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Eventful Blog (8 unread)

July 10, 2008
1:21
New! Eventful for iPhone and iPod Touch
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Today we're announcing Eventful for iPhone, our new native iPhone application that is available from Apple's App Store -- for free!
More details coming soon.
Here's our press release.
And here's a screen shot:

And here's the video!
May 29, 2008
17:00
6 Million Users!
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Today Eventful celebrated reaching its 6th Millionth Registered User. Thanks to our customers for their continued support!
April 21, 2008

Permalink for 'A Word About "Event Planning"'

4:45

A Word About "Event Planning"

» ‎ Eventful Blog

This one goes out especially to writers and reporters doing stories on Eventful. :-)

Dear reporters: far too often I see Eventful described as follows: "Eventful, an event-planning site, etc."

I would like to take this opportunity to explain what event-planning is, and why Eventful is not, and never has been, an "event-planning" site.

What better source to turn to than Wikipedia, which, I am delighted to discover, has a clear definition of what event-planning is. So without further ado, here are the first four paragraph's of Wikipedia's entry on "event planning":

Event planning is the process of planning a festival, ceremony, competition, party, or convention.

Event planning includes budgeting, establishing dates and alternate dates, selecting and reserving the event site, acquiring permits, and coordinating transportation and parking.

Event planning also includes some or all of the following, depending on the event: developing a theme or motif for the event, arranging for speakers and alternate speakers, coordinating location support (such as electricity and other utilities), arranging decor, tables, chairs, tents, event support and security, police, fire, portable toilets, parking, signage, emergency plans, health care professionals, and cleanup.

Event Planning is a relatively new career field. There is now training that helps one trying to break into the career field. There must be training for an event planner to handle all the pressure and work efficiently. This career deals with a lot of communication and organization aspects. There are many different names for an event planner such as a conference coordinator, a convention planner, a special event coordinator, and a meeting manager.

In a nutshell, that's not Eventful. Indeed, that description inolves way too many atoms, and far too few bits. In other words, we are about information, not the physical "heavy lifting" of putting on actual events and dealing with all the logistical headaches. Nah. No worries about decor, tables, chairs, tents, let alone police, fire, portable toilets, and whatnot. We're geeks. We work with computers. :-)

So if Eventful is not, so I dare to claim, an "event planning site", what is it?

It's the best way on the Internet to discover, share, track, create, and demand events. Since day one, Eventful's mission has been, in three words, to "maximize event discovery", something that I felt the Internet had done a poor job doing in the years prior to a service like Eventful being available. "Event discovery" is the act of discovering events that are interesting and meaningful to you such that you want to go to them and hopefully do wind up going to them.

How does this act of discovery take place? By finding out what your friends are doing. By sharing what you're doing with your friends. By having the system recommend events to you based on your interests. By browsing through the site and discovering events you might never have heard of before. By joining groups whose members share an interest, and, together, all of you can find events related to that interest. This is what discovery is all about. It is very powerful.

So what about "share"? Sharing means taking those discoveries you've made, and telling others about them, that simple! Getting the word out. Making your discovery someone else's discovery, and so on, and so on.

What do I mean by "track"? I mean tracking things down -- having the system work on your behalf to automatically and regularly search for people and subjects you are interested in, and when it finds events that match those people and subjects, it lets you know in as much advance time as possible. Did you know that whenever you search Eventful, you can save the search results as an RSS or iCal feed, and then re-run those feeds any time you wish, to get fresh results? That's tracking. Did you know that you can save a search, give it a name, and have it listed in your My Eventful page, and tell the system how often you wish to receive email notifications whenever the system finds items that match your search terms? That is tracking. Did you know that you can use My Eventful's iTunes / Last.fm importing feature to instantly import all of your favorite musical artists, and then Eventful will email you whenever any of them announces they're coming to your town for a performance? That's very powerful tracking.

By "create" I mean two things -- first, simply posting new event listings on the site, either via our Add Event page or the Eventful API for the developers out there. Second, by using Eventful Demand to create a groundswell of interest and support for an event in your town that you and your fellow demanders really, really, really want to have happen. When events come about because of Eventful Demand, you can truly say that you've helped "create" them.

And finally, "demand" -- using our world-famous Eventful Demand service, unique on the Internet, you can connect to performers and get them to come to your town for an event, be it a concert, comedy show, political rally, interview, public appearance, speech, book signing, film screening, or whatever other type of event you wish. Ask, ask loudly enough, and you shall be surprised at how often you can receive . . .

So. Not "event-planning." When you see that in a published news story about Eventful, you know somebody has not done their homework. :-)

Meanwhile, invite your friends to come on in and together use Eventful, especially the My Eventful feature inside Eventful, to its fullest -- indeed, the very best way to get the most out of Eventful is when your friends use it too. That way, each of you doesn't have to do much to get all the recommendations and event discoveries from the others.

March 02, 2008
22:19
Vote for Eventful for a WebWare 2008 Award
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Last year we won a WebWare 2007 award thanks to all of the votes we received from supportive fans. Time to vote again this year!
They've re-arranged the categories this year, and we're in a very crowded group, "Commerce and Events", which they describe as including "Retail, auctions, travel, real estate, concerts, conferences" (yikes!). So, more than ever, we need your votes and your friends and family's votes so we beat out the likes of Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Google, and others!
Click on the logo here to go vote, or, click this link!
Voting Ends March 31st! Be sure to get your friends and family to vote for us too. Thanks!
February 25, 2008
3:00
Eventful: Now with 5 Million Users!
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We reached the 5-million-user mark today. Thanks to our users all over the world for their continued support. Keep sending us feedback on how we can make Eventful better!
January 03, 2008
2:28
Eventful's Online Demand Data Reveals Obama and Huckabee Strong Ahead of Iowa Caucus
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Obama and Huckabee Demanded in More Cities in State of Iowa Than Any Other Candidates

