We’re happy to announce that EventVue will be delivering the online community for DEMOfall 08!  We’ve been working with the DEMO team to bring the EventVue tools to DEMO so that the DEMO presenting companies and attendees can get the most of the networking opportunities at DEMO.

DEMO is the world’s premier launch platform for the hottest emerging technologies. DEMO brings together the top media and investors to see the latest innovations unveiled for the very first time and we’re proud to be powering the person-to-person connections that happen at the event.   Check out the DEMOfall 08 EventVue community and get a peek at who is coming to DEMO.

Of course, not all of us will be able to attend DEMO so if you want to get the inside track on what’s happening, follow the special twitter account we’ve set up, @demofall08.  This account will republish all the tweets of the registered DEMOfall attendees during the event.  We expect it to be a neat way to hear about all the cool companies that are presenting at DEMOfall in real time from the people who are actually there at the event.

A few months ago we announced our new chatter functionality.  The concept is simple.  Conference attendees add their twitter accounts to EventVue.  We then find their tweets, aggregate them within EventVue and republish them on twitter.  This provides a powerful way for people to follow the conversation that is happening at an event.  We’ve gotten great feedback on our chatter functionality and our auto-updating screens have been quite popular as well.

While the idea of aggregating tweets is simple, making it work isn’t quite as easy.  Here is a behind-the-scenes look at EventVue and the technology that makes it happen.  It’s the story of how a company called Gnip came to our rescue at just the right time.

Our first prototype

For our first chatter prototype we used a simple script that fetched the tweets from each attendee one at a time.  The script ran once a minute and gave us a great proof of concept.  We only had to demo it working with a couple dozen people.  It was enough to get people excited about the feature and prove that we were onto something.  It quickly became obvious that the method we were using for our prototype wouldn’t scale.  We were querying twitter non-stop since we needed the conversations to be displayed in real time.  We quickly grew from dozens of queries a minute to hundreds of queries a minute.   With each request taking several seconds to process, it became harder and harder for us to present results in real time.

Our second attempt

Then we remembered that Twitter provides a feed of all your friends tweets.  Ah-hah!  All we needed to do was follow everyone who added their screenname in EventVue and we could get their tweets with a single request to twitter.  Brilliant, right?  Not quite.  It turned out that the feed from twitter was missing about 50% of the tweets and it progressively got worse as we started following more and more people.  People started complaining and we we were forced back to the drawing board once again.

Getting desperate

We went back to our first prototype except this time we used Summize (now a part of twitter).  Their API is about 7 times faster, doesn’t have any published rate limiting, and most importantly allows complex queries up to 160 characters long.  This meant that we could fetch tweets from a dozen people at a time.  We turned on multi-threading, sacrificed a CPU and started pounding Summize as hard as we could!  This enabled us to process tweets from several thousand people and display the results within just a few seconds.  Not bad.   It still wasn’t ideal, but we had exhausted every other option.  Everything was going smoothly until I got this (somewhat inevitable) email from Greg Pass at Summize/Twitter:

“We notice you’re using the Twitter Search API — that’s great! Unfortunately, you are so exceeding our rate limits, that all of your requests are being refused.  You’re currently at ~34 requests per second. If you slow it down to 1 request every few seconds, you’ll be back in action.”

Bummer!

That’s around the time when I heard that this new service called Gnip had added twitter support.  Gnip promised to “make data portability suck less”.  More specifically, they promised to take away my never ending battle with twitter.  Needless to say, they had my attention.  I started playing with their API and immediately feel in love.   Instead of having to continually ask if there were any new tweets, Gnip offered to watch for me and to let me know when it came across any tweets that I cared about.   It didn’t take much of a decision for us to switch to Gnip.  A couple dozen lines of code later and Chatter was back — better and faster than ever!   Gnip gave me the push architecture that I desperately needed, freed up our computing resources and ultimately saved us a huge amount of time and money.

For anyone who finds themselves in a similar predicament, I can’t recommend Gnip enough.  Gnip has a rock solid service and a team that has been incredible in helping us make the transition.

