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My favourite rss calendar application upcoming.org went mobile a couple of days ago. In their usual humble style upcoming team anounced: “Just open up m.upcoming.org on your mobile phone’s web browser and log in. We’ll give you your Upcoming events for the day, plus links to your watchlist, your friend’s events for the day, and an event search form, just in case you’re looking for more stuff to do.”

I tried it out immediately but was a bit dissapointed with the given functionality, just browsing my or my friends’ events on my mobile is not really something I currently need when I’m on the move.

I liked the 2nd paragraph of the anouncement though: “We tried to focus tightly on showing 90% of what you’d need while you’re out of the house, but if there’s anything essential missing, let us know and we’ll do our best to add it in. This is an exercise in minimalism, so please think about space and download time when offering your suggestions.”

Well, here’s some I’m looking for when on the move inbetween conferences:

Actually it’s a good excercise to start with for anyone attending regularely events and who needs to travel a lot… What excactly one needs from a mobile accessible, live updateable calendar application? The events you’re attending or watching, you’ll have probably listed already on your laptop, location map functionality is obvious to have when looking for the event location while on the road. What about friends to connect to, attending the same conference? All this makes sence to me.

I created the Mobile Events group a couple of months ago for the Carnival of the Mobilists website (Events section) which you may also view here on my blog. I think it’s a great way to stay updated on events in the mobile & wireless sector and watch which friends are attending events around, have a look which events are currently anounced.

Upcoming Mobile isn’t yet offering the functionalities I would like I described above, however I’m confident upcoming is busy thinking about and/or developing the stuff. They just added some RSVPs and Guestlists for Event Organizers too…

Meanwhile I love the possibility to integrate my upcoming ‘Mobile Events’ group events feed into iCal or MyYahoo! Maps or Calendar

The best part is synchronising my iCal to my N91 beaming all those events with a single click into my calendar on my mobile, that’s neat! Now just keep building the other functionalities around. How about you, how do you manage (or would like to manage) your events and functioalities while on the move?

During my years working in mobile, I have always found it difficult to find a good calendar of relevant mobile events in our sector. The most appropriate to me was the Wireless World Forum Calendar but though relevant, still not perfect, neither complete. Then there are the other consulting and event agencies that are only promoting their own events, so I thought it was time for the mobilists to come in

After some discussion with Carlo on the best tools, I started a little experiment at upcoming.org. I must say, this seems to be a very efficient tool to stay updated on events of my interest. I can add events, invite friends, see who’s attending events and start discussions about what’s happening and do a lot more…

I created a Mobile Events group and invited some mobilists friends to see how fast we can get some decent event calendar together… Check for yourself the result, in a day we got some 20 events together starting from the idea that all group members enter a couple of events he/she knows about. Anyone can subscribe to the calender feed or integrate it into his personal iCal/Google/Yahoo! calendar. To subscribe to the group and suggest events yourself, you just need to subscribe to the service and look for the Mobile Events group.

Apart from what I mentioned above, upcoming.org groups allow you to find and collect events by interest or location. You can create your own calendar and send an interesting event to a group, add and search your favourite tags, look for maps of venues, etc.

So, what are you waiting for? If anyone joining can add some events, we’ll get soon the best mobile event calendar around and we can all share it!