SAN DIEGO, Calif. - Eventful, the leading global events web site, announced today that Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are the most 'Demanded' candidates by their users in the state of Iowa, and have surged to the top of Eventful's Hottest Demands rankings, just hours before the first votes are cast in the Iowa caucus. Both Obama and Huckabee have requests to speak in over 60 cities throughout Iowa, more than any other candidate.
January 01, 2008
22:37
We're Four Years Old!
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Hard to believe, four years have passed since Eventful, Inc. was founded in my kitchen on January 1st, 2004. The company was originally called EVDB, Inc. simply because I was able to get the EVDB.com domain but wasn't yet willing to spend $888 to get eventful.com (that would come 18 months later and by then cost a lot more than $888).
Today we have roughly 35 employees, and four and a half million users, soon to pass five million. We've indexed over ten million event listings since 2004. There are 1.2 million Demands for events via the Eventful Demand feature. We have over 90,000 performer records in the Performers database.
2008 will be the most exciting year for Eventful yet!
December 12, 2007
3:59
Open Web Awards: Vote for Eventful!
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Voting for the Open Web Awards is open, and Eventful is one of the nominees in the "Places and Events" category.
We'd love for you to vote for Eventful!
Just click here to go vote for Eventful, or click the button below.

Thanks for your support!
October 09, 2007
1:09
More video from Columbus, Kentucky event
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Some great video shot by Jed Sundwall interviewing townfolk in Columbus, KY during the John Edwards event:
October 05, 2007
2:15
John Edwards at the Columbus, KY event
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Shawn Dixon introduces Sen. Edwards:

John Edwards speaks:
0:41
CNN Coverage of John Edwards' Eventful Competition
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CNN's Wolf Blitzer covers Eventful once more, this time with a brief interview with John Edwards in Columbus, Kentucky, the winning town in the "Demand and Be Heard" competition that Edwards ran on Eventful during this past summer:
August 19, 2007
2:20
How to Use Saved Searches
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Since the earliest days of Eventful, we've had a feature that let you save a search that the system would run on an ongoing basis, emailing you the results hourly, daily, or weekly.
We recently improved that feature and made it a lot easier to create and manage saved searches.
I'd like to take a moment to show you how the feature works and how you can start tracking events you're interested in.
It Starts With a Search
The way to create a saved search is by first going and searching for something. For example, you're on the home page and you want to create a saved search for "technology" events in "San Francisco". Type "technology" in the what box and "San Francisco" in the where box and click the Search button. That takes you to the search results which might look something like this:

I've highlighted the green "Save this search" button. You'll only see it if you're signed in to Eventful first. If you're not, then you first need to sign in or register, then do a search, and view the results. To save the search, just click the green button.

A dialog box appears with a small form providing you with a way to name this search and specify how often you want to be emailed with updates. The default notification setting is "daily" but you can also specify hourly, weekly, or never (the latter disables any email notifications from going out).
There's a link called "Show more options" that you can click to expand the form to display additional options. When you click "Show more options" you'll see the form expand, and the link text will change to say "Show fewer options". If you click the link again, the form will shrink back to the smaller size:

The expanded form lets you customize the "what", "where", and "when" search keywords, as well as what category, if any, you want to limit the search to, how you want the results sorted, and whether you want to limit the search to a particular geographical radius.
The possible "sort by" settings are revealed in the pull-down menu. The default setting is "date", meaning the search results will be sorted by date.
The possible "Within" settings are revealed in the pull-down menu. The default setting is "25 miles", which means the search engine will limit the results to events that are happening within 25 miles of whatever you have specified in the "where" field. This can be particularly useful if you want to find nearby events, for instance, within 5 miles of your zip code, for example. Likewise, for more distant events you might be willing to drive to, you can set a distance up to 100 miles.
The category pull-down menu lets you specify a particular category to limit the search results to, if you want. But by default, the system will search all of Eventful without limit to any one category.
Before you can save the search, you'll want to name it. We suggest you give it a name that is reflective of what the search is about. So in our example, let's use "my-tech-search" as the name, and click "Save".
You're all done! The search is now saved in your My Eventful records, and if you specified any type of email notification, the system will send you an email if there are any results that match.
Finally, you can see the list of your saved searches by clicking on the "my eventful" tab in the navigation bar (again, you'll need to be signed in first).

