Eventvue Grabs Angel Round Over The Weekend
Nick Gonzalez
18 comments »
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.
Really dumb investment.
It is a great concept but if your great at making the connection and keeping it, it is really unnecessary. Making connections at conventions and events has survived as a top way to network without a service like this. It makes me wonder what kind of professionals are really going to use it?
I dont really see the point but as we all know some companies and people can succeed whether or not the product or service is great, and the reason is: because they know how to sell
thanks Jay, i resemble that remark.
(and guess what, you get the distinct honor of paying full price at any of my conferences
Brad Feld must have known them since college — Rob Johnson, Josh Fraser
College pals?
I’m surprise to see Boulder CO meets Boulder CO startup. Please don’t mess with TC guys. These guys are smart…
Its a crowded space but there’s room for a rockstar to emerge -non of the current services measure up.
And the investment/advisory team looks solid. I met Wendy at a TIE breakfast a few weeks back and she’s a born marketeer.
I’d say IntroNetworks and Affinity Circles are the direct competitors as they are in the exact same space - private social networks for events/organizations. They are more heavily financed than Confabb (and EventVue judging by the amount mentioned in the post).
Being a social network “customized” for a specific event means it will get much more attention from event goers as it will be marketed by the event organizer. Crowded space, however.
Nick,
Thanks for the mention, however the link to Confabb doesn’t go anywhere.
Confabb’s global reach also puts you within a click or two of potential leads, audiences or fellow enthusiasts. We’re the largest conference search site on the web (currently tracking 48,278 conferences), and our users span just about every industry, profession, event and vocation. Additionally, we do in fact now offer many of the latest Social Networking tools http://blog.confabb.com/?p=43 - which really allow you to bring the “hallway conversations” online and into lasting relationships.
Jon Mandell
Confabb.com
jon {at} confabb.com
Congrats to Rob and Josh! Great job!
i wish them good luck….but it is going to be really tough to make any attendee participate in yet another social network
this concept has been there for years…direct competition might be from upcoming.org, confabb etc…also indirectly face competition from custom social networking providers like ning, crowdvine etc.
Thanks for the writeup Nick!
If you’re a conference organizer, we also work on your behalf to drive more registrations to your conference. We use the natural friendships and connections made at a conference to help promote the conference to your attendees network or dare I say it “social graph”. EventVue builds an online community for your attendees and works to help it grow.
@bala:
You’re right — our most common feedback from our users has been resistance to creating a new profile on yet another social networking site. We don’t much like it either so we’re working on being able to draw in content from existing profiles around the web. Thanks for your goodwill wishes.
We (CrowdVine) have put together a social network package for conferences. It’s great to be able to connect with people before the event, put a name to a face, and then jump right into chatting when you run into them in the halls.
Our simple roll-your-own social networks work great if you want to set it up yourself. That’s what BarCampBlock did:
http://barcampblock.crowdvine.com
We also do a custom package where we integrate with your site and design, bring out a social calendaring feature (icalico), import data and attendees, and provide a community manager to help facilitate. Latest one is Future of Web Appps:
http://fowa.crowdvine.com
I don’t know why anyone would want to be well-funded to do this, or funded at all. I built the software while supporting myself with contract work. Now we’re three people in order to keep up with demand.
I’m looking forward to see their product. I think this is a space where a lot of value can be added to conferences. For The Next Web Conference we looked at all the players in the market and nobody offered what we were looking for.
We will definitely use a social network for all our future events, but it will most likely not be Eventvue, IntroNetworks, or Affinity Circles… this time a yet to launch European startup
There’s Eventscope in the UK too, now looking to expand into the US.
May be not useful for regular Socialites
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