By Megan McCarthy and Michael Calore

AUSTIN, Texas – Last year, Twitter was the big winner at South by Southwest. In 2008, it's all about Sched.org.

Every year, one web service captures all the buzz at the two-week-long conference by proving itself to be innovative, geek friendly and, perhaps most importantly, insanely useful. This year, a simple calendaring service is the site most plugged into SXSW's zeitgeist.

The Sched.org website displays the entire conference calendar, covering the interactive, film and music events plus parties and unofficial galleries, on a dynamic, easily customizable web page. The site has proven itself to be a godsend to overwhelmed attendees trying to figure out where to go, when to get there, what the most popular events are and who you'll see once you arrive.

"It solved the problem of complete chaos in the schedule-management part," says Chirag Mehta, the site's co-creator.

At 2007's conference, that role was filled by Twitter, a microblogging service that lets users post simple updates about their location.

Keyed-in geeks used Twitter to find out where all the best parties were happening and who was there. Since it was geared toward mobile use, it proved to be indispensable at the busy conference plagued by flaky WiFi connections.

But while Twitter came from established Silicon Valley digerati – the app's creators include the founders of Blogger, which was bought by Google in 2003 – Sched.org was cooked up in 14 hours by two Florida developers with day jobs.

Mehta, a 27-year-old IT consultant, built the site with 24-year-old web designer Taylor McKnight.

It was McKnight who found inspiration for Sched.org while on a Mexican holiday with his family. He began thinking about how to tackle SXSW's sprawling schedule and built a simple version of it. McKnight coded up a quick demo and sent it to Mehta the day before his vacation ended.

"Taylor showed it to me at 12 noon that Sunday," Mehta says. "I said, 'This is really cool.... You're going to drag me into this, aren't you? I can stay up until 2 a.m., so we've got 14 hours. Let's build it.'"



Using a simple Ajax interface, the two have built an elegant application.

The login is simple – just pick a user name and password and Sched.org sets up your account. Each day's festival events are laid out in their own tab. Click on a tab to browse the events and pick which panel, film or music show you want to attend. One click adds the item to a personalized page with a unique URL, which can be bookmarked on a mobile device (it looks great on an iPhone) or printed out. You can also see who is attending which event, and sort the events by popularity.

By Saturday afternoon, Sched.org already had 1,900 users signed up and utilizing the site.

McKnight and Mehta have a history together. The two recently collaborated to build Chime.tv, a video-search website that seeks out clips on all the popular video-sharing sites and presents them in a TV-like interface, complete with dedicated channels for different topics. McKnight, along with his friend Daniel Westermann-Clark, also previously built Podbop, a search mashup that helps you discover bands playing in your city, displaying venue information and links to MP3s so you can sample the music.

Mehta and McKnight were able to input the official schedule from the South by Southwest website, but they had to enter all the unofficial events by hand.

"If we would have known that this would have caught on like this, we would have spent another day making sure that the unofficial (events) were automated," said Mehta.

The pair imagines they will be able to build unique versions for other crowded conferences or big, multi-day events once they iron out the kinks.

But for now, connected geeks are using Sched.org to find the hottest kicks around Austin – and breathing a collective sigh of relief that somebody else did most of the dirty work for them.

Taylor McKnight (left) and Chirag Mehta worked together to create Sched.org. The easy-to-use web app is a hit among SXSW conference attendees.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

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