Localist Team

We're Hiring!

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:30:00 -0500

At Localist, we’re looking for an eager self-starter with a strong desire to win to join our awesome business team.

As a Sales Representative, you will be responsible for generating and qualifying leads in our target verticals. This position requires successful experience working as a Sales Representative preferably for an innovative web technology company.

We offer excellent compensation opportunities that scale with experience.

A bit about us

Localist provides a licensable platform that offers event and venue listings combined with social calendaring tools to provide a complete solution for partners looking to promote and monetize local content. Universities can take advantage of Localist to provide an interactive calendar of events, and enable students to share their plans with each other, fostering a greater sense of community. Tourism boards using the Localist platform will for the first time be able to connect local businesses with customers, and better promote events by empowering people in the city to see what others are doing. For media companies, the Localist platform takes existing event data and wraps a social dynamic around it, creating new revenue streams along with increased traffic and accurate user targeting.

After closing a round of investment and launching the new version of the Localist Platform, we announced partnerships with several universities looking to bring their calendars to the next level. We need your help to continue this great momentum in our target verticals: universities, media companies and tourism boards.

Responsibilities

Generate leads for Localist’s industry leading social calendaring platform by aggressively reaching out to our target markets
Work closely with business development and executive team to cultivate leads to accounts
Maintain a pipeline database using Highrise software
Communicate prospect feedback to the product and development team

Requirements

Tenacious attitude with a competitive drive to win
A charming, enthusiastic demeanor
Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Results oriented focus and dedicated work ethic
Experience and passion around current Internet technologies
Comfortable calling on all levels of an organization
Comfortable working independently
3 years as a Sales Representative with consistent overachievement

Send to info@localist.com

Your resume
One or two sentences on your first impressions of http://localist.com and http://events.jhu.edu (running on the Localist Platform); How it made you feel and what you think are its selling points

Please, we implore you, no recruiters or offshore companies.

Localist 2.0 has arrived

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:59:00 -0500

Finally! After much discussion, analysis and development, the next version of Localist is upon us.

Every part of the platform has been redesigned from the ground up with speed, simplicity and branding flexibility in mind. We’ve removed features you’re not interested in and focused on making the core experience much more enjoyable. What’s new, you ask? Almost everything!

We’re back working on feature development, with some great ones coming in the next few weeks:

Tighter Facebook integration

Interact with your Facebook friends, directly from Localist!

Foursquare Checkins

See all the Foursquare users who have checked into places

Mobile version

A smooth mobile experience, with core features available quickly

More content

Our curator, Ty Collins, knows what’s what in Baltimore. He’ll soon be gracing the Localist community with recommendations of events and venues you may have missed.

Newsletters

Ensure you never miss a cool exhibit, or your friends’ plans with our simple, smart newsletters.

Check Localist, or Johns Hopkins to see the new, clean, pretty Localist platform.

Johns Hopkins University Selects Localist to Power New Interactive Calendar

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:20:00 -0400

Localist Provides Social Calendaring Platform for University’s 20,000 Students and Faculty

Baltimore, Maryland — October 7, 2009 — Localist today announced a partnership with Johns Hopkins University to provide a branded interactive events calendar to the university’s 20,000 students and faculty. Accessible at http://events.jhu.edu, the Localist platform is the primary solution for promoting internal university events in addition to highlighting local events happening nearby.

Johns Hopkins students will be able to see what activities others are attending in real time, and share and discuss their social plans with fellow students, fostering a greater sense of community. The Localist platform also learns a student’s interests in order to custom-tailor recommendations of events to attend and new places to visit.

“We are excited to partner with Johns Hopkins to deliver a calendar platform that sets a new standard among universities,” said Mykel Nahorniak, co-founder and chief operating officer of Localist. “Giving students the opportunity to branch out of their typical social circles, and discover new things to do and places to go yields a more rewarding educational experience.”

“Every university has an events calendar, but, until now, no university has a great events calendar that ties into the tools that students are already using. That’s why I was excited at the opportunity to work with Localist to build a solution for Johns Hopkins that not only is simple to manage but plugs seamlessly into Facebook, Google Calendar and iCal on the Mac and iPhone,” said Tim Windsor, Director of Web Strategy at John Hopkins.