We’re highly indebted to the guys at Gnip.  This post is really just to say thanks.

That’s right, your attendees are talking.  In our participatory web that’s emerging around us, what your attendees are thinking and writing about on the web is important and valuable content.  We at EventVue have always believed that the best conferences are a gathering of a community and the content and ideas of your attendees is a key gathering point of your community.

This is why we have built new tools that find the content that your attendees are creating around the web and help you share that with your audience - namely the other conference attendees.  When attending a conference in our tech industry, I enjoy finding out about other attendees who are blogging and pushing the field of knowledge forward in our industry.  In fact, that’s how we have formed some great relationships.

With our RSS feeds for attendee content, you as a conference organizer can feature and highlight what your attendees are saying on your conference website.  As an example, I’ve created a widget that features the recent blog posts from attendees to the NYC SummerMash event.  Check it out and if you’re a conference organizer, get in touch with us and let’s set up something similar up for your conference.

We’re pretty excited over here at the EventVue headquarters to announce that EventVue will be powering the Mashable SummerMash tour.  We’re big fans of Mashable and Pete and are pumped about working with them.

The EventVue communities will help people who attend the SummerMash events all across the country to connect with the other attendees.  We’ve been to a Mashable event before and remember how important it was to us to meet some of the other people attending.  As of today, we’re joining with Mashable to make this easier.

We’re also launching some brand new functionality for the SummerMash tour.  As we announced earlier, we’ve built some really cool tools that help you keep up with the conversation at conferences.  We’re particularly excited about the Twitter functionality — SummerMash attendees will now be able to follow one twitter stream to see all the tweets from all the attendees at the SummerMash events.  So let’s all cross our fingers and hope Twitter will work (yeah, it’s risky) so we can deliver the next step in helping attendees connect at conferences.

We’re launching three of the communities today; the SummerMash Seattle, SummerMash Los Angeles, and SummerMash San Francisco.  If you’re attending any of these, log in to the EventVue community and get started.  You can follow along on Twitter at @seattlemash, @lamash, and @sanfranmash.  You’ll want to register to attend these events at if you’re in one of the three cities.  Always remember: Don’t Mash Alone!

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with 360conferences.  360conferences produces conferences under the sole premise that “Great Conferences should not be Expensive.”  We’re excited that they have chosen EventVue to provide the online community for their conference.  360conferences just wrote about why they chose EventVue on their blog and we love it!

360conferences has an upcoming conference in August in San Jose focusing on the Flex/Adobe development world.  If you’re a developer playing around with the new Flex technology including AIR, we highly encourage you to check it out.  Of course, if you are planning to go to the 360|Flex conference, you know that we’ll be there helping you make the most of your networking experience and inviting you to participate in the EventVue community for 360|Flex.

We’re excited to be working with 360conferences to help them deliver some killer shows for their attendees. 360|Flex is just the start!

We think it’s important for our customers to see for themselves how their attendees are connecting through our product.  That’s why we’ve added a way for event organizers to see what’s happening in their communities.

With our new stats pages, event organizers can now see:

• How many of their attendees have signed into EventVue
• What percentage of users filled out a profile, uploaded a picture or added some tags
• How many messages have been sent
• Who the most popular attendees are in their community
• (And my personal favorite) A map showing the geographical spread of their attendees

This is just our first iteration.  We’ll be adding more statistics as we hear your feedback.  Be sure to let us know what other information you care about so we can continue to improve our product and give you one more reason to use EventVue.

I recently attended the Google IO conference in San Francisco. There were some great sessions, but that’s not why I was there — I was there for the 2999 other developers!

I’ve been to a lot of conferences in the past year, but most of them have been EventVue customers. It was a strange experience for me to attend a conference that didn’t use our product. I think it was healthy for me to feel the pain of going to a conference without EventVue. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing there are people in the building you want to meet and having no way to find or connect with them!

