EventSpan is For Sale!

Put up for sale in May, 2009, EventSpan is an on-demand publishing, social networking, search and syndication platform for webcasts, webinars, and various online events. EventSpan optimizes the public relations and lead generation efforts of event marketers.

As you may know, EventSpan has operated in a "beta" program for some time and we, NYC-based Aperio Networks, are working on other Web 2.0 ventures. EvenSpan will remain a valuable property and with a new owner it will continue to grow with some critical feature add-ons like integrated registration, e-commerce payment admissions, and other lead generation/CRM services.

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SEO Improvement for Webinars and Webcasts

To improve "search engine optimization" or SEO for webcasts and webinars, today we changed the URL structure of the enhanced web event listings that are uploaded by users to EventSpan. Previously we had a a unique URL for each event composed of a string of random characters. Now, with the new and improved URLs, we are using the title's words of the event, separated by hyphens, in the URL of the event listing. Using hyphens over underscores is better for SEO, as search engines like Google see hyphens as dividers in URLs and body text, and ignore underscores (underscore is not considered as a divider by Google).

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Search

In the world of webinars and webcasts, EventSpan stands on three legs: Search. Syndication. Social Networking. In our recently released alpha version, we've implemented Phase 1 of the syndication and social networking services and we will be adding more features to them in the near future.

Today and over successive days and weeks we're implementing a search functionality beyond the enhanced web event listings on the EventSpan site. In other words, EventSpan now automatically crawls the web and adds basic listing links to the search results of the EventSpan site. More and more listings links will be added. These non-featured links aren't nearly as rich or syndicated like EventSpan generated listings are (with the widgets and other social media sharing tools) but they add more value to the EventSpan site for those searching for webinar and webcast events.

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The Alpha Version of EventSpan: A Taste of What's To Come

Welcome to the alpha version of EventSpan, launched today. This is our public test mode and gives us a chance to show the rudimentary features in Version 1 of EventSpan to various players in the web event services market. Our alpha version is like a lick of the brownie batter before the product is fully baked. As you can see on the site there are now just a few events (some not fully populated with the richness of media that EventSpan affords), an expert speaker profile, and an industry professional profile or two.

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Soft as a Grape, And Seedless Too

Virtually all user-generated content ventures of the Web 2.0 sort launch their websites with pre-seeding of the content that they intend to aggregate and distribute. Everyone does this, because if you announced to the world the launch of your site and there wasn't any user-generated content there would be no interest and excitement on the part of the site visitor. So everyone seeds their site with pre-loaded content to create buzz. Yet this also speaks to the simple and relatively limited functionality of basic content listing sites. That's not EventSpan.

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EventSpan and AT&T Yellow Pages: Listings in Ruby-on-Rails

EventSpan, created by Aperio Networks, has been developed in Ruby-on-Rails, a newer, sophisticated framework designed specifically for developing web applications.

The development team at Aperio uses the Ruby-on-Rails framework for all of our web-based application ventures and we've been developing in it for over two years. Ruby-on-Rails has increasingly become the development choice for some prominent web startups, and today Ruby-on-Rails received a major validation as an excellent web development languauge: AT&T chose Ruby-on-Rails to power its new YELLOWPAGES.com site.

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Take a Peek

There are several groups in the web event services market that EventSpan involves: attendees, marketers, producers, sponsors, publicists, speakers, web event professionals, B2B publishers, and web event services companies. The EventSpan team is now offering the web event services companies, such as the technology companies that power online events, a peek of the EventSpan service.

Does your company power online events? Contact us now and we'll set up a private demo for you and leave you with access to the site to get a feel for this powerful search, syndication, and social networking site in the world of webcasts and webinars. There's also an opportunity for web event service providers to set up an account on EventSpan and create a "profile page" for a yearly fee. This page will allow a service provider to showcase its company through a content-managed page that features a company's offerings, its featured web events, its key business development executives, and its key speakers. A vendor can also upload its web event service related white papers and, optionally, embed an RSS feed in the profile page.

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Company Profile Page

 

EventSpan is offering a content-managed "profile page" for your company's featured offerings and people relationships in online events. It's a subscription-based account with a yearly fee that allows service providers to publish and maintain their company presence with a logo and description, featured web events, featured speakers, featured employees, uploaded white papers, award listings, an embedded blog or news feed, and contact information. It's like a home away from home page with embedded content related to web event services. All of the content on this profile page is published and edited at anytime by your company, and through this same account you can list for free any and all web events on the site for search and syndication. Site visitors are able to contact you with this page and "recommend" and virally share your profile page - with all the events, people, and content - with others.

If interested in getting a proposal from EventSpan to publish and advertise your web event services company in the company profile pages, please contact us.

