App for Your Event Planning Needs

It’s hump day and I for one am quite glad. I’m tired, sore from the gym, tired of homework, and just ready for the weekend again. Many of us already have weekend plans and are looking forward to them. I’m hoping to hang out with my gal pal Lindsey or my like-a-sister, McKenna. Weekend plans have a way of becoming really complicated when there’s a million people to text and details to hammer out. Facebook events suck and are more annoying than anything and chain texts are just obnoxious. If any of you “suffer” with these current technologies, then allow me to introduce you to a handy little app called Flashplan.

FlashPlan is brand new and if I’m not mistaken, still in beta testing. I got to talk to the app’s creator, Shravan Rao, a University of Connecticut graduate, about what the app does and here’s what he said:

“We focused on a few issues that we found with the current process of making plans:

> There isn’t a great mobile solution, which doesn’t make sense, because everyone is always mobile.

> Current tools use social accounts, so you can’t invite people that don’t have the app or don’t have facebook, twitter etc.

> Current tools are inefficient (no one checks facebook events, etc.)

We’ve solved these problems by:

> Making Flashplan truly mobile.  You use a phone number to log in and send invites to people in your contact list, which is your truest social network.

> Flashplan currently only uses phone number to log in, and we’ll eventually maybe add facebook log-in to make the process easier, but that would be only to pull name and other info from facebook.  No events or anything would ever go on facebook and you would never invite through facebook.

> There aren’t any additional ads, no random notifications, etc.

Flashplan is all about helping users spend less time making plans and more time making memories.”

Shravan’s idea is brilliant. I get so many Facebook invites to Tupperware parties, online trunk shows, and Mary Kay sales that I completely ignore invites now. Apps like these get my attention because their only purpose is to make planning an event easier. His idea was sparked by his own experience trying to plan an event.

“In November 2013, I was trying to organize a birthday dinner for a good friend, but it was super inefficient; facebook events, for example- no one sees the invites because they’re getting a ton of other notifications and there are ads everywhere, messages, comments, picture tags, etc.  Flashplan is meant for the person that’s social and on the go and is a mobile solution to the problem of quickly and privately getting a few friends together face to face, instead of interacting behind a screen.”

As a society, I think we have lost quite a bit to social media. It certainly is convenient and even fun to use. However, being together in real time is much better than over the internet. Flashplan is designed to simply plan an event and then execute it. 

My own experience using the app was pretty grand. A few things I really liked were that when you begin to plan an event the app syncs with the contacts in your phone and you can simply invite them by selecting their number regardless of if they have the app or not. Another thing is that if you have multiple events in the works, they are organized into each of their own tabs so you can keep details straight and not get anything confused. It has all of the standard planning necessities such as date, time, location (including a map), and notes.

This app is really impressive and I don’t see anything else on the market like it. Here’s the link to the app on iTunes!