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.
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.
I wonder about these names sometimes…
I do not understand the scope of this blog. All right it is an integrated place to add/ see events. Was there not a blog already doing this??
Its hard to believe there was none..
Pretty cool… I wish there was a way to export events in KML and add them to umapper map mashup.
Andrei, if you’re looking for KML, at least for music/theatre/comedy events, check out http://gruvr.com – it generates GeoRSS as well as KML ICBM geocoding, geotags, and several other microformat encodings to fully integrate events to the geoweb with a fully open API :
http://gruvr.com/developers/
We have also offered embeddable flash maps like umappr for myspace bands for a year now
http://gruvr.co...pwidgetinfo.htm
Anyway, one measure of how many events a site indexes is how many of its event pages are known by google, since that is how most people will ultimately find the site. Happenr is currently at about 30K pages:
http://www.goog...mp;aq=f&oq=
… as opposed to on average 400-600K pages indexed for larger sites like gruvr, eventful, etc.
Still, if these guys really have a good AI approach to geocoding that will disambiguate “Birmingham” (UK) from “Birmingham” (Alabama, US) when the source omits country code – kudos! Most heuristics fail miserably at that….
A decent start. High points for the open API and RSS feeds. From the look of it though, your team could use a user experience resource. It’s always easy to tell when a site’s layout has been left to code junkies. I would also make sure my servers are ready for a horde of visitors next time I do PR on Techcrunch. God speed.
agree wih jonathan, slow site and there is nothing that makes you want to explore it more.
LOL…
$31.2M for US based zvents.com
$19.6M for US based eventful.com
and…
€100k ($125k) for EU based oxynade.com
between US/EU this is a 1/160 to 1/250 ratio… either there is not money in EU
or EU startups perform better with less money 
Series A and B for Eventful amounted to $9.6 million. With that money they indexed 6 million events. So they’ve used $1.6 per event.
Oxynade took €100k to index 57967 events in its database, that’s €0.58 per event. In 1 year.
Oxynade must be doing something right…
I think it is naive to view the costs as ONLY the number of events that have been indexed, and that is coming from a guy who built a live music site with one of the biggest indexes of events.
You have to consider the marketing costs of an actually functioning startup. The cost of indexing more events scales, as it is the cost/time of building your indexer and making it run efficiently which is the challenge.
Seems a bit clunky.. In Copenhagen I’d suggest kbh.dk for events and mitkbh.dk for info on restaurants, venues, shops and more..
I think the API and RSS approach is the only sensible one…. There’s indeed plenty of people keeping all kinds of lists, all imperfect, incomplete… Unless you invest a dreadful amount of energy into keeping them up to date.
If the public would only recognise this fine initiative as THE list, it solves the whole fragmentation issue. Obviously there’s not something like THE public, only more fragmented crowds. Yet that’s another discussion.
Kudo’s to Happenr. See what happens.
JFL
I’m from Belgium … the budgets here are a joke …
of course , our target audience is a lot smaller when we do a site in our native tongue and also we are not such global thinkers here … we leave that up to the Dutch
Very slow site. I think going.com should go global!
Btw
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