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.

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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.

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Confabb may on an almost identical path. The company, which has created a social network around conferences, launched just three months ago. And from what we’re hearing, they are very close to being acquired in the next week, for $5 million or so. Look for founder and Chairman Salim Ismail to make an announcement about this at the Stirr event in Palo Alto tomorrow evening.

This is good news for Confabb’s angel investors, including Dave Winer and Andrew Rasiej, who put a total of $75,000 into the startup. And it’s even better news for Ismail, who needed a win after his last startup, PubSub, imploded due to founder conflicts.

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Confabb is lead by former PubSub co-founder Salim Ismail, product manager Cameron Barrett (who incidentally built campaign web sites for Wesley Clark and John Kerry) and former AT&T exec and PubSub team member Jon Mandell. Early investors include chronic conference attendee and web innovator Dave Winer.

At launch the site includes details on more than 16,000 conferences and anyone can fill out a form to submit other events for consideration. Confabb calls itself the largest conference database in the world. It’s a very well put together site; there are both standard categories and tags, integration of off-site resources, reputation management, user watch pages to track a number of events, a badge generator to post conference logos on your blog and iCal export of your conference list. Attendees and watchers can list themselves for public display.

Confabb plans on rolling out a number of new features over the next two to three months, including integration with more calendar programs, video and podcast listings, web based chat rooms per conference and per session and both native and integrated RSVP capabilities. It’s an ambitious road map, but most of these features look like tech industry best practices brought together into one place at a time when at least our sector is finally widely familiar with them.

Will Confabb be able to gain traction outside the Web 2.0 world? If attendees of events like the All Asian Food Expo and the Second International Doris Lessing Conference start using Confabb then the events world could really be shaken up. Building use of the system outside the community most prepared for it will take a concerted effort and probably some changes to suit the cultures of other conference communities.

There are a few technical things that Confabb could still use. RSS feeds for events by categories are needed badly. Microformats are being considered, the company says, and would help demonstrate that Confabb is a community participant more than trying to be an exclusive destination site. The integration with off site resources is great, I’d like to see Mary Hodder’s Speakers Wiki, a wiki intended to help diversify conference speaker lists, drawn from as well. Map and attendee tag features as was explored by the service Attendr could be interesting too.

It’s high time someone took the best practices from across the web that conference attendees and support sites have been developing. It’s great that Confabb is bringing many different services together and aggregating them. The project should get a lot of support and I expect that at least the web world, if not the larger conference world, will be using Confabb quite a bit.

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