-product developments and a couple of late night programming episodes powered by take-out sushi. Plus, a day running around in the woods with 30 other web folk.
Welcoming Jake Archibald to team Lanyrd
Super awesome news to tell you all today, our merry little band of three becomes four! We welcome Jake Archibald to Lanyrd.
Week notes: Serendipity and Building Lanyrd
Nat and I hit the speaking circuit again this week, discussing Lanyrd's relationship with serendipity and detailing some of the technical challenges we've faced building the site.
Presenting thumbnails of slides and video
Lanyrd now has a whopping 2,500 videos and 3,000 slide decks from events all around the world; we have spruced them up with thumbnails to make it easier for you to discover all this lovely content.
Lanyrd pops to the seaside
It may be raining now but we’re hoping that it clears up again in early September because Team Lanyrd is off to the seaside.
Week Notes: Under the Thumbnails
This week we’ve been busy releasing the coverage thumbnails update. We got to hit the big red deploy button, which always makes us happy. It feels like it’s been a while since we launched a publicly visible update and this is because the thumbnails ended up being a bit trickier than we’d anticipated.
Week notes: Collaborative note taking and video highlights
Collaborative note-taking at Encampment London, and highlights from this week's conference video releases.
Weeknotes: Happy Birthday, Lanyrd
A super-busy week punctuated by our birthday party and three varied and interesting conferences down by the sea at the Brighton Digital Festival.
Introducing our Investors
We've got some very exciting news to announce. We have now closed our round of seed funding, raising $1.4 million from primarily UK investors alongside some US angels.
Week Notes: Back to the office
Last week was super exciting for team Lanyrd. We were back in the office on Tuesday after a weekend of conferences, for our funding announcement.
Visualising Lanyrd's topic data
In our first ever guest post for the Lanyrd blog, Matt Biddulph shares an interactive visualisation of Lanyrd's conference topic data and explains how he created it.
Welcoming Jake, and this week in conferences
This week we moved office and welcomed our fourth permanent team member, Jake. Plus, this week's conference video highlights.
A bit of a catch up
I’m cheating a little this week and giving you a bumper edition. We’ve all been rather busy over the past couple of weeks and three quarters of us are jetting off to speak at conferences.
Lanyrd for iPhone, on iOS 4 and iOS 5
We're pleased to announce the release of our first native iPhone (and iPod touch) app. The Lanyrd app gives you instant access to your events on your phone, and stores the schedule and attendee directory offline so you can access it abroad regardless of hefty roaming charges or dodgy conference WiFi. Download it now from the App Store.
Travels, tech, and wardrobe malfunctions
Crikey, I've only been at Lanyrd a couple of weeks and they've already let me loose on the blog, what were they thinking?
Week Notes: Talks and Plans
Web Directions South, the origins of Lanyrd, upcoming talks and other office goings-on.
Week notes: Internet Week, BarCamps and Spectrum chip tunes
Looking back on BarCamp London 9, and forward to this week's Internet Week Europe.
Welcome, Tom Insam
We're excited to welcome Tom Insam, developer extraordinaire and latest addition to the Lanyrd team.
Week notes: Tomorrow's World, Full Frontal, Power of One and our iPhone app update
Last week we had the joy of having everyone in the office and we've been busy!
Week notes: Puppets, garlic and RAWWWWK
On Tuesday we were dragged our of our coding lair to a 'Surprise Lanyrd night out' to celebrate Tom & I joining the team.
Timely goodness: Start and end times for events and a mini design refresh for the schedule
We're releasing a much requested improvement today - start and end for events, along with a refresh of the way we display session information.
Week notes: Hedgehogs and coffee
It's Monday, and I've been working here two entire weeks, which means that they've let me out of the New Employee Orientation Box for the the first time! Hello world! It sure is bright out here.
Campfire, Hubot and looking forward to 2012
This week we've mainly been playing with our new chat bot, and looking forward to the next round of conferences in 2012.
Week notes: Design process, stationery & Lego seagulls
It has been a week of juggling many exciting new things — not literally though because I have no co-ordination whatsoever. Project Hamster continues and we start in ernest on 'Project Firefly' which involves a significant amount of cutting gluing and sticking.
Week notes: Fireflying towards Christmas
This week we have mostly been concentrating on "Project Firefly", our last feature for 2011. We've moved beyond last weeks paper and wall based designs and have moved onto prototyping and building the feature.
Presented by
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Natalie Downe @natbat
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Simon Willison @simonw
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Sophie Barrett @sophystar
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Jake Archibald @jaffathecake
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Tom Insam @tominsam