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Admission Fee Required: Collection, Processing, and Ticketing in Online Events

A couple of years ago we were attending a web conferencing gathering hosted by a vendor for its end-users and partners. At the end of a presentation, we asked the question, "Are you developing any features in your web conferencing technology to allow your content-providing customers to accept online payments for their web-based events?" ...The presenter looked befuddled and didn't say much. We then quickly followed up with, "Is anyone in the audience collecting and processing online payments for people to attend web-based events?" Again, silence. We were shocked that no one was planning on selling tickets to online events. That was two years ago.

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Back to the Future: Announcing an XML Schema to Standardize Web Event Listings

We issued a press release today about EventSpan on Business Wire. The irony wasn't lost on us when we used an older, traditional newswire service to make an announcement about our future product - Eventspan.com - which will be a web platform to announce and promote webcasts and webinars using various search, web syndication, social media tools and marketing services features.

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Year of the EventSpan Widget

Forgive us with the self-serving title entry, as we borrow it from a not-well-known but believable declaration by Newsweek magazine that on the internet, 2007 will be the year of the widget. As we wrote about in a previous entry, a social media feature (among many) in EventSpan is the ability to automatically create widgets for one or a series of online events.

Widgets on the web, also knows as gadgets, are used in different ways. In the B2B space, Aperio Networks (developer of Eventspan) has developed a B2B widget exchange platform that will be used in the Web 2.0 EventSpan site (among other websites). B2B web publishers, bloggers, and professionals with profile pages on the web will be able to click on a webinar or webcast listing on EventSpan and automatically create an IAB standard size banner - a widget - to place on their respective websites. These various ad formats of the widget will include a leaderboard, skyscraper, full banner and large rectangle. The widget will display the webcast's or webinar's title, (and sub-title in the larger banners), sponsor logo, date/time of the event, a countdown clock to the start of the event, a speaker headshot, and a link to the registration page. A publisher or blogger can even create a channel of widget displays based on editorially relevant keywords and categories that will automatically pull from EventSpan and display contextually compatible web event listings.

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Monitoring Viral Activity in Promoting Webinars, Webcasts and Online Events

If you're a webconferencing or webcasting company that powers online events, or a webinar production services firm that produces them, or a B2B publisher or big marketer who frequently hosts or sponsors webinars for lead generation, take note that EventSpan allows you to monitor the viral performance of your web-event listings.

For power producers of virtual events, the "dashboard" view, pictured above in the sneak peek image, allows an account holder to see a snapshot of his or her company's profile, online event listings, watchlists of events and people profiles, and recommendations of events and expert speakers. In the "Your event listings" in the admin section of EventSpan, as in the sample image here, an event producer can see and monitor the aggregate viral actions taken by site visitors of the producer's events. In another section of the site, one can view a specific event's viral action data, also. This includes how many recommendations have been given to an event, how many people have it on their watchlists, and how many click-throughs from the event listing page to the producer's event registration form have occured.

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Tracking Webinars, Webcasts and Other People's Picks: Watchlists & Profiles

Webinars and webcast events are a great way for professionals, journalists, analysts and bloggers to increase their knowledge about a given topic. But when one is searching for an upcoming web-based event, how does one keep track of it? One way we recently described is through various alerts that EventSpan will provide. Yet for frequent attendees of webinars and online events, such as the technology service providers who co-produce many of them, how can one keep track of all these events?

On EventSpan.com, users will be able to view upcoming online events and if they're interested in a given event they can "track this event" with one click.

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Ajax in EventSpan: Drag and Drop Speakers

The EventSpan platform we're about to launch is loaded with proper implementations of Ajax to significantly enhance the usability, interactivity and speed when publishing various content on the site. When in the administration mode as an account holder, a user is able to upload and easily edit and rearrange content through various interactive Ajax calls. Dragging and dropping photos of the order of speakers or the logos of webinar sponsors and hosts are examples where Ajax is used to efficiently manipulate publishing features of a virtual event listing.

In the sneak peek image above, you can see how a producer of frequent online events can easily manage speaker profiles for a given event in the event manager mode. Through Ajax, an event producer can view, edit, and add or remove speakers to an online event with speed and ease, and do it on the fly without reloading new web pages. Morevover, the order of the speakers and where they appear in the online event listing is a simple drag-and-drop function.

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Webinar & Webcast Event Reminders

The ease with which one attends an online event like a webinar is matched by the ease of forgetting about it. When attending an on-location event like a seminar, it's a committment one makes with a conscious effort that involves physical movement through space to attend. Yet with a virtual event like a webinar, you're just few clicks away from doing something entirely different, at your desk.

Eventspan will have a several self-selected notification features - calendar, watchlist, email reminders, IM reminders - that will automatically remind an attendee of his/her interest in attending a specific online event. A sneak peek is pictured above of a modal dialogue box enabling the ability for a user to remind himself or herself of a web-based event.

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