Under The Radar: When 2.0 notes

I’m at Under the Radar today. Here’s my notes from the When 2.0 session on calendaring.

CalendarHub

Missed it.

Mosuki

Came in as the presentation started, didn’t get my laptop up in time to take good notes.

Social event discovery. Comments on events. Find what your friends and others are doing.

Arrington: Unfair to be in the calendar room since you’re not a calendar

Skobee

Skobee isn’t an event planner, it’s a tracker for the way you already plan events.

conversations with friends turn into events

fuzzy ideas at first, become firm as dates get decided

email integration. Skobee understands when: 3/6 9pm and when it sees an email that has this text, it sets or updates the event time. entered "Where: Coupa" and it found a restaurant called Coupa Cafe and automatically linked it

Plans IM integration too, so events planned by IM can be tracked by Skobee

Business model: local venue advertising, knows a lot about demographics so can serve very targeted ads

RSS and OPML exports of events

Steve Gillmore asks: where’s the calendar view. Noam: there isn’t one and no one has asked for it. Gillmore: how many people in the room want a calendar? No hands go up.

How’s the email parser work? No NLP now, needs when: and where: but there’s NLP on the part after the keywords to find times and locations

Arrington: likes the fact that email is natural. Doesn’t need unique addresses for email. Doesn’t need unique ID in the subject or body. Disappointed that Noam couldn’t tell them what’s coming because he had no idea what it was. Doesn’t care what the business model is. Shouldn’t need one, will get acquired sooner

Rael: Skobee is a focused app and looks at integration rather than adding on features

Krishna: Unique idea, good, agrees that no business model is needed.

ZVents

They’re not a calendar Either.

What’s going on in Mountain View right now? Google can’t say, the newspaper knows some of it, your friends know some of it.

Newspapers are getting their butts kicked and are looking for ways to compete. Search engines can’t find events but would like to

Events are expensive. There’s lots of money in advertising events. Everyone advertises events.

Where’s the data come from? Hard to do right. Times and dates are in many forms. Location information is often incomplete. No recurring patterns - different times on weekends, This Monday is off limits because the venue’s in use. Shelf life is short. Since events aren’t persistent they aren’t searchable by search engines

Craigslist events are shrinking lists 2500 events in the bay area. Zevents lists 76000

CPC advertising. What/where targeting.

Bay Area now, 20 metros 2006, 80 in 2007

Finding events through what/when/where search.

Has embedded calendars that are filtered and displayed inside existing sites. What to know about things for your kids? bayareakidfun.com has a zvents calendar

Search results in list, a map, or a calendar. Exports in RSS and ical

Krishna: Are you trying to replace the events section in the paper? Yes, but more. Building a data pump for all the social calendar.

Rael: don’t understand the story. It would be a good data source for Skobee. Interface needs work. The embedding into other apps is great. But either improve the interface, or let partners build the interface.

Arrington: I disagree with everything Rael said. How’s this different than eventful? Eventful has users enter content, zvents scrapes data

Audience: Wireless? Every event is tagged with lat/long. Has a REST interface, will let developers build mobile apps

Arrington: Not as pretty as Skobee, but this is the only company so far today with a real business model. Sees more and more people linking to zvents pages

Krishna: Likes the user perspective. Sees a challenge in how data’s gathered. Going back a step from user-centered, since users don’t control the data.

Audience (Noam): Once said that zvents becomes successful when they’re the plumbing behind other events systems. So how’s the business model work in that case? CPC advertising and distributed set of ad functions, so they can drive ads alongside events.

Rael: That makes sense, there’s the story. The plumbing and the ads are the compelling story.