For San Francisco hockey fans bummed out about (a) the lockout and (b) driving all the way to the Shark Tank to watch a game in person, the Bulls are exactly what you’re looking for. This ECHL/Sharks affiliate plays at the 13,000-seat Cow Palace in Daly City. The team put $2 million into renovating the arena, including installing one of the most impressive, 360-degree wraparound video scoreboards in the nation. You’ve got to check it out for yourself.

Starting today, we’re running a contest inside Eventster for two really great, center ice tickets to the Friday, Nov. 9 game against the Bulls’ biggest regional rival, the Stockton Thunder. We’re geofencing the campaign to a 200-mile radius around the Cow Palace, so if you’re using Eventster from the Central Valley, you should see your very first in-app contest.

Ludovico Einaudi is a world-renowned pianist currently preparing an international concert tour next year. His management approached us earlier this month to talk about rolling out a multicity advertising campaign centered around premium experiences. These might include stuff like exclusive backstage passes, a VIP meet-and-greet with Einaudi, premium seating, or something equally cool. We’re still building out our contest/offer feature set, but they were impressed with what they’ve seen so far. Einaudi is our first concert partner, and (up until now), our first multicity partner. We’re very excited to be working with him and his team.

One of the new things we’re trying out with this week’s contest is a follow-on offer for those of us who don’t win the tickets. We’ve also built a neat, Facebook-powered referral engine, making it easier for you to share the contest with your friends.

Stay tuned for further updates. We’ve got other exciting partnerships in the works, and more features to tell you about very soon.

• -New front page UI to show more nearby events that are trending
• -New social signals format that immediately show photos streaming from instagram, youtube and twitter as a slide show.
• -We’ve re-introduced “following” feature that shows which of your facebook friends liked the same event.  Aside from seeing what’s on your friends event playlist, we’ll also display how much of your playlist overlap.  When you are looking at event details, we’ll also display a list of friends right there on the event view.
• -Bug fixes.  New bugs introduced (of course).

I could go over each of these cool updates but I wanted to focus on one in particular, “location triggered offers”.  We’ve partnered with a couple local promoters like “San Jose Broadway”, Neiderlander group,  Bulls (Hockey team in Cow Palace) and others to offer ticket giveaways inside the app.    How does it work?  Let’s say your in Sunnyvale one afternoon and you open Eventster.  We may display a free giveaway contest for “Memphis – The Musical” as a popup when you open the app.  We can make this offer based on your location, the time of day and in the near future, your preference and taste.   We’re running pilot test now and we’ve already given away San Jose Broadway tickets.   This is pretty exciting for us as it’s great for fans, great for promoters and opens up some exciting possibilities we won’t get into now.

After looking at what sorts of events were relatively plentiful in a few cities in the US in a previous post, I became curious about the rest of the country.  Were particular events popular in certain parts of the country?  What was the event-density like for most of the nation, outside big cities?

So I collected and graphed a month’s worth of events, covering most of the populated areas of the continental US, and mapped it out.  Certain things immediately stood out.  There’s an amazing disparity between how much is listed in various parts of the country, for one.  From nearly five thousand listed music events around the New York area to single digit numbers in some states, for example.

Population plays an obvious role in the number of various events, but it seems to be modified by population density as well as other, less obvious factors.  The number of events in areas that have low populations that are spread out end up almost imperceptible on the map.  Dense cities are towers of activity.  Some areas have activity levels unexplained by their population or density – the Sacramento, California area, for example. 

What’s interesting is that the same sorts of events end up showing up in the greatest numbers everywhere, even if the relative proportion of each varies.  Community, music and sports events are universal.  “Visual arts” (i.e. film) is close, but doesn’t necessarily have much of a presence in some of the more rural areas.  Categories like “performing arts” seem to be indicators of largely urban, affluent, cultural centers.  Some areas have thriving music scenes (but not much else).

More than anything, however, the map made me grateful that I live in a part of the country that’s bustling with activity!  I’m definitely spoiled for choice.

UPDATE: Zvents saw this post, loved it, and updated us with more insight into the metrics. (Is that cool or what?)  There is a strong correlation between strong content and local partnerships within the Zvents network.  In markets like the San Francisco Bay Area where the towers of content show on this graph, you will find multiple partnerships, creating a network effect leading to exponential depth and breadth of content. Awesome!

In an increasingly connected world, we tend to do more activities with friends who share similar interests. Music and arts festivals, sports, and conferences provide communities these shared experiences. Eventster makes discovering ideal events easier, but the logistics behind attending them with friends can be daunting. For those different social circles, coordinating a group (or multiple groups) can be a tedious and frustrating effort. Here are some strategies to ensure everyone has the best time possible:

1. Tell people where you’re going, not where you’re at. With so many things going on at large events, time moves too fast to justify waiting for others to catch up. It’s a slim chance that your friends will get your message and can actually find you in time, and you risk missing out the longer you stay. Also, if you leave early, your friends may be stuck there instead. Avoid picking a remote location for a meet up spot–plan to meet where something is happening. If it doesn’t work out, at least you’ll be where you want to be. If everyone still can’t find you, then at least they won’t miss out either.

2. Communicate efficiently. Large crowds accessing data networks at the same time can overload cell phone towers. Texts may get delayed or might not send at all. With limited to no communication, you have to make each message count. Include, at the very least, your question, current status and location, future plans, and the time the message was sent, all in the same text.

