Here's the press release we issued upon the launch of Eventful Demand at the ETech Conference in San Diego on March 8th:
Turn Ideas Into Events With EVDB's 'Eventful Demand' - a New Free Service for Building Viral Demand & Facilitating Bookings
Bring VIPs, Authors, Indie Bands, Conferences & More to Town
SAN DIEGO, March 8 /PRNewswire/ -- O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference -- Power to the people has now reached the world of event bookings with EVDB Inc.'s new Eventful Demand, a free online service for mounting grassroots campaigns to attract performers, personalities, conferences and more to local venues. This new addition to EVDB's Eventful.com website uses the viral power of the Internet to build a critical mass of supporters for a given request, then alerts promoters or venues when certain thresholds are reached. This mix of petitioning and matchmaking helps turn event ideas into reality.
e-Petition Power
Visitors to http://eventful.com can now set up a "Demand" for a particular indie band, mystery novelist, little-distributed Sundance flick, animal rights advocate, political blogger or any other desired attraction by clicking on the Demand tab on the site's home page. Demands can also take the form of requesting a professional organization to hold its next conference in a certain city, asking a local store to host a private sale, inviting a well-known entertainer or public figure to give a lecture or serve as the master of ceremonies for a community event, and so on.
In addition, performers of any type can announce their availability and encourage fans to create requests by posting special "Demand me!" buttons that link directly to Eventful.com on their blogs or websites.
Once a demand is created, the service provides spread-the-word tools such as emails inviting friends to sign on, e-stickers resembling wanted posters for use on personal blogs and websites, and links to social bookmarking sites where users can further publicize their efforts. All tools link directly back to Eventful.com so that like-minded individuals can easily add their votes to any request.
Eventful.com will consolidate demands from contiguous zip codes to create a true picture of local support, help rally additional support by enabling users to search the entire demand database by performer and/or city for campaigns of interest, and post detail pages for each performer or personality on the current demand list. The service will also regularly update the number of demands for each campaign to provide user feedback, and notify the appropriate parties of the "we want you" activity to help secure bookings.
More Votes, More Events
These tools empower local residents by helping them shape their entertainment calendars. Performers and others can now book dates and venues knowing how large a house they can fill in a particular city. Smaller bands might have house concerts. Independent film directors might agree to screen their latest movie and host a post-show discussion. Even better-known figures might respond to a local demand by adding a special appearance or lecture to their itinerary when they are in town for another event.
"Until now, consumers had to sit back and wait for events to come to them. Eventful Demand not only gives them a vehicle for initiating and publicizing event requests and building demand, but it also acts as their advocate by proactively contacting the performers and their representatives to get them involved in making the event happen," said Brian Dear, EVDB founder and CEO and the creator of Eventful.com. "This is something completely new."
Eventful Demand adds to the functionality of Eventful.com, a worldwide calendar of event listings that can be searched and browsed by keyword, geographical region, date and time. The site also allows users to contribute their own public or private events, receive notification of new events via RSS and iCalendar feeds, create and join groups of like-minded users, and create and share personal calendars through their own websites or blogs.
About EVDB
EVDB Inc. is a provider of search engine and web services technology for event and venue data worldwide. The company operates Eventful.com, a website that enables people to discover, contribute and share events of all kinds around the globe, and makes its EVDB API available to developers for building tools and desktop, web, and mobile applications that interact with the EVDB database. The San Diego-based firm was founded by Brian Dear, an experienced Internet entrepreneur, and is backed by investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Omidyar Network. For more information, visit http://www.eventful.com .
Source: EVDB Inc.
