Any event based site is basically a social network – they are designed to allow interaction among friends to coordinate virtual or real world activities. The venerable Evite is still the king of online event coordination. None of the recent startups (renkoo, socializr, mypunchbowl and the deadpooled Skobee) have presented much of a challenge. And none of the event aggregators/search engines, including upcoming, zvents or eventful, have managed to dominate their space, either. So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not. St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc. Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself. The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc. The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly. See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped → Read More
I’ve been tracking Skobee, headquartered in San Francisco, since I first saw founder Noam Lovinsky demo it at a recent event at Stanford. Noam took me through a demo of the product again earlier this week to refresh my memory, and he opened the doors to the service earlier this evening (it looks like Dave Winer got a look at it too). If you plan events with friends using email, Skobee is going to make your life a lot easier. Instead of contacting all of the friends you would like to plan an event with through the normal channels (IM, email, phone, etc.) and trying to keep things organized, Skobee has a dead simple and better way to handle it. Create a new event, put in vague (or definite) information on location and date/time, and add emails for people you’d like to include. Skobee will then send out emails to each person along with the current event information, and they can register for the site if they are a new user (viral business model – yes). Here’s where things get interesting: those people can add new participants, and suggest changes to the date or place by leaving a comment with natural language, such as “How about Tuesday instead, and we’ll meet at TechCrunch”. Skobee will structure the data and update the event information for everyone. And even better: instead of logging into the site and leaving a comment, participants can simple “reply all” to the email, which includes “plans@skobee.com”, and skobee will figure out what event is being discussed, add a comment to the event page automatically, and update accordingly. I’ve used Skobee to plan an event this week (see screen shot below), and all of the above functionality works pretty flawlessly. Future plans include an “after party” page where Skobee will automatically pull flickr pictures from users and incude them on the page. Noam says this will be based on picture metadata time to know if the pictures apply, although I recommended that they use flickr tags instead or in addition to the metadata from the photos. Skobee rocks. → Read More
I attended the E27 Technology Conference today at Stanford University. Startups founded by entrepreneurs who are less than 27 years old were eligible to present. With a couple of exceptions these companies were all new to me, and a few have the potential to be real winners. The E27 founders did a great job of picking quality attendees (lots of venture capitalists, big company representatives and bloggers in the audience), and promising companies. The invite-only event was created by Noah Kagan, Shivani Sopory, and Nancy Gong. Below are my notes on each of the nine startups that presented. See Robert Scoble and Emily Chang for additional commentary, and Max Kiesler has a podcast recording of the entire event here. BillMonk I wrote about BillMonk last week. The company, founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, have created an excellent tool for managing social debts and IOUs. It’s easy to see this catching on. IOweYou is a competitor. 411 Metro 411Metro, is an advertiser-supported free 411 service. Derek Merrill presented the company. His co-founders are Alec Andronikov and Alexey Bulavin. 411Metro joins Free411 and 411 Save in this space, with a nearly identical business model of playing a short advertisment from a competitor to the requested business. The company is seed funded from Hummer Winblad and launched in November 2005 Standpoint Standpoint, which launched today, is a “wikipedia of opinions”. At its core it is a simple blog for users to post their opinions and links to websites that help them form or support those opinions. Topics are grouped and the aggregate opinion of the community on any topic can be gauged. Co-founder Justin Smith presented. Gentry Underwood is Standpoint’s other founder. LicketyShip Robert Pazornik’s LicketyShip has the potential to be a big winner. It is an ecommerce service that can deliver purchased goods within two hours of placing the order. The magic? They combing local retail shops with the apparent over-capacity in the local courier market. Couriers pick items up at retail shops and deliver them immediately. Lickety Ship hopes to tap into the must-have-now crowd (Robert claims theat 30% of Amazon orders pay for overnight shipping, often paying more for shipping than for the item itself). The company is beta testing now in a few select cities. This reminds me of the good old days when we had kozmo to deliver a packet of skittles. The difference here is → Read More
