Quick Pitch: A licensable, branded social calendaring platform.
Genius Idea: Although there are a lot of various local event web sites (Upcoming, Eventbrite, Eventful) for finding out what what's happening in your area, there aren't a lot of white-label services aimed at businesses or schools to manage their own event listings, while also allowing integration with social media. This is what Localist aims to do.
If you look at the Localist homepage, you can see that it offers robust event listing for the Baltimore, MD and Washington D.C. areas. You can browse events by venue, type, age-restriction or date and easily agree to attend an event or comment on it with Facebook or Twitter.
However, the real beauty in what Localist isn't with its main site, but with what its event listing database and API. Check out Johns Hopkins University's Event Calendar for example. Local events taking place on and off campus are listed in an easy-to-read manner, you can download the calendar into iCal, Google Calendar, or using RSS, and you can use Facebook Connect to comment or confirm your attendance. On the event's page, you can see who is attending, if any of your friends are going, as well as venue information.
I really like the idea of an event calendar solution for businesses or organizations to utilize on their own sites. Rather than having to integrate everything into a third-party service on another site, businesses can take advantage of an already existing infrastructure and built-in social media tools, while still retaining branding control and listing events on their own sites.
Localist is still in the developing stages, but it seems like a really great idea that will hopefully branch out to other cities and regions.
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