Jeff Sinclair, 42, and Ben West, 41, were former colleagues each running their own tech companies when, in 2009, they took what has turned out to be a very fortuitous walk. “Jeff and I were walking our dogs together in the forest in Vancouver and holding the iPhone, which had just come out, and going, ‘This is going to be big. There’s an opportunity to do something with this,’” West says. With the 2010 Winter Olympics soon to arrive in their hometown, they set to work creating an app for the games, with one hitch: They did it before talking to anyone at the Olympics.
“We built the application without having the contract. We took a big risk. We built a product that we thought would be very useful for them, and they ended up licensing it from us three months before the games,” Sinclair says. “It was the first app ever for an Olympic Games. They estimated originally 50,000 down- loads, and we ended up blowing through a million downloads in the first few days. And ultimately that set us on a path of doing event applications.”
Thus was born Eventbase. The company has produced the apps for the 2012 and 2014 Olympic Games, as well as for South by Southwest, the Sundance Film Festival, Comic-Con, Cannes Lions, and for some of the largest events hosted by corporate clients such as Cisco, SAP, I.B.M., and more. But whereas that first app for the Olympics was designed simply to replace a printed guide, now Sinclair and West are focused on how an app can improve the attendee experience.
“Events are inherently mobile. You are moving through venues and interacting with content and people in different ways,” West says. “Now that mobile tech has shown up we are able to start leveraging technology to enhance events. And that means enhancing the connection to content, to enhancing the ability for attendees to network with each other and really bring about a richer experience to events in a way that just wasn’t possible previously when we were living in a web world.”
At SXSW in 2015, Eventbase installed more than 1,000 iBeacons across more than 250 venues to provide targeted networking recommendations through the app. This year, the company created a feature dubbed “SXSW Recommends” to provide customized session suggestions based on an attendee’s location, favorites, and activity of like-minded guests. Eventbase has doubled in size in the past year to more than 100 employees and Sinclair says they expect to continue growing into the future.
“We are seeing clients that historically may have spent more money on their website now shifting those budgets across to mobile. That’s been a key trend over the last few years,” he says. “It’s been an exciting journey so far, but we’re really excited to see where we can take event technology in a mobile-first world.”
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