What's Hapnin

Follow Your Favorite Locations and People

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:16:00 -0500

Hey there!

We’re working on some new cool features. Soon you’ll be able to follow your favorite locations (you can already follow people). We’re also building a new page to show these hapnins; from the locations and people you follow.

It’s looking good! We think this will help you cut through our data to find the best hapnins for you.

Greg and The Hapnin Team

Hapnin.com Redesign

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:33:00 -0400

We’ve added a lot of the features from the mobile site to Hapnin.com. If you’ve only used the mobile site (m.hapnin.com) stop by http://hapnin.com and check it out.

Now you can login on http://hapnin.com and share/recommend (with the heart) things to do on the site or add your own. You can also add them to your list (with the star.)

On Hapnin.com you can also view things to do a few days in advance, this is always useful.

—Coming Soon—

iPhone app, will be ready soon, if you have an iPhone and want to help us test it, email me
social filters, soon you’ll be able to find things to do based on your friends’ shares/recommendations

Until next time,

Greg and the Hapnin Team

Twitter, One-off Recommendations, iPhone

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:06:25 -0400

Hello Hapnin Users!

We wanted to share the news about some cool new Hapnin Mobile features including Twitter integration, one-off recommendations and upcoming apps.

—Twitter—

In case you didn’t see the Twitter link at the bottom of the screen on http://m.hapnin.com, you can now link your Hapnin and Twitter accounts! When you add a recommendation, you’ll have the choice to share it with your Twitter followers.

It’s easy to setup!
1- login to http://m.hapnin.com
2- click the Twitter link at the bottom of the screen or click here http://m.hapnin.com/oauth/authorize_twitter
3- add a recommendation!

Bonus: if you have a blog you can add an event stream to it. When people see your recommendations via Twitter, they can click a link that sends them to your blog! (email me for details, greg@hapnin.com)

—One-off Recommendations—

This one was suggested by you guys! Now when you add a recommendation, you can specify a date or date range. This is great for recommending concerts, sample sales, etc.

—Upcoming—

We’re currently working on an iPhone app. It’s really great. Soon Hapnin Mobile will be available on the iPhone, G1 and Blackberry.

Until then, you can access Hapnin Mobile from http://m.hapnin.com (make sure you bookmark it in your phone’s browser!)

Lastly, send me some feedback, I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! (greg (at) hapnin.com)

Talk soon,

Greg and The Hapnin Team

Hapnin in the Field

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:00:35 -0400

When you’re counting down the time before the end of your workday, Hapnin is a great place to plan your night. We have a ton of hyperlocal things to do, from concerts to community and happy hours to food specials.

But what happens when you step out of the office? Surely there should be away to find all your hyperlocal favorite things to do while you’re on the go. This is exactly what we’ve been working on lately, Hapnin Mobile.

I’m going to share more details soon, but for now let me tell you we’ve made a cool mobile website with a social twist…

Try Hapnin Mobile today via the web: http://m.hapnin.com.

Apps coming soon!

TonisNightOut.com Rocks!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:21:41 -0400

Just in time for summer, our blogger spotlight turns to TonisNightOut.com. Her blog covers lots of local concerts.

What’s your blog all about?
My blog, TonisNightOut.com is all about Rock N’ Roll and the concerts I go to. I’ve always loved going to concerts and taking photos and my blog is where I keep everyone updated. It’s meant to connect fan to fan from a personal perspective providing a new way to not only read about your favorite artist but to experience them live! I write music reviews, take photographs, live video performances and even one on one interviews with the artists themselves, all shot from select venues in NYC and around the tri-state area. I also keep you up to date on trendy hot spots and celebrity sightings.

What are the best concerts this summer?
I’m looking forward to U2 and Muse at Giants Stadium, All Points West in Liberty State Park, and the Stone Temple Pilots at the Borgata in Atlantic City.

What’s your fav hood and venue/shop/store? Why?
I like anywhere downtown, especially the MEatpacking Dist and the West Village. The Highline Ballroom is my new favorite place to catch a show.

What’s your best NYC tip?
To get to the front of the stage, arrive a little early and keep a smile on your face as you work your way through the crowd. Be courteous. It will keep you out of trouble.

On a Saturday night you’ll find me…
…out with friends watching live music or having a nice dinner.

Yankees of Mets?
I’m not into sports, but if I had to choose, I would have to say the Yankees.

