Time Out acquires Hugecity

Time Out Posted at 6:15 pm May 7, 2014

Time Out Group has completed the acquisition of Hugecity - a crowd-sourced event guide for every neighbourhood in the world, on desktop, mobile and email. The founders of Hugecity, Hugh Malkin and Adam Wilson, will be joining Time Out as Time Out Labs, a new innovation arm of the company, working from Atlanta, Georgia, USA and managed from London. 

Hugh and Adam bring with them a wealth of experience and expertise that will make Time Out Labs a hub of creativity and innovation and will enable Time Out to develop innovative new products, as well as identify and incubate new ideas for Time Out and its fans.

This acquisition will help Time Out to continue to expand our digital offering to a much wider audience right across the globe. We already speak to a combined worldwide audience of over 28 million people but that’s just the start. Hugecity, which will be rebranded as Time Out World will be a place that engages and inspires Time Out fans to keep up and join in with everything they need to enrich their social lives.

Fallen Arrows Tastemakers 2013

Our city is full of movers and shakers – people working toward making Atlanta an amazing place. We’ve named our top 10 people and organizations who have done incredible things for Atlanta in 2013. Take a look below at the Fallen Arrows Tastemakers of 2013. 

Hugh Malkin

If FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) had a poster child, it might be Hugh Malkin. As the brains behind HUGECITY, Malkin has created a way to keep up with your online social calendar while checking out other popular events in your area. HUGECITY also gives you the ability to see what your friends are into and recently launched as an app for on-the-go fun. Want to know where the party is at? This is your guy.

10 Atlanta startups to watch

Creative Loafing Atlanta posted October 10, 2013

Meet the men and women behind some of the city's most interesting new business concepts

LARGER THAN LIFE: Hugecity CEO and co-founder Hugh MalkinBuckhead office; Hugecity CEO and co-founder Hugh Malkin (right).

Company: Hugecity

Founded: 2011

Name: Hugh Malkin

Position: CEO and co-founder

Website: www.hugecity.us

Elevator Pitch: An app that places Facebook events on a map and shows where your friends are going

Location: The Goat Farm

Hugh Malkin once relied upon Creative Loafing's event listings and Scoutmob's app to find out what was going on in Atlanta. But those resources didn't show him where all his friends were going each night. So he started Hugecity, a global website and app that visually shows Facebook events laid out on a map. In doing so, it allows users to see who's going to different events across a city. "We see interactions that people have with their cities all over the world," he says. "We couldn't normally find pop-up shops or zombie crawls just through our friends. This way we can step out, explore, and see that much more." Combined with a daily email blast, Hugecity wants to change the way people plan their days, nights, and weekends.

10 startups from Atlanta that you need to know about

The Next Web posted September 15 2013

This post comes courtesy of Fueled, a mobile design and developmentcompany based in New York and London. You can read more posts like it at the Fueled blog. Brooke Pendleton currently resides in Atlanta, GA where she manages marketing and operations for a tech startup.

When considering the business landscape of Atlanta, Georgia, most people think of a handful of corporate behemoths such as Delta, Coca-Cola and CNN, just to name a few. While the city is best known for these Goliaths, the “Capital of the South” is fast becoming home to an active community of technology startups and digitally focused “Davids”.

Atlanta’s low cost of living, an ever-growing population of young professionals, four very livable seasons (although they do call it Hotlanta for a reason) and the presence of first-rate colleges like Georgia Tech and Emory have all contributed to a tenacious and diverse start-up scene that rivals any major market in quality, if not quantity. Below are ten promising companies that show that Atlanta has definitely not gone with the wind.

Founders Hugh Malkin and Adam Wilson built HUGECITY to answer the pervasive question: what’s going on tonight? Pulling from the thousands of Facebook events created everyday (whether you’ve been invited or not), HUGECITY’s iOS app and website tell you what’s going on nearby and who in your network is attending.

The app will recommend events based on your own social profile and allow you to coordinate with your friends without the dreaded mass text. With big dreams of becoming the universal social calendar, the team’s focus has been on member acquisition over monetization. The good news is that there are many potential directions for the company to go in and it benefits from being one of the first event discovery apps out there.

Meet Hugecity. They are Pretty HUGE!

