Upcoming.org Attempts a Comeback via Kickstarter

Every week, we're going to be checking out what's new on Kickstarter to find the most innovative and interesting new projects on the crowdfunding website. That's because in the last couple of years, some of the most exciting developments in technology have come, not from the established players but from small teams with big dreams, like the Pebble smartwatch and the Oculus Rift. We're watching out for what comes next. Such as the potential relaunch of Upcoming.org, for example.

First a small history lesson. Upcoming was launched by Andy Baio in 2003, and was one of the sites that started what came to known as Web 2.0. It was a collaborative event calendar that was entirely curated by the community, and it would help people find events that fell under the radar of traditional event listings.

You could describe the site as a proto-social network, as it also surfaced what your friends were interested in attending, to help you plan your own calendar. Baio had in 2003written announcing the launch of the site: "My new site has launched!Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, where anyone can add the music/sports/arts/film/drama events they're going to, find out who's going to the same events, and browse the event listings of other people with similar tastes. After adding events to your list, you can use the generated RSS feeds to list them on your own weblog. By adding people to your friends list, you can track your friend's events as they add them (also available via RSS)."

After the first year, Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin joined as co-founders, and two years later, in 2005, Yahoo bought the site. The founders left Yahoo in 2007, and ever since, the site started to fall into disrepair and quickly became defunct, before finally being shut down in 2013.

Now, Baio is looking to revive the site by raising funds via Kickstarter. The idea came when Yahoo unexpectedly reached out to Baio in April, offering him the chance to buy back the Upcoming.org domain, an offer that he promptly accepted.

Instead of going to any traditional sources for funding, Baio hopes to revive the site using Kickstarter, which he believes will give him the freedom to work on the site without working towards an exit, as was the case for the first iteration of the website.

With Kickstarter, he hopes to bring back Upcoming with all of its old functionality, and update it for a changed Internet. For example, the new upcoming will use APIs from Twitter and Foursquare to share events, and find events, something which seems obvious today, but would have been unimaginable in 2003.

In his Kickstarter post, Baio says that the huge amount of user content that had been built up on Upcoming over the years was archived before the site closed forever, and Upcoming will release this 35TB of data over time to bring back the original content of the site, along with new content which new users will be able to create.

The site has been defunct for years, but amazingly, reached its funding goal of $30,000 in just 90 minutes.

Still, with a public beta planned only in March 2015, it's hard to say if Baio will get the network effect that is required to make the site work - the original Upcoming was a product of its time, but in the years that passed, social networks have continued to evolve and there's a big difference between Friendster and Facebook.

You can see the full Kickstarter video below.

For our earlier Kickstarter of the Week stories, click here.