In 1914 Ernest Shackleton placed the following ad in a London newspaper seeking recruits for his imperial trans-antarctic expedition:

“MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”

Recruiting people to work for a startup can feel a lot like this classified ad.  Startup life often means working long hours, taking less than competitive pay and accepting the fact that there are plenty of unknown variables that could affect your success.

Why did thousands of people respond to Shackleton’s ad?  Why are so many people signing up for startup life?

It turns out your answer to “how was your day?” really matters.  No one wants to work on something boring.  We want to work somewhere where we can see our ideas become a reality.  Life is too short to hate what you do all day.  Life is too short to spend your life doing stuff that doesn’t matter.   Life is too short to work in a cubicle.

Safe jobs aren’t safe anymore.  Companies that have been around for decades are closing their doors.   All of a sudden, startups don’t seem so risky anymore.

The reality is that you will spend a huge percentage of your life working at a job.  Many people are realizing that working on stuff you believe in is much more satisfying than just getting a paycheck.  Why sit around waiting for something to happen when you could be busy advancing something you believe in?

A few months ago I started talking to a few friends about a crazy idea.  I’d noticed that every startup in Boulder was needing developers.  At the same time, I had a gut feeling that there were hundreds of geeks across America that would love a chance to work at a startup, but just didn’t know how to get started.   I enlisted some friends and we banded together to put on the boulder.me job fair.  We’ve received hundreds of job applications and we’re now in the process of picking out 100 developers for will get a free trip to Boulder to interview with our companies.  I’ve been blown away by both the response and the quality of applicants we’ve received.  We’ve got some brilliant people heading to Boulder and all that’s left is to convince you why you should quit your job, move to Boulder and join this team of people who are obsessed with making conferences better.

EventVue is growing like crazy and we need passionate people to join us.  More than anything we’re looking for smart people who believe in what we’re doing.

Conferences are where people gather to share ideas.  Those ideas spread.  Those ideas ultimately change the world.

By helping the right people connect at conferences, we’re helping those ideas spread faster.  The conference industry has been stagnant for way too long.  But it’s beginning to  change.  Conferences are waking up to the new reality of a connected world.  With the cost of travel going up and the stock market going down, conference organizers are searching for new ways to convince people that their show is worth the trip.

I really believe a day is coming where every conference will use online tools to help their attendees connect.   We’re going to be a part of that.  We have the opportunity to determine what those tools should look like and then go out and build them. We’re going to take EventVue to conferences everywhere.  We’re going to get to hear some amazing stories of what happens when the right people get together.

Want to be a part of that?

EventVue is built in PHP, so it would help if you’re good at writing code that starts with <?php and ends with ?>.  There are an awful lot of conferences that still need to be introduced to EventVue.  That means that we’re going to need a lot more servers and some smart people who know how to manage them.  With thousands of people using our product, our user interface is going to be pretty important.  Want to help us design that?  We are driven by ideas. We dream big and work hard.  If you can see yourself fitting in an entrepreneurial environment that demands a broad range of skills, we’d like to talk to you.

We’re hiring people who want to change the world.  If that’s you, let’s talk.  Email me at josh@eventvue.com.

We’re continually looking for new ways to help the right people connect at conferences.

Our latest feature helps you make those connections by making it easier for you to note the people you want to meet.  Our new favorites feature lets you make a personalized list of the people that you find interesting.  Adding or removing people from your favorites is as simple as clicking a star.  We’ve even included a print-friendly version that you can take to the conference.

Included with this release are a few design tweaks.  We’ve redesigned our profiles to make them more streamlined.  You can now send messages and favorite people directly from the search results.  We’ve also added paging to the top of the search results so you don’t have to scroll so much.

We’re excited about the tools we are building and we would love to hear your feedback.  Let us know what you think.

We have been very lucky to have some amazing advisors help us make EventVue a success.  Their voices of experience have been invaluable over the past year to help us avoid many pitfalls that could have derailed our initiatives.

Today, we’re extremely proud to announce that two of these advisors, Wendy Lea and Paul Berberian, have been appointed to our board of directors (pending the legal stuff that makes it official).  Both are successful, trusted, and well respected entrepreneurs with long track records for getting early-stage startup companies up and running.  Wendy has some of the sharpest marketing instincts in the country and Paul has previously taken a company public.  We are very pleased to have their continued support to guide EventVue’s future growth.

