I thought I'd do a little mid way event-week wrapup to summarize the state of affairs. I am obviously obsessed with events and event software. I've been obsessing over the issue of leveraging the web to market, promote and organize events with my Company, WhizSpark, for the past 3 years. The innovative companies that I've highlighted so far are attempting to change the way that events are discovered and created.

Skobee, Eventful Demand, HeyLetsGo and Meet with Approval are tools that let us publish our interest in activities and our availability. Skobee, HeyLetsGo and Eventful Demand take it a step further and let us contribute our individual interests to a public store of information. By doing so, these services are aggregating our interests in public. This is a capability that meetup first enabled. But, meetup's more rigid category based groupings have been outdone by these free form user generated tagging and event entry forms. Instead of centrally controlled meetups, these services let us enter whatever event we want and let us describe it through the use of tags in whichever way we want.

With these capabilities, we are being given the capabilities to program our own experiences and determine demand - all in a public fashion.

Once demand is determined, I believe that most events worth attending will be planned by someone. Probably an organization, venue, performers or promoters. They'll atleast need the tools to publish the basic event information to their websites and let people organize that in this new interoperable world. This is the capability that Trumba is delivering.

The next crop of tools that I've highlighted enable us to find and search for events. Up until now, event information has been held hostage in silos and proprietary websites. But, Zvents, upcoming.org, Eventful, Busy Tonight, HeyLetsGo are all working on the problem of aggregating event information and making it searchable. They each have different approaches to the same problem of not being able to find 'anything to do in this damn town'. Although, I am sure that people will always make that excuse, the rest of us that aren't trapped by our own laziness, will be able to point these people to these services.

Now that there are unlimited possibilities at our fingertips; large stores of centrally located and searchable events, managing this glut of information is the next challenge. That's where personal calendars come in like 30 Boxes and Spongecell. I should also certainly cite the personal event aggregator, EventSniper, as a novel approach to organizing event information, that I believe should be a part of other online calendars. Although, I really don't want to try each of these services myself, I am sure I'll be able to find well written reviews from other people and highlight what each of these companies makes them purportedly better than the other. I've started with Spongecell and 30 Boxes. Next up, I'll hightlight the rest.

Where to go from there? I believe that the next step for event services online is to leverage the web to make an event last more than its duration. Ha? New relationships are formed as a result of events. And existing ones usually become stronger. Bridging the gap from the web to the event and back to the web is the next frontier. Using the web to capture the experience in digital form (pictures, video, words, etc). Then, letting people continue to relate online after they've met in person. HeyLetsGo does some of this. But, there are others working in this space too.

Til then.... I hope you are enjoying event week. Again, if you have something you'd like me to highlight (including your own project or company), please send me an email to pcaputa at whizspark dot com.