Hey fans, beeets JUST GOT BETTER. If you have a group on beeets, you can now set up a ticketing account through us and use it to ticket your events. Ticketing is done through our third-party ticketing buddies, Brown Paper Tickets. Obviously this applies mainly to venues. The great thing about Brown Paper Tickets is they’re cheap as hell. They charge a measly $1.99 service charge to the buyer, and nothing to venues. This is a step up from most ticketing sites, who charge the buyer & the seller.

To get started ticketing, you’ll need a group. If you already have one, great. If not, you can log in and create a new group for your venue/organization. Then you set up a ticketing account (you only have to do this once):

1. Log in to beeets and go to your group (http://beeets.com/groups)
2. Bring down the menu under the group tags and click “Set up ticketing”
3. You’re presented with a form to enter some info about your company. We don’t store this information, but we pass it on to BPT (using SSL for impenetrable security).
4. Once you submit it the page will refresh, and if there are no errors, you’ll get a success message. We will email you a temporary password you can use to log in to your new BPT account.
5. That’s it! Your group is now set up to do ticketing!

Now let’s say you have an event you want to sell tickets for. Follow a few easy steps and you’re done.

1. Go to the “Post an event” page and fill it out as usual.
2. Assuming you have ticketing set up, you’ll see a checkbox at the bottom to add ticketing to the event. Make sure it’s checked.
3. Your event will be added, then you’ll be redirected to a page where you can set up the ticketing.
4. You can now set the ticket price for each date the event happens, the maximum number of tickets to sell, and the date and time ticket sales for that date end.
5. Once complete, if all goes well, you’ll be redirected to the event detail page and see the “Buy tickets online” link.

You can also post edits to the ticketed event. Just make sure if you add new dates to an event that you check the “Update ticketing” checkbox and fill out any missing information. Your event on Brown Paper Tickets will be automatically updated along with any new/changed pricing or sales information. If you feel like you need more control over the ticketing for a specific event, you can always log in to your BPT account and make changes as you see fit.

So that’s the news. We just made things a lot easier for event producers and venues. Feedback is welcome. Please keep in mind that ticketing is a beta feature and may still have a few kinks. If you run into problems, let us know and we’ll “correct” them.

tata!

Santa Cruz, CA – April 29th 2010 – Lyon Bros. Enterprises today announced that Beeets.com, the only events search engine powered by your interests, will launch May 13th during a free show at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz, California. The Beeets launch show is the first stage in the strategic rollout of Beeets.com for the Monterey Bay region.

Beeets.com is a revolutionary new service that allows people to post, search and share events based completely on their interests. Events are “tagged” with descriptive words, allowing people to quickly filter through the local events listing by clicking on one or more interests. This unique interest search makes it easy for people to post and find events that wouldn’t fit into the few pre-defined categories on other events sites. Beeets.com is an ad-free experience that aims to get people off the web, into their communities and having fun with their lives.

Beeets enables local groups, including music venues, sports teams and community organizations, to have a central place to post and manage their events, not only on the Beeets website, but on their own websites as well. Using the simple drop-in Beeets Widget, organizations can pull their events listing from Beeets.com into their own sites. The Beeets Widget makes it easy to maintain an up-to-date list of events on any web site, and also allows people with similar interests to easily find these events on Beeets.com.

The Crepe Place is the first Santa Cruz company to integrate the Beeets Widget into their site, and is also hosting the Beeets.com launch show on May 13th. Featuring local bands Wooster (Santa Cruz) and Yung Mars (San Francisco), the show will be free to the public and include raffle prizes such as iPods and T-shirts. The launch party will coincide with the release of The Crepe Place’s new web site, built by Lyon Bros. Enterprises and powered by Beeets.com events.

Lyon Bros. Enterprises is a privately-funded web enterprise company based at the NextSpace offices in downtown Santa Cruz. Owned and operated by two brothers, Jeff and Andrew Lyon, Lyon Bros. Enterprises builds the technology behind Beeets.com as well as other local web startups such as Rally Up and PrivacyChoice.

For more information, please see http://beeets.com/launchparty

Yoo, we’re doing a kickass launch party to celebrate the beeets launch and our integration with the Crepe Place website. It’s a free show (21+) with Wooster and Yung Mars. That’s right. Free.

Come check it out to win prizes (iPod touch, iPod Nanos, etc), get discounts on drinks, and hear some awesome music.

May 13, 2010 @ The Crepe Place w/ Wooser + Yung Marz.

We love you all, thanks in advance for coming (you know you want to).

More details here

Hey loyal fans. Just wanted to give a heads up. We’ve recently updated the options in the beeets event subscriptions that allow you to set how many days in advance you’re alerted about events (default is now three days), how often you’re alerted, and what time(s) of the day you’re alerted.

If you aren’t aware, you can subscribe to a set of beeets tags and we send matching event updates to your email. You can subscribe from either from the homepage or the event search page. This is an insanely easy way to keep track of what’s going on, and you can be as broad or as specific with your tags as you like. It’s easy to set up, easy to use (just read your email), and also easy to unsubscribe.

Give it a shot, give us feedback, and go have fun!

