The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
We’re back for a new episode of TC Cribs, and it’s one of our most colorful yet: Eventbrite. The company, which offers a variety of ways to coordinate events and sell tickets, has a penchant for orange — and it shows.
Their office is nestled in San Francisco’s SOMA district and has an office loaded with goodies that include everything from train sets to nap rooms… and random people walking around in costume (huh?)
Hey look, that’s me in a tiara. Tune in! → Read More
Online ticketing service EventBrite has had a busy year, what with raising $50 million in Series E funding and a potential IPO on the horizon. Now the company is entering some unfamiliar territory: it used to be that only iDevice owners could wirelessly check guests into conferences or big parties, but EventBrite has levelled that playing field today with the release of their new Easy Entry Android app.
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At any company level, the board of directors has a direct impact on the organization’s product strategy, hiring, fundraising and much more. And startups have to be very selective in choosing board members who will advise the company in the right direction. In the big company realm, both the media and the company’s shareholders have questioned Yahoo’s board, which continues to employ a floundering Carol Bartz as CEO and supports a bizarre product and business strategy. Then you look at Facebook, where founder Marc Zuckerberg has strategically assembled an all-star board to help the company grow as a public company and expand into new directions. Most recently, Facebook added Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings to its board, joining Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Donald E. Graham, Peter Thiel and Zuck himself. Hastings not only will add his experience in taking a web company public, but he will also help Facebook navigate potential movie and TV show streaming opportunities. Facebook has a rock solid board—almost every member has been a strong innovator in the past few decades.
The fact is that the board plays an extremely important role in some of the major events for any company with shareholders. The board helps manage and make decisions about financing, acquisitions, product strategy and even an IPO. So it goes without saying that entrepreneurs are faced with challenging decisions assembling a board. For big public companies, this has always been the case, but the role of the board at startups is also changing. I interviewed a handful of early-stage investors—Jeff Clavier, Keith Rabois, Dave McClure, and Paul Lee—to find out what startup founders should know about picking and managing a board. → Read More
There’s no doubt that online ticketing platform Eventbrite is growing like gangbusters. The platform is on track to sell $400 million worth of tickets this year, which is double the $207 million it did last year. The company could reach $1 billion in gross ticket sales in 2012. And part of Eventbrite’s future plan will include a public offering. Co-founder Kevin Hartz tells ZURB in a recently published podcast that Eventbrite could file to go public as early as late 2012 (at the 38 minute mark in the podcast) if the company reaches certain performance benchmarks.
Hartz had some interesting commentary about going public in general. He believes companies should IPO earlier rather than later, and that staying private too long allows for “bad habits to fester” under little regulation. As for Eventbrite, Hartz says that he wants the company to be around 30 years from now and being a public company is part of that strategic plan. → Read More
Online ticketing service Eventbrite is on track to sell $400 million worth of tickets this year, which is double the $207 million it did last year. But in order to do that, and push towards $1 billion in gros ticket sales in 2012, it must capture more ticket sales.
One project it is revealing today is the beginnings of what will become an Eventbrite Box Office. All Eventbrite tickets today are sold online, which means that people who decide to spontaneously show up at the door are not necessarily buying through Eventbrite. So Eventbrite is bundling together an iPad with an Eventbrite app, a card swipe, and a ticket printer so that event organizers can take payments an issue tickets at the event itself. → Read More
Online ticket seller Eventbrite has raised another $50 million in a Series E financing round led by Tiger Global, according to a release issued by the company. This infusion comes only eight months after the company raised $20 million in funding last October. This latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $80 million.
To date, Eventbrite has helped over 120,000 event organizers in 150 countries host more than half a million events. Over 10 million people have attended an event ticketed by Eventbrite, and the company is on track to process nearly half a billion in gross ticket sales this year. Last year, the company sold 11 million tickets for $207 million in gross sales. → Read More
Eventbrite has had a banner 2010. In a blog post wrapping up its 2010 milestones on its company blog the company reveals that gross ticket sales in 2010 were exactly $206,899,900, more than double the $99,141,981 in ticket sales raked in in 2009. The total number of tickets sold in 2010 also ran laps around the 5,141,051 sold in 2009, at 11,004,743.
