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.

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The first is confirmation of our story that they are supporting OpenID, although they aren’t releasing any details (It’s our belief that they will first issue OpenID IDs, and possibly become a relying party later).

The company is also announcing the launch of two new Data Availability integrations: Flixster and Eventful (we built what we believe is the first Data Availability app last month).

MySpace is also making a core policy change to Data Availability. Previously third party services were not allowed to store any MySpace user profile information at all – they simply requested it from MySpace, used it to create a web page and then dumped it. Now MySpace is allowing 24-hour caches of profile information, and permanent caches of certain “core elements” of a user profile.

Screen Shots:

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So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not.

St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc.

Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself.

The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc.

The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly.

See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped Media.

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