As the topics covered by events are becoming more widely followed, particularly in the technology community, demand seems to be growing for new and more useful ways to bring those events to people that want to see them. Eventials.com, a company based in Blumenau, Brazil, wants to make those events more interactive.
The company’s “a-ha” moment was when they noticed that while MacWorld 2007 had 5,000 people physically in the venue, more than 80% of the “attendees” (myself included, I might add) followed it virtually.
While there are certainly numerous companies that are trying to bring events to larger communities, Eventials claims to want to make the experience interactive, which is a component lacking in many of their competitors (e.g. LiveStream). That said, I can’t figure out based on their website exactly what kind of interactivity they are talking about — Twitter feeds? Instant messages? Video jump-ins?
Eventials’ main strength appears to be scalability: by using a Content Delivery Network (in this case Cloud Server Pro, based in Brazil) they can host large events using something like a closed peer-to-peer network. This is a big deal, since their free service only covers up to 15 people — after that event organizers have to pay for the service. They claim to have another business model but are keeping quiet about what that might be.