University calendars have traditionally focused on internal events only, and lack the social interactivity that users have come to expect. Localist changes that with its turnkey platform that seamlessly integrates into partner websites, leveraging user activity to deliver rich local content.

Johns Hopkins faculty can easily input and manage events and venues across multiple university campuses, and highlight those that merit special promotion.

In addition to the calendar functionality provided by the core Localist platform, the company also developed features specifically for student groups to organize and share events with their members and interested students.

Localist Corporation (http://www.localist.com)
Baltimore-based Localist provides a licensable platform that offers event and venue listings combined with social calendaring tools to provide a complete solution for partners looking to promote and monetize local content. Universities can take advantage of Localist to provide an interactive calendar of events, and enable students to share their plans with each other, fostering a greater sense of community. Tourism boards using the Localist platform will for the first time be able to connect local businesses with customers, and better promote events by empowering people in the city to see what others are doing. For media companies, the Localist platform takes existing event data and wraps a social dynamic around it, creating new revenue streams along with increased traffic and accurate user targeting.

Johns Hopkins University (http://www.jhu.edu)
After more than 130 years, Johns Hopkins remains a world leader in both teaching and research. Eminent professors mentor top students in the arts and music, the humanities, the social and natural sciences, international studies, education, business and the health professions. Those same faculty members, and their research colleagues at the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory, have each year since 1979 won Johns Hopkins more federal research and development funding than any other university. When considered in partnership with its sister institution, the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, the university is Maryland’s largest employer and contributes more than $10 billion a year to the state’s economy.

Localist: Branded Event Calendars For Your Neighborhood

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:05:48 -0400

Localist: Branded Event Calendars For Your Neighborhood:

A nice writeup on Mashable about where we’re headed.

New features

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:36:00 -0400

We’re really happy unveil some new features on Localist! A completely redesigned event calendar, city browser and personal dashboard are ready for you to use.

Oh, and… drumroll please… our API is now public! That means you can access all sorts of event and venue information to use as you wish.

What you need to know:

New calendar

Focuses on 1 day, rather than an entire week
Tons more information about events
More sorting options
Easier to navigate
This is changed for cities, businesses and users

New browsing & searching

More results per page
More sorting options

New dashboard

Based on user feedback, much easier to read

We’ll be posting a more in-depth entry for the Localist API later this week.

As always, let us know if you find any issues by contacting us.

"You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is events. Pure..."

Fri, 15 May 2009 18:12:18 -0400

“You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is events. Pure E. Not old, not hired, not stepped on. Not one gram of E and 10 grams of baby laxative. Pure E. That’s what Localist does. And somehow when E changes, we’re there first on the shore. Beckoning. Is there anyone who can aggregate the way we can? I don’t think so.”

- A clause that didn’t make the cut in our business plan…

Ranking updates

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:33:12 -0400

We’ve updated our event ranking algorithms to really nail down what’s popular. If you see an event that shouldn’t be where it is, let us know.

Automatic exporting

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:38:00 -0400

Localist now automatically exports your event information to Zvents, Upcoming and Eventful!

It means you only need to add your event once on Localist for the listing to appear on the most popular event listing services in the world.

You’re welcome!

Have lots of events?

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:29:45 -0400

Due to popular demand, an Excel file is now available to quickly add multiple events to Localist. Download the file, add your events, and send it along to info [at] localist.com. The events will be added promptly.

Download the file here.

Facebook? We got that on lock.

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:30:00 -0400

Inspired by our Twitter shenanigans, we’ve gone nuts making our Facebook integration as neat as possible.

You can now sign up and log in to Localist using just your Facebook account. It’s so ridiculously easy.

Here’s the cool part: You can now keep your Facebook friends up-to-date with your activities! Whenever you make plans, you have the option to publish the information on your Facebook profile.

Think: Facebook’s Events application, but actually useful.

The Case For an Event Listing Format (ELF)

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:24:00 -0500

From our experience with the APIs of the big players in the event listing market (Upcoming, Zvents, Eventful, TicketMaster, etc.), it is evident there is no standard format being used to exchange event information behind the scenes.

Each API arbitrarily assigns its own naming scheme, date formats and data structure. We’ve had to pick up the slack at Localist by developing customized parsers to retrieve and standardize the information for each service.

