Zvents Gains Big New Round

Zvents announced a big, new funding round ($24M) from Nokia Growth Partners, NAVTEQ (also Nokia-owned) and AT&T. That makes about $31M to date approximately. The company now has an impressive partner list, including Yellowpages.com, MTV, MSN and lots of newspapers. 

The interesting question is: Where to now? Zvents clearly has aspirations beyond “events,” which the company defines very broadly. Here’s an indication from the language in the press release: 

Zvents powers a unified international search index for the partner network, on which local consumers everywhere can perform “what, when, and where” searches for millions of events, businesses, performers, and other activities in their areas. This unique search technology platform aggregates data via web crawling and extraction, user- and merchant-generated content, and dozens of data partnerships; and provides localized search relevance and ranking to individual media partners.

Through its search service, Zvents creates for local businesses the opportunity to promote their locations online in ways that match their established media buying patterns. Events motivate consumers to engage with local businesses – a fact that local advertisers have utilized in print promotions for decades. The Zvents network is an enormous online distribution channel by which merchants can distribute these proven, effective marketing messages to engage local consumers. The Zvents network supports a paid listings model which enables merchant self-service, multiple local sales forces, and agencies to quickly and easily sell and syndicate local event and business listings.

Placecast in LBS Ads Deal with Eventful

Among the many flavors of online ad targeting, there are geotargeting, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting and demographic targeting. 1020/Placecast aims to subsume most of these under the concept of “place,” which is not the same as location in the mind of CEO Anne Bezancon. Place is more specific but also broader and potentially incorporates more elements — time of day, demographics, context — in addition to location.

This morning the company announced a “cross-platform” ad deal with Eventful, which includes desktop (including email) and mobile (Eventful has an iPhone app). According to the release:

Placecast enables Eventful to segment site visitors based upon the location of specific events, significantly increasing advertising revenue opportunities through premium location-based inventory. In addition to advanced targeting, Placecast brings the expertise of a dedicated sales team, which collaborates with Eventful’s direct sales force.

Placecast adds a new dimension to audience targeting by using location-based information provided by publisher sites. This allows advertisers to deliver messages customized to a specific audience and a specific location, increasing the relevancy of these ads and therefore the value of the publisher’s inventory. Using proprietary targeting algorithms, Placecast delivers more relevant ads by matching publisher data with information specific to an event venue in which a user expresses interest. For example, a user checking Eventful’s site for the next Coldplay concert in New York City would see an ad for Scion with the address and link to the closest Scion dealership, while a user looking for outdoor activities in San Francisco would see a localized ad for Subaru.

Placecast tries to use any available location-aware technology or data to deliver place-based ads. In the example provided above, there’s a combination of demographic and local targeting going on, based on the younger demographic profile of most Eventful users.

As the technical barriers to location awareness come down — more on that later — the challenge becomes having enough of the right kind of ad inventory to serve ads that can take full advantage of Bezancon’s notion of “place.” (There’s probably enough “local” ad inventory today in one sense but it’s not centrally available for all to tap into.) This will require dynamic delivery of ad creative, such as what Yahoo is seeking to do with ShopLocal/PointRoll and Publicis (in mobile). Ads will need to be parsed into components so that they can be changed on the fly, depending on the audience, location, behavior, etc.

That dynamic, templated ad model is still somewhat experimental. By contrast the beauty of search is that it’s directional and so there’s some manifestion of consumer interest and intent — and the system doesn’t have to work quite as hard to deliver relevant ads.

Zvents, MTV Team Up on College Sites

MTV, which is developing a network of “Campus Daily Guides,” has partnered with Zvents to offer events, local content and ads on a series of local sites targeting college students. Here’s an example site for George Washington University in Washington, DC:

There are currently 25 sites in the US, with an equal number more expected to launch by the end of the year.

These sites are potentially very effective marketing vehicles and could become widely used, depending on how well MTV manages them and develops their content. If it’s done thoughtfully and well it could become a powerful “hyper-local” cityguide network for twenthysomethings. If done cynically or in a perfunctory way, it could fall flat.

In any event (so to speak) it’s another good distribution deal for Zvents in the company’s quest to evolve and broaden its reach.

Zvents Formally Announces MSN Deal

Hopefully I didn’t blow the embargo, but last week I wrote about Zvents’ integration into MSN Cityguides. Today the relationship was formally announced:

Microsoft selected Zvents to power the Events, Venues and Performers platforms for MSN City Guides, because the Zvents Media Platform infuses MSN City Guides with new character and capabilities for identifying and delivering information about local things to do. Zvents partners with hundreds of media channels to distinguish the local search experience with verve and detail what’s currently happening in any locale. The broad scope of the Zvents Media Platform is enriched with highly targeted advertising that relates specifically to an individual’s search for things to do. Local advertisers can deliver specific information to audiences looking for promotions, event, and business listings that relate to unique interests and searches.