Bang Arts posted January 24, 2013

In a world blessed and respectively plagued with an abundance of technology and convergence, one can get overwhelmed with all the information. Like it or not, however, technology is a part of all our lives. Someone should come along and simplify all of this, yes? Meet Hugh Malkin, one of the pioneers behind HUGECITY, a new app that will help figure it all out in a method tailored to you.

BANG! In essence, what will the HUGECITY app provide for users?

Hugh Malkin HUGECITY will solve the question “What’s going on tonight?” anywhere on the planet. Let’s say you and a friend just finished dinner at HD1. You know that this is Atlanta and there are tons of events within walking distance, but where? The HUGECITY app will allow you to listen to the band playing at the Highland Ballroom, see the art show at Young Blood Gallery and watch the trailer for the indie flick shown at Plaza Theatre. Because we use Facebook we will also show you which friends you should expect to see at each event.

BANG! What void do you think the app will be filling?

Hugh Malkin It’s 2013. You and I know that lots of information is out there. Huge companies are tracking everywhere we go, everything we buy, and everyone we know. These companies who own our information seem to be only using it to advertise to us. Our team thinks that only using this information for advertising is unimaginative and one-sided. We think our information is useful so we created a way to show you the public data that these big companies know. We make it even more useful by combining the information from different companies.We know that Facebook is the biggest event database on the planet but they make it impossible to discover the public events that you have not been invited to. So you turn to alternative newspapers like Creative Loafing to find out what is going on. Creative Loafing rocks but it doesn’t answer all of your questions about what event to go to. You end up spending the majority of your time between a map to find where everything is, with YouTube looking up what that band sounds like, and Facebook to find if anyone else wants to go with you. HUGECITY brings all of this together to become the ultimate place for event discovery.

BANG! What cities will be included?

Hugh Malkin HUGECITY changes the way you see Facebook events. Facebook is global so HUGECITY is in every city. Check out our map and you will see events all around the world.

BANG! What kind of activities will HUGECITY focus on to suggest to the user?

Hugh Malkin Unfortunately, Facebook does not have categories for their events so we show all events. Personally, I like events that remind me why I live in the city rather than out in the burbs and Atlanta has lots of them. From pop-up dinners in a top chef’s backyard, to world class lectures, to a homemade lantern parade celebrating the city’s latest improvement project. These events are happening in our city, in every city across the country and all over the planet. HUGECITY allows you to be a part of every single one of them.

BANG! What spurred the idea to create an app of this magnitude? It must be quite the endeavor.

Hugh Malkin I moved back to Atlanta from Amsterdam in 2010 and I was travelling 5 days a week. I knew I had friends in town and I knew Atlanta was even cooler than when I left in 2005. Back then I was the guy who knew everything that was happening but in 2010 I couldn’t seem to find Atlanta’s pulse. I went for a bike ride around the beltline and rode into a pack of Zombies crawling out of the Oakland Cemetery. My mouth dropped, I had found my people again!  I asked them “how did you find out about the zombie crawl?” They all heard about it when they were invited to an event on Facebook. It wasn’t on Scoutmob or Creative Loafing, it had happened too quickly. Initially we only wanted to show events in Atlanta, but we quickly saw that events were all over the map in every country. HUGECITY got huge quick.

BANG! How will HUGECITY deem what to include in its services? What restaurants, venues, etc… get to make the cut to be included and/or mentioned?

Hugh Malkin Our goal is to concentrate on event discovery so we will only show events. We don’t want you to spend 30 minutes looking for something to do on HUGECITY. Our idea is that you want to go to events that you like and events that your friends are going to. We use your Facebook profile to show you those events first. Then we show you what is popular. We show all of the public events to every user but the order that they are shown is different for every user.

BANG! What is the process to create an app? It sounds pretty technical.

Hugh Malkin I think it’s different for every app team, but it always involves beer and coffee. HUGECITY is our first app and we got the idea after having a few beers and watching The Social Network. I am the head and the feet for HUGECITY while Adam and Jon are the body. I point us in a direction and get everything out of the way so Adam and Jon can focus on building everything that is HUGECITY.

BANG! With all the information being funneled into HUGECITY, how do you think you and your team will be able to sort it out to create a comprehensive service?

