Announcing our unofficial SXSWi session planner and attendee directory

We're heading back to SXSW Interactive 2012 this year and Lanyrd will be more useful than ever. Use our mini site to plan your SXSW experience and ensure you catch the best sessions for you.

SXSW Interactive is more of an endurance challenge than a technology conference - this year's event includes over 2,000 speakers presenting more than 1,000 sessions spread across 15 different venues around Austin, Texas. It's even bigger than last year (I know, we say that every year!) - but don't worry, we're here to help.

We are launching the first nugget of SXSW-y goodness today: an improved version of our incredibly popular SXSW mini site. This year we've added a new searchable attendee directory to our powerful schedule explore, helping you to find the right people to meet as well as navigate the maze of great sessions.

Explore and plan your schedule with austin.lanyrd.com

Sign in to austin.lanyrd.com with Twitter and we'll instantly show you which sessions your contacts are presenting, attending or just interested in. There's a high chance that someone you follow on Twitter is either giving or attending a session you might want to go to.

If you give us your email address we will email you with your daily schedule of events you are planning on attending, great if you are travelling to Austin from overseas and don't want to pay data roaming charges.

Powerful search and filtering

Search through all 1072 sessions (more will be added as they are announced), or take advantage of our splendid filtering interface powered by our meticulous topic metadata. Check out all the sessions on Automobiles or journalism for example.

You can also use your Twitter contacts as a natural filter for finding sessions, and even search through their sessions for anything your are interested in.

Topics can be combined, often with interesting results, for example Social Media and Food, or Mobile and Near Field Communication.

Export to your calendar

Once you have decided which sessions to attend, you can export your schedule to your calendaring system of choice - be that iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook or something else. In the 'your schedule' tab on the right hand side there is a 'subscribe in your calendar' link where you can choose to add the calendar URL for sessions you are attending or sessions you are just interested in (tracking).

Improved attendee directory

This year we have a new and improved 'attendees' tab, a searchable attendee directory for SXSW. This makes it easy to seek out types of people before the event, for example investors, astronauts or people who work for foursquare. You can also search within your contacts attending the event or just see all of the people you know who are attending SXSW.

Twitter lists of all the speakers

Since we have collected the most complete list of SXSW speakers on Twitter anywhere, we thought it would be nice to share it with you. Follow these lists to see what the SXSW speakers are tweeting about right now:

We're also maintaining a list of useful SXSW related Twitter accounts that talk about what's hot and happening at SXSW this year. We'd also recommend you follow @LanyrdSXSW, our SXSW specific twitter account, tweeting all sorts of useful hints and tips on how to get the most out of those five intense days!

More to come!

We're definitely not done yet — we'll be adding a bunch of improvements between now and the conference so keep checking back, or follow @lanyrdsxsw on Twitter for updates.

You need to sign in with Twitter to comment on this entry