Weekend Hapnins

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:00:00 -0400

Friday: Best Friends Forever at the Silent Barn in Cobble Hill

Saturday: Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward at the Guggenheim Museum in the UES

Sunday: $1 Busch and Busch Light beers at Lucky 13 Saloon in Park Slope

What's up at Hapnin.com?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:07:37 -0400

Blogger Spotlight

Lifestylermag.com Helps You Save a Buck

I caught up with Lauren Fairbanks, the Founder/Editor of Lifestylermag.com, for some NYC tips.

What’s your blog all about?
LifeStyler is all about living in NYC on a budget. We cover free and cheap local events, as well as show you how to save money doing everything from setting up a retirement account to grocery shopping.

What’s your favorite hood and store?
My favorite neighborhood is Ditmas Park, it’s really affordable, and my fav store is Housing Works. They’re a thrift store/ AIDs foundation, that sells furniture, clothing, and housewares. I furnished my kitchen for around $30!

On a Staurday night you’ll find me…
…at a bar in my neighborhood, probably Sycamore.

Yankees of Mets?
Yankees

What’s your best tip for going out in NYC?
Karma bar because you can smoke there. It’s never crowded after work and they have lots of red velvet furniture. It’s old swanky dive meets dive bar.

Want your blog featured? Send an email to greg@hapnin.com.

Event Stream Updates
Price filters: Now you can sort your event stream by price!

We Sketch Our Vision

Fri, 22 May 2009 14:23:00 -0400

We’re excited to announce the soft-launch of Hapnin.com, our hyper-local events platform. We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into what we included (and excluded) in this release. This is a sketch of our vision, you can see what our goal is, but there’s a lot more to do!

The Problem and Solution
Showing hyper-local, time sensitive events is critical and the response has been positive. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section. It’s hard to find something to do nearby if you have a short time horizon (now - 24 hours.) Hapnin.com aims to solve this problem by showing you fun things to do.

The Platform
From the very beginning, we wanted to strengthen our community and the connection people have to it. Sharing our information is the best way to do this. Hapnin.com is a platform, which means you can take a slice (or all) of our event stream and create a “things to do section” on your site.

Check out these sites that have their own event streams:
http://www.SoUrban.net/east-village-events
http://greasyguide.com/harlem-nyc-events/
http://thisbarsucks.com/events-calendar-brooklyn-new-york/new-york-brooklyn-events/

We know Hapnin.com will help people find great things to do in their neighborhoods and we hope they’ll feel more connected to their community.

Greg

Putting It All Together - Fragemented Data and Aggregation

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:48:00 -0400

“The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.” -Aristole

We believe aggregation and filters have an incredibly important role to play on the Internet today and in the future. There is simply too much information for any person to process. A source is needed to collect the data and people must be able to filter it based on their preferences.

Fred Wilson, on AVC.com, articulates why aggregators are important:

“There is no way that anyone can consume all of the content that is available and relevant to them. And no media property, be it the Wall Street Journal or any other content creator, can produce even 5% of the best content I want to consume daily.”

Below, I will expand on this idea by describing Craigslist and Hapnin.

Reverse Aggretators

In the very near future, I’ll be in the market to find a new apartment. (If you live in NYC, you can image how fun this is.) As a person looking for apartments, I want a single source that will show me ALL the available apartments in NYC. Then, I want to be able to filter, based on my preferences and budget.

Others feel the same way, in fact there is so much demand for this service that people pay to list their apartments on Craigslist. This is an example of “reverse” aggregation. Cragslist doesn’t go out and find apartments, but it allows others to post. For a user, you can see far more apartments on Craigslist than if you went to individual real estate websites.

Regular Aggretaors

Here at Hapnin, we are working on a different idea. Hapnin.com will be a “regular” aggregator. We’re going to find events, list them and link back to the source. Google is by far the most popular company that does this.

It’s good to know there’s a happy hour at BoA at 7pm. But, it’s better to be able to see all the happy hours going on in the city and then filtering by time and location. This is a new and exciting way to connect with your surroundings.

With aggregation and filtration, the whole is by far greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Greg

Passive Search and the Hyper-Local

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:46:00 -0400

A natural synergy exists between passive search and hyper-local content. At Hapnin, we’re building a platform and the tools to make it as easy (and fun) as possible to find hapnins around you that are going on now.

