turn2live.com

“What are you in the mood to do tonight?” Turn2Live helps you plan your night out based on how you feel. Whether you’re in the mood for a romantic date-night, a relaxing evening, or a day filled with energy, Turn2Live helps you find the event that’s most relevant to you. 

Our goal is to make event discovery easy, intuitive and relevant to what an entertainment-goer wants at any given moment. By combining our algorithms with the immense amount of readily available entertainment and event data, we have built a real-time event guide that allows users to interact with our site and immediately purchase reservations and tickets to events that fit their moods. 

Entertainment-goers dig through pages and pages of event listings just to find out where they might spend their hard-earned cash. Even after narrowing down a list to concerts, restaurants, movies and other events, deciding on what to do still feels like comparing apples to oranges because listings are typically categorized by generic terms like “event type” or “venue.”

At Turn2Live, we organize all of our events by mood so users can find everything happening around them that fits the vibe, feel and mood of what they want to do. Moreover, because we allow users to discover dining, live-music, movie, theatre and sporting event options, we cater to a large demographic while still suggesting events normally found on niche event recommenders and blogs.

For entertainment seekers, Turn2Live offers an easy and intuitive way to find and buy tickets to highly relevant events. For advertisers, Turn2Live lets buyers place ads that are contextually and emotionally relevant to users wanting to know where to spend their money at any given moment.

Currently, we are validating our mood algorithms for live-music in Austin only.  We expect testing to be complete (based on current funding) by spring of 2010, at which point we will open our application to movies, dining, theatre and sporting events.

The main feature behind Turn2Live is the engine driving the search-for-entertainment-by-mood functionality. On the back-end we have developed a system of crawlers and natural language parsers that will automatically extract event data from affiliate feeds and merge them with revenue-generating ticket links. In 2010, we will begin development on an evolving personalized recommendation engine and an analytics-based back-end that allows advertisers insight into how, where and for what types of entertainment consumers are spending their money.

We will compete in the billion-dollar online ticketing industry, which to date has been experiencing a 20% growth in customer visits, despite the significant drawbacks in consumer spending. Of this total market, we will initially hook into partnered ticketing programs to supplement our user-driven event data feeds. Within 5 years, we anticipate capturing $10 million of a potential $50 million / year affiliate ticket market. 

Beyond affiliate sales, by categorizing all listed events by mood, we will be able to provide contextually and emotionally relevant advertising through which our ad partners can target users by mood, geography, entertainment category, and ad-type. Based on projected user growth estimates, by year five we expect non-video ads to yield an additional $500,000 per year.

Our customers are the increasing number of users who have turned to online portals for the convenience of purchasing tickets as well as users who look online for event recommendations.  Based on customer interviews, we have found that in a group situation, women tend decide where to go for an evening out, and men generally follow.  Beyond that, we have also found that users who describe themselves as movie and music enthusiasts have been the largest group of (non-solicited) street evangelists for Turn2Live.  We will aggressively target these customer types over the next five years.

Our main marketing will be done through online advertising, event social-networking (via Facebook, Twitter) as well as user-grab events. From previous live-concert user-grab events, we have seen an average monthly increase of 200 users/month and 500 additional user-email addresses from event RSVPs. Over the next five years, we will aggressively promote Turn2Live through traditional online strategies as well as off-line strategies (fliers, mailers, print advertising) to attract audiences that are further along the technology adoption curve. By tightly integrating our application with facebook and twitter, we will enable users to talk about where they are going as they normally would on social sites, but with the added advantage of rich event information and the ability for friends of users to purchase tickets to the same event through Turn2Live.com.  

Of the 32 million online ticket-purchasers nationwide [1] by year five, we aim to direct approximately two million (6.5% of total market) entertainment-goers to purchase tickets and reservations through Turn2Live.