Everyone who has attended a conference before can probably relate to my pain. In fact, we get emails all the time that say:

“I don’t want to attend another conference that doesn’t use EventVue.”

We want to do everything we can to make EventVue available at the conferences you love. We’ve now made it easier for you to tell us which conferences should be using EventVue. Simply look for the link on our homepage or inside any EventVue community. We’ll take your suggestions and do everything we can to win them as EventVue customers.

To be fair, we can’t take credit for the idea.  Bill Flagg from RegOnline gave us the original inspiration for this feature:

My experience at Google IO reminded me that what we are doing really matters. I came back to Boulder more passionate about our work, and more excited for the day when EventVue is a standard part of every conference experience (including you, Google).

We’re proud to announce that the Colorado’s Technology Association (CSIA) has named EventVue Rookie of the Year.  David Cohen has a great writeup over at Colorado Startups.

The award is given to the most promising technology company in Colorado that has been operating for less than 18 months.  At the ceremony, CSIA announced that we were selected for our potential to transform the conference industry and the clear need for our product in the market.

We’re honored to have been selected for the award.  We’ve had a great first year at EventVue and next year looks even more promising than last.  Much thanks to everyone in the Boulder startup community who have helped us this far — we would be far less without your support.

We’ve been cranking away on new functionality at EventVue in the last weeks and we’re now ready to announce that it’s live! We’re really excited about the progress we’ve made here and the added value that we can now offer to conferences. Here’s what new at EventVue:

1. Twitter goodness. Twitter at conferences has been big. Really Big. We’ve seen what’s happened at SXSW (see the Sarah Lacy hoopla ), at Graphing Social Patterns, Defrag, and others. Twitter gets heavy use by attendees who want to find out who else is at the conference and share short commentary about the sessions they’re listening to. For conference organizers, Twitter is becoming a very powerful promotional tool to engage with attendees and build buzz around their events.

We’re now ready to take all this one major step forward. EventVue now brings all the conversation happening on twitter at a conference into one place inside EventVue. We make it possible to see what the other attendees are saying on Twitter at a conference.

This isn’t all though; we also publish this all back out to Twitter in a specialized twitter stream for each conference. Attendees can then follow the collective conversation any way they wish — on EventVue, by SMS at the conference, or using any of the many other Twitter clients.

2. Chatter. Want to know what attendees are talking about on the web before, during, and after a conference? We now find all the blog posts from the attendees and all the flickr pictures and youtube videos from the conference and aggregate them inside EventVue. Attendees are already writing on their blog about the content of the conference and uploading pictures and videos from their experience at the conference. We are now bringing all this together for attendees inside EventVue. We think this is a great way to uncover and participate in the conversation happening on the web around a conference.

3. Auto-discovery of where you are around the web. We’ve heard from many of our users that they would like it if we made it easier to fill out a profile in EventVue. We’ve listened and now with the help of some web magic, we discover stuff about you automatically like your blog, your LinkedIn profile, your Twitter account, and other sites around the web. It’s just one more way to make it easy to use EventVue. This is only the start — look for us to make it even easier in the near future as we do more and more cool stuff with various web APIs.

We’re very excited about this new functionality and can’t wait to see it in action at more and more conferences. Let us know what you think and if there’s some other really cool burning idea that you think we absolutely must do.

So you ever had that "Oh Crap!!" moment?

Well we just had one. We’ve been pretty excited about what’s going on at EventVue in the past month and wanted to tell all our friends about it. Naturally, right? After all, when we build cool new stuff, you guys want to hear about it.

So I wrote up a excited newsletter email to send out to you, our friends. And you probably recieved it with great excitement too. The first time. And then it came again. And again. And again. As it turns out, our servers sent out multiple copies of our newsletter email to each person.

Let me just say this: We’re sorry.

We’re running around the EventVue HQ pretty frantically right now trying to figure out what happened. We’re not sure how it happened just yet, but trust me, some of our servers are going to get an earful tonight. Please feel free to yell and scream and email us and tell us how much spammers suck. We’re sorry.

- Rob