Active Search, Passive Search and Data

Most people are very comfortable searching for info online. The process is straightforward, go to your favorite search engine and type in your query, “when is Easter 2009,” “bar on A map,” or “Bronx Zoo.” This behavior is called active search; you’re actively looking for information. For many queries, actively searching is the best way to find the data because it’s direct and unanticipated. With active search, you’re pulling data from a source. A thought pops into your head and you search.

Passive search allows you to setup criteria and have the data pushed to you. Financial data, weather, social feeds and RSS are excellent examples of passive search. It is much more convenient for you to setup your portfolio in Google Finance than it is to actively search for each quote. When you want to, you can easily check your portfolio and see its changes without searching. (The data is just there when you need it, no searching required.)

Twitter and Facebook are also good examples of passive search. On both sites, you select people who are important to you, people you want to receive information from. Once they are selected (accepted your friend request), the data they share will be pushed to you. You don’t need to look at everyone’s profile, you can see all the news that’s important to you in your feed. This is one reason these sites have exploded in popularity, it’s easy to get information you care about.

Passive Search and Hyper-Local Events

Why can’t we do this with hyper-local events? Why can’t you select a neighborhood and event category and get updated? The Coovents East Village Twitter account shows the synergy between passive search and hyper-local events. The Coovents_East account tweets every time a happy hour in the East Village starts. When you follow this account (criteria) it will send (push) you data.

What’s Next

There is so much more to do with passive search and hyper-local content. One of our goals is to make our service so useful and intuitive that you don’t need to search for events, rather they’ll come to you. I’m usually looking for interesting things to do on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in New York. Why can’t these events be pushed to me when I want them?

Soon, finding hyper-local events will be much easier.

Greg

Defining a Hyper-Local Events Platform

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:59:00 -0400

We’re gearing up, collecting data, and styling our pages, launch is coming soon! One of our first, and most important, decisions was “what would Hapnin.com be?” Should we create a destination site like Yelp or a platform like outside.in? How does this choice affect our service, our partners and the events community at large? After a lot of thought, we choose to create a platform because we believe this is the best option for everyone.

To build our platform, we needed to aggrate and normalize events data, or create an events feed. Feeds are taking over the Internet, from Twitter, to blogs, to Yelp and Facebook, they’re everywhere. For streams of information, they just make sense because people can digest lot of data easily.

Feeds for events are slightly different than the usual ones. Event feeds are chronological, they move from what’s happening now, to what’s happening in the future. A reverse chronological feed for events wouldn’t do you any good, you’d only see past events. Coovents illustrates what an event feed could be; list the current events, then upcoming ones.

Aggregated events data is amazingly useful, it can answer the question “what’s there to do around me now?” We know others will benefit from this data, we are building an open feed to share our data. Any website can take our feed (or a subset of it) and list hyper-local events on their page through our micro site plugin and our (soon to be released) API.

You can think of Coovents as one “view” of the Hapnin feed (happy hours in New York.) Which feed will you use?

In addition to sharing our data, we want to strengthen our community, from event goers to bloggers and location owners. Organizing our data in a useful format was crucial We’re confident we did this well, event goers will be able to easily find events. Bloggers will benefit from our great content and some features we’ve built in to our service. First, bloggers will keep their traffic, as event goers click around, they will stay on the blogger’s page, which increases pageviews. Also, social features (sharing on Facebook/Twitter/calendar/email) come standard, this attracts new event goers to blogs. Between our data and our partners, we’ll be able to spread the hyper-local events far and wide. Ultimately, this will result in more people going to the events. Local business will be able to fill their venues (cheaply) and talent (musicians/artists/ect.) will attract bigger fan bases.

The essence of a hyper-local service is its community, nothing is possible without it. We’re excited to provide a platform to strengthen our community for all involved.

For more information on our private beta, please sign up here or leave your email address in the comments below.

Greg

The World is Hapnin

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:17:00 -0500

There’s a lot of activity out there and you’re missing out. I’m always amazed when I hear about a cool activity… a day late. Why does this happen? A block party, concert, happy hour or sale, you’ve gotta know when these things are going on to take advantage.

Team Coovents took a swing at this problem and solved the happy hour conundrum. We gathered happy hour data and listed it online, with a map, sorted by time. Now it’s really easy to find happy hours in NYC. We even have an iPhone app coming out that will show happy hours near you!

There’s still so much more to do. We alway ask what if, what if? We’ve formed a new company to bring you hapnin.com. It’s going to be bigger, badder and more viral (like the flu, *cough*.)

Indeed, the world is a hapnin place. Greg