A hearty and warm welcome to Paul and Wendy from the entire EventVue team! Feel free to leave a comment welcoming them as well.

We’re happy to announce that EventVue will be delivering the online community for DEMOfall 08!  We’ve been working with the DEMO team to bring the EventVue tools to DEMO so that the DEMO presenting companies and attendees can get the most of the networking opportunities at DEMO.

DEMO is the world’s premier launch platform for the hottest emerging technologies. DEMO brings together the top media and investors to see the latest innovations unveiled for the very first time and we’re proud to be powering the person-to-person connections that happen at the event.   Check out the DEMOfall 08 EventVue community and get a peek at who is coming to DEMO.

Of course, not all of us will be able to attend DEMO so if you want to get the inside track on what’s happening, follow the special twitter account we’ve set up, @demofall08.  This account will republish all the tweets of the registered DEMOfall attendees during the event.  We expect it to be a neat way to hear about all the cool companies that are presenting at DEMOfall in real time from the people who are actually there at the event.

A few months ago we announced our new chatter functionality.  The concept is simple.  Conference attendees add their twitter accounts to EventVue.  We then find their tweets, aggregate them within EventVue and republish them on twitter.  This provides a powerful way for people to follow the conversation that is happening at an event.  We’ve gotten great feedback on our chatter functionality and our auto-updating screens have been quite popular as well.

While the idea of aggregating tweets is simple, making it work isn’t quite as easy.  Here is a behind-the-scenes look at EventVue and the technology that makes it happen.  It’s the story of how a company called Gnip came to our rescue at just the right time.

Our first prototype

For our first chatter prototype we used a simple script that fetched the tweets from each attendee one at a time.  The script ran once a minute and gave us a great proof of concept.  We only had to demo it working with a couple dozen people.  It was enough to get people excited about the feature and prove that we were onto something.  It quickly became obvious that the method we were using for our prototype wouldn’t scale.  We were querying twitter non-stop since we needed the conversations to be displayed in real time.  We quickly grew from dozens of queries a minute to hundreds of queries a minute.   With each request taking several seconds to process, it became harder and harder for us to present results in real time.

Our second attempt

Then we remembered that Twitter provides a feed of all your friends tweets.  Ah-hah!  All we needed to do was follow everyone who added their screenname in EventVue and we could get their tweets with a single request to twitter.  Brilliant, right?  Not quite.  It turned out that the feed from twitter was missing about 50% of the tweets and it progressively got worse as we started following more and more people.  People started complaining and we we were forced back to the drawing board once again.

Getting desperate

We went back to our first prototype except this time we used Summize (now a part of twitter).  Their API is about 7 times faster, doesn’t have any published rate limiting, and most importantly allows complex queries up to 160 characters long.  This meant that we could fetch tweets from a dozen people at a time.  We turned on multi-threading, sacrificed a CPU and started pounding Summize as hard as we could!  This enabled us to process tweets from several thousand people and display the results within just a few seconds.  Not bad.   It still wasn’t ideal, but we had exhausted every other option.  Everything was going smoothly until I got this (somewhat inevitable) email from Greg Pass at Summize/Twitter:

“We notice you’re using the Twitter Search API — that’s great! Unfortunately, you are so exceeding our rate limits, that all of your requests are being refused.  You’re currently at ~34 requests per second. If you slow it down to 1 request every few seconds, you’ll be back in action.”

Bummer!

That’s around the time when I heard that this new service called Gnip had added twitter support.  Gnip promised to “make data portability suck less”.  More specifically, they promised to take away my never ending battle with twitter.  Needless to say, they had my attention.  I started playing with their API and immediately feel in love.   Instead of having to continually ask if there were any new tweets, Gnip offered to watch for me and to let me know when it came across any tweets that I cared about.   It didn’t take much of a decision for us to switch to Gnip.  A couple dozen lines of code later and Chatter was back — better and faster than ever!   Gnip gave me the push architecture that I desperately needed, freed up our computing resources and ultimately saved us a huge amount of time and money.

For anyone who finds themselves in a similar predicament, I can’t recommend Gnip enough.  Gnip has a rock solid service and a team that has been incredible in helping us make the transition.

We’re highly indebted to the guys at Gnip.  This post is really just to say thanks.

