This is interesting. I had an idea a few years back that was a variation of this as a consumer/small business service, rather than a developer one.
The idea (roughly) was predicated on the belief that much information that needs to be communicated in the general sphere of "local" is in the form of calendar events. Everything from community meetings to wine tastings to school events, soccer games, carpool times, and so on, can be communicated in the form of calendar events and their metadata. So the concept was to do a clearinghouse for discovering and subscribing to events and event feeds (which would auto-update when changed and so on) that also made it easy for publishers of events to enter them in a single format (calendar feed, email-to-event, etc) and have them translated into whatever formats were preferred by the end-users.
EDIT: wondering if i just described Upcoming.org...
The idea (roughly) was predicated on the belief that much information that needs to be communicated in the general sphere of "local" is in the form of calendar events. Everything from community meetings to wine tastings to school events, soccer games, carpool times, and so on, can be communicated in the form of calendar events and their metadata. So the concept was to do a clearinghouse for discovering and subscribing to events and event feeds (which would auto-update when changed and so on) that also made it easy for publishers of events to enter them in a single format (calendar feed, email-to-event, etc) and have them translated into whatever formats were preferred by the end-users.
EDIT: wondering if i just described Upcoming.org...