Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans

Eventbee an event management startup out of Sunnyvale, CA has been a busy little bee lately. They are rumoured to be launching two Facebook apps (one for event registration and one for event recommendation) in the next week or so (who isn’t?). They are also developing a channel on Ustream.tv to cover local events. The company provides a great package of event management tools including online registration, email marketing (souped-up spam) and online event promotion.

Their online event promotion tools include a nifty service called Event Network Listing that can only be described as “AdSense for events.” The service lets event planners for a fee list an event on any site or blog in Eventbee’s growing partner network. The partner network consists of sites and blogs that have AdSense-like code embedded on their sites. This allows for highly targeted and controlled event promotion. You can see Eventbee’s network event listings in action on Rajesh Setty’s LifeBeyondCode.

Eventbee partners get paid in two ways. First, they get an initial listing fee for each new listing that they get to set in advance. Second, when event ticket purchases are initiated from their site they receive a commission. The commission amount is set in advance by the event planner. Eventbee keeps 29% of the total earnings partners make.

Event planners can create customizable event pages on Eventbee’s site just like you can with Eventbrite (see our Eventbrite TC20 page here). Tickets sold from event pages start with fees as low as 1.45% of ticket price, plus a minimum fee of $0.25. RegOnline and Acteva also offer online event registration.

Eventbee’s glorified spam, I mean, email marketing service is tightly integrated with their online registration. You can create beautifully designed emails by importing HTML code or using their WYSIWYG editor. The service allows you to track bounced emails, opened emails and online registration URL click-throughs.

They currently have over 6,000 event managers. They are self-funded with CEO Bala Musrif claiming to be profitable since 2005 with no plans for raising money.

Saturday Morning: I’m Watching Tubecast

Good find over at Go2Web2 - Tubecast.tv is a new Internet video startup that, like others, is building a user interface layer on top of the online video services like YouTube, Veoh, etc.

For the most part the site has grabbed a lot of content from those sites and organized it into channels ranging from music videos to martial arts. Videos are shown on a schedule like normal television, although you can skip ahead.

What’s cool about it is that you can watch videos full screen with a click, and browsing to new content is much easier than using the video sites directly. This isn’t for searching, but it’s an excellent time waster if you want to browse pre-selected content.

What I like best about sites like this is that they are completely browser based and no download is required. I’m thinking Joost is going to have to move in this direction eventually. They can offer lower quality video via the browser, saving the higher definition content for the P2P application

The site’s blog is here.

NoSo - Backlash Against Our “Always On” Culture

“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”

NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street corners and other public places.

Other users come, but people “meet without meeting.” Users arrive alone, unplugged and aren’t allowed talk to anyone, presumably taking comfort in the fact that other NoSo users are there sharing their experience. “Allow the NoSo experience to envelope you,” the site suggests. The video on the home page of the site describes the other details. A sample event is here.

It’s an obvious play on Flash Mobs, although, of course, without publicity.

This also appears to be a semi-serious endeavor.. The NoSo founders (Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho) were interviewed by 10ZenMonkeys:

We invite people to take a break from their every day experiences carrying around laptops and cellphones, and give them the chance to just disengage from the noise, the social network, the constant communication that’s going on around us all the time. We let them just experience the absence of that — the feeling of being without all those distractions. And a NoSo could happen in a number of different places. It could happen on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in an installation in a gallery setting.

LendingClub To Close $10.26 Million Series A

Peer to peer lending service Lending Club will close a $10.26 million series A round of financing from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners tomorrow. This comes a few months after the company’s $2 million angel round. Coinciding wit the investment, Jeff Crowe and Dan Ciporin (former ceo of shopping.com) are joining Lending Club’s board of directors.

Similar to other P2P lending sites (Prosper, Zopa, Kiva), LendingClub matches borrowers and lenders. However, LendingClub doesn’t work through their own website, but solely through Facebook on the application they launched at the F8 platform launch conference. Borrows and lenders a linked up using their “LendingMatch” system, which recommends loans based on credit and their social relationships to each other. The idea being that trusted relationships make lending more likely and defaults less likely. The application currently has over 13,000 installs.

Unlike Prosper, interest rates aren’t determined through bidding, but calculated based on the borrowers credit score, debt to income ratio, and amount of the loan. There are no hidden fees, and the interest rate is fixed for three years. In July the service surpassed $500K in loans. They recently claimed a little more than 4 out of 5 loans get funded and haven’t reported any defaults or late payments.

It’s still the early days for this industry, and as TC commenters point out, it’s very much a case of Caveat Emptor.

USAToday Says Traffic Way Up

Less than twelve hours after I posted that USAToday’s traffic appears to be going the wrong way, they issue a press release saying traffic is way up.

USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.

Much of the increase was attributed to the Simpson’s Movie (the site held a contest around it) and an exclusive interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

This was issued way too fast to have been a response to my post, so the timing is coincidental. I also received an email from Pluck CEO Dave Panos, who says that their social networking tools are doing very well on USAToday’s site. He says “The results that USA Today has received from our social media tools has been absolutely phenomenal and usage continues to skyrocket each and every month. I wish I was a liberty to give you the specific metrics — but they are staggering.”

Well, if the results are indeed “staggering,” (in a good way) the Comscore data must be pointing the wrong way. That’s good news for USAToday, and even better news for Pluck.

But the situation isn’t certain. The Comscore data I posted only went through June. The data released today is for July. A 24% traffic increase from June to July is too much of a jump, too. As they said in the press release, the Simpson’s contest and the Rowling interview probably helped drive most or all of the gains.

What would be ideal is if USAToday or Pluck published a case study on the results of the social network experiment to date.

TechStars Demo Day - Class of 2007

Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage - ten of them - to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring.

Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each - and see Don Dodge for his take:

EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.

Intense Debate - see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.

socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.

J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.

Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.

Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.

MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.

FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messages. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.

KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.

BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local businesses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.

A Peek At Didja.com: VeryFunnyAds Clone

Although “advertising as entertainment” site Didja.com is not launching until next year, the NYT has a sneak peak at what it will look like (screen shot below). The NBC Universal project is part of the yet unnamed News Corp/NBC Universal cooperative strategy against Youtube. However, New Co.’s second “major assult” on YouTube looks like more of the same, a clone of TBS’s VeryFunnyAds. It’s very similar to the TBS re-branding effort, letting users watch heaps of ads by search, ratings, and sort by various companies and countries.

That’d all make sense if New Co. was copying a successful site, but VeryFunnyAds doesn’t appear to be a resounding winner despite the 63 million clip views the site article says they delivered over the past year. That number of views suggests an average of 5 million videos streamed each month, but the viewership of the site doesn’t stack up.

After an initial bump on launch, VeryFunnyAds’ traffic has since tapered out at about 100,000 uniques per month, according to Comscore. Sixty-three million streams is a lot of traffic for an audience that size, especially since they don’t allow off-site video embeds. Heavy.com, whose network generated about 6 million streams in April has about 5.2 million uniques per month. If the numbers are true, it appears TBS’s site is at most attracting a small cadre of ad fanatics.

Contrary to the “advertainment” meme going around, it doesn’t look like it has legs.