If you are looking for something to do in Europe, check out Happenr, an events search engine that covers Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and the top 100 cities across the Continent. The site just launched after a year in development. It scours thousands of European tourism, town, and cultural sites to keep its events database up to date, and is available in English, German, and Dutch (events are displayed in their original languages).

The site is operated by a Belgian company called Oxynade founded by two Belgian engineers: Hans Nissens and Niko Nelissen. (Disclosure: One of our writers, Robin Wauters, is an investor and acting as head of marketing). The founders have put 50,000 Euros into the bootstrap startup, and received another 50,000 Euros in the form of a grant from the Belgian government.

Event databases are a dime a dozen, and Happenr is up against more established, better funded competitors including Eventful, Zvents, and even Yahoo’s Upcoming.org. Happenr thinks there is still room for a comprehensive events search engine in Europe, and it believes it has a better way of indexing events automatically.

I can’t really see too much difference in the quality of search results, but I do like the map view that places each event on a map, and goes down to the street level. The startup already has an API that lets other sites tap into its database, and has developed an iPhone app that is still awaiting approval (see screen shots below). Getting this on mobile phones is really essential. Soon Happenr will add the ability to create and subscribe to an RSS feed for any search result page. The company also offers a search widget that anyone can customize and embed on other sites.

eventwebcontrol_form = 3;
eventwebcontrol_where = “London”;
eventwebcontrol_country = “6″;
eventwebcontrol_period = “next7days”;
eventwebcontrol_bgcolor = “8ac640″;
eventwebcontrol_fgcolor = “ffffff”;
eventwebcontrol_numberofevents = 5;

The startup hopes to make money by licensing its hyper-local content to European media companies who want to incorporate the events search onto their sites (the free API links back to Happenr). The other sources of revenues will be ticket sales (not yet turned on) and advertising.

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.

Zvents combines a strong product with an API, a very strong team and an impressive customer list. They are establishing themselves as leaders in a particular niche of web services – they are essentially a B2B calendar and events widget provider. I think the funds involved have made a smart investment.

Zvents partners with other media companies to provide an Ajax rich events calendar to embed in their websites. In January Zvents will launch a beta of its new local advertising network, further monetizing the media partnerships it’s building. The company’s showcase customers include the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald and the Denver Post. Zvents says it will soon roll out a free calendar product for venues, events promoters and organizations. The company currently offers a commercial API and highlights startup social networking site Maya’s Mom as a customer. Primary competitor Trumba only recently incorporated Ajax and has announced that it is ending support for its free and small publisher products. Trumba’s customers include the NYTimes auto section online.

Zvents is also announcing that David Carlick from VantagePoint Ventures is joining the company’s board of directors. Carlick was a co-founder of DoubleClick and an investor in Ask and MySpace/Intermix. Carlick will join Rich Melmon, co-founder of Electronic Arts, and Paul Martino, founding CTO of Tribe Networks, on the Zvents board. Gordon Rios, a former principal scientist at Yahoo! Search, has been hired as Zvents CTO.

The company will be rolling out service on Boston.com next month and in the top 50 metros in the United States and Canada over the next year. Our previous coverage of Zvents is here.

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.

The zvents team took the wrapper off their social event manager/calendar today. The timing of the announcement couldn’t be better, as Upcoming.org (a competitor) announced its acquisition by Yahoo yesterday.

Ethan Stock posted about the launch on the zvents blog. Key features include best of breed event search, tagging of events, easy blogging and blog/website widgets to promote your event. zvents uses ajax intelligently and the site feels very stable.

Zvents is also opening up a number of APIs to grab their data, encouraging mashups. We applaud them and look forward to developments.

I had a chance to see a demo of the upcoming Zvents service this evening at the NetService Ventures Group office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.

Mark this one down as an ajax showcase. Zvents is a complete events ecosystem, with search, event creation, calendaring, sharing and blogging/webmaster tools (lots of ajax here) for promotion of events and calendars.

It looks similar in many respects to EVDB (now eventful), although the search functionality is clearly a generation further along and it certainly is a very good looking site.

zvents opens up next week and will be launching at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Peter Caputa wrote a detailed analysis of this space, including eventful and zvents, on PC4Media.

Team

Tyler Kovacs
Tom Hill
Ethan Stock
Matt Melmon
Paul Martino
Allie Williams
Tim Harrah
Chris Serrano
Chris Law
Diane Barrera