Hugh Malkin Our users do the sorting for us. When anyone gets to HUGECITY they see a list and a map. Everything that is on the list is on the map and visa versa. By zooming in to how far you want to travel you will see fewer events and get rid of the ones that are too far away. The events at the top of the list are the ones that were most visited, most saved and most attended by users. We also use your Facebook profile to show you which events your likes have created and which ones your friends are going to.

BANG! Who are your predecessors and what will HUGECITY be taking from previous apps?

Hugh Malkin We love the look of Svpply, Scoutmob, and Hotel Tonight. Our goal is to get you to quickly see what you want to do and bring others with you. These apps are great for doing just that.

BANG! How big, forgive the pun, do you think HUGECITY will get once it gets going?

Hugh Malkin I have met with several people in media and all of them complain about the same thing. We need a universal public calendar to show every event. HUGECITY is going to be that calendar. We know that more and more people are moving to cities and more and more amazing ideas are being created and shared. HUGECITY is here to accelerate the awareness and growth of those ideas. We want to make our world better, quicker. And we are going to start with the city we love, Atlanta.

Sounds good, right? Malkin and his team are working away to make HUGECITY the best it can be, and Atlanta gets to sink its fangs into the convenience-inspired creation first! Be sure to lookout for the app on your smartphones as it will surely become an extension of everyday life. Check it out and get hooked at https://www.hugecity.us/

-Miles Jenson

Source: http://www.eidemagazine.com/huge-city/

Tagged: Hugh Malkin, HUGE City, Worldwide Events, Questions and Answers, Tech

Eide Magazine: Huge City

by Tova Gelfond Photography by Austin Holt

The app-creating, web-coding, mobile-developing world is an innovative place. This realm is teeming with ways to make life easier, faster and more connected. Not to mention that the profits for developing the “next big thing” are, well, impressive. So when the next LinkedIn, Instagram or Foursquare pops up, people take notice. Which is why we’ve got all eyes on Hugecity, a site and soon-to-be-app that completely changes the way that you discover and keep track of Facebook events. And this modern marvel isn’t restricted to the South, or even the nation - it spans the entire world. When catching up with Co-Founder Hugh Malkin outside his Atlanta-based office, he mentioned that he had just shown someone how to benefit from the site in Peru. #impressed

Up until now, keeping track of events - for business or individuals - meant that the only way you could see a Facebook event was if you were invited to it. You could not see what was going on right around the corner from you. In this Spotified, Scoutmobbed world of instant gratification, this rouse seemed archaic to Malkin and his friend and Co-Founder Adam Wilson. Their resulting frustrations led them to see out a better way to keep track of all those art strolls, underground dinner clubs, neighborhood bands and beer festivals.

“We started by compelling events from lots of different sources and we quickly realized that Facebook had all of the events,” Malkin says. “It made sense because Facebook is the first place everyone puts events up to get the word out.” So when partner, Wilson )who worked as software developer at the CDC), and Malkin committed to finding another way to utilize all this information. Hugecity was born.

Basically, the site shows you all of the Facebook events happening around you. You get to see all of your events on a map, and see which events your friends are going to. The public Facebook events from each person who logs in is added to the map for everyone to see. Hugecity does not curate the events, or prioritize them; you do. The more people using it, and the more pages you like, the more events are populated into your view.

Imagine this: you have a night off and feel like hitting the town. What are you going to do? What is even going on? Just log into Hugecity and you can pick and choose whatever you want to do and with whoever you want to see. All the information you are looking for - date, time, location, photos, videos - is right there for you. Yeah, we were thinking the same thing: “Why didn’t I think of that?!” It’s simple: and it’s genius. 

With the anticipated launch of the Hugecity app this April, the worldwide tech community is taking notice. And you will, too. When you do, you’ll find that your city - no matter where you are in the world - is not as small as you thought. In fact, it’s HUGE.

Atlanta Heydays: Atlantans Hugh Malkin and Adam Wilson

Atlantans Hugh Malkin and Adam Wilson

Location: Tribute Lofts

Date taken: November 11, 2012

 When Hugh Malkin moved back to his hometown of Atlanta in 2010, his job with Philips had him working with the Atlanta BeltLine, figuring out how to light its trails and rails. Soon, Hugh started noticing all sorts of events popping up along the BeltLine – events that were spreading simply by word of mouth. Nicknamed “Huge” and the social coordinator among his friends since high school, Hugh saw an opportunity and contacted his long-time friend Adam Wilson.