We’d like to start a discussion with interested people in the industry about creating a standardized data interchange format. We’ve already created a preliminary standard, dubbed ELF (Event Listing Format), that can easily work with all existing services, along with an explanation of how it complements hCalendar. You can check out some example RAW XMLs too.

We know this community is filled with ridiculously smart people — some who may be interested in taking part in this discussion. If you, or anyone you know would like to be involved, shoot an e-mail to myke at localist.com.

UPDATE: A wiki page has been created to bring some organization to everyone’s ideas. There’s also a discussion happening in #elf on Freenode.

We put our integration with Twitter on steroids

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:37:00 -0500

Localist Smash!!

We found it frustrating to see people on Twitter referring to the same event with different hashtags. After all, what’s the point of tagging something if nobody agrees on the name of the tag? A disorganized mess, we say!

Thus, every event and business on Localist now has its own unique hashtag so it can be easily referenced on Twitter. Check out Sonar or Ignite. See the little “Hashtag:” item? That’s what you’ll be using in your tweets.

So, bear with us while we attempt to illustrate your new, high falutin’ abilities:

What do you do with this hashtag? You make plans with it, of course! Simply put @localist, then the #hashtag anywhere in your tweet and your plan will be made! If you went somewhere yesterday, include “was” or “went” in your tweet. Here are some examples:

@localist went to #sonar
Will make a plan to go to Sonar, with yesterday’s date.

@localist going to #ignite_baltimore
Will make a plan to attend the Ignite Baltimore event

@localist heading to #sonar, then going to #redbull_happy_hour
Will make a plan to go to Sonar and attend the Redbull Happy Hour event

So now you’re saying, “Okay smart guy, what if I’m too busy to look up the hashtag?”

Pff, easy!

@localist going to Sonar
Will try to figure out what “Sonar” means and make a plan for it. It works pretty darn well, actually!

Phew! I know I’m confused. Give us a tweet if you need some help.

Localist.com has gone mobile!

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:04:00 -0500

Visit m.localist.com on any mobile phone to view Localist in all its tiny-resolution glory. The site is designed to load fast while still delivering all the great information you need, so don’t worry about missing out on anything.

For best results, use a phone that supports full-HTML browsing (iPhone, T-Mobile G1, Blackberrys, etc). If you notice any strange quirks, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Some more exciting things are coming soon. Stay tuned!

Tweet tweet!

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:01:04 -0500

You can now create and update your plans on Localist through Twitter! Specify your Twitter username in the Settings section of Localist to get started. Then, tweet your plans.

An example:
@localist going to Sonar

Localist will automatically update your plans for you.

Every event in Baltimore and DC in your reader!

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:28:47 -0500

Yes, that’s right. We have added subscription abilities to the Localist calendars. You can subscribe to a friend’s calendar, or the events calendar for the entire city! Check out the links on the calendar pages for Baltimore and Washington, DC.

Localist on the iPhone. Coming soon!

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:45:47 -0400

Localist on the iPhone. Coming soon!

How have you been?

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:39:12 -0400

We’ve been great! Here are a few things that rolled out recently:

Anyone can now submit a public event to Localist
Tweaked search to yield better results
Fixed many, many, many cosmetic issues
Improved overall readability of various elements
Organized the footer to deliver more content
You can now add your favorite places just by typing them in! Go to the Friends & Places section and click the “Places I Go” tab to check it out.

Changes

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:31:25 -0400

Here are a few significant changes we’ve rolled out over the past couple weeks:

Completely redesigned plan creator
Completely redesigned event submission
Tweaked the “Most Popular” lists to be more accurate (finally)

We’ll post a preview of something very special soon…

City Paper's Best of Baltimore 2008

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:26:15 -0400

City Paper's Best of Baltimore 2008:

The poll is up. Nominate Localist.com for the Best Baltimore-Related Web Site!

Attention Geeks

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:01:19 -0400

We recently migrated to Rails 2.1! What does this mean? Not much. The idea is to stabilize Localist’s back end a bit and hopefully make things a little peppier.

We fixed a few quirks when testing the upgrade, but there might be some more out there. Send an e-mail to info@localist.com if you notice anything funky.