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"Eventful, the site that helps users find and demand events worldwide, has raised $7.5 million in Series B financing led by venture capital firm Bay Partners - previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Omidyar Network and Esther Dyson also chipped in.  The money comes on top of a $2.1 million Series A round in March, and it will be spent on building out the team, marketing, engineering and business development.\nEventful was launched by eBay veteran Brian Dear back in 2004, when it was called EVDB.  The service lets you discover, promote and share event information - over time, they've added a ton of useful features like alerts, RSS feeds, calendars and bulletins of upcoming events.  There's social networking, too - you can form groups around clubs and events, add other users to your friends list and leave comments on profile pages.  For developers, there's an API to integrate Eventful data into your own apps.  \nMore recently, they've added a really interesting feature: Eventful Demand is a way for users to request concerts and perfomances in their area - if enough people demand the event, they might get their wish (although right now the requests seem too widely spread to get any consensus).  To get more people behind your demand, you can post a widget to your page on MySpace, Friendster, Piczo and elsewhere.  A quick search of MySpace reveals that they've gotten more uptake for the widget than most \"2.0\" startups - there are more than 68,000 mentions of Eventful on the site.  Since most startups just throw out their MySpace widgets and expect the uptake to happen on its own, this is good going (I hate to say it, but I suspect that a bunch of the products in the MySpace codes category will fail to get traction due to a lack of marketing).\nI've always thought Eventful was a pretty solid site, and I doubt this money will go to waste.  It's a worthy rival to services like Yahoo's Upcoming.org and newcomer ILCU.  The company has a massive events database it can leverage, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think the MySpace Music angle is big for them - I'm seeing plenty of MySpace bands adding the widget to their pages.  But I also think they have a great asset that could be leveraged in lots of ways - it sounds like a fairly sensible investment.\n\nEventful User?\nMashable's Eventful account is HERE - feel free to add Mashable to your friends if you sign up, or you're already a member.\n\n\n(via)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/09/18/eventful-demands-75-million-and-gets-it/>