Brian BrianStorms Dear introduces his new company, EVDB (Events & Venues database). Calendars are a poor metaphor for publishing events on the Web, he says. They scroll off the page, they’re inconsistent. And there’s no structured data. And there’s no way of getting notified about an event you would have gone to “had you known.”

EVDB is event focused and aims at being a web service, not a portal, he says. The business model: Targeted advertising, commercial use of API, and used by “powered by” apps (web and mobile).

Brian shows a demo. We see a conference schedule. Every session counts as a separate event, under the parent of the overall conference. RSS feeds for events. You can subscribe to events that don’t exist. He shows a calendar based on crawling through Meetup.com data.

What does he hope people will do with the API? Desktop projects and mobile projects. Or services like Flickr where people are covering events in some way.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? The blogosphere is big enough to be a good market to start with. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 evdb]

Categories: Uncategorized dw