“Hugh had gotten back in town and was interested in creating some sort of social event site for Atlanta,” said Adam. “He messaged me to see if I knew someone that he could talk to about building a website. I said, ‘You can talk to me.’ We went out for a drink, saw the Social Network and decided to start something. ”

Hugh and Adam have known each other since childhood – their families hung out together and the two Roswell natives became good friends when they were self-described “band nerds” at Roswell High School. With Hugh’s passion for Atlanta events, places and happenings and Adam’s knowledge of software, the two Georgia Tech grads created HUGEcity.us in January 2012 to help connect people with events in Atlanta.

The site, which utilizes Facebook’s public events to create calendar listings, has become one of the most popular places to find out what is happening in Atlanta and in cities around the world. Thousands of people are logging onto the site each day. Atlanta, where HUGE city started, is the only city (for now) with its own e-mail – events hand-picked by Hugh.

“This city has so much to offer, and most people don’t know about it,” said Hugh, who was born in Houston but moved to Atlanta as a child. “Atlanta might not have the best of anything, but we have a little of everything. HUGE city provides people with the opportunity to find out about events, celebrate where they live and share their experiences.”

Next up for HUGE city – creating a mobile app. Adam, a third generation Atlantan, works full-time for HUGE city and is focused on getting the app up and going sometime early next year.

“Imagine sitting at Dark Horse Tavern in the Virginia-Highlands and wanting to find out about events nearby. How do you find out? Facebook has all the events, but no discovery mechanism,” said Hugh. “An app will allow people to pull up all that information up on their phones easily. With all that is happening with technology, it’s exciting – the connections that are being made. Exciting things are happening to connect people.”

 Check out HUGEcity.us to learn about events in your city or go to Facebook and connect with the HUGE city app. Atlantans can subscribe to a weekly events e-mail created each week by Hugh Malkin.  

VIDEO: Hugecity presentation at ATDC Startup Showcase

Presenting Hugecity at the ATDC Startup Showcase in Atlanta

AUDIO: Atlanta Business Radio X Interview with Hugecity

Atlanta Business Radio X posted this on May 7, 2012

Download here We come in at 21 minutes

Hugh Malkin/HugeCity

Hugh’s natural curiosity leads him to constantly question how the things around him work and if they can be better. Hugh has worked in several exciting industries from Formula 1 to LED lighting in Europe and North America. HugeCity is Hugh’s first venture into social media. Hugh is responsible for HugeCity’s overall direction, financing and business development.

Adam Wilson/HugeCity

Fueled by coffee, Adam has an incredible ability to bring ideas into reality. He can solve complex problems that have never been faced before and teach himself new technologies as he goes. Adam has experience from user interfaces for Mars missions to public health alert messaging systems. He’s responsible for bringing HugeCity to life on your computer and on your phone.

HugeCity finds the events important to you and happening around you. It connects you to what your friends are doing on facebook. You see what you like and where it is. The site syncs up with facebook to map out all of your friends’ events around the world.

Like them on  Facebook and follow us on Twitter for ongoing updates on new products, announcements and stories.

Their mission at HugeCity is to get people involved, locally and globally, enjoying the world around us.

VIDEO: Startup Riot 2012 Hugecity Presentation

Hugh Malkin from HugeCity publicly showing our Facebook Application that allows you to discover the Facebook events that are happening around you.

AUDIO: Atlanta Business Radio X at Startup Riot 2012

Our interview with Atlanta Business Radio X during Startup Riot February 22, 2012 

Download Here

AUDIO: Out There Atlanta Episode 35 Hugecity

Out There Atlanta posted February 22nd, 2012

Today’s episode is with Huge City. We’ve all had weekends that just didn’t pan out because we missed the best events. The big idea behind Huge City: don’t let that happen to you. With guest host Kara Moskowitz, we sat down with founders Hugh Malkin, Adam Wilson, and Daniela Cateriano, to hear all about how the website works, the future of facebook, and the ups and downs of social media. They’re Atlanta locals and entrepreneurs, but their game plan will take you anywhere. 

Listen here or download from itunes (free).

Topics include: parents on facebook, how many cell phones are in the room, and how to avoid crowds and find parking.