In the "Saved searches" section you'll see your saved search named "my-tech-search". If you click it, the system will go run the search, and you can modify the settings if you wish (look just above the search results for a blue header that says "This search is saved as my-tech-search" with a "modify" link just to the right of it).
Be sure to try out Saved Search. It's incredibly handy for tracking all kinds of events you want to know about but don't want to have to keep coming back to Eventful and manually searching for. Let Eventful do the work on your behalf with Saved Searches!
August 18, 2007
6:36
The Stories Behind the Stories
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Couple times lately I've seen comments in blogs, on YouTube, and elsewhere, and I've heard occasional feedback from random people at conferences expressing skepticism that the news reports on Eventful that aired on Wolf Blitzer's CNN program Situation Room (see here and here) surely must have been prepared by or even paid for by Eventful. Likewise, I've gotten feedback that Eventful's Eventful Politics initiative seems biased towards the Democratic Party candidates (for example, the John Edwards competition).
This blog post is intended to set the record straight, with the stories behind these stories. It's important that people understand that as a company we are taking a very firm stand at neutrality and impartiality, building and supporting a technology platform that all can benefit from. Likewise, when it comes to news reports, believe me, the news organizations call the shots with their stories.
Let's take the CNN case first.
How'd it come about?
First, a digression. I can't help but be reminded by Woody Allen's famous quote, that "eighty percent of success is showing up." It may have been a simple offhand joke for Woody, but since the very founding day of Eventful back in 2004, I have found that quote to be amazingly true. Showing up, time after time after time, was what got the company funded. Showing up was how we got great people to join the team. Showing up got deals closed. Showing up at conferences, particularly to exhibit and/or participate in a keynote or panel session, has always led to good things happening.
Such was the case when a contingent of Eventful folks converged at the Personal Democracy Forum conference back in May. I was sick as a dog that week, and was in no condition to be walking the streets of New York City let alone speaking at the conference. We had a booth in the PDF exhibit hall, where Tim Breidigan and Jed Sundwall did an awesome job of answering questions and doing demos all day long. Booth duty is exhausting work and I was amazed at their energy and enthusiasm.
At one point while I was hanging around the booth during a break from the conference sessions, a woman approached and inquired about Eventful and what we were doing with politics. She introduced herself as Abbi Tatton, a reporter from CNN's Situation Room show with Wolf Blitzer. She asked a lot of great questions, and said she was thinking of doing a segment on Eventful. Cool!
Now, when a startup company sticks in the game long enough to create some buzz, the media starts waking up and checking you out. By May 2007, we were getting a good share of buzz and the corresponding mainstream media inquiries, including major print and television outlets who'd tell our PR firm they were considering a story and wanting to do interviews. You quickly learn not to get too excited about the media attention for, as Yogi Berra might have said, "it didn't air on TV until you can play the clip on YouTube." So many times the reporter you've done this great interview with will be suddenly pulled off the story, or the producer will have to table the project because another unrelated story just turned urgent, or something else will get in the way and suddenly that major print or broadcast feature about Eventful you were looking forward to seeing isn't happening after all. And then a day goes by, and suddenly another fantastic opportunity opens up and you move on to pursue the new opportunity. So it goes.
So when a CNN reporter stopped by our exhibit booth at PDF on May 18th, we were excited, for sure. But reporters from lots of other news organizations had stopped by that day. Like we'd done with everyone, we did our best to help answer her questions, walk her through a demo of the site, suggest some story angle ideas for her and Wolf Blitzer to consider, and then we said our thank yous and goodbyes and that was that. Maybe there'd be something to air on TV, maybe there wouldn't. You just never know.
Not two weeks later, on May 29th, our PR firm excitedly contacted us to let us know that they'd heard from CNN that we were indeed going to be on Wolf Blitzer's show, that same day! We found out when the segment was due to air, and a bunch of folks at the office dashed off to the gymnasium downstairs in our building, as it happens to have a TV connected to cable, and they were able to watch the segment live.
We couldn't believe how good the ninety-two second segment was. Blitzer and Tatton did a great job accurately describing Eventful in brief sound bites, along with how the 2008 presidential candidates were using the service to invite their supporters to "demand" them to come to their towns for rallies and speeches. In 92 seconds they succinctly got the message out better than we probably could have. And it was all their own reporting. Personally, I was amazed at how good it was. It was a great day for Eventful.
Woody Allen was right.
But more good was to come out of our participation at the PDF conference. On July 17th, Blitzer and Tatton were back with a yet another segment about Eventful Politics, this time specifically covering the news about John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition which was due to wrap up within 24 hours, with the winning city likely to be tiny Columbus, Kentucky. Now, our PR firm had stayed in touch with Tatton who has been genuinely interested in tracking what Eventful's been doing in the politics arena. This was another great segment that succinctly put together, in ninety-five seconds, the whole John Edwards competition story, including how Columbus, Kentucky got into the lead thanks to the hard work of one Shawn Dixon.
Which leads to the next issue: that Eventful's politics initiative does too much with Democrats and not enough with Republicans (not to mention other parties). I heard this the other night at a dinner party: how come you're working so much with the Democrats and not the Republicans?
