Let’s face it: If you’re not a professional event planner, planning a party or event for a large group of coworkers or friends is not a fun or easy task. If you need catering, a photographer, or a DJ, get ready to contact lots of companies and rip your hair out because people aren’t getting back to you or charging too much.

Enter Fiestah, an online marketplace that promises to connect New York City event planners and all kinds of vendors in a much easier manner than what’s described above. The event planner simply signs into Fiestah’s dashboard, inputs what “items” they need for the event, and then vendors place bids to fill in those needs. If you’re a vendor — such as a baker, DJ, photographer, caterer, food truck, or personal chef — you can look through events in the area and make bids. Fiestah generates revenue by taking a 10 percent cut of each transaction.

One other thing Fiestah provides for both parties: The payment is held in escrow until the vendor completes its task, meaning both sides need to get what they want first. So if a DJ charges $1,000 for an event, Fiestah deposits $900 into the account of the DJ once the event is over.

Fiestah chief operating officer Nurul Yahya (pictured above in the pink shirt) said that she came up with the idea for the startup a few years back. “I had another company prior to this making wedding invitations part time,” Yahya said. “Once I did one wedding, I kept getting more requests. When I was working with these brides, I realized they had a hard time finding a DJ and getting vendors. It was difficult for brides to find companies that would fit their budgets.”

So Yahya teamed up with two friends to found Fiestah — CEO Stefanos Missailidis and chief technology officer Marvin Tam. All three have the pedigree to get a business off the ground. Yahya formerly worked for Goldman Sachs, Accenture, and Barclays in program management, and Missailidis was an IT consultant for Accenture. Tam’s story is a bit crazier — he quit his job as a front-end engineer at Jetsetter to work on Fiestah’s tech full-time and, in turn, he had to move back to his home country of Malaysia because he no longer had a work visa. (Yahya said they hope to get Tam back in New York “soon.”)

Yahya and her co-founders pitched the idea at New York’s Startup Weekend in Nov. 2011, and while it didn’t win, Yahya said there was a lot of positive feedback. She said audience members came up to her and said they wanted to use the service.

And so, the Fiestah team has been hard at work building out the marketplace, introducing themselves to lots of New York businesses, and trying to get traction. The next thing on the company’s long to-do list is to create full merchant profiles with the ability to rate vendors some time in the next few months. And, as it might not surprise startup-world watchers, the next city Fiestah plans to bring its marketplace to is San Francisco.

My first exposure to Fiestah was on the “Startup Bus,” where I met 14 startups that were trying their hand at pitching investors and meeting other young companies in Montreal. Fiestah was one of the most promising startups out of that batch because it serves a clear purpose and could easily work in big cities all over the country.

New York-based Fiestah was founded in February and is currently self-funded. The team said it is in contact with several angel investors and hopes to secure seed funding early next year.

Photo credits: Fiestah

Event planning must be one of the most stressful jobs around. On the day, everything can go awry, and there’s always the risk that the event will be a huge waste of time and money.

Online ticketing startup, Picatic, brings the crowdfunding model to events thereby removing some of the financial risk for promoters, artists and venue-owners. The Canadian company, founded in 2008, is the brainchild of a former events organizer, Jayesh Parmar.

Using EventTilt, a technology that is not dissimilar to Eventbrite, promoters create custom event pages with information about the artist and the location. If enough fans decide to pre-fund the event, then it actually gets organized. ”Crowds will dictate what the market can bare, which takes the guessing game out of event planning,” Jayesh Parmar, the company’s CEO, told me.

Similarly to crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, there are perks for users who fund the successful events, typically in the form of discounted tickets or SWAG. Those who fund events that don’t actually take place because they fail to reach the threshold set by the organizer will be reimbursed.

“EventTilt allows people putting on events to have cash in hand before they have to pay for venues or talent,” Parmar explained. It’s a cool idea, especially if it means that local and grassroots organizers can get their hands on some funding to host an event that brings together their local community.

Crowdfunding is all the rage; Picatic is up against startups like Gigfunder and Queremos that also offer crowdfunded events. To succeed, the startup will also need to convince enough people that it’s worth putting their hard-earned dollars behind events, rather than conventional projects and ideas on Kickstarter. Another barrier to entry: there are already plenty of great events and tours, so why bother funding ones that may or may not happen?

For Picatic, the biggest threat comes from the big-name crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Already, people are using sites like these to raise cash for their books, and events would be a natural progression.

The startup has raised $200,000 in seed funding, and will begin fundraising for its next round in the coming months.

Live Matrix doesn’t host any content, instead it links to sources like shopping sites or streaming video sites like Justin.tv and USTREAM. The types of events it indexes include sales, gaming tournaments, streaming videocasts and more.

Users can RSVP to individual events and get reminders as the event start time approaches, as well as share the site with the typical smattering of social networks.

But the company does sell advertising space on its site to capitalize on the time users spend browsing through events, in addition to sponsorship deals with event providers. Live Matrix also has plans to sell its analytics data for individual events.

The hope is that individual hosts — like ESPN3, for example — will provide Live Matrix with event details so the service won’t have to crawl the web for them. Founder and CEO Sanjay Reddy, former senior vice president at Gemstar-TV Guide, and his team are also working on a way to let users submit events and crowdsource the data-mining process.

The site has already been active for four months, with about 100 pre-approved beta users after launching at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this year. As of May, the company had raised around $250,000 from angel investors.