Event search drives traffic; Zvents expands partnerships

The incredibly exciting opportunity that drove me to start Zvents is that one third of local search -- "discover things to do" -- is an untapped market. I define local search as three major areas:

* What to buy: Yellow pages & merchant search
* What to do: Events, movies, restaurants, activities
* What happened: News



Of these three, "what to do" is completely untapped, whereas the other two have seen significant efforts, both by traditional media and by Internet companies.

There's a simple reason that "What to do" is untapped - it's hard to do well. Events expire rapidly, events are highly structured (think repeating series of plays, with different times on weekends) and events are very fragmented -- in a major metro area, there are tens of thousands of events in a given week, across a vast range of categories like sports, music, performing arts, classes, politics, community, clubs... the list is endless.

So it's very gratifying to see the positive response that our local search engine for things to do has garnered -- both among users, where we've seen huge growth in traffic; and partners, where we've been signing up media firms at a steady clip, with the New York Times Regional Media Group being our latest relationship.

Local analysts Pete Krasilovsky and Greg Sterling both wrote about our latest news this morning, and I encourage you to check out their pieces. "Discover things to do" is a great opportunity and a fun place to be, and across the market of Zvents and the others chasing it, I look forward to huge advances and lots of fun.

Startup life!