This one is easy to address. We've reached out to everyone equally, in keeping with our mission to strictly stay impartial and encourage everyone to get involved and use these tools. In general, I believe it's safe to say the Democratic side has to date been more active on the Net. I could be wrong, but that is my simple take. Not just with Eventful, but with all of the various web services out there including blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Perhaps it's due to the head start the Democrats gained thanks to the efforts taken back in 2003-2004 by the Howard Dean campaign, who made history with his aggressive use of the Net and support of the "netroots". It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a few short years ago.
But the Net is far enough along now that political campaigns from all parties realize that using the Net is key to winning office. And I fully expect to see much more activity from the Republican campaigns in the coming months. I hope to see more activity from Democrats too. Indeed, it'd be awesome to see independents and third-party candidates get involved.
When Eventfullers Alex Hunsucker and Jed Sundwall originally pitched the Eventful Politics project back in late 2006, we all thought it was a great idea. We would go aggregate every politics-related event we could find, happening at the local, state, and national level across the entire U.S. We'd index all of the members of Congress, making each of them "performers" in our Performers database. We'd even index the daily hearings and other events on Capitol Hill. And, of course, we'd enable people everywhere to "demand" that a political figure come to their town to give a lecture, or participate in a debate or rally. One rule we all agreed on right up front: Eventful would remain neutral, and our mission would be to offer our technology platform to all citizens of the U.S. to discover, share, track, and demand political events regardless of political affiliation. Alex and Jed made up a list of conferences we should participate in, and they set out to contact all of the 2008 presidential campaigns and see if they were interested in sharing their event data and participating in Eventful Demand. The first conference Eventful attended was CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Washington DC earlier this year. We had a booth and spent a lot of time meeting with conservative political operatives, pundits, supporters, and a few candidates and elected officials. Next up, PDF. Most recently, YearlyKos. We've done a bunch of conferences now, and established relationships with all of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.
As you might expect, each campaign has their own strategy, priorities, and timing, particularly when it comes to Internet initiatives. So far, with the exception of Republican candidate Ron Paul, the Democratic candidates have been quicker at adopting Eventful's tools to connect to supporters. Again, I suspect this traces back to the Dean activity in 2003-2004.
It's been remarkable is how fast Eventful has become one of the key Internet tools for many of the campaigns. So far, we've seen more of the Democratic candidates use Eventful for specific campaign initiatives, most notably John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition (we look forward to seeing him actually go out to meet the people of Columbus, Kentucky -- hopefully that will be soon!). Most amazing with Edwards, at least for me personally, was the video he and his staff prepared for the competition. The video began with a black page with white titles showing "Senator John Edwards", with "Eventful.com" appearing below that. And then there he was, wearing a light blue T-shirt, sitting in the corner of some room, surrounded by walls of maps, talking clearly and succinctly about the "Demand and Be Heard" competition. I think it's safe to say everyone at Eventful was blown away by the video. We'd suggested to the Edwards campaign that it'd be great if they could do a video, but we weren't sure they'd have the time to put it together. The result was all their own work, presumably produced at campaign headquarters in faraway North Carolina, and when they sent it to us to put on the site, that was the first time we'd seen it.
So, going back to the question submitted to me at a recent dinner party, where's the Republican activity? Well, for one, the Ron Paul campaign staff has been quite active, not to mention his supporters, who have been amazingly busy at a grass-roots level, catapulting Ron Paul to the top of the Demand charts for Republican candidates.
But what about a Romney competition? To which we of course say, fantastic, let's do it! And Giuliani? Same thing. And same for McCain, Thompson, Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo, and any other candidate anyone's in favor of. There are demands underway for all of those candidates, and we'd be delighted to see any and all of them use Eventful's tools in any way they and their campaigns see fit to reach out and connect to their supporters. Any candidate is welcome to do their own "Demand and Be Heard" initiative or something else. Indeed, if you're a supporter for one of these candidates, or any of the Democratic candidates, or candidates of any party, the first thing to do is always join or start a demand for the candidate to come to your city, and then get in touch with the candidate's campaign and let them know you're demanding them and that you'd like them to help alert their supporters at the national level, so everyone's demanding their favorite candidate. And while you're at it, if you know of any political events in your area that are not listed on Eventful, well, add 'em!
The Eventful Politics initiative has so far wildly exceeded our expectations, and we still have many months to go before the 2008 presidential election. What's more, we're starting to see 2008 senatorial campaigns begin to embrace Eventful. It's my hope that by this time next year, all candidates have used Eventful in a significant way, and have found that it has helped them connect to their supporters around the country. It's also my hope that lots of people around the country will have discovered, through Eventful, intriguing local political events that they might have otherwise never known about. We love the idea of a tremendously well-informed populace, and if we help even a tiny bit with the tools we've built at Eventful to get closer to that goal, then we'll keep going. We invite you to participate!
6:27
500,000 demands and counting
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On Thursday, the number of demands in Eventful Demand passed the 500,000 mark. A mere two days later, as of this posting we're at 509,461 and counting. Amazing!
My guess is the next big milestone will be the first performer to have 100,000 people demanding them. Currently the rock band Hinder is in the lead with 80,160 people demanding.
July 17, 2007
7:30
More Eventful coverage on CNN
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Wolf Blitzer and Abbi Tatton of CNN's Situation Room program do another segment on Eventful:

