Eventvue Grabs Angel Round Over The Weekend

The firstTechStars startup has gotten funded over this weekend. Eventvue has closed a round estimated to be about a quarter million dollars from Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, amongst others. See our earlier coverage of them here.

Eventvue brings social networking to the context of conferences, helping conference goers re-connect or follow up with business they couldn’t follow up with in the limited span of a conference. Networking at a conference is a fairly inefficient process, left up to chance encounters and stacks of business cards. Anything that can help optimize the limited conference time that thousand dollar ticket bought you is an easy sell.

Confabb is the most direct competitor in the space, but has focused on being a comprehensive directory of the who, what, and where of industry conferences rather than on the palm greasing that goes on at the events. More social competitors include Meetup.com and Eventwax. Eventvue is set for a public launch later this year.

Piczo Zone: Better User Profiling Through Viral UGC

Social network Piczo has released a new feature into private beta: Piczo Zone. It’s being tested by a small group of users now and will be released generally in a few weeks.

What is it? Product Evangelist Keith Crowell says its a way for users to decorate their profile pages in much the same way as teenagers decorate their rooms - with posters, music, etc. Users take (or create) images, videos, style sheets or just about anything else and then add it to their profile. Each content item also includes descriptive data and tags. When someone creates something (say an image showing a band or artist name), any other user can add it to their profile as well. All of the “stuff” created in the Piczo Zone will then spread virally as the more popular items gets added by more and more users.

Users like this stuff - they can see what the popular kids (however defined) put on their profiles and then add the same things to their own. For now users can’t add stuff that they see directly from their friends’ profiles, but software engineer Devon Boyle says they’ll add that functionality shortly.

Users Love This Stuff. But So Do Advertisers

But there’s another reason this is important: user profiling for advertising. As users add artists/bands, popular movies and well known brands (nike, whatever) to their profiles they build an extremely detailed demographic and psychographic profile of themselves that can be used for far more targeted advertising. As an example, a music label could focus advertising around a new album release to users who’s added certain similar bands and artists to their profile. It’s highly likely that the advertising will be aimed at people who are likely to buy, and ad rates increase dramatically.

The content can also be used to predict new trends far before traditional methods. Users will create their own images for a popular local indie band, for example. As more and more users add the image, someone with access to aggregate data will be able to see what’s going to become mainstream well before it actually does. Since Piczo’s users, mostly teenagers, are the trendsetters, it’s a particularly powerful tool.

Piczo isn’t the first social network to experiment with something like this. In July we wrote about a similar product called HotLists released by HotOrNot. HotLists are made up only of images, but like Piczo users create them themselves and they spread virally as users add them from the profiles of people they view. Users immediately took to the idea, adding brands, movies, artists and other things that they identified with to build out their profile. And HotNorNot now has much deeper user information to aim advertisement at. Everyone wins.

ProfileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts

nullWith a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site. The latter solution has attracted quite a bit of attention with sites like Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster.

ProfileBuilder is another startup looking to help solve the identity problem by providing one place to manage your personal information. They gave party goers a sneak peek of their identity management tool at the TC 9 party at August Capital. During the beta preview, approximately 5,000 profiles have been created, and ProfileBuilder has received more than 450,000 page views. Now the site has launched to the public.

ProfileBuilder isn’t just about getting friend status updates or single login access, but more about easily controlling what information shows up on what sites. However, they do have an API that allows anyone to build a program to push updates from your profile to other social networking services. The service creates a master profile where you can catalog your biography, photos, links to other services, blogs, and even create new kinds of information pages. You can expose this information to people across the net through an embeddable badge (like View my Profile). When you place the badge on a site, ProfileBuilder knows and lets you choose what type of information gets exposed through the embed on that site. You can manage all your embeds through their website.

Encouraging people to use the service by embedding profiles across the web is no doubt a first step in toward serving as a total online identity solution. Plaxo has been gunning for this distinction as well, and certainly more companies will want to serve as the focal point for identity on the web.