| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Genre | Web service |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Founder(s) | Brian Dear |
| Headquarters | San Diego, California, USA |
| Website | www.eventful.com |
Eventful is a web service which aims to help users search for, track, and share information about events. Eventful is a service of Eventful, Inc. (formerly EVDB, Inc.) from San Diego, California. EVDB stands for "Events and Venues Database", and anyone may add information about events, venues, and performers.
Yahoo!'s Upcoming is a competing service.
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Users can search for events worldwide by time, location, performer, and descriptive keyword. Users can create private or public calendars, including "smart" calendars which automatically update when events matching search criteria are added or existing events are modified. As of July 2007 the company claimed it had approximately 4 million future events in its search engine index.[1]
Eventful Demand allows users to declare an event or performance they would like to see locally, and then campaign for others to join their "demand". With enough declared interest, a targeted performer might then decide to plan an actual event. Various presidential campaigns for the 2008 U.S. election utilized Eventful Demand, most notably John Edwards,[2][3] Barack Obama, and Ron Paul. The company announced its users had created the 500,000th demand on August 16.[4] The company claims the service has over 2 million users and is growing at approximately 100,000 new users per week.[1]
A major feature of Eventful is My Eventful, which enables users to view their watch list, which is a list of events they can optionally indicate they are "going to", as well as a list of events from the combined watch lists of all other users designated as "friends". My Eventful also provides users with a way to view and manage a list of favorite performers and venues, as well as a list of "saved searches" akin to Google Alerts. My Eventful also summarizes all Demands that a user has joined or started.
Users can import their iTunes libraries or Last.fm profiles to indicate which performers are "favorites". The service then sends notifications when nearby events featuring these favorite performers are scheduled to occur.
A web services application programming interface is provided to use Eventful information in other programs and websites, such as mashups, as well as to load new or modify existing data about events, venues, or performers.
Eventful, Inc. was founded as EVDB, Inc. in January 2004 in La Jolla, California, by Brian Dear, a veteran of eBay, the late-90s Mp3.com, and early consumer-Linux startup Eazel. A public beta test under the name EVDB.com was launched in March 2005, and the service changed its name to Eventful.com in September 2005. The company was renamed Eventful, Inc. in August 2006.
Since inception, the company has raised approximately $19.6 million in financing.[5] Investors include Esther Dyson, Evan Williams, Mark Pincus, Josh Kopelman, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bay Partners, and Omidyar Network.