By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—Many media companies, among others, feature event calendars as part of their offerings, but few make much money from them. Event Seek, one of 15 startups in the Atlanta CapVenture program this year, will offer a platform to help them increase traffic and revenue via their event calendars.
Founded in the middle of 2007, the four-person company raised about $300,000 from friends and family and is just starting its hunt for an angel round, says founder and CEO Connor Fee.
The company has developed a platform that promotes local events to targeted audiences, but it’s more than a simple calendar.
Fee describes the company’s product this way:
“Event Seek provides a private label event calendar service for media providers to increase their online revenue through event recommendations and targeted advertising.
“We provide our customers not only with an advanced event calendar that supports unique user profiles and personalized event recommendations, but access to our extensive network of local event content.
“In this way, we provide them with enough data to meet the demands of all of their consumers and a fantastic filtering engine, ensuring that each consumer only sees events relevant to their interests.
“In addition we provide a variety of planning and social networking tools that enables a community where consumers can discover, search, review, comment, and discuss events – keeping them coming back time and time again.”
Event Seek’s recommendation algorithm helps match consumers with events suggested for them. The platform also helps advertisers to target consumers specifically interested in their products.
The on-demand, hosted platform requires no IT resources, maintenance, infrastructure costs, or adoption, scalability, security or integration risks, according to the company. It will be branded to reflect the look and feel of the media client.
Fee tells TechJournal South the company platform will help media companies increase advertising opportunities, earn commissions from ticket sales, and increase their traffic by engaging users with a variety of features.
A Google interface makes using maps to events easier and descriptions will help users find venues they’ve never been to before.
Users will be able to invite friends or associates to join them in events they feel might interest them directly from the site. It will also include “sticky” content, access to demographics and user generated content, all buzz creating aspects of viral marketing.
The company has a variety of partnerships with event providers and ticket sellers in place.
Clients will be able to choose from a variety of levels of control over which events appear on their calendars, from approving every item to allowing a category/word filter to do most of the work.
Free says the company will expand its marketing to other verticals eventually, with academic institutions, hospitality groups and chambers of commerce among future targets.
“We’ll expand when the time is right,” says Fee.
Fee says that participating in the CapVenture program, which is sponsored by the ATDC and the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), offers not only lessons associated with each piece of a fund raising plan, but also the opportunity to meet and interact with other entrepreneurs.
“It allows you to meet and interact with other entrepreneurs and coaches to continue the discussion outside the classroom,” he says.
On the Web: www.event-seek.com
© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
