Last year Planvine emerged as part of the new wave of apps designed to figure out your entertainment for the evening . For a monthly subscr...
Last year Planvine emerged as part of the new wave of apps designed to figure out your entertainment for the evening. For a monthly subscription, it reserved two tickets to events based on your pre-selected interests. However the company has been pivoting and today launched it’s new consumer iOS app: Line-Up, a new app with a new kind of method for event discovery. It’s a new model which is more likely to give them scale. You can download it here.
The app provides users with a personalised what’s on guide, which they can build from its database of events. It is powered by a pretty definitive event listings nightclubs, galleries to cooking schools, and many others. Initially it works in Manchester, UK, however this will be a test bed for a much wider roll-out.
Line-Up lets people create their own personalised what’s on guide. Users follow their favourite venues to receive a stream of upcoming events. The stream can be supplemented by following suggestions from bloggers, critics or local “heroes” who recommend the best events. Users save it to their own personal Line-Up of the things they want to do. They are aiming to build a scalable user-base first.
Line-Up CEO and founder, Barnaby Clark, says: “Manchester has been overlooked on the app scene prior to now, which is a shame as it’s such a vibrant and exciting city.” Line-Up says it has has processed more than five million events.
It might look like Line-Up is in competition with the well-funded yPlan, however, this is more of an open platform for people to curate lists of events that are relevant to them.
The goal – says the company – is to eventually have every event in the world on Line-Up, and for the community of users to decide which are the most exciting for them. yPlan and most other apps in this space offer a curated, limited list of events, which in the case of yPlan tend to be last minute events.
Line-Up won Seedcamp London in January 2013 and subsequently received investment from Demotix founder Turi Munthe, and serial angel investors Osman Mardin and Richard Fearn.
The creators of the Iron Man project are a team with an injection moulding factory out of Shenzen, the company tells me, including engineers with over 15 years experience in die casting manufacturing. The factory employs between 30 and 40 people, and currently produces toys, routers, smartphone parts and more. They’ve been working with designers in Beijing on the Iron Man project, and began producing small runs of the Iron Man helmet alone via 3D printing. To get costs down and volumes up, they’re looking to cover the costs of initial setup for a full-scale, injection moulding production run.
The company also tells me that it’s working on a space-grade aluminum version of the suit, too, which it plans to put into mass production provided the initial campaign is successful. They declined to comment on licensing, indicating this isn’t a project with Marvel’s official blessing, but that probably won’t stop the superfan from drooling over this. And yes it’s $2,000 and it doesn’t even fly, but imagine the faces the next time you walk the con floor.
