Tackable Team Introduces New Hyperlocal App to Crowdsource Events

Share this:

Eventster, a new iOS application launched today by the same team behind Tackable and TapIn, allows users to crowdsource approximately 600,000 events by location in cities across North America and Europe in what a Tackable Inc. press release calls the “Pandora for events.”

Users of the iPhone and iPad application can upvote and downvote certain events, delivered using data from the StubHub-owned event listings provider Zvents, with the results delivered in real-time. The app’s home page delivers the most popular events by location, sponsored events and nearest events, available to view via a list or map. Once accessed, users can also find an event’s details, add it to an iPad calendar, and see available ticket prices from vendors such as StubHub, Ticketmaster and Brown Paper Tickets. In about half of circumstances, Luke Stangel, Eventster’s chief marketing officer, said, users can purchase tickets directly through the app.

Eventster is free to download, Stangel told Street Fight. The company’s monetization plans revolve mostly around sponsored events, as promoters seek to reach their local constituencies.

“Eventster plugs you into stuff happening in your city, no matter where you live,” said Ed Lucero, Eventster’s CEO, in a press release. “Our goal is to get you out of the house and having fun with other humans.”

Eventster iPhone screenshotTackable, which allowed users, mainly media companies, to request photo and video in real-time from event attendees, and TapIn, which aggregated live information about one place from various publishers, such as reviews from Yelp, articles from Wikipedia, etc. and displayed it via Google Maps, were both pulled from the Apple App Store earlier this year.

TapIn users, Stangel said, frequently turned off every layer of information except events, and so earlier this year, in a creative phase dubbed “Tackable Christmas,” the company decided to create and distribute any application users requested, even including a kitten photo-sharing social network named KittenBot. The most successful of these experiments, though, Stangel said, was an events-focused platform called EventMob.

“We got so many downloads of EventMob in the first week that we maxed out our API calls with Zvents, and our servers crashed for several hours,” Stangel recalled. “We knew we were onto something important. Eventster is the robust, bulletproof version of that earlier experiment.”

With Eventster, the developers at Tackable are hedging their bets on the belief that events discovery, not a down economy or general apathy, is the main reason why approximately 40 percent of industry tickets go unsold. To more effectively target users, the application will, over time, recommend events based on past preferences, in addition to location.

“All of us want to have fun,” Stangel said. “People have been having fun for the past 100,000 years. If we were cavemen, the tribe on the other side of the hill would invite us over for a party Saturday. If we were Romans, we’d check the schedule for weekend lion feedings at the Coliseum. Victorian London? We’ve got huge posters up about the traveling circus coming next month. Today, it’s no different. Our idea of fun is widely divergent, but it’s a basic human desire. Good weekends are good, and we’re all about making good weekends better.”

Patrick Duprey is an intern at Street Fight.

Tags: