Thats Interesting

The review team at odinjobs.com showcases up and coming companies and their products. Who knows one of them may be the next Google.

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Zvents – Live The Eventful Life

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Thanks to web 2.0, we are all going to be knowledgeable, culturally aware, and ‘cool’. Because there’s no chance in hell you are going to be ignorant, given the Zvents of the world, unless you unplug that machine and head to the Himalayas.

Zvents is positioned as an “event search engine�. It comes right down to your neighborhood and tells you what’s hot. The company was born right after the founders discovered just how tough it was to keep track of events in the Bay Area.

As summed up by killerstartups.com

“Zvents is an events search technology company focused on providing the best local search and advertising solutions to local publishers and media through the most comprehensive database of events and things to do�.

The site itself is easy to use, letting you search for events, venues and movies. There is an upcoming list and once registered, users can create groups, share events, save favorite event searches and get a calendar too. It has the ubiquitous RSS.

It’s a well thought out solution, with a win-win for users and event planners. As techcrunch says:

“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."

At the core of this site, is the Zvents media platform which provides a complete events solution. This includes, Zvents Crawler or Zbot, which crawls into websites listing events to be shared, to automatically get event information. Its new release includes Zvents Network Calendar, for Venues, Event Promoters, & Organizations.

The competition is plenty. The latest issue of the Economist listed two similar offerings Flavorpill and Le Cool as great success stories with massive funding. EVDB (now eventful ), operates in the same space, though Zvents is clearly ahead on the technology front.

The company, located in San Mateo, California, was founded by Ethan Stock and Tyler Kovacs in March 2005. It is privately held and is funded by NetService Ventures, Red Rock Ventures, and VantagePoint Venture Partners. This funding enabled Zvents to go nationwide and expand its team. They also generate revenue with ads on site.

A Zvent To Discover – What They Say

Where does the name Zvents come from?

Z is a cool letter - like X, Y, etc. -- I wanted a 'hook' to hang our brand and logo around. Zvents sounds like events, it's short, and it was available. Our first alpha launch featured the phrase (from me) "Until we come up with something better, that's what we're calling this puppy." We've never really looked back from the original decision.

What type of programming is used to create Zvents.com (http://zvents.com) ?

Our front end is a combination of Javascript, AJAX, and Ruby on Rails (ROR) - our back end is mostly Java, with some chunks of C++ for the gnarly bits.

What kind of technical skills does Zvents look for in potential employees?

We have a more 'science' side of the team and a more 'engineering' side of the team - but general themes are search or scientific computing background, strong CS fundamentals, worked as a production coder producing highly scalable and highly available code before.

What is the state of local search? Is it growing significantly?

Oh, yes. Enormously - and as the latest Borrell numbers show, local advertising online is growing as well.

How does Zvents use its blog to communicate to users?

Given the tremendous work being done on the part of our developers and engineers, they, for example, haev implemented an extension to the Internet Archive's "Heritrix" crawler that enables it to store crawled content directly into the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem for processing with Map-Reduce, our blog is a wonderful resource for industry developers interested in working with events, local search, and the work we're doing to substantially improve both. More than that though, the blog provides an opportunity to communicate Zvents' voice with perspective on our new capabilities and features. We'd like to talk to our audience to share with them not only developments on the platform but exciting things to do and popular destination. Zvents gives people the opportunity to Discover things to do, the blog allows us to do a little of our own discovery and share what we find.

How can event promoters use Zvents?

As a search engine we provide the unique opportunity to get your event in front of a highly relevant, interested audience. Through Zvents, those that see your art festival in Palo Alto, CA are those that are seeking an art festival or its related activities and live in and around the area. More than that though, powers the event calendars for hundreds of partners with our event database distributed through newspapers and local websites. Put your events on Zvents to attract the most targeted audience possible and benefit from reaching millions more through distribution through our partners.

What type of individuals can benefit the most from using Zvents?

Anyone who is trying to discover things to do in their local area – a single guy looking for a great date idea, a mom looking for a place to take her kids on the weekend, a hipster seeking cool music or art shows... we're a general search engine for all of these people, stuffed with great things to do.

Zvent – Happening?

Yes, the leisure industry has never had it so good. With Zvents, even smaller events can reach their target audience without the big spends. However, I would echo the Economist’s sentiments that most of their audience trusts these sites because of their cool, underground, non-commercial image. With funding and expansion, the trick is to be true to your roots.

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 04:36AM Aug 07, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


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