Nextdays Aims To Become Your Flexible Event Calendar

    Nextdays is new startup based in Helsinki that’s hoping to take events to more of a natural level. Nextdays helps you share what you’re planning to do and what you’re intending to do with your friends using a feed of time periods like today, tomorrow, the next 7 days, or even longer periods of time. The service is designed to help you share real events, as well as those flexible events like “lets get brunch next Sunday.”

    On top of that, Nextdays also offers event channels that anyone can create and curate. The channels already up on the service include Movie premiers – Helsinki and Startup events – Helsinki. The company imagines businesses like rock clubs and other organizations using these feeds as a way to publicly promote their events to interested people.

    CEO Joonas Tunturi is one of those ex-Nokia guys who finally got the impetus to start his own company after MeeGo went downhill. And to be honest, I really didn’t know what to make of Nextdays until I talked to him. Facebook pretty much handles all of my events these days, and the concept of logging into another service using a Facebook login just to view some events seemed an step I didn’t have to take.

    But Tunturi explained Nextdays plans to also nail what Facebook really doesn’t do well. “Facebook is good for real events, but creating a Facebook event for brunch, or to go climbing doesn’t make sense because it’s too heavy for that kind of usage.”

    To combat this, Nextdays offers easy and flexible categories like, “Up for anything,” “Lets move,” and “Something to eat?”. The discussion section lets people improve plans over time, and easily change the set time.

    Other startups have seen this pain point as well, most notably Plango from the region. Nextdays is well aware of this, and says they believe their strengths are in their UI, and in their channels.

    “The service is open globally … but even if we have automatic Facebook friending, so we copy your social graphs from other services (with Twitter and Google coming soon). It’s still always hard to engage people to become active in new service when having only few friends there. That’s why we are targeting heavily at use cases where you can use Nextdays alone.”

    Visitors may find that many of the channels are Helsinki-focused at the moment, but the service went live only very recently, and Nextdays plans to stay agile with their Helsinki-based users and figure out how they use the service. The company also plans on focusing on curating channels for some major cities with Dublin, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Stockholm and San francisco first on their radar.

    To monetize the service, Tunturi pictures perhaps a blend of event advertising, as well as a basic “deals” functionality that restaurants or other businesses could use to promote discounts. He clarifies that they don’t see themselves competing with Citydeals or other services in any way, but there is likely value in a scaled down version.