EventVue

EventVue lets you customize the entire look and feel of your community.  We have simple customization tools that let you choose a completely unique color scheme and logo in minutes.  We also support custom CSS to allow you do more advanced customizations.  We’ll even have a professional designer work with your team to make sure everything looks just right.

Here are a few examples from some recent conferences:

We now support custom domains.  This has been a highly requested feature and we’re happy to announce it’s availability today.  To set this up you will need to be able to modify your DNS settings so you can add an A or CNAME record that points to eventvue.com.  We are including custom domains as a free addition to our white-labeling package.

You may have noticed that we’ve cleaned up our URL structure to give each community it’s own subdomain at EventVue (ex. yourevent.eventvue.com).  We understand that many organizers have linked heavily to their communities, so we’ve made sure to keep 100% backwards compatibility so those links will still work.

I hope you enjoy the new functionality.  Let us know when we can get an EventVue community set up for your next event.

I know.  It’s confusing.

People sometimes ask where we got our name.  The story I usually tell is that Rob isn’t very good at spelling and messed up the legal docs when we incorporated.  The truth of course is that Rob is a great speller, but we opted for EventVue since eventview.com was taken.

The problem is that sometimes people have a hard time finding us due to way our name is spelled.  We’ll get eventview.com one day, but until then we need your help.

When you tell your friends about EventVue, be sure to let them know how to spell it.  Thanks!

While this is totally not a surprise to anyone, it’s looking like 2009 will be a particularly brutal year for the conferences and tradeshow industry. There are lots of very loud signals about this such as attendance declining at CES, Apple pulling out of Macworld, and Gartner canceling key events. And this doesn’t even begin to include the smaller independent conference organizers who we speak to on a daily basis. It’s reached the point where leading voices in the industry are saying it’s over. Scoble declares Macworld to be on life support and wonders if the same fate awaits CES.

So here’s the deal — tradeshows and conferences are not dead. But they are in need of rescue.

Quite simply, people are no longer interested in the blast marketing of tradeshows. Why would you pay money to go to an event that is largely about being advertised to by marketers who treat you exactly like the guy who walked by the booth 2 mins ago? The current model at tradeshows is a relic from a time past when information was the scarce resource and attention was plentiful. Now, as Seth Godin has written a lot, in a world where attention is scarce, marketers must have permission to capture attention.

For the tradeshow or conference exhibitor, this means that you must abandon the schwag and engage in a conversation with the attendees you care about before the show. We all know that the best tradeshows and conferences are the ones where you have interesting conversations that help you solve your problems. The tradeshows that survive will be the ones that facilitate more of these conversations — amongst both attendees and exhibitors.

Thankfully, the leading edge shows and their organizers know this and are already adapting. Despite all the doomsayers, we at EventVue are quite bullish on Macworld’s future because of their recent efforts to focus on the Apple community that gathers at Macworld. In the heavily covered townhall on how Macworld will go forward, Paul Kent clearly said that community is Macworld’s future (friendly note to Paul - right on! but Ning? really? we should talk ;) )

Over on the conferences side, our advisor and friend Eric Norlin is starting a brand new conference in 2009 called Glue. No, he’s not crazy, and as he says, he’s confident the conference will be a success. It will be a success because he knows that “above all else, community matters” and he works for it.

I agree with Umair Haque who says that todays firms will be successful based on the degree that they create sustainable, valuable relationships with their customers and amongst their customers. This is the recession-proof strategy in 2009 (and beyond) that will save tradeshows and conferences. EventVue exists to help conference producers become community organizers. It’s exciting to have front row seats as we watch the best events start this transformation.

One of the things that makes EventVue valuable is the ability to put names with faces.  That’s why we’ve put a lot of effort into making it easy for you to add your profile picture.  In fact, we offer you 3 different ways to do it:

1) Upload it the old-fashioned way

2) Take a picture with your web cam

3) Grab your picture from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Gravatar with one click

Creating an EventVue profile is really simple, and that’s the way we think it should be.  We’d rather your attendees spend their time meeting each other than filling out yet another profile on yet another social network.  This is just one example of how EventVue is the easiest tool you could use to help your attendees meet the people that matter to them.

Yes, that’s right, we have just launched a new design of our front facing website. We’re pretty pumped about it because, well, we think it looks gorgeous. Much thanks goes to the great team at Orangecoat who did amazing work for us.

