Webware

Microsoft has decided to close down Windows Live Events and will be focusing its development efforts on building event planning and management tools for Windows Live Calendar instead. Beginning next month, users of Windows Live Events will be unable to create new events. And sometime next year, the site will simply redirect to Live Calendar instead.

In the meantime, Microsoft is encouraging users to download any photos or documents they have stored in their events, either to their hard drives or to Windows Live SkyDrive. The service has also long had a way to export events to other services including Outlook, Google, and Yahoo calendar, as well as Apple's iCal.

Windows Live Events was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007. Designed as an Evite competitor of sorts, it let users create events that could be shared publicly. It also made use of other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger to let party goers and planners alike communicate.

A nice little summer shopping spree for AOL: Under the auspices of new CEO Tim Armstrong, the company has acquired "hyperlocal" news site Patch and hipster-oriented events listing site Going.com.

The acquisition of Patch isn't too much of a surprise. Armstrong founded and invested in Patch while at his former gig as Google sales chief. The start-up offers a model for local news on the Web and plans to have launched in a dozen cities by the end of 2009. Going, meanwhile, has been around since 2006 and offers event and invitation services along with ticketing. It's likely that AOL will use its technology to take the service beyond its party-friendly current target demographic.

"Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today--there's a lot of information out there but simply no way for consumers to find it quickly and easily," Armstrong said in a release. "Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL. The acquisitions of Patch and Going will help us build out our local network further with excellent local services that enable people to stay better informed about what's going on in their neighborhood."

He's not the only new-media executive thinking local: in his keynote address at the Advertising 2.0 conference on Wednesday, IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller called local "one of the few areas that hasn't been colonized" on the Web. IAC owns Citysearch, with which AOL has partnered in syndication deals.

Online-invitation service Socializr is hoping to be the FriendFeed for your social life. The site announced on Wednesday that it now aggregates invitations from MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo's Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendar, and industry leader Evite (owned by InterActiveCorp) in addition to letting members send their own invitations. The new feature is called "Event Connect."

Socializr, which was hatched by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, also has implemented Facebook Connect and MySpaceID so that members of those social networks can invite friends to Socializr events. A third new feature of Event Connect lets members tap into their accounts on any photo-sharing sites to pull in pictures.

You can't yet auto-sync your entire Socializr event listing with a calendar service, but Abrams said Event Connect beta testers have been requesting it and that it will probably get implemented down the road.

"The vision for Socializr was always to do more than to be a better Evite," Abrams explained to CNET News. Aggregating other invitation and event-listing services was "sort of something that people have been asking, 'Why hasn't anyone done this?' for ages."

There are plenty of event-listing services trying to take a bite out of the market share that Evite--and now Facebook's invitation service--has dominated for years. Abrams said that while Socializr is small, it's still well-positioned to grow.

"We're doing OK. We haven't taken over Evite yet, but they've been around for 10 years," he said, adding that the company is still prerevenue. "We have a lot of interesting ideas about ad revenue, but it's still premature for us. We're still only five people, and still in the product development and growth stage."

Belgium-based Oxynade announced Tuesday that it's picked up a 1 million Euro series A round of funding led by investment group Arkafund along with Vinnof.

The company's current consumer service is a search engine for events called Happenr. It crawls sites for names, dates, addresses any any other information, and puts it in an index that can be searched and sorted. This is connected to a ticket-purchasing service, so users are able to browse and buy tickets to these events right from the site.

Happenr also has an API and a new iPhone app, with the former being a simple way for developers to add Happenr's events database to their applications. The iPhone app follows a similar path to services like Upcoming, Eventful, and others in letting you browse for goings-on by your current location.

Happenr is currently limited to European cities.

Eventful, a service that discovers and promotes local events, announced on Thursday that it has joined forces with Billboard to deliver two new charts to add to the music brand's growing list.

According to the company, Billboard will now feature "Eventful Hottest Demand" and "Eventful Weekly Most in Demand" charts to rank artists who are most in demand for live performances. Eventful's 'Hottest' chart will be updated every 30 minutes, based on the tally of fans that demand artists to perform in their area. The rankings are based on Eventful's proprietary algorithm, which measures demand frequency, currency, and total number of demands.

Eventful's "Weekly" chart ranks performers by the number of performance demands they receive from Sunday to the following Sunday. Much like Billboard's other charts, it includes the current week's ranking, number of weeks on the chart, and the performer's highest overall rank.

