And adding a handy second-round funding of $1.5 million from initial backers Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.

“We always knew we wanted to do this,” CEO Greg Schwartz told me yesterday. “But we didn’t realize how important it would be. … It’s a pivot in terms of energy.”

The company’s mobile app integrates with the calendar app on your smartphone, focusing not just on your own events but on the future events that friends, family, and colleagues consider important. You can also share events out to your UpTo connections – Schwartz described it as the Instagram of calendars last time I talked to him: a layer on top of your calendar, just as Instagram is a layer on top of your camera.

People used it, Apple featured the app in the App Store, and downloads grew, but access to public streams grew even faster. Last year UpTo tentatively opened up the platform to public streams, and pro sports teams, organizational calendars, speaking tours, and organizations jumped on the new capability, to the point where there are now more than 2000 streams of events on the UpTo system .

The problem with that growth? Most of them have been placed there by the company itself.

So now Schwartz is opening up the platform, allowing any business, school, club, or organization to create their own event streams. Interested users can subscribe to those streams, and organizations can also embed live UpTo calendar streams on their websites, for an experience Schwartz says is much more dynamic and social than the standard static event pages.

It’s good timing, as user growth is coming faster than ever: UpTo has had more downloads in the last 45 days than in the previous year. And it’s also a smart one-step-removed user acquisition strategy.

“It’s a B-to-B-to-C user acquisition strategy,” Schwartz explains.

Once organizations join, their members and fans join, meaning that one “sale” (the app and the event stream are currently free) generates hundreds or even thousands of installs.

This is a much bigger vision, and a much bigger product than UpTo had envisioned before. It’s essentially the social network of tomorrow: What’s happening, who’s attending, which friends will be there, and which ones do I want to attend? And it will bring some new competition, too, as UpTo enters space occupied by companies like Eventful and Meetup.

For Schwartz, Upto doesn’t always need to be in the forefront.

“It’s not all about downloading the app or using the app,” he says. “You might experience UpTo and maybe not even realize it. It’s a more distributed approach.”

Schwartz wants to work with companies like Eventful and Meetup, and it is actively pursuing Facebook as well to bring in Facebook events natively and share events from UpTo not as status updates but as Facebook events. The goal is a future in which when users like the Detroit Lions or New York Yankees, for instance, UpTo and Facebook can then recommend other event streams they might be interested in.

The pivot, such as it is, was mostly due to good fortune, Schwartz suggests:

“We sort of got lucky that we were able to experiment, bring a few streams into the app,” he says. “Then we gave people the ability to suggest streams … and huge traffic resulted.”

That sort of luck is how startups stop being startups and start being contenders, and the new round of funding from existing investors Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures, both based in Detroit, will help.

photo credit: Mike Rohde via photopin cc

Google’s claim is that typical event-management tools online are simplistic and partial: They basically boil down to invitations and RSVPs. I’m a dues-paying member of Meetup, and there’s some truth to that assertion:

During and after the event, Google complains, there’s little else that typical event services offer. Again, there’s something to what Google is saying — here’s a sample Facebook event that happened a few weeks ago:

Google wants to change that by making an event management tool that is useful before, during, and after an event. And it’s trying to bridge the online and offline experiences of everyday events:

“It’s how we connect with others, honor friends and family, or simply unwind after a long week. Unfortunately, the subtlety and substance of real-world events is lost online.

“Today’s online event tools are really just web forms that ask, “Are you going?” Worse yet, they bail [on] when you need them the most: during the actual event, and after everyone leaves.”

Google+ Events is designed to fill that gap. It starts, of course, with creating an event:

Note that you can change the theme: A quick look reveals themes for sports, fashion, party, birthday, wedding, dinner, and kids events. The Location functionality seems to fully integrate into Google+ Local, which means that you can simply start typing, and local landmarks start appearing.

Adding invitees is simple if they are on Google+ … simply start typing their names, and the people will appear. Regular Event users would be better served to create a Google+ Circle for their attendees, so that all the members of a group can be added with a single click.

After creating your first event, a new tab appears in Google+ with your event visible on it. You won’t be able to tell from this screenshot, but the image is dynamic: There’s HTML5 magic in the image that, in this case, is causing the bubbly to actually be … bubbly:

Users can then add photos, share the event, or start a hangout right on the event page. And when they accept, the event is automatically added to their Google Calendar.

But it’s when the event starts that the real magic begins.

Google calls it Party Mode, and it’s only available on Android phones with the Google+ app. Party mode will share any photos or videos taken while you’re at the party automatically to the event, streaming updates to others who are at the event or following it online. Additionally, if you schedule a hangout, anyone who can’t make it to your event but still wants to be included will get an automatic invite to the hangout, so they can at least watch the event and participate that way.

The question in my mind: How does this compete with Meetup, Facebook, Evite, or any of the other players in event scheduling and management? When I spoke to a Google representative, she said that competing with other services was not the company’s priority:

“It’s more about giving our users one beautiful Google experience,” she said. “Events are such a huge part of life … it’s a natural step within Google+.”

That said, there’s no doubt that this is direct competition to other events sites.

Meetup is the gorilla in the room, with almost 11 million monthly visitors and 340,000 events scheduled and attended each and very month in 45,000 cities. That’s a lot of traction, and, one would assume, a significant proportion of those who are looking for an event-management service.

And Facebook is no small competitor. Despite the fact that its event solution is limited, Facebook has the tremendous advantage of built-in supply: the 900+ million Facebook user base.

But Google+ has what at first look seems to be a better, more comprehensive solution than either of them. Google has done its homework on this one and created a full-circle event experience.

VentureBeat has reached out to both Facebook and Meetup for comment, and this story will be updated as necessary.

Image credit: ShutterStock