As part of the new site, we’re also launching a support community for EventVue powered by Get Satisfaction. If you have some really cool ideas for us — perhaps you know of this amazing thing we should for your next conference — please head over to Get Satisfaction and let us know.

We’re growing pretty steadily here at EventVue and are excited to have a new fresh looking face on the web to match our growth. Of course, these things are always a work in progress, so let us know what you think.

Keep watching us - we’ll be introducing some other new faces soon.

In 1914 Ernest Shackleton placed the following ad in a London newspaper seeking recruits for his imperial trans-antarctic expedition:

“MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”

Recruiting people to work for a startup can feel a lot like this classified ad. Startup life often means working long hours, taking less than competitive pay and accepting the fact that there are plenty of unknown variables that could affect your success.

Why did thousands of people respond to Shackleton’s ad? Why are so many people signing up for startup life?

It turns out your answer to “how was your day?” really matters. No one wants to work on something boring. We want to work somewhere where we can see our ideas become a reality. Life is too short to hate what you do all day. Life is too short to spend your life doing stuff that doesn’t matter. Life is too short to work in a cubicle.

Safe jobs aren’t safe anymore. Companies that have been around for decades are closing their doors. All of a sudden, startups don’t seem so risky anymore.

The reality is that you will spend a huge percentage of your life working at a job. Many people are realizing that working on stuff you believe in is much more satisfying than just getting a paycheck. Why sit around waiting for something to happen when you could be busy advancing something you believe in?

A few months ago I started talking to a few friends about a crazy idea. I’d noticed that every startup in Boulder was needing developers. At the same time, I had a gut feeling that there were hundreds of geeks across America that would love a chance to work at a startup, but just didn’t know how to get started. I enlisted some friends and we banded together to put on the boulder.me job fair. We’ve received hundreds of job applications and we’re now in the process of picking out 100 developers for will get a free trip to Boulder to interview with our companies. I’ve been blown away by both the response and the quality of applicants we’ve received. We’ve got some brilliant people heading to Boulder and all that’s left is to convince you why you should quit your job, move to Boulder and join this team of people who are obsessed with making conferences better.

EventVue is growing like crazy and we need passionate people to join us. More than anything we’re looking for smart people who believe in what we’re doing.

Conferences are where people gather to share ideas. Those ideas spread. Those ideas ultimately change the world.

By helping the right people connect at conferences, we’re helping those ideas spread faster. The conference industry has been stagnant for way too long. But it’s beginning to change. Conferences are waking up to the new reality of a connected world. With the cost of travel going up and the stock market going down, conference organizers are searching for new ways to convince people that their show is worth the trip.

I really believe a day is coming where every conference will use online tools to help their attendees connect. We’re going to be a part of that. We have the opportunity to determine what those tools should look like and then go out and build them. We’re going to take EventVue to conferences everywhere. We’re going to get to hear some amazing stories of what happens when the right people get together.

Want to be a part of that?

EventVue is built in PHP, so it would help if you’re good at writing code that starts with <?php and ends with ?>. There are an awful lot of conferences that still need to be introduced to EventVue. That means that we’re going to need a lot more servers and some smart people who know how to manage them. With thousands of people using our product, our user interface is going to be pretty important. Want to help us design that? We are driven by ideas. We dream big and work hard. If you can see yourself fitting in an entrepreneurial environment that demands a broad range of skills, we’d like to talk to you.

We’re hiring people who want to change the world. If that’s you, let’s talk. Email me at josh@eventvue.com.

We’re continually looking for new ways to help the right people connect at conferences.

Our latest feature helps you make those connections by making it easier for you to note the people you want to meet. Our new favorites feature lets you make a personalized list of the people that you find interesting. Adding or removing people from your favorites is as simple as clicking a star. We’ve even included a print-friendly version that you can take to the conference.

Included with this release are a few design tweaks. We’ve redesigned our profiles to make them more streamlined. You can now send messages and favorite people directly from the search results. We’ve also added paging to the top of the search results so you don’t have to scroll so much.

We’re excited about the tools we are building and we would love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think.

We have been very lucky to have some amazing advisors help us make EventVue a success. Their voices of experience have been invaluable over the past year to help us avoid many pitfalls that could have derailed our initiatives.