That’s right, your attendees are talking.  In our participatory web that’s emerging around us, what your attendees are thinking and writing about on the web is important and valuable content.  We at EventVue have always believed that the best conferences are a gathering of a community and the content and ideas of your attendees is a key gathering point of your community.

This is why we have built new tools that find the content that your attendees are creating around the web and help you share that with your audience - namely the other conference attendees.  When attending a conference in our tech industry, I enjoy finding out about other attendees who are blogging and pushing the field of knowledge forward in our industry.  In fact, that’s how we have formed some great relationships.

With our RSS feeds for attendee content, you as a conference organizer can feature and highlight what your attendees are saying on your conference website.  As an example, I’ve created a widget that features the recent blog posts from attendees to the NYC SummerMash event.  Check it out and if you’re a conference organizer, get in touch with us and let’s set up something similar up for your conference.

We’re pretty excited over here at the EventVue headquarters to announce that EventVue will be powering the Mashable SummerMash tour.  We’re big fans of Mashable and Pete and are pumped about working with them.

The EventVue communities will help people who attend the SummerMash events all across the country to connect with the other attendees.  We’ve been to a Mashable event before and remember how important it was to us to meet some of the other people attending.  As of today, we’re joining with Mashable to make this easier.

We’re also launching some brand new functionality for the SummerMash tour.  As we announced earlier, we’ve built some really cool tools that help you keep up with the conversation at conferences.  We’re particularly excited about the Twitter functionality — SummerMash attendees will now be able to follow one twitter stream to see all the tweets from all the attendees at the SummerMash events.  So let’s all cross our fingers and hope Twitter will work (yeah, it’s risky) so we can deliver the next step in helping attendees connect at conferences.

We’re launching three of the communities today; the SummerMash Seattle, SummerMash Los Angeles, and SummerMash San Francisco.  If you’re attending any of these, log in to the EventVue community and get started.  You can follow along on Twitter at @seattlemash, @lamash, and @sanfranmash.  You’ll want to register to attend these events at if you’re in one of the three cities.  Always remember: Don’t Mash Alone!

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with 360conferences.  360conferences produces conferences under the sole premise that “Great Conferences should not be Expensive.”  We’re excited that they have chosen EventVue to provide the online community for their conference.  360conferences just wrote about why they chose EventVue on their blog and we love it!

360conferences has an upcoming conference in August in San Jose focusing on the Flex/Adobe development world.  If you’re a developer playing around with the new Flex technology including AIR, we highly encourage you to check it out.  Of course, if you are planning to go to the 360|Flex conference, you know that we’ll be there helping you make the most of your networking experience and inviting you to participate in the EventVue community for 360|Flex.

We’re excited to be working with 360conferences to help them deliver some killer shows for their attendees. 360|Flex is just the start!

We think it’s important for our customers to see for themselves how their attendees are connecting through our product.  That’s why we’ve added a way for event organizers to see what’s happening in their communities.

With our new stats pages, event organizers can now see:

• How many of their attendees have signed into EventVue
• What percentage of users filled out a profile, uploaded a picture or added some tags
• How many messages have been sent
• Who the most popular attendees are in their community
• (And my personal favorite) A map showing the geographical spread of their attendees

This is just our first iteration.  We’ll be adding more statistics as we hear your feedback.  Be sure to let us know what other information you care about so we can continue to improve our product and give you one more reason to use EventVue.

I recently attended the Google IO conference in San Francisco. There were some great sessions, but that’s not why I was there — I was there for the 2999 other developers!

I’ve been to a lot of conferences in the past year, but most of them have been EventVue customers. It was a strange experience for me to attend a conference that didn’t use our product. I think it was healthy for me to feel the pain of going to a conference without EventVue. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing there are people in the building you want to meet and having no way to find or connect with them!

Everyone who has attended a conference before can probably relate to my pain. In fact, we get emails all the time that say:

“I don’t want to attend another conference that doesn’t use EventVue.”

We want to do everything we can to make EventVue available at the conferences you love. We’ve now made it easier for you to tell us which conferences should be using EventVue. Simply look for the link on our homepage or inside any EventVue community. We’ll take your suggestions and do everything we can to win them as EventVue customers.

To be fair, we can’t take credit for the idea.  Bill Flagg from RegOnline gave us the original inspiration for this feature:

My experience at Google IO reminded me that what we are doing really matters. I came back to Boulder more passionate about our work, and more excited for the day when EventVue is a standard part of every conference experience (including you, Google).