Cool Tool Review: Plancast

Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

I’m delighted to introduce a new feature. Todd Hoskins will be choosing and using tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Plancasting
A Review by Todd Hoskins

How do I break into an industry? Where should I go to meet the people who can help me broaden or deepen my network? What events are worth my time?

Plancast, a new free service from Worldly Developments, helps answer these questions.

There’s been a lot of attention paid lately to location-based services. Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter are effective at communicating where people are geographically and what they are doing. Plancast shows you the future – the places and events people are planning to attend.

The business value can be immediately grasped. Subscribing to the plans of investors, clients, or people within your industry or network, allows you to prioritize the events you want to attend. By sharing your own plans, you give people the chance to find you.

Signup is simple with Facebook Connect and Twitter integration. Your profile is imported, along with the option of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Then, you enter event information – what, when, and where. There is no RSVP functionality – it’s a plan not a commitment. The option exists to share your plan through Facebook or Twitter, or you can export through the iCal format. You can subscribe to others’ plans, then view them on the Plancast site or within their new iPhone app.

Personally, it’s a great way to keep track of parties, festivals, or concerts friends are planning to attend. The effectiveness is entirely dependent upon adoption. Since Plancast is only a few months old at this point, there are a limited number of people casting their plans onto your laptop. But I predict this will change.

Worldly Developments has secured some new funding, so we expect some improvements hopefully including better tagging and categorization of events (an aggregated database would be ideal), grouping of subscribers, alerts, integration with event sites, and more mobile apps.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 1/5 – more events, dashboard would provide some value

Entrepreneur Value: 4/5 – user base of influential people already

Personal Value: 3/5 – with widespread adoption this functionality will become a must-have for social scheduling

Thanks, Todd! You can find Todd on Twitter @ToddHoskins

What about you? Have you used it? What do you think of Plancast?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!