Here's the video itself:

And here's a related story published on the CNN site as well.
July 14, 2007
4:38
I Demanded
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Have you demanded?
June 18, 2007
7:00
Eventful wins CNET WebWare 100 Award
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Hot off the press:
Eventful wins a CNET WebWare 100 Award in the Entertainment Category!
Read all about it here.
Thanks to the many Eventful fans who voted!
June 08, 2007
10:35
Everything you ever wanted to know about Eventful, but were unable to click
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Long, long overdue (my bad, blame me) but we finally have a more useful "About Us" section on our website.
New pages include:
- An Overview page describing what Eventful is
- A page listing out Eventful's management team
- Who's on our Board of Directors
- All of Eventful's snazzy Press Releases
- A humongous (go check it out! it's really humongous!) list of news clippings mentioning Eventful
- A cleaned-up page with information on how to contact us
These pages are surely to evolve and grow over time, and we'll be regularly updating the news and press pages in particular. All of that combined with our not one, not two, but three blogs should hopefully help you stay in-the-know on all things Eventful!
May 29, 2007
15:46
Eventful on CNN
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Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room program on CNN featured a segment on Eventful.com today, regarding how the 2008 presidential candidates are beginning to use Eventful more and more.

"Thanks to a popular website," Wolf said in the intro to the segment, "people from Portland to Paris are demanding that Obama and other candidates come to their hometown."
May 24, 2007
5:16
Recent Media Mentions
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Some recent media mentions of Eventful:
- The other day, CNET let us know that we've been selected as a finalist in their WebWare 100 best-of-the-web awards for 2007. Click on the icon below to go vote for Eventful!
- Cindy Rakowitz of the Voice America podcast interviews Eventful CEO Jordan Glazier. It's about 1 hour long. (Here is a link to the MP3 itself).
  Part of the interview includes a 3-way interview between Cindy, Jordan, and Eric Hawke, marketing director from indie record label Strange Music, who talks about how his company's been using Eventful Demand to gain more exposure for his artists, including Tech N9ne. Quote: "Eventful Demand has definitely become a very useful tool for us. We're using that to determine markets which Tech [N9ne] maybe hasn't been to, and what the demand is in those particular areas. We just did a contest on Eventful Demand and of course Seattle, being one of our biggest markets, ended up getting the show, and we've decided to go ahead and increase that to include other cities, along the routing there . . . . [Eventful Demand] exposed new markets where we didn't even know we had a demand, you know, which was really wonderful."
- Here's another interview, conducted by Jon Udell, with Brian Dear, Eventful's founder. Approximately 34 minutes. Here's a direct link to the MP3 file.
- The June 2007 issue of WIRED magazine includes an article on web services for the "digital underground". Eventful is mentioned in a 59-word blurb that even the busiest and hippest of today's continuous-partial-attention digerati crowd should be able to find the time to read.
- The TechPresident blog has a new posting about the rise of presidental candidate Ron Paul, including Mr. Paul's popularity in Eventful Demand (he's the most demanded Republican candidate).
  By the way if you haven't seen TechPresident's coverage of Eventful's politics demands, you should definitely check it out.
- On May 10th, Eventful was selected as Website of the Day at GeekSugar.com. From the review: "It's simple to use and jam packed with fun events. So much to see and do, oh me oh my!"
- A fascinating blog post on new media use in the Barack Obama campaign: read this article which mentions how the Obama campaign is using Eventful and other services. Quote: "He talked about Eventful, a site where people can demand that someone come to their town, whether it's Kelly Clarkson or 50 Cent or Barack Obama. When Obama visited Atlanta, 20,000 people showed up at a rally for him. They were able to mobilize large numbers because there had been a groundswell on Eventful of people asking for him to come there."
- Finally, congratulations are due to long-time Eventful user Johnathan Coulton (pictured below with yours truly during a visit to Eventful HQ back in February) who received a major write-up in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May 13th. From the article: "When he performs, he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140." While the Times doesn't mention Eventful Demand directly, Jonathan's definitely used and benefited from the service. In a follow-up post on his own blog, on the long strange journey from starting out in music to winding up in the pages of the Times, Jonathan had this to say about Eventful: " I had somehow come across Eventful.com, registered as an artist, and started to tell people through my site to go there and demand a show. When I found out at the last minute that I was going to be doing something with John Hodgman in Seattle one weekend in September 2006, I used Eventful and my own site to alert all my Seattle fans that I would do a show if someone would find an available venue for me. Within 24 hours I had several options, so I picked one and set up the show. An audience of 75 people materialized out of nowhere to come hear me play. My booking agent called me after that to say “Forget what I said about ever-widening concentric circles, it looks like there’s a way to skip that step.” And now he and I use the numbers at Eventful (along with his own expertise at this sort of thing) to plan where I’m going to play. In September 2006 Thing a Week ended, then right before Christmas the Thing a Week Box Set went on sale. Around then I was interviewed on NPR Weekend Edition which led to another huge surge in traffic. I continue to receive and rely on the support of bloggers, podcasters and fans, and I’m playing shows for ever more thrillingly large audiences in cities I’ve never been to before. And then there was that NY Times Magazine story, which seemed to tie it all together in ways that even I hadn’t been able to express."
April 25, 2007
2:22
Tech N9ne demands Demands
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Rapper Tech N9ne posted a video (see below) on MySpace page last week to announce a Demand competition fort The Tech N9ne Experience.
The first city to get 1,500 Demanders gets a guaranteed spot on his tour.
April 03, 2007
1:56
Many Many More Events
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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About three and a half months ago, I wrote a post on here announcing that we had over 1,000,000 future events in Eventful's database. Then we all got very busy and stopped blogging as often.

Then last week someone said to me, "Wow! I hear you have a million events!" Imagine the pain I felt—because of my lax blogging, our legions of blog readers knew nothing of the strides we'd made.

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to recommit myself to this blog and announce that as of yesterday, Eventful is serving up information for over 3,000,000 future events! We've got concerts, bake sales, free museum days, lectures on Hungarian democracy, you name it.

If you want to celebrate with me, come to the Ratatat concert at Porter's Pub tonight!
March 31, 2007
16:01
Eventful switches to an all-Twitter interface
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SAN DIEGO, Mar. 31 -- Eventful, Inc., the leading global events service, announced today that it would cease the operation of its popular Web site Eventful.com on May 1st in favor of next-generation interface Twitter, provided by Obvious Corporation of San Francisco. Twitter is a service which allows users to get instant update messages ("tweets") from friends via SMS, instant messenger, Web, or by way of a number of custom desktop clients.

"Twitter solves all the problems we faced on the Web", said Brian Dear, founder of Eventful. "We used to worry about uptime, instant responses, clean markup, and SEO. Now we don't even have to check spelling. It's such a time saver."

The decision to use such a simple interface exclusively, a first in the industry, came on the heels of Michael Arrington's seminal article The Usefulness of the Simple Command Line, published in January 2007. Eventful had previously experimented with an Instant Messenger interface, but the technology was shelved in favor of traditional Web site development.

Deciding to use Twitter rekindled interest in the project when the service gained significant momentum among Web 2.0 early adopters at the South By Southwest Interactive conference this month. "Everyone I talked to at South By was saying 'tweet this' or 'Twitter that'," remarked Jed Sundwall. "I thought it was some kind of band."

Once the commitment was made, it was surprisingly quick work to adapt the Eventful API to the new platform. Development of the Twitter-based service, dubbed Eventful Chicken, took just over a week to reach the public beta stage, including event search, recommendations, watchlists, reminders, and Eventful Demand (renamed "I wish they'd come here"). The service can be previewed currently at [twitter.com].

"Once our messages are boiled down to 140 characters, it's hard to get anything really wrong", said Joe Radcliff, one of the developers of Eventful Chicken. "If we can't figure out a good response, the Chicken can always tweet about some aspect of its personal life. What would be a failing in the traditional Web world is seen as endearing on Twitter."

Starting May 1st, Eventful.com will redirect all site traffic to the Eventful Chicken page on Twitter, and all stickers will be automatically replaced by Twitter badges for Eventful Chicken. Existing Eventful.com users will be given the month of April to make the switch. The site will feature a screencast tutorial on using the new interface, including how to befriend the Chicken, ask it for event information, and patiently await its attention.

