May 24, 2007

Recent Media Mentions

Some recent media mentions of Eventful:

• The other day, CNET let us know that we've been selected as a finalist in their WebWare 100 best-of-the-web awards for 2007. Click on the icon below to go vote for Eventful!
  
• Cindy Rakowitz of the Voice America podcast interviews Eventful CEO Jordan Glazier. It's about 1 hour long. (Here is a link to the MP3 itself).

  Part of the interview includes a 3-way interview between Cindy, Jordan, and Eric Hawke, marketing director from indie record label Strange Music, who talks about how his company's been using Eventful Demand to gain more exposure for his artists, including Tech N9ne. Quote: "Eventful Demand has definitely become a very useful tool for us. We're using that to determine markets which Tech [N9ne] maybe hasn't been to, and what the demand is in those particular areas. We just did a contest on Eventful Demand and of course Seattle, being one of our biggest markets, ended up getting the show, and we've decided to go ahead and increase that to include other cities, along the routing there . . . . [Eventful Demand] exposed new markets where we didn't even know we had a demand, you know, which was really wonderful."

• Here's another interview, conducted by Jon Udell, with Brian Dear, Eventful's founder. Approximately 34 minutes. Here's a direct link to the MP3 file.
• The June 2007 issue of WIRED magazine includes an article on web services for the "digital underground". Eventful is mentioned in a 59-word blurb that even the busiest and hippest of today's continuous-partial-attention digerati crowd should be able to find the time to read.
• The TechPresident blog has a new posting about the rise of presidental candidate Ron Paul, including Mr. Paul's popularity in Eventful Demand (he's the most demanded Republican candidate).

  By the way if you haven't seen TechPresident's coverage of Eventful's politics demands, you should definitely check it out.

• On May 10th, Eventful was selected as Website of the Day at GeekSugar.com. From the review: "It's simple to use and jam packed with fun events. So much to see and do, oh me oh my!"
• A fascinating blog post on new media use in the Barack Obama campaign: read this article which mentions how the Obama campaign is using Eventful and other services. Quote: "He talked about Eventful, a site where people can demand that someone come to their town, whether it's Kelly Clarkson or 50 Cent or Barack Obama. When Obama visited Atlanta, 20,000 people showed up at a rally for him. They were able to mobilize large numbers because there had been a groundswell on Eventful of people asking for him to come there."
• Finally, congratulations are due to long-time Eventful user Johnathan Coulton (pictured below with yours truly during a visit to Eventful HQ back in February) who received a major write-up in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May 13th. From the article: "When he performs, he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140." While the Times doesn't mention Eventful Demand directly, Jonathan's definitely used and benefited from the service. In a follow-up post on his own blog, on the long strange journey from starting out in music to winding up in the pages of the Times, Jonathan had this to say about Eventful: " I had somehow come across Eventful.com, registered as an artist, and started to tell people through my site to go there and demand a show. When I found out at the last minute that I was going to be doing something with John Hodgman in Seattle one weekend in September 2006, I used Eventful and my own site to alert all my Seattle fans that I would do a show if someone would find an available venue for me. Within 24 hours I had several options, so I picked one and set up the show. An audience of 75 people materialized out of nowhere to come hear me play. My booking agent called me after that to say “Forget what I said about ever-widening concentric circles, it looks like there’s a way to skip that step.” And now he and I use the numbers at Eventful (along with his own expertise at this sort of thing) to plan where I’m going to play. In September 2006 Thing a Week ended, then right before Christmas the Thing a Week Box Set went on sale. Around then I was interviewed on NPR Weekend Edition which led to another huge surge in traffic. I continue to receive and rely on the support of bloggers, podcasters and fans, and I’m playing shows for ever more thrillingly large audiences in cities I’ve never been to before. And then there was that NY Times Magazine story, which seemed to tie it all together in ways that even I hadn’t been able to express."