3. Big groups don’t have to do everything together. Your group is guaranteed to have different preferences for what each individual wants to do. If everyone follows the majority, then everyone will have an average time at best. The few people who make personal sacrifices may live with regret and resentment. Given all the effort and money spent to make this event possible, you want to make sure get the best value for your investment. Big groups are also hard to relocate since they can only move as fast as the slowest person. Plan your ideal itinerary before the event and share it with your friends. Agree on a couple points where everyone can meet, like meals or the grand finale, then partner with those who have overlapping interests. Everyone will have a chance to do more and will have a better time overall.

These events are stressful in nature, but that shouldn’t distract you from the reason why you’re there: to have fun. Understand that you can’t meet everybody, you can’t do everything, and you might not have a perfect experience. The important thing is to make the most of your time and appreciate the people whom you are already with. You’ll learn a lot about your friends, and you might realize something about yourself!

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve… these holidays alter human behavior in a variety of ways.

This week I’m getting texts messages from friends to see what I’m doing for Halloween and if I am interested in attending costume parties.

Right around Thanksgiving, almost every major US city will be hosting a Turkey Trot. I’m sure there will be some sports bars hosting some football parties.

Churches and other venues host a variety of events centered on religious holidays. Many communities come closest together when the Christmas spirit is in the air.

Speaking of altering human behavior, one or two Eventster employees even checked out SantaCon 2011, which broke the world record for most naked Santas in one place.*

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m always attending a New Year’s Eve party. What better way to break in the new year than getting drunk with friends* and making new friends?

This holiday season, don’t get stuck wondering where to go and what to do. Let Eventster point you towards the fun!

P.S. Here are some Halloween ideas if you live in the SF Bay Area:

Halloween Pub Crawl, San Francisco.

Spookfest 2012 featuring Calvin Harris, Benny Benassi, Example, Datsik, R3hab and Miles the DJ @Oracle Arena

7 Deadly Sins Pre-Halloween Party @Cityline Events Center

* Eventster takes no responsibility for things you cannot un-do nor un-see this holiday season.

Coming up next: Mike Lee has three great tips for getting together with your crazy texting friends at large events!

Mike S. happens to be right near us, in the SF Bay Area (this did not play a role in our highly scientific random drawing, however). Mike says about Eventster:

I found Eventster when I was searching for an app that could tell me what’s going on at any given time.  I’ve tried a lot of them.  Eventster is unique because of the Popular function.  It’s an easy way to see what other people think are good, and it also makes it super simple to cast your vote while looking for events.

That’s Eventster beautifully summarized. Thanks, Mike!

And thanks to everyone who took the time and effort to send in survey responses. We appreciate it! We wish we could send you all gift cards (but we can’t).

As always, if you have feedback, comments, or questions, you can write to us at contact [at] eventsterapp [dot] com!

Popular Tab

• Longer iPhone 5 screen means our table cells no longer fit the screen and paging no longer lines up to iPhone borders.
• We’ve also found that (1) people don’t realize you can scroll down and see more events since we fill the entire screen with one event and (2) thumbs up and down are not popular activities for this view.

Updates:

• Removing paging
• Shorten the event table cells so you can see that events are stacked.  Visible on iPhone 5 and previous versions of iPhone
• Remove thumbs up/down.  Show bare bones info.  Show current like count without any restrictions.

Detail View (when you press on an event)

• These views aren’t a big problem as the table view just exposes more data
• Feedback and data showed that people didn’t know about the social feed AND voting things up and down were not getting the engagement numbers we were looking for.  It’s always been a debate internally whether or not thumbs down should be included.
• So…. we test another hyphothesis

Updates:

• Inspired by the way apple designed business listing on their map.
• We include event info and social into one view.  You can toggle between the two different content categories.
• There are other updates happening behind the scenes to collect more event data.
• Thumbs down is gone.  Thumbs up becomes one of the three main buttons

Other things:

• You can see in previous screenshots that we’ve renamed bookmarks (or saved, or playlist or daybook) into a tab simply called “My Likes” (or liked) with the like icon.  Hopefully this makes the activity of liking something clear….it goes to the “My Likes” tab.  Perhaps we’ll animate something so its really really clear (and fun).
• We’ll probably remove “R U Free” Tab.
• There’s a hidden tab where we are testing Facebook login integration.
• We’re removing sharekit in favor of iOS built in sharing.
• Search or Browse tab will be updated.
• More surprises on the way.

No one has gotten our hands on iPhone 5 yet.  We’d like to see how this feels before submitting it.  The goal is to send this to Apple by early next week.

Our self-selected survey respondents are a tad different from what our Charts, Charts, Charts! blog entry shows. A heavy proportion of our respondents are from our neck of the woods, the SF Bay Area, and although you’re (assuming “you” have done the survey) interested in the popular Music category, you’re also very interested in the Business & Tech category.

When it comes to finding events, many of you find events through social media, in addition to your tried-and-true friends.

No surprise, but the vast majority of you use the Eventster app on iPhone, and less so the iPad edition. (We are fond of our iPad edition, though, so if you haven’t tried it, we encourage you to check it out – it’s free, of course.)

Lastly, a great many of you just want to be heard. A chance to win a $25 gift card wasn’t important to you. Either way, though, we salute you, Eventster app contributors!

If you haven’t contributed already, here’s the link to our survey! We want to hear from you!

Eventster users, tell us what you think!

There’s even a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card for qualifying Eventster surveys. See last page of survey for details! (Surveys must be completed by end of next Thursday, Sept. 20th 2012, Pacific Time.)