Marketing director April Poole can't wait to take advantage of the new platform. "Eventful Chicken already has over a thousand friends on Twitter, all hanging on every word," she said. "That's the kind of devoted audience a Web 2.0 property would love to have."

About Eventful, Inc.

San Diego based Eventful, Inc. operates Eventful Chicken, the leading events chatbot on Twitter which enables its community of users to discover, promote, create and share events throughout the world. Inquiries about Eventful Chicken and Eventful.com should be referred to April Poole at april1@eventful.com.

UPDATE: as is (hopefully) obvious, this post was a joke for April Fools' Day 2007. We hope you enjoyed it.
February 15, 2007
12:29
Podbop: 1 year old
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Congrats to our friends at Podbop. Hard to believe that a whole year has passed since the great launch and award-winning success at last year's Mashup Camp.
We look forward to seeing more cool ways Podbop conjures up to use our API!
February 07, 2007
22:59
Another Milestone: 100,000 Demands
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Earlier this week we passed the 100,000 mark on Eventful Demand. And the count keeps rising -- as of this moment the number's at 101,470. Whoops, make that 101,474! Keeps going up!
In other Eventful Demand news, the band Pretty Ricky announced they're going to play 100 cities anywhere in the world, and which cities entirely depends on where their fans demand them. Any city that accumulates 1,000 or more demanders gets a performance.
December 18, 2006
3:32
1,000,000 Future Events
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Sometime this past Sunday morning, our database welcomed its millionth event.

What can we say? It's a nice milestone for us. It's a big round number that looks good in a headline. It's an excuse to pat each other on the back. But it's not even close to where we want to be.

If anything, it's an excuse for a blog post. I think this is a good moment to point out what we hope this million future events means for our users.

We think it's great that superstar comedian Jim Gaffigan uses Eventful Demand to interact with his fans. We're stoked to have the details about his upcoming 30 city tour.

Personally, I'm glad that Eventful's million events includes the Stephen Malkmus show at the Casbah that I'm planning on going to next month. It's nice to have a single spot to find out about what's going on around San Diego.

But what really gives us the warm fuzzies is knowing that among our million events are things like Munden, Kansas's Republic County Spring Czech Festival and tomorrow's Philadelphia Community Service Project Meetup.

Eventful is about making events discoverable. We love helping Jim Gaffigan and Stephen Malkmus sell out their shows, but what really fires us up is the thought of helping people find the small events, the little community ones that happen down the street. We'd love to take a few of those little meetings and turn them into standing room only events!

So, poke around our 1,000,000 future events and see if you can find something near you that you knew nothing about. It shouldn't take long.
0:50
Srchr
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Gentle reader, let me introduce you to this blog's "newest" category: Spotted in the Wild!

I say "newest" in quotes because we've been posting the Spotted in the Wild series over on our Labs blog for the past year or so. We've used it to highlight the work of creative programmers who are using Eventful's API* to make it easier to find out about the events you care about. We're moving the series over here to make sure that more people know about the cool sites we've found.

The latest site we've found using our mighty API is the mysterious Srchr. In addition to boasting a charming devil-may-care disregard of vowels, they claim to be the world's first-ever "Search Aggregator."

Srchr provides a simple customizable interface that allows you to search an unlimited number of sites simultaneously. At press time, they provide 26 default search sites, and Eventful is one of them! Entering a search term is like bombing yourself with content, be it video, ebay items, news, or event information. Go give it a shot!

*An API is like a toolbox that we give to programmers to help them write programs that tap into our database. More info on our (seriously awesome) API can be found at api.evdb.com!
0:50
Spotted in the Wild! - Srchr
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Gentle reader, let me introduce you to this blog's "newest" category: Spotted in the Wild!

I say "newest" in quotes because we've been posting the Spotted in the Wild series over on our Labs blog for the past year or so. We've used it to highlight the work of creative programmers who are using Eventful's API* to make it easier to find out about the events you care about. We're moving the series over here to make sure that more people know about the cool sites we've found.

The latest site we've found using our mighty API is the mysterious Srchr. In addition to boasting a charming devil-may-care disregard of vowels, they claim to be the world's first-ever "Search Aggregator."

Srchr provides a simple customizable interface that allows you to search an unlimited number of sites simultaneously. At press time, they provide 26 default search sites, and Eventful is one of them! Entering a search term is like bombing yourself with content, be it video, ebay items, news, or event information. Go give it a shot!

*An API is like a toolbox that we give to programmers to help them write programs that tap into our database. More info on our (seriously awesome) API can be found at api.eventful.com!
December 12, 2006
7:45
Best Records of 2006 & the Best Events of the Future!
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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NPR's All Songs Considered broadcast their Best Music of 2006 list last Wednesday. You can listen to it at All Songs Considered's website (subscribe to their podcast while you're there).

In Wednesday's program, ASC host, Bob Boilen, made the observation that his listeners voted for an unprecedented variety of artists and genres when choosing this year's best album. He wondered aloud if the increase in variety of music embraced by his listeners had any relation to this year's demise of Tower Records.

None of his guests were willing to say one way or another, but I'll take a stab at it. My answer is "yes."

I'd guess that today's broader music tastes and Tower's demise both have to do with the way the internet has allowed musicians to overcome the barriers presented by "traditional" music distribution channels.

It's like this: CDs take up music stores' shelf space. CDs that fail to sell essentially fail to justify their placement in the store. It's as if they weren't paying the rent for their shelf space, so they get evicted. This demands that music retailers focus on stuff that's guaranteed to sell. It makes things hard for retailers serving customers with a widening variety of tastes.