Zvents Adds MSN to Its Roster

Zvents is now being integrated into MSN Cityguides:

Zvents is actively trying to broaden the definition of “events” to include promotions/sales and happenings that don’t fall into conventional performing, arts or sports and entertainment categories — as a prelude to further local expansion.

More such partnerships are on the way.

CultureMob: Events and Recommendations

The local events segment is now relatively crowded. There’s Zvents, Eventful, Yahoo/Upcoming, Citysearch, Thrillist, newspaper sites, AmericanTowns.com, among others, as well as numerous specialized events “verticals” (e.g., local wine events or Jambase). Yet “events,” which can be defined in various ways, is an important piece of the local puzzle.

I recently became aware of a new site CultureMob, which has a strong social element and is also offering events recommendations to registered users. Zync, which was not long ago acquired by uLocate, was trying to do something similar with recommendations. CultureMob is currently live in four US cities: Seattle, Portland, Phoeniz, Denver.

Local events is also interesting because an area where “discovery” is more important than “search.” Mobile is also an important platform for events.

Zvents Rising

At the recent Urban Mapping Local Summit in Las Vegas I had dinner next to Ethan Stock, CEO of Zvents. I’d met Ethan at an NAA conference but much more formally in a booth. Under the influence of several glasses of wine (me) he and I chatted about a range of interesting topics, funding, local, etc.

Stock is very thoughtful about the issues and problems in local — in general the event offered some of the more interesting conversations about the local Internet I’ve had.

Zvents more broadly is a very interesting company and the roadmap stretches beyond what is there today. For example, shopping is an intriguing category that offers considerable potential. But that’s just one area.

Zvents has done a range of deals with third parties (e.g., newspapers) and so is making money. Although they’re one of several companies in the local events segment — all events are local by definition — they have a reasonable chance of realizing some of those larger ambitions.

Superpages Adds Local Events

Maybe this has been on the site for weeks and I haven’t seen it but Superpages now features a listing of local events:

The events data are provided by American Towns, which hosts the actual listing.

What’s interesting about this to me is the way it further expands the yellow pages “use cases” beyond core service business listings. One of the IYP efforts has been to develop traffic through biz dev and third party relationships. But improving site usage frequency is an equally important initiative.

Online Event Sites Proliferating

Online events as a category is literally and figuratively a microcosm of the local space itself. There’s now lots of fragmentation and no single comprehensive source of data (Ethan Stock of Zvents would probably argue that point).

Even two or three years ago, local events used to be entirely the realm of print newspapers with little competition from online. Now there are a host of competitors showing you local events. Here’s the very partial top-of-mind list (alpha order):

• AOL City Guide
• Attendio
• Citysearch
• DiscoverOurTown
• Eventful
• GoCityKids (Viacom-owned)
• Going.com
• Google Calendar (Public Events)
• Meetup
• Ticketmaster
• Yahoo! Local/Upcoming
• Yelp (just launched this week)
• Zvents

And there are a host of events in the music space, including Oodle’s Bandtracker and the independent Jambase. Indeed, every ticket site is an events site. Speaking of which, UK-based ticket-search site Tickex recently launched in the US. CEO Richard Robinson recently told me that he’s aiming to be the “Kayak of ticket search.”

Beyond this partial list above, every local newspaper site and independent city guide or tourism site has events. And there are many niche event sites, such as LocalWineEvents.

Like the experience of online travel booking and trip planning, this is both good and bad. It gets into the “paradox of choice” discussion again. Where there was once little or no good information, now there’s arguably too much. In that context, sites that already have trust and brand momentum will likely do well in this segment.

New Ask Mobile App. Launched

Ask has launched a new GPS-powered mobile application that contains content from Citysearch and Evite (and other IAC properties in the future). In the quick overview I received, I was impressed with its many features and capabilities. But the most interesting and impressive aspects of it from my point of view involve the integration your contacts, the application’s content and tools and GPS, allowing me to send my location information very simply to many people simultaneously through my contact list.

In a certain way the current (and intended future) integration of these IAC brands and content under the Ask mobile application is more successful than anything IAC has yet been able to do online.

Here are a few screenshots:

Here’s Ask’s own description/discussion of the service on the Ask blog.

Yahoo!’s Upcoming Gets an Upgrade

Events is an important but historically neglected area of local search, previously the almost exclusive province of newspapers and printed weeklies. Now there are a range of startups and more established sites providing local events information. They include Socializr, Attendio, Eventful, Zvents, Citysearch, AOL Cityguide, Heyletsgo, Jambase, the various ticket sites and Yahoo’s Upcoming, among others. And this doesn’t include all the online newspaper calendars and entertainment guides.

When Yahoo bought “social events calendar” Upcoming.org more than a year ago the site was basically three guys, a cool idea and some software, but not lots of data. The events information is entirely provided by the community. And Yahoo! has greatly upgraded and improved the site since the acquisition.

The rest of this brief post is at Search Engine Land.