Today, we’re extremely proud to announce that two of these advisors, Wendy Lea and Paul Berberian, have been appointed to our board of directors (pending the legal stuff that makes it official). Both are successful, trusted, and well respected entrepreneurs with long track records for getting early-stage startup companies up and running. Wendy has some of the sharpest marketing instincts in the country and Paul has previously taken a company public. We are very pleased to have their continued support to guide EventVue’s future growth.

A hearty and warm welcome to Paul and Wendy from the entire EventVue team! Feel free to leave a comment welcoming them as well.

We’re happy to announce that EventVue will be delivering the online community for DEMOfall 08! We’ve been working with the DEMO team to bring the EventVue tools to DEMO so that the DEMO presenting companies and attendees can get the most of the networking opportunities at DEMO.

DEMO is the world’s premier launch platform for the hottest emerging technologies. DEMO brings together the top media and investors to see the latest innovations unveiled for the very first time and we’re proud to be powering the person-to-person connections that happen at the event. Check out the DEMOfall 08 EventVue community and get a peek at who is coming to DEMO.

Of course, not all of us will be able to attend DEMO so if you want to get the inside track on what’s happening, follow the special twitter account we’ve set up, @demofall08. This account will republish all the tweets of the registered DEMOfall attendees during the event. We expect it to be a neat way to hear about all the cool companies that are presenting at DEMOfall in real time from the people who are actually there at the event.

A few months ago we announced our new chatter functionality. The concept is simple. Conference attendees add their twitter accounts to EventVue. We then find their tweets, aggregate them within EventVue and republish them on twitter. This provides a powerful way for people to follow the conversation that is happening at an event. We’ve gotten great feedback on our chatter functionality and our auto-updating screens have been quite popular as well.

While the idea of aggregating tweets is simple, making it work isn’t quite as easy. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at EventVue and the technology that makes it happen. It’s the story of how a company called Gnip came to our rescue at just the right time.

Our first prototype

For our first chatter prototype we used a simple script that fetched the tweets from each attendee one at a time. The script ran once a minute and gave us a great proof of concept. We only had to demo it working with a couple dozen people. It was enough to get people excited about the feature and prove that we were onto something. It quickly became obvious that the method we were using for our prototype wouldn’t scale. We were querying twitter non-stop since we needed the conversations to be displayed in real time. We quickly grew from dozens of queries a minute to hundreds of queries a minute. With each request taking several seconds to process, it became harder and harder for us to present results in real time.

Our second attempt

Then we remembered that Twitter provides a feed of all your friends tweets. Ah-hah! All we needed to do was follow everyone who added their screenname in EventVue and we could get their tweets with a single request to twitter. Brilliant, right? Not quite. It turned out that the feed from twitter was missing about 50% of the tweets and it progressively got worse as we started following more and more people. People started complaining and we we were forced back to the drawing board once again.

Getting desperate

We went back to our first prototype except this time we used Summize (now a part of twitter). Their API is about 7 times faster, doesn’t have any published rate limiting, and most importantly allows complex queries up to 160 characters long. This meant that we could fetch tweets from a dozen people at a time. We turned on multi-threading, sacrificed a CPU and started pounding Summize as hard as we could! This enabled us to process tweets from several thousand people and display the results within just a few seconds. Not bad. It still wasn’t ideal, but we had exhausted every other option. Everything was going smoothly until I got this (somewhat inevitable) email from Greg Pass at Summize/Twitter:

“We notice you’re using the Twitter Search API — that’s great! Unfortunately, you are so exceeding our rate limits, that all of your requests are being refused. You’re currently at ~34 requests per second. If you slow it down to 1 request every few seconds, you’ll be back in action.”

Bummer!

That’s around the time when I heard that this new service called Gnip had added twitter support. Gnip promised to “make data portability suck less”. More specifically, they promised to take away my never ending battle with twitter. Needless to say, they had my attention. I started playing with their API and immediately feel in love. Instead of having to continually ask if there were any new tweets, Gnip offered to watch for me and to let me know when it came across any tweets that I cared about. It didn’t take much of a decision for us to switch to Gnip. A couple dozen lines of code later and Chatter was back — better and faster than ever! Gnip gave me the push architecture that I desperately needed, freed up our computing resources and ultimately saved us a huge amount of time and money.

For anyone who finds themselves in a similar predicament, I can’t recommend Gnip enough. Gnip has a rock solid service and a team that has been incredible in helping us make the transition.

We’re highly indebted to the guys at Gnip. This post is really just to say thanks.