"These latest charts take full advantage of the information available through Eventful Demand, which gives fans a way to influence where their favorite performers tour and also acts as a guide to assist performers in scheduling their tours," Eventful CEO Jordan Glazier said in a statement.

Billboard's decision to use Eventful's Demand system is an interesting one. For years, the company has displayed the top grossing concerts, but this marks the first time that it will tell the artists where they're most wanted. And for Eventful, which is competing against a slew of companies, including Zvents and EventOrb, the company's Billboard deal cements it as a major force in the local-events market.

Right now, Paramore tops the list of today's most wanted performers, and Kenny Chesney heads the list as the week's most demanded performer.

AOL on Monday launched When.com, a rebranded version of Zvents' online events guide.

The two sites are largely indistinguishable except for one element: "Where when.com differentiates is the addition of Kids and Family activities, which we feel is important to our audience," said AOL spokeswoman Jaymelina Esmele. Zvents handles the categorization, but AOL draws more attention to the family-friendly events.

Another difference: the AOL version lets people search by popularity and date.

AOL expects more changes. "While it is fully functional, the site today is still a phase one beta site; we'll be continuing to introduce new features as well as update the site based on user feedback," she said.

AOL launched its When.com site Monday, a rebranded version of the Zvents online events site. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

Eventful, a service that lets users discover, share, promote, and create local events throughout the world, on Wednesday announced that it has secured $10 million in Series C funding in a round that was led by Telefonica, along with existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bay Partners. In total, Eventful has been able to raise $19.6 million in funding over the past three years.

The company, which boasts 8 million registered users, will use the funding to increase its sales and marketing initiatives, and explore growth in the mobile and international sectors. More importantly, Eventful's executives believe that the latest round of funding will help it achieve profitability.

"This round of financing will enable Eventful to enhance our services to existing and new users throughout the world, and achieve profitability," said Jordan Glazier, CEO of Eventful.

Profitability in the event-planning sector won't be easy. Eventful competes with a slew of companies, including Zvents, EventOrb, and many others that provide users with opportunities to find and announce events in their area.

Contour Venture Partners is the lead investor in Series A funding for Punchbowl Software, which is behind the event-planning and invitation site MyPunchbowl.

Total cash raised was $2.1 million; the other investors in the round include Intel Capital and eCoast Angels.

Previously, Framingham, Mass.-based Punchbowl Software had raised seed funding from Intel and eCoast.

MyPunchbowl's team said that the fruits of the Series A round will be visible soon, with new features and new hires on the way. But invitation start-ups are in a tough spot; IAC's Evite is as big as most of its smaller competitors combined, and Facebook's "events" application has become popular for casual and large-scale get-togethers.

MyPunchbowl's pitch is that it helps with the entire planning process, not just the invitation, and that there are plenty of people looking for that. "We've seen explosive growth since our first...funding last year," CEO Matt Douglas said in a statement.

One of the things that impressed me most during my interview with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer was his focus on iterative development and rigorously testing new features before they are rolled out. As I've said, most of the Web 2.0 companies I see focus on building new features more than they do on analyzing what their users are actually doing with them. It's crazy. It's like they all work at Microsoft in 1996.

There's a conference coming up that focuses on measuring and improving the user experience: Startonomics, October 2 in San Francisco. The conference will be run by Dave McClure, an entrepreneur, investor, and familiar face to Web 2.0 conference goers.

McClure's main point is that when you're building a new service, you want to think about "conversion events," in other words, moving users from one state to the next (from browsing to exploring, exploring to buying, etc.). That has nothing to do with releasing features.

However, you can't overthink things or dawdle. Release early, watch the right metrics, and revise. McClure points to Slideshare and Teachstreet as companies that are working this way. (He's invested in both companies.) Who's doing it wrong? "Anyone who takes longer than a year to ship," he says. Examples of this include Chandler and Trillian's Astra. By being late, they are missing their market windows. The world's moved past them.

I've worked a little with Dave at various conferences, as well as with the Startonomics conference producer, Debbie Landa. (Her company runs the Under the Radar conferences where I often moderate start-up pitch presentations.) I like what these people are doing with this conference, and I think more entrepreneurs should pay attention to the message.

Here's McClure's five-minute start-up pirate talk. He says this is the pitch that has morphed into the day-long conference.