Garysguide Archive

Last weekend we showed you how you can use Gary’s Guide to navigate SXSW. This week Gary has added more service directories to his event planning guide. The directories include coworking, event venues, free event venues, and a classifieds section where you can post open desks and/or office space.

The coworking directory lists 20+ locations around NYC where you can find desks for rent. Most of the listed spaces are located in Manhattan but there are some in Brooklyn as well. Late last year the city council said they would be opening more incubator space in the outer boroughs so look for this list to grow.

The event venues list has a couple hundred locations where you could hold a tech event. Gary notes, “We’ve also compiled a list of event venues which have been used for tech and media events. The list is sorted by order of popularity (# of events). In addition to the usual assortment of hotels, we noticed offices of IBM, Microsoft and Sun amongst the most popular.”

Gary covers events in 50 cities around the world and I assume that the service directories will be pushed out to other cities as well. I’m not exactly sure how he plans to make money from Gary’s Guide but by indexing so much content, he should be able to become the “wikipedia for tech events and service listings”.

We are just a few days away from the annual event known as SXSW. I’ve provided a primer for the 2010 SXSW which should help you get around and make the most out of the event.

So how do you keep track and/or find all of the events and then figureo out which SXSW events you want to attend? Here are some options – it’s important to note that none of the guides seem to have all of the events listed.

• Plancast – the popular valley-based service has a list of “plans” aka events around SXSW interactive. Considering how popular SXSW seems to be with the Plancast community, it was very hard to find the page listing the events – they should probably link to it from the Plancast homepage.
• Gary’s Guide – the NY-based service has event listings for about 20 cities. Gary appears to have the most comprehensive listing for Austin events. What I like about Gary’s list is that it also shows tech events not-related to SXSW – i.e regular meetups – which is great to meet locals and get a deeper look at a topic or subject.
• Upcoming – Yahoo’s Upcoming event list service has a list of SXSW events. I’ve never found Upcoming to be that useful to me but it does appear to be a very popular service on the west coast.
• SXSW – The official list of parties and events around the conference.
• Meetup – Typically a good resource for a listing of events for a city and/or time, I was unable to find a list of sxsw or even Austin-based events for next week. It appears they have redesigned the site and the formerly-easy way to find meetups has been removed.

I think Gary’s Guide has the best listing of events. The list is easy to browse and also very simple to add an event to a calendar and/or share the event with friends. Leave a comment if you know of other good event listings for SXSW and I will add them to the post.

So we’ve covered Leora’s attempt to sell various body parts at conferences. We’ve covered the guy and the girl who sell tshirt infomercials. We’ve even looked at Drama’s attempt to sell porn videos featuring your startup. Here’s a new one…guy selling ad space on his tie!

Gary runs a popular tech events guide in NYC and several other cities in the U.S. He’s well known for wearing a red tie. He’s decided to offer advertising space for companies on his tie. He says he will be going to many events this month and he, "realized that I have some prime billboard advertising space available on my red tie". He continues with the sales pitch, "Perfect place to place your logo stickers etc where it’ll be seen ‘n talked about by the city’s movers and shakers".

The revenue generated from the ads will be donated to CityHarvest. If you are interested in sponsoring a tie this holiday season and helping a local charity, contact Gary on Twitter.

You better act quick because Tie is running out! Here’s Gary sporting the Red Tie®:

We’ve reviewed a number of technology event guide services over the past couple of years. Most come and go because they aren’t able to get a good supply of events into the system. Since their launch, NY-based Garysguide has been able to keep a good supply of NYC tech events in the system. If you’ve been to any tech events in the city, you’ve certainly seen Gary… he’s the man in the red tie.

Garysguide offers a comprehensive event guide (I’d say they have about 90% of all events) along with the ability to note that you plan to attend the event (a mini social network). There’s also a newsfeed to see what events other members are going to. Lastly Garysguide offers a list of deals – which are conference discounts and sweepstakes to win free passes.

Garysguide launched in NYC but continues to add new cities and now covers: Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, San Diego, Denver, Toronto, Portland and Las Vegas. The key for Garysguide to continue to grow is to make sure they have the best supply of events in the system for the cities they serve.