Simon Willison’s Weblog

Which tools exist for learning about the people attending a particular meetup / conference, in advance?

My answer to Which tools exist for learning about the people attending a particular meetup / conference, in advance? on Quora

This is one of the most popular aspects of our service, Lanyrd—we offer an attendee directory for each event showing everyone we know who is speaking or has told us that they plan to attend the event. Here are a few examples:

OSCON 2012: http://lanyrd.com/2012/oscon/att...
dConstruct 2012: http://lanyrd.com/2012/dconstruc...

The directory is searchable, which makes it easy to e.g. find investors who attended SXSW this year:

If you sign in with Twitter, we’ll give you the option to just see the people attending an event who you are already following on Twitter. We also use your Twitter network to suggest upcoming events that you might want to go to.