I learnt of EventDove several years ago via my Boston connections. I even used it once at a small local event in the Boston area, but honestly did not find it particularly different from eventbrite. I was so wrong.
I attended a talk by Jun Chang, the CEO and founder of EventDove in Shanghai. She gave a very personal talk about the company and it's business model. My key takeaways make me believe that this company is going to be very successful:
EventDove focuses on B2B
While the EventDove platform clearly is useful for event registration services for events of any size, (there is a free plan), the company is focused on servicing large scale, repeated customers. EventDove often provide back end system integration with their larger customers to provide many features that may not be visible to the event attendees. This provide a high barrier of entry for competitors, and high exit costs for their integrated customers.
These integration reaches beyond event organizers. It can include event revenues operators as well, which are a source of new customers.
A customer is a customer when they are paying for the service
Jun stress that while she values all customers who uses her platform, paying customers are where she is concentrating her companies resources on. The initial paying customer based is most important. Having worked with many start ups, I completely agrees with her. A start up sometimes too eagerly chases after potential paying customers by listening to their non paying customers too much.
O2O - Online too Offline (and back)
This is a key feature of EventDove that I did not see before because I did not attend a large scale event serviced by EventDove. Their platform has significant feature set to support onsite registrations, badge handling and much more. It is geared towards a large scale event hosted at a convention type venue. These onsite, off line features, with venue system integration, create another high barrier of entry for competitors.
EDM and Data Mining
As EventDove is used by more and more conference venues, with it's integration with both the event organizers and venues, it has access to a large data set of attendees. While currently the platform can feed this data back to the conference organizer for used in the electronic direct mail (EDM) marketing, is it possible for EventDove to mine this dataset across events and organizers?
Jun also mentioned that events in China a slowly moving away from focusing on big name speakers as the key marketing source. As the event organizers focus more on the content of the events, and the quality of the attendees, (think barcamp) can EventDove leverage it's combined attendee dataset and provide social networking features like meetup.com?
Standards and Platform
If EventDove is the first platform to integrate event organizers and event venue operators, it has the potential to set the standard for data exchange in this space. Will it become *the* platform for large scale event hosting?
Dove
I want to end this summary with a fun fact. The "Dove" in the name EventDove has a meaning that perhaps get lots in the English name. Doves can also be referring to carrier pigeons. They carry information back and forth. EventDove then is a platform for information exchange between event organizers, attendees and venue operators!
Just got my AppleTV shipping update ! Yes I ordered it hours after it was announced. Funny bit is -- it is coming from Lan Tau Island Hong Kong, and I know exactly where that is since I lived there.