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Posts Tagged ‘conferences’

If ticketing startup Eventbrite wants to become the Ticketmaster of do-it-yourself events, it just added a new board member who might have some ideas on how to get there. The company just added Sean Moriarty to its board of directors. Moriarty was previously the CEO of Ticketmaster, which he helped build into an events juggernaut between 2005 and March, 2009, when he left the company.

Whereas Ticketmaster rules ticketing for large events at concerts and sports stadiums, “Eventbrite is coming at event management from a grassroots effort,” says Moriarty. “It is effectively providing tools that did not previously exist.” Eventbrite lets anyone create and sell tickets for events ranging from backyard BBQs to TechCrunch 50 (we use Eventbrite for many of our conferences).

Last year, Eventbrite sold more than $100 million worth of tickets. Eventbrite takes various fees for paid tickets, including 2.5 percent of the ticket price, plus another 3 percent if it acts as the payment processor instead of a credit card or Paypal. (Watch our recent interview with the founders and Sequoia VC Roelof Botha).
“We want to do a billion dollars” worth of ticket sales, CEO Kevin Hartz told me about a month ago. Over the next few years, that is certainly possible.

By that point, Ticketmaster had better watch out.

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As the way consumers read books evolves, there is an opportunity for mobile technologies to connect consumers with their favorite reads. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, is collaborating with one of the most foremost publishers, Random House, to launch iPhone apps for authors.

The Random House group will launch free individual iPhone applications, powered by Mobile Roadie, for three of its bestselling authors—Steve Berry, Sophie Kinsella, and Karen Marie Monin. With this new application, fans will be able to preview books, access bonus content, interact with other fans, check upcoming author appearances, listen to audiobook clips, watch author videos and book trailers, and more.

Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference.

Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.

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Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.

The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly.

Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.

Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.

Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.

Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).

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As mobile web usage increases, conference attendees need real-time, updated information on the go that can be accessible from mobile devices. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, has developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. LeWeb 2009 is set to take place next week in Paris, France. The LeWeb App, which is free, essentially puts the entire conference in the pockets of show attendees and lets anyone who isn’t attending the conference watch a live stream of the events directly from their iPhones.

The LeWeb App packs in the essentials for attendees, speakers, and participants, including a detailed show schedule and agenda, speaker bios, and directions. To help people network at the show, the app contains a list of show attendees with a link to their Twitter profiles. The application also supports Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, so that all comments and Tweets can be blasted back out to Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag for LeWeb. And the app features push notifications so administrators can send alerts and updates easily to iPhone users.

Mobile Roadie has partnered with Ustream to enable iPhone users to watch LeWeb live inside its own app. For now, Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.

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Technology conferences are supposed to have Internet. Most don’t. In fact, audiences are trained to be grateful for even a trickle of bandwidth. Maybe enough to get off a Tweet or two. But uploading photos and videos is something that you do later, after the event is over. Because it can take days.

It’s been a real problem for us over the years. We’ve thrown money at the problem. We’ve tried new vendors and technologies. We’ve prayed. And cursed. I’ve offered vendors a big wet kiss of a post on TechCrunch if they could get it right. They never have.

Last year we had a full day Internet outage at TechCrunch50, and it wasn’t better on day 2. The only good thing about an Internet outage is that most attendees can’t blog or tweet about it, since they can’t get on the Internet.

Giving 2,000 hard core Internet users simultaneous access from a single location is very, very hard. I’ve seen grown men cry when they tried and failed.

This year, though, WOW. There was more Internet at TechCrunch50 than you could shake a stick at. And for that, Mariette Systems gets that big wet kiss I promised.

The team: Ernie Mariette, Cliff Skolnick and Tim Pozer. They came in, brought bandwidth (100 Mbps line-of-site microwave link from WiLine and 30 Mbps from Telekenex), hooked it into a BSD router and distributed it throughout the building via more than 100 Cisco switches and 28 wifi access points. There were hundreds of ethernet connections (and power strips) at attendee tables. Plus dedicated bandwith to Ustream, the DemoPit area and the main stage. And, overall, lots of very happy attendees.

There were more than 1,200 simultaneous connections at peak points, and bursts of up to 88 Mbps inbound bandwidth usage. But no one was ever cut back. And I noticed multiple people in the audience watching the live Ustream feed on their laptops. Others were watching the US Open livestream. In other words, the audience was totally wasting bandwidth. And it was wonderful.

In fact, I was a little disappointed that the audience failed to make our Internet fail. They tried their best, and were found wanting.

Thanks very much, Mariette Systems. We owe you. And we love you. Keep doing Apple’s WWDC and other huge events, but keep your calendar clear for our conferences, too. I wouldn’t want to work with anyone else.

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Apple announced today that its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has already sold out. That’s pretty incredible considering two things. First, tickets went on sale only a month ago, and are anything but cheap — even the early-bird special was well over $1,000. (And remember, this is a recession, and plenty of other conferences are struggling to move tickets.) And second, last year’s event was the first one ever to sell out — and that only happened a couple weeks before the actual show.

Clearly, anticipation is high for this year’s event for a number of reasons. The first is that developers and presumably the audience at the keynote (which we’ll be at, so that means all of you will get to follow along as well) will get a major glimpse at OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” The new OS is currently being tested by developers, but most of the expected user interface changes have yet to be unveiled. WWDC may be the first time anyone gets a real look at those.

But even bigger than Snow Leopard, is the possibility that Apple may use the event to unveil a new version of the iPhone. There have been no shortage of rumors about this, but some kind of new hardware now appears pretty likely. Will it offer faster data speeds? Will it have video recording capabilities? Will it have better battery life? An OLED screen? People want to know. Last year at WWDC, Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G, and dropped the bomb that it would only cost $199 after subsidy.

One other thing that is undoubtedly causing a lot of interest in this year’s WWDC, is the question of whether CEO Steve Jobs will make an appearance. Publically, Apple is saying that Jobs remains on track to make a return at the end of June, but could he really pass up an opportunity to unveil the above two products? I’ve contacted Apple to see who is slated to be the keynote speaker this year, and will update if I hear back.

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