<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Thousands of people will be descending on Austin, Texas this weekend for the annual SXSW festival.\u00A0With over 1,500 sessions taking place at SX Interactive this year, and nearly that same number in parties, deciding what to do and where to go can be really overwhelming.\r\n\r\nThankfully, there's an app for that. More than one to be certain, but a platform we particularly like is Laynrd, an\u00A0events planning app that leverages your social connections on Twitter to deliver relevant panels.\r\n\r\nWe covered Lanyrd's launch\u00A0over a year ago in January, 2011 and since then the company has been working hard to maintain an organizational presence at all major events and conferences. For this year's SXSWi, Lanyrd produced an\u00A0unofficial Austin schedule guide,\u00A0which recommends panels based on who you follow on Twitter. You can use it to\u00A0search and filter the schedule, or browse an attendee\u00A0directory that lets you search through the Twitter profiles of over\u00A03,500 known attendees.\r\n\r\nI love that it tells me how many of my Twitter connections are speaking at this year's conference:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nSimon Willison, one of Lanyrd\u2019s two founders says you can even use it to find astronauts (there\u00A0are two at this year's event) by searching the attendees\u00A0here.\u00A0You can also search for the most\u00A0popular sessions (ranked by the number of people tracking/attending on Lanyrd) at\u00A0the whole conference here.\r\n\r\nIf you're a social media addict, you'll want to check out this list of\u00A0the most popular social media panels. If you'd like to browse by location, look here for the most popular at the Hilton Downtown hotel. And finally, if you want to support your favorite TNW Writer, please attend the panel I'm moderating! (Yes, I know the name is lame.)\r\n&amp;quot;We think our tools will be uniquely useful in this year's crowded\u00A0startup marketplace - we've focused hard on building things that will\u00A0help attendees navigate the even-bigger-this-year interactive\u00A0conference,&amp;quot; says Willison.\r\nLanyrd hatched from Y Combinator\u2019s winter 2011 batch, and raised a further round of $1.4 million of seed funding in 2011. Investors include Index Ventures Seed and PROfounders Capital.\r\n\r\nLanyrd also has an iPhone\u00A0and mobile web app\u00A0that include offline storage so that you can access your schedule even without a reliable data connection. So, what panels will you be attending? Let us know in the comments!\r\n\r\nAlso read:\u00A0Bluebrain releases a teaser video for its latest location aware music album for SXSW.\r\n\r\nFollow all of our live SXSW coverage here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/06/lanyard-leverages-twitter-to-show-you-which-sxswi-panels-you-should-attend/?awesm=tnw.to_1DZFy>