Now, an internet full of blogs and mp3s and online music stores has allowed people to discover artists that they'd rarely encounter on the shelves of their local record shop. (I could further explain how this has happened, but its best explained in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail) Looking for something new to feed your ears no longer requires leaving your house. It's awesome, but bitterawesome.

When I was a wee lad intent on collecting every single Chemical Brothers single I could get my hands on, I knew exactly where to get them: Tower's shelves of imports. When I studied at the University of Utah, I had to force myself to steer clear of Salt City CDs (R.I.P.) because it was one of those magical music joints that you couldn't enter without leaving with a handful of life-changing CDs.

I'm sad that those places don't exist anymore. Going to them was special. Discovering music back then was an (*ahem*) event.

And here's my point. My name's Jed, and I'm new here at Eventful. I came here because I love music. I love discovering music, and I love finding places to discover new music. I'm here because I want to make sure that Eventful makes it easier to discover what music's playing outside, away from the internet.

I'm here because technology has brought a greater variety of music into our lives, and it should bring a greater variety of events too. Watch this blog for tips and news about how Eventful can make this a reality.
December 08, 2006
0:33
10News coverage of Eventful
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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San Diego's KGTV 10News stopped by Eventful's offices on Wednesday!

News10 visited us back in July (you can see a video from July's visit on the 10News website) and missed us so they came back. Well, actually they wanted to talk to us about how local face-melting rock band (and really nice guys) Underminded has been using Eventful Demand to find their fans.

News10 and Underminded enjoyed bottled water and fresh fruit (as do all of our guests) as they toured our cozy La Jolla office.

I'd say more, but why not watch for yourself?

We were sad when they left, so we hope both News10 and Underminded won't be shy about coming back soon!
Here's a shot of the band getting ready to be interviewed in our conference room (CEO Jordan Glazier is on the far left, getting ready to demo Eventful).

Here are some screen shots from the video:
November 27, 2006
1:36
50,000 demands
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Sunday marked the creation of the 50,000th demand in Eventful. As of this moment we're at 51,456 demands and counting!
October 07, 2006
10:09
[Interview] Demanding Screenings for Not One Film, But a Trilogy
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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You may have noticed it, if you have ever viewed the "all demands" page within the Eventful Demand section of the Eventful.com site -- lots of demands for something called "'TSL' // Jessica Mae Stover". Well, here's the scoop.
Among the more than 26,000 demanded events on Eventful right now, one set stands out as rather unusual relative to the others: 66 demands (some of which can be seen in a thumbnail running along the right-hand side of this blog post) for screenings of Jessica Mae Stover's yet-to-be-produced trilogy of movies.

I thought it might be interesting to ask Jessica (who runs the JessicaStover.com website) some questions about her film project, how it came about, and how the demands for screenings are going.
What follows are questions and answers that went on in some recent emails with Jessica:
When did you originally get the idea for The Silver Legacy (TSL), when did you start writing it, and when did you finish?
JS: In a way, it’s a story that has been evolving with my imagination over my entire short-life. It took me years to write the full story. Part of that was time needed to become a more masterful screenwriter, part was that stories of magnitude take time and part is that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and quality takes time. I have boxes upon boxes of old drafts, notebooks, sketched out maps… All sorts of snippets from the TSL world. When I moved to LA I came out here with the TSL “Bible” in hand. (Which is screenwriter-talk for the all-encompassing stack of information about the world.) It is a big thick binder with about 200 pages of script and about 100 years of history. So when I got here, I really hit the ground running. TSL was, and still is, after all, the reason I came to LA. I suppose I have been on a mission for quite some time now.
Can you summarize what the story is about, what the setting(s)/ characters are like, anything to help people understand?
JS: The film is a modern-mythology, especially in that the characters are just like you and me: This is the sort of story that might happen to you tomorrow. Unlike a lot of epic fantasy, which has very clear good vs evil lines and themes, TSL explores the more realistic greys between the black and white. We have started to roll-out concept art at [www.thesilverlegacymovie.com]. More will be added soon.
What were your influences in coming up with the story-- what other films, books, characters?
JS: Comparative mythology, family, friends, strangers, real places… As simple as it sounds, daily life and academic ideas play a huge role either directly or metaphorically. After I finished the writing, I realized that the state of the world, U.S. politics and current events, had greater impact than I had been aware of. I’m a little ahead of the curve in regards to what’s coming down the pike, I think (and fear), which I suggest might say a little something about the subconscious things that people often know without directly realizing. Some people who have read the script recall the magic of fantasy movies of the ‘80s, some recall books they’ve read… fairytales, the news… . Certainly I was influenced when I was little by The Dark Crystal and stories of that sort. Joseph Campbell’s ideas have influenced me, as have David Mamet’s, Thoreau’s and those of classical, English writers (Shakespeare). Music helps me quite a bit: I rarely write without music. At times, I will write in response to the things I dislike about current genre movies. (In that I tend to do the opposite of those things I dislike.)
You've done online promotions before that have gone viral -- can you give me a summary of the AOL project you were involved in, and what the usage statistics were like for that?
JS: I had a teen entertainment show on AOL that had 5 million viewers. There I was fortunate enough to work with just about everyone from Hilary Duff to George Lucas. Getting to pick Lucas’ brain about Joseph Campbell, mythology and the state of the industry was hugely important to me. I doubt he’d remember it despite it being a turning point in my life as a storyteller. Of course, regarding the show, I had the backing of AOL promotion, and at the time they were boasting 30 million users. Not exactly grassroots. It’s far more difficult to promote my projects now, but I much prefer the quality of the work I’m doing now to the easier, more commercial work.
What exactly do you hope to achieve using Eventful Demand?
JS: To support the audience demand, to give audience and artists back some of their power and to help open the door for new, quality voices in film and in so doing help raise the bar for cinematic art.
How would you say things are going so far?
JS: The Demand is up to 66 cities, which is great because it’s a tricky little thing to promote, and is only linked via my official site. I’ve been through enough projects to know that things of this sort take time to snowball. I have other projects in the pipeline and those will help the Demand once they come to fruition because the audience has already worked up an amazing foundation. Since the Demand is an audience driven movement, beyond supporting it, there’s not much for me to do. It’s really up to the movie-going community to add to the screening list and open the door.
What do you see currently as the top 2-3 challenges for you to get to 100k people signed up and demanding TSL?
JS: 1. The Silver Legacy is not a preexisting property (meaning that it’s not a book, comic, amusement park ride...). Some have suggested turning it into a book. I considered it (that’s not bad advice, after all) but decided that turning it into a book in order to get it made into a film would be ridiculous: It’s a film, always has been. I know that’s a rare thing in this world of hack adaptations, but that’s what the work is; a film. So it’s challenging to get people to support something that I can’t show them without ruining the story and their experience. That’s why we started sharing some of the concept art. Plus, there is some writing and otherwise on my website which people can use to get a feel for what I’m like as an artist. Speaking of adaptations and bad story-films: What was the last great, genre movie? Now how about the last great genre movie not based on a book or comic, etc.? They really are very few and far between.
2. Another challenge is that people are lazy or jaded with the film industry or not interested. It really shouldn’t fall on the audience to hand pick artists and stories. Unfortunately, as the studios aren’t doing their jobs very well and people are buying whatever crap they put out regardless, things have really slipped and it is falling to artists and the audience to cut the red tape and make some changes in the name of artistic quality.
How many pages total is the screenplay (or, are the screenplays)?
JS: On paper they each run about two hours and twenty minutes. (Nice and tight for an epic.)

