Attendio leaves event listings in favor of widgets

October 15, 2007 | Chris Morrison | Comments | |

updated
attogydg2.GIF After being a portal for events for less than half a year, Attendio has abandoned the the events industry, saying that market is too small. It has decided instead to become a widget-making company, jumping from one crowded industry to another.

It’s just the latest indication that the Web 2.0 market is bubbly, and raises questions about why VCs keep investing in the sector. The San Francisco company raised (see coverage) less than $1 million in funding from Sunbridge Partners earlier this year.

Renamed Gydget, the company’s widgets will link out to online articles, pictures, videos, and mobile-connected services. Users include several dozen celebrities and sports teams, like Beyonce and the Bengals.

Gerardo Capiel, the company’s CEO and founder, looks to be leaping from the frying pan to the fire. Even when Attendio launched, the events market was crowded: Other sites include Eventful, Zvents, Going and Yahoo Events (which acquired Upcoming).

Similarly, the widget-making boom has already arrived. Dapper, Widgetbox and Splashcast all offer some variation on the build-your-own widget theme. Capiel says Gydget’s offering is superior, as its widgets are capable of offering any type of content, while other companies focus on a niche like video or news.

Gydget’s advantage may be in simply having seen what works. Most traffic to Attendio already came from existing Gydgets like the game schedule widget used by the Oakland Raiders football team. By closing down Attendio and focusing only on widgets, the site may be able to capture a more significant audience.

However, it’s difficult to assess whether there’s a widget opportunity. Capiel declined to share traffic numbers. Widgets are fast becoming a commodity, offered widely around the internet. Pageviews also may not be as important a metric for the new business, as much of its revenue may come through affiliate sales of tickets for bands and teams.

Attendio first emerged during DEMO earlier this year. The company is in the process of raising another round.

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About the Author, Chris Morrison

Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.

  • Chris,

    Eventful and Upcoming were in this space nearly 2 years before Attendio launched. I'd also add that there are many user generated aggregators in the space, disagreeing with the CEO's assessment that the market is small. Seems Attendio was too late to the party.
  • Good point, and I should clarify that Capiel told me there didn't seem to be any clear winners in the event space a year ago. That continues to be the case -- I've got a little more info coming in a separate post later.
  • FYI Eventful's doing fantastically well. We're now around 3.5 million users, with well over 100k new users signing up each week. Contrary to Capiel's assessment, I would submit that the market is huge, global, and we're still only in the very early stages!
  • Thanks Brian -- I actually talked to Jordan Glazier a few weeks ago, and have some more detailed info on Eventful that's just waiting for me to write it up. It does seem that Eventful has been one of the more successful sites.
  • Yen
    Would love to see Gerardo take a different spin on widgets. To take the aggregation angle from Attendio to pull together great content from fragmented sites and enable consumers like me to filter through all that aggregated content to get the most relevant bits from his widgets.