Eventbrite also had 222,353 events posted in 2010, over 9,370 cities from 147 countries represented, bringing in an 17,224,232 average monthly page views. The most trafficked month for the Eventbrite site was October with 6,738,155 unique visitors. → Read More
How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite. → Read More
Online ticket seller Eventbrite raised a $20 million round of funding from DAG Ventures, Sequioa Capital, and Tenaya Capital (formerly Lehman Brothers Venture Partners). DAG led the round (Sequioa led the last one). The D round is twice the amount of capital as all three previous rounds combined, bringing the total raised bey the company to $29.5 million.
CEO Kevin Hartz tells me he still had $5 million in the bank from his previous rounds of funding, but he is now ready to expand aggressively. Only about 15 percent of Eventbrite’s gross ticket sales come from outside the U.S., and he wants to make that bigger. → Read More
Online ticketing startup Eventbrite is amping up the social features of its service by creating deeper hooks with Facebook. When you purchase a ticket through Eventbrite (like you can for Disrupt, for instance), you can already share that purchase with your Facebook friends. But now Eventbrite will be adding a deeper layer of integration with Facebook to power social event discovery.
Later today, when you log into Eventbrite with your Facebook ID, you will start to see all the Eventbrite events your Facebook friends are going to. It will show you a list of social recommendations based on the Eventbrite tickets your friends have bought and chosen to share publicly. It is all opt-in. Activities ned to be shared publicly on an event-by-event basis, and only if the event organizer has made the event itself public. → Read More
Back in March, on the eve of SXSW, Plancast got an iPhone app out just in time. Now, with more time to work, they’ve perfected it with the launch of version 2. And that’s not all they’ve been working on.
Over the past couple of weeks, Plancast has rolled out a new site design, a new plan social invitation system, and Eventbrite integration. On top of that, they’re also testing out two other new features: local plans and a recent activity feed. Each of these features make a great service even better. → Read More
Event ticketing site Amiando is relaunching today with a new look, new features, and new pricing. The German startup is eliminating its $1-per-ticket fee for free events, bsically matching competitor Eventbrite’s freemium model. About 35 percent of Amiando events currently are free, so this is a major shift of the company. CEO Felix Haas believes the promotional value of going free for customers who don’t charge for their events will outweigh the lost revenue.
Amiando has been growing at a nice clip, doubling revenues from last year. Haas won’t disclose total ticket sales going through Amiando, but it will probably be somewhere between $40 million and $60 million this year. Eventbrite, in contrast, sold $100 million worth of tickets last year. Amiando is much stronger in Europe, where it is based, with less than 15 percent of its business in the U.S. It hopes to take more share in the U.S. with its more competitive pricing and set of features. → Read More
Here’s a fascinating idea – Facebook looks to be partnering with Eventbrite to let users sell tickets to the 3.5 million events added to Facebook each month.
Earlier this month we confirmed that Facebook intends to sell tickets to its upcoming F8 developer conference through Eventbrite. But there was no indication that the partnership extended beyond that.
Then a reader noticed that facebook.eventbrite.com linked to a page showing the image above (the page has since been removed). The message says: → Read More
If ticketing startup Eventbrite wants to become the Ticketmaster of do-it-yourself events, it just added a new board member who might have some ideas on how to get there. The company just added Sean Moriarty to its board of directors. Moriarty was previously the CEO of Ticketmaster, which he helped build into an events juggernaut between 2005 and March, 2009, when he left the company.
Whereas Ticketmaster rules ticketing for large events at concerts and sports stadiums, “Eventbrite is coming at event management from a grassroots effort,” says Moriarty. “It is effectively providing tools that did not previously exist.” Eventbrite lets anyone create and sell tickets for events ranging from backyard BBQs to TechCrunch 50 (we use Eventbrite for many of our conferences). → Read More
Earlier today we wrote about Square, the new payment service cofounded by Jim McKelvey and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. We also interviewed Dorsey and used Square to buy a coffee.
We knew Square had closed a hyper-competitive venture round. What we didn’t know until recently was the size and valuation of that round. Square is valued at a massive $40 million or more after raising $10 million in funding, and the service is yet to launch publicly for anyone to use.
Khosla Ventures is taking most of the $10 million venture round, we’ve heard from multiple sources. This is Gideon Yu’s (former Facebook CFO) first investment since joining Khosla Ventures in August. Other investors are joining the round as well, and we’re now trying to confirm those individuals and funds.
The feeding frenzy around Square isn’t just because of its celebrity founder, say our sources. This is a bold foray into a huge, and complicated, market: physical payments. “What PayPal was to eBay, Square is to the real world,” said one person close to the company. → Read More
