Eventful.com progress report

Yesterday, I met with Brian Dear to catch up on progress with his event database platform and Web site. Since I wrote about his company EVDB when it launched in March 2005, the eventful.com Web site has accumulated more than a million events, with about 150,000 currently active (forward events), Dear told me. Eventful.com is a destination for finding, contributing and sharing events, venues and calendars, and is built on the EVDB (Events and Venues Database) Web services platform for building applications (Podbop) and mashups, as well as normalizing event information data.

In our podcast interview, Dear talks about building an ecosystem for events, business models and Eventful.com's demand creation service. While Eventful.com generates some commission revenue from ticket sales, it isn't a focus for the company. Dear said that he plans to have targeted ads, beyond the current AdSense units on the site, that take into account time, matching tags, and location, such as a restaurant across the street from a venue. "We haven't rolled it out yet, and it's too soon to talk about it," he said.

 Brian Dear, founder and chairman of EVDB and Eventful.com

Dear also discussed progress with Eventful Demand, a new service in which the Eventful community can request that a performer come to their town. The first demand event derived from the service is form actor and blogger Wil Wheaton. Nearly 3,000 people from across 135 cities signed up to have Wil Wheaton perform, Dear said. Based on the demand and Wheaton's schedule, an event will be held, with about 200 people signed up so far, in July at a bookstore Brookline, Massachusetts.

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