VentureBeat

The online event-planning market is mature. Various event web sites have gotten bought, gone out of business, or gone nowhere in the last several years.

However, two companies, Amiando and EventBrite, allow you to sell tickets to events online, and they’ve emerged with a business model: They take a cut of the ticket sale. This differs them from the slew of other sites that helped you organize events, but never made money.

Notably, the two companies have just announced new rounds of venture funding.

The two companies fill the middle ground between the enormous task of building your own ticket-selling software (not very practical, obviously), and using a large-scale ticket-seller like Ticketmaster. In addition, they help you set up websites to promote those events.

Today, Amiando, a Munich, Germany-based service that says it has the “first mover” advantage in Europe, is announcing its first round of financing, from Wellington Partners and Adinvest.

Eventbrite, the San Francisco-based company that’s likely better known to our United States-based readers, announced its first, and undisclosed, round earlier this week from the European Founders Fund. Eventbrite’s chief executive is Kevin Hartz, an early advisor to Paypal and a repeat entrepreneur who is also the co-founder of angel investing outfit Youniversity.

Both services should be familiar to VentureBeat readers. We’re using EventBrite to sell tickets for our MobileBeat conference in July. Amiando, meanwhile, was the online ticket seller for the Crunchies awards that we co-hosted last January.

Amiando, which also offers a widget that lets you sell tickets on your own site, has been focusing on international expansion. Besides English, it already provides the service in German (of course), as well as Spanish and French. It recently announced a distribution partnership for the East Asian market with Web2Asia, a company that provides business development services for foreign companies looking to expand into Asia. The East Asian region, particularly China, has unsurprisingly shown impressive growth potential for events and related services that go along with general economic expansion. China’s event industry for example is growing 20 percent per year, with the second highest number of trade show visitors and exhibitors in the world, according to a 2007 report by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Anthony Ha contributed to this article.

Seatwave, a European market place for event tickets where fans can buy and sell directly from and to each other, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding.

The financing continues a — yes, a large wave — of interest in the secondary ticket market, where people buy tickets, but then turn around and sell them to someone else. These markets can serve people who are legitimately caught with tickets and want to get rid of them because the can no longer go to an event, or they can also benefit scalpers trying to make a few bucks through arbitrage.

In the last year, we’ve seen a frenzy: Stubhub, TicketsNow and GetMeIn have all been gobbled up in the last 12 months by eBay and Ticketmaster (see our coverage).

The funding comes from Fidelity Ventures, a Boston based venture capital firm that is betting strongly on online marketplaces. It backed marketplace companies like China’s Alibaba and money lending company Prosper. Indeed, the firm’s partners are going around saying that Alibaba’s recent IPO represented a watershed event ushering in a new era of successful marketplace companies. Another firm making a big bet here is Benchmark, which is also an investor in Prosper.

Seatwave offers tickets for theater, sports, music and other live events. Other investors in Seatwave include Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest.

The company was launched last year by Joe Cohen, a former exec at Ticketmaster and Match.com.

The company said it has 500,000 tickets available for sale and is the most-trafficked ticket exchange website in the UK. The money will be used to expand into other countries, the company said.

The company estimates the secondary market to be worth around $1.9 billion in the UK alone, and $6.8-9.7 billion Europe wide.