Our three main competitor categories are ticket sellers, competing event recommendation sites and stay-at-home entertainment publishers (TV programming, online games, streaming media, etc.) Nationally, Going.com, AOL.com, Last.Fm and Facebook have quickly been growing their entertainment portals whereas locally, niche event sites have been popping up at an increasing rate. With over 40 main competitors in the entertainment-guide market, this is a highly fragmented market with no clear market winner. While our competitors embrace presenting users with more entertainment options, we believe this has led to increased user frustration and thus increased the desire for many to stay home because it’s “just easier to stay home than search for hours looking for something to do.”

Nik Daftary – Co-Founder & Frontman

Nik is Turn2Live's CEO and one of the company’s original co-founders. In addition to leading the company towards its March 13, 2009 launch, he is responsible for Turn2Live’s overall business strategy, partner relationship management and online execution.

Previously, Nik served as a customer relationship management (CRM) consultant at Accenture, where he led the design, development and implementation of industry-first CRM features for Fortune 50 telecom and software clients. Prior to his work with Accenture, Nik worked at Target Corporation where he recognized his passion for marketing and consumer-facing products while developing buying and branding strategies. Nik holds a B.S. in marketing and finance from Trinity University and a M.B.A. in marketing and entrepreneurship from The University of Texas at Austin. Nik is also an avid music lover and an electronic music DJ.

Zelal Gungordu – Lead Semantic & Natural Language Developer

Zelal is Turn2Live’s lead natural language developer and computational linguist. She has designed and developed the mood-based search capabilities of the Turn2Live search engine.  Prior to joining Turn2Live Zelal held an eight-year tenure as an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and developer at Cycorp, where she served as lead developer on AI applications for a wide variety of domains including natural language processing, data integration, and computer network security.

She is author of publications in areas ranging from computational linguistics and AI applications to computer network security and data integration problems. Zelal holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh where she specialized in natural language processing, machine learning and computational linguistics.

Jackson & William Blacklock – TwinB Creative

TwinB is a full service, user-centric, socially connected creative agency. TwinB’s partnership with Turn2Live began with its conception. Developing the full identity and the user interface of the current engine as well as the collateral and marketing pieces. TwinB also handled a considerable amount of the development work from backend to frontend.  TwinB’s co-founder Jackson Blacklock, is an accomplished musician and has published multiple albums in varied styles from classical to electro, while William Blacklock also toured internationally with his brother in the award winning group Schrödinger’s Cat.

Bart Bohn - Director

Serving on the Turn2Live board of directors, Bart works with the Austin Technology Incubator as the director of Wireless and Information Technology. There, he is responsible for identifying promising early stage companies and providing them with the necessary strategic business assistance to help them achieve their growth objectives.

Bart also serves as executive director of the Austin Wireless Alliance, a non-profit association promoting growth of the wireless industry in central Texas, on the planning board for MobileMonday Austin, and on the advisory board of the Austin Technology Council. Prior to ATI, Bart was an engagement manager with BearingPoint consulting and advised clients on strategy, strategy development, strategy implementation and business process design.

Aakash Parekh - Director

Aakash is a member of the Turn2Live board of directors and one of the company's original co-founders. He has served on the board since the company's incorporation. Aakash is a patent attorney, licensed by the State Bar of Texas and registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He works at an intellectual property law firm in Austin. Prior to his legal career, Aakash worked as a software engineer at FactSet Research Systems, developing investment portfolio analysis software.

Aakash is currently a practicing patent attorney and holds a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and a B.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Our main revenue sources will come from ticketing sites and outlets that have affiliate programs and developed API platforms.  Based on an average of 25 total purchases per year across entertainment categories on our site, each user acquired will yield just over $8 / year. Because data feeds already exist for the information we seek, scalability is limited only by the number of cities in which we intend to launch. On the ad front, we will capture an immense amount of consumer spending and entertainment search information.  To monetize this, we will launch an ad-platform similar to the facebook ad platform where advertisers can choose the level of detail in user targeting. In contrast to bid-based ad pricing, we will be offering fixed-fee pricing, which we believe will encourage local business advertising due to simplicity, transparency and the low cost of ad-experimentation.