Prettiness is subjective - I like our current design, and we've had a lot of praise for it, but clearly it isn't to everyone's taste. We've recently expanded our design team so we'll be making a bunch of changes in the near future.
We're useful in helping people figure out which conferences and events they should be going to. We have comprehensive event listings for a wide range of different topics (try http://lanyrd.com/topics/user-experience/ or http://lanyrd.com/topics/web-design/ or http://lanyrd.com/topics/startups/ or http://lanyrd.com/topics/ios/ for example). If you sign in with Twitter we'll show you events the people you are following are speaking at, attending or tracking which we've found works extremely well as a recommendation mechanism. You can also subscribe to emails with suggested events so you don't have to keep visiting the site.
For events that we have a schedule for, our iPhone and Android/Mobile Web apps will store it offline so you can quickly check what's happening during the event.
If you're a conference speaker, you can use us to build up a profile of the talks you've given. Here's mine: http://lanyrd.com/profile/simonw/
If you organise conferences, you can use our speaker profile pages to find speakers for your events (and watch videos of their presentations to see if they'll be a good fit), e.g. http://lanyrd.com/profile/paulg/
Finally, we're building up an index of slides, notes and video from talks. If you want to learn Scala for example, our collection of Scala talk videos might be a good place to start: http://lanyrd.com/topics/scala/video/