For more information about Jessica's TSL project, I suggest you read this Metroblogging LA interview with Jessica; an article entitled "It Started With One Demand"; and this July 2006 article entitled "Ignorant Critics".
And hey, last but not least, help Jessica achieve her dream by joining a demand in your city and spreading the word far and wide for TSL screenings!
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2:57
More on the Event Plugin for Windows Live Writer
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Microsoft and Eventful announced on Sept 28th the arrival of the Event Plugin, a software plugin for Microsoft's Windows Live Writer blogging tool.
The best introduction to Microsoft's Windows Live Writer and the Event Plugin powered by Eventful is available here as a half-hour "screencast" with Jon Udell of Infoworld interviewing Microsoft's JJ Allaire and Jack Ozzie (complete with ping-pong like stereo audio, with Udell in one ear, and the Microsoft folks in the other). It's episode 9 of Screening Room, what Jon Udell calls a "monthly series of screencasts about important software." Elsewhere Udell has this to say about why watching the screencast is worthwhile: "Live Writer itself may or may not appeal to you as a blog authoring tool, but if you're curious about how Ray Ozzie's wiring the web strategy will play out, you'll want to see and think about the end-to-end linkup between Live Writer and Eventful that's shown here."

Inserting events into your blog posts just got a lot easier!
The Event Plugin lets you create your own events or find existing events through integrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post includes correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of copied events via Live Clipboard from the Eventful.com website.
When you click on the Insert Event button within Windows Live Writer (with the Event Plugin installed), you invoke the Event Plugin, and it displays a dialog box that looks like this:

You can fill out the form and post an event listing (with all the appropriate hCalendar microformatting in place) right in your blog, or, even cooler, you can search Eventful to find events:

Note how you can even sign in to your Eventful account.
Let's say you search for "MIT" in "Cambridge, MA", and Eventful comes back with these results:

You can then select a result, click OK, and it gets inserted into the form we saw before:

You can even search calendars on Eventful, and find events that way:

Bottom line, if you use Windows, and you blog, you ought to try out Windows Live Writer -- with the new Events Plugin!
Let us know what you think, and what features you'd like to see added to it!
September 28, 2006
4:50
Eventful and Microsoft Launch New Event Search Plugin for Windows Live Writer Blogging Software
» ‎ Eventful Blog

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Here's the press release on the new Events Plugin developed by Microsoft, that uses our Eventful API to help users search for events and publish them in their blog posts (more on this plugin in a later post here on the Eventful blog):
SAN DIEGO, Sept. 28 -- Eventful, Inc., which operates Eventful.com, the leading global events website, announced today the availability of the first events discovery and promotion plugin for Microsoft's Windows Live(TM) Writer. Microsoft developed the plugin using Eventful's developer tools (API). Part of the Windows Live(TM) set of personal Internet services and software, Windows Live Writer is a free, downloadable program for bloggers that enables WYSIWYG authoring of blog posts and supports all of the popular blog software applications and hosting services.
Available today on the Windows Live Writer website, the new plugin enables bloggers to search Eventful's comprehensive index of events worldwide and then easily embed one or more matching results into a new blog post without having to retype the information. The plugin provides this cut-and-paste capability by incorporating Microsoft's Live Clipboard data-sharing capabilities on more than one million Eventful.com event pages. As a result, bloggers are able to more easily spread the word about events they care about and want to share with their readers.
"We are pleased to work with Microsoft to introduce the plugin for Windows Live Writer and support for Live Clipboard," said Jordan Glazier, CEO of Eventful, Inc. "These initiatives are part of our ongoing efforts to develop innovative ways for people to discover, share, promote and create events and to help make their lives more eventful."
Currently, Eventful gives users the ability to discover what's happening near them from a selection of hundreds of thousands of worldwide events ranging from concerts and sports to cooking classes and kids' activities.
"Eventful's implementation of Live Clipboard is the most visible example yet of how we can take advantage of structured data formats to bring the desktop cut-and-paste metaphor that everyone knows and loves, to the web," s

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