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IMThere Joins MadeIt As The Most Recent Attempts To Crack The Event Nut

Michael Arrington — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:30:41 +0000

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 Media.

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Renkoo "Beeta" Launches

Michael Arrington — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 09:16:58 +0000

Palo Alto based Renkoo, which just raised $3 million in venture financing, is opening its doors this morning to beta testers. They’ll immediately let in the first few hundred requests and then trickle in new users after that (if you don’t see a box to request a beta account, they haven’t switched over to the new site yet). Once you are a member, you can invite others to use the service.

Renkoo, like competitor Skobee, helps people plan events (the pre-evite stage). Want to gather a couple of friends and discuss when and where to have drinks next week? Renkoo is a perfect choice to help you do this. Socializr, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams’ new startup, is also rumored to be entering this space.

I’ve tested Renkoo off and on during its development cycle, and it’s evolved rapidly. CEO Adam Rifkin gave me another walk through today to see some of the recent feature additions.

To use Renkoo, you set up a new event and invite people. If they are not yet Renkoo users, they will receive an invitation. If they are, they’ll receive a new event notification. Once people start interacting over an event, things get interesting.

Renkoo is an early “Comet” application (allowing real-time two way interactivity in a browser – Google Talk and Meebo are based on underlying Comet technologies). That means the event page updates in real time as your friends give their input. The experience is similar to instant messaging. Users who aren’t logged in see the comment stream once they are.

Renkoo also allows instant messenger, email and sms notifications of events, comments, etc. (all user controlled). Once an event is finalized, it can be exported in icalendar format (for desktop calendars like Outlook and iCal), or Google Calendar format. Support for additional web calendars and microformats is coming soon.

Renkoo was founded by Adam Rifkin, the founder of KnowNow, and Joyce Park, formerly a senior web developer at Friendster and an author of PHP5 and MySQL Bible.

Screen Shots (click for larger view):

Renkoo Nails $3m in Funding

Michael Arrington — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:49:27 +0000

The funding train continues to roll this week – Palo Alto based startup Renkoo, still in private beta, has closed on $3 million in venture capital from Matrix Partners.

Renkoo is one of a number of new Web 2.0 event creation companies that I’ve had a chance to preview (see also Skobee). Renkoo was founded by CEO Adam Rifkin (founder of KnowNow) and CTO Joyce Park (formerly lead engineer at Friendster). Launch date: “soon”.

So what exactly is Renkoo?

Michael Arrington — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 02:45:40 +0000

Joyce Park’s Renkoo looks interesting.

The Renkoo blog give a number of interesting feature hints.

It looks to be an event/calendaring application, but it seems to include chat and other features as well.

It is the goal of Renkoo to help people plan and remember and share peak experiences.

and

The Renkoo’s application interface intentionally blurs the lines between “webby”, desktop, and instant messaging.

Anyone out there beta testing Renkoo and care to comment?