We just spent a few days building you one! There is now a mobile version of the beeets homepage, ready for your iPhone to sink its teeth into. It’s still missing one or two things (like the ability to add tags to your search list) but we’re working on.

The reasoning behind this is we’re about to start a big marketing campaign in Santa Cruz, with stickers, flyers, posters, etc etc. A lot of people are going to see these and want to check out the site instantly on their iPhone or Android or whatever they have. Why not give them a good sense of how everything works without the clutter of a homepage meant for a large screen? And so, the mobile homepage was born.

We implemented the W3′s geolocation API which makes it easy for devices with a GPS installed (or Firefox) to give us a more accurate guess of where the device is when hitting the site from. Honestly, we thought we’d be doing this on our location-based iPhone app long before we did it on beeets, but sometimes things in life just work out differently than you expect. The W3 geo API returns a latitude/longitude pair among other things, which is kind of tricky to turn into a city and state/country code. Enter the GeoNames API, which saved us a ton of ball-busting, and keeps some of the load off our poor geolocation database.

Also, detecting a mobile app is actually a bit trickier than I suspected it would be (it’d be nice if they all had the word “mobile” in the UserAgent, but alas, they don’t). We found a good PHP library for detecting mobile devices that has done us good, so far.

Anyway, it’s been a good exercise in simple and non-cluttered UI, and we think it makes a great and well-needed addition to the site.

This is what someone might have said if they tried to post an event on beeets about two weeks ago. Well I invite all you naysayers to check again. We now have a nice interface for posting recurring events. For how complicated different combinations of dates can be, we’re pretty confident that the interface covers most of the scenarios an event would fall under while still staying simple enough to not burn your eyes just by looking at it. We’d love your feedback.

Recurring events can happen weekly (Mon-Sun), monthly (every 15th), or monthly base on a week (every 4th Friday). We currently don’t support yearly events, and probably won’t for a while.

So if you happen to book Britney Spears to sing at your venue every Monday, be sure to post it on beeets and let us know how it works.

Do you have a site?  Do you have a beeets group?  Now you can have beeets events on your site!  All you have to do is paste one tiny block of code in your site, and the most current events from your beeets will always show up on that page.  It’s like magic!

This makes it easy to show events on your site, and have them available for searching on beeets.com.  It makes your events visible to more people, and it saves you time–you no longer have to edit any pages or format any HTML.  Just post your events on beeets!

To get started, go to your Group feed page and click the “Add these events to your site” link in the upper-right.

We set it up so that the listing will use the colors and fonts from your site so that it fits in with your visual theme.  But you can customize the heck out of it if you want, easily, and without editing any code.  Just use the customization menu on the beeets widget page.

We’re really excited about this feature, since it helps open beeets up to the world.  Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

I’ll keep this one short. Given our privacy policy, nay, our beliefs, we feel that what users decide is public should be public, and what they want private is private. Because of this, we no longer track analytics using Google Analytics. They are known to employ user tracking campaigns and profile building…and we’re just not feelin’ it.

We’ve since tested and deployed a new analytics tracker, an open-source project known as Piwik, that has almost seamlessly replaced Google Analytics. The best part is, nobody sees the data but us.

So the highest-bidding advertiser might be able to buy your ad profile and show you highly targeted advertisements, but not from information they got from beeets.

Out of our millions of daily users, I’m sure at least a few of you have noticed the “Subscribe to these tags” links (see the Santa Cruz homepage for an example). This is a feature which allows you to select some tags you’re interested in and get email alerts when events that have those tags are coming up. For instance, you can subscribe to “santa cruz ca”, “shows”, and “punk” to get alerts of upcoming punk shows in SC. This is a great way to stay up on current events but not have to check the site every day. Also, just like our search, we only send you events having all of those tags. That means if a “show” is happening in “santa cruz ca” but it’s not tagged as “punk,” you will not get an email from us. Great way to get only what you want.

Some things to mention about tag subscriptions:

• You don’t need an account to use this feature. Exciting, we know. Subscriptions are open for everyone.
• You can have multiple subscriptions. In fact, you can have as many as you’d like.
• You can unsubscribe at any time with two clicks. We send an unsubscribe link with every email so if you decide you’re sick of it, you’re off the list instantly.
• As usual, our policy with your information is very strict. No selling your email to asswipe spammers.

So give it a shot. There may only be a few events posted now, but we will still send you updates as we get more events.

Also please note that this feature is in its infancy. We’ll have problems in the near future with email servers blocking us for sending out bulk mail, and although we’ll try to get things worked out as soon as possible, you may miss out on a few events. So thanks in advance for sticking it out and loving us anyway. We love you too.

Given how other tagging systems work (a comma used to separate multiple tags) and that it may be confusing for us to allow tags with commas, we’re changing the tagging system. Tags will no longer allow commas, include location tags. We have already made this change, and in the future plan to integrate the comma into our tagging boxes.

For instance, you’ll be able to type “music, shows, folk, bars” into a tag finder and it will add all those tags for you so you don’t have to do them one by one. This will work for the event search page where you can add favorite tags, and on the event and group posting pages where you tag your event/group.

Hopefully this should make beeets a bit easier to use, and as always we’d love to hear your feedback.