Eventomatic Will Keep You Scheduled Even in Freezing Weather

When Arash Pessian was working on his graduate degree in a yurt located in icy Fairbanks, Alaska, he ran into a common scenario that many of us in colder climates are familiar with.

When walking home one cold night, Pressian saw an advertisement for a promising local garage sale that he wanted to check out. As he fumbled around with his gloves, trying to put the details into his iPhone calendar app, he had an inspiration: what if he could just take a photo of the sign and have his iPhone do the work for him?

Eventomatic was born.

What makes this app great is the ease of use. Simply point your iPhone at a poster and tap the big camera button. Eventomatic will upload the photo to its servers where human transcribers actually parse the information, which means that even hand-written signs can be automatically sent to your calendar. It works with Google, iCloud, Yahoo!, Outlook, Exchange, and any other calendar app you might use. It’s not just optical character recognition (OCR), like Evernote or similar apps are.

“Because you need human intelligence for event posters, Eventomatic runs the pictures through Amazon Mechanical Turk–you know, the crowd sourcing platform,” Pressian told AppAdvice in an email. “Qualified transcribers collect the information, which the app then compares for the best results. You get an accurate calendar entry after around 15-30 minutes. That makes it sound complicated but Eventomatic is really just a one button utility app that does one job well.”

Eventomatic is free to download, respects your privacy, and won’t bug you for ratings, all of which can be dealt with in the Settings for the app.

Next time you don’t have the time or the coordination to get an event loaded into your iPhone from a poster near you, give Eventomatic a shot, cold weather or not.