EVDB - Profile
HQ: La Jolla, CA
Founded: January 2004
Management: Founders are Brian Dear (CEO), Chuck Norris (CTO - not the kung-fu star), and Raj Basavaraju (Sr. Database Architect). Dear was founding Director of Ebay Design Labs. He also worked at Real Networks when it was Progressive Networks and at MP3.com.
Investors: Apparently EVDB impressed some people with cash lying around at the recent PC Forum and they cobbled together a series A. In March 2005, the company raised its first round of financing totaling $2.1M from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Omidyar Network, PC Forum’s Esther Dyson, blogger founder Evan Williams, Half.com founder Joshua Kopelman, and Tribe Networks’ Mark Pincus.
Business Model: The company is reminiscent of IMDB - the Internet Movie Database bought by Amazon. However EVDB focuses on events and it more Web 2.0 and decentralized. Still in Beta, EVDB is a collaborative, searchable database and web services platform for event and venue data worldwide. It is both a search engine and a wiki, and claims blogging will become a part of it once it gains a head of steam with users. EVDB enables people to find relevant events along with detailed venue information, and to save that information to personal calendars on their desktop or mobile devices.
Competitors: No large direct competitors. Closest competition might be Meetup or Apple iCal.
Dirt: In Beta, EVDB is in waiting-for-the-party-to-get-started mode. Because the company relies on outsiders to fill out the event listings, it can’t make the site work without free help. That must be a scary proposition, but it’s happened with plenty of other companies. Plaxo comes to mind. We see this as a Bloglines or Picasa type of play where the founders have limited funding, work hard, get street cred, and sell to a large search engine.
