This post is also about looking at existing tools that have similarities to our application. AppAppeal made a list of the top 34 free event planning application. This post will categorise these types of application and compare them to our social networking application to illustrate how they differ.

Group Event Organisation 

• Meetup (www.meetup.com)
• GroupSpaces (www.groupspaces.com)
• Capsule  (trycapsule.com)

These applications are centered around organising events for specific groups. However, it doesn’t organise the transport element, and nor does it allow inclusion of people not on a social network.

Event Planning

• Evite (www.evite.com)
• Punchbowl (www.punchbowl.com)
• Kuandoo (www.kuandoo.com)

These applications offer full event planning services, from creating websites for your events, helping with locations and vendors, and even organising invitations to the events. Kuandoo is by far the most similar application on this entire list to our social networking application, as it actually offers some form of transportation management by allowing people to organise car pools for the event. It also allows you to connect via Facebook. However, it is still lacking some of the features of our application that will allow you to be invited to an event even if you aren’t on a social network. and our intelligent travel algorithm will organise the best solutions for people’s travel preferences including trains, busses, taxis, etc, as opposed to just car pooling.

Invitation Design

• PurpleTrail (www.purpletrail.com)
• AnyVite (anyvite.com)
• Pingg (www.pingg.com)
• Cocodot (cocodot.com)
• Socializr (www.sozializr.com)
• InviteKix (www.invitekix.com)

These applications are designed to aid people with their invitations to events. They provide invitation templates and illustrations for people to use, and organise delivering and managing the invitations as well. Our social networking application organises the delivering of the invite, but purely as a plan text invitation. However this is because the main focus of our social networking application is to bring people together through the events as opposed to focusing on the inviting side.

Event Listing & Ticketing

• Eventful (www.eventful.com)
• Eventjoy (www.eventjoy.com)
• Eventie (eventie.com)

These applications are predominantly focused on selling tickets to events. Our social networking application is focused on the social aspect of events where people create events for either their friends or colleagues, or people they have some form of connection to.

Event Location

• Wherevent (www.wherevent.com)
• UpOut (www.upout.com)
• Wikido (www.wikido.com)
• Lifecrowd (www.lifecrowd.com)
• Eventgrabber (www.eventgrabber.com)
• Plangr (plangr.com)

These applications look at finding events for people to join in a specific location, and or matching a specific type of event. This is aimed at someone who is looking to go to events, where as our social networking application is focused on people who want to organise events.

Event Calendar

• Plancast (www.plancast.com)
• Localist (www.localist.com)
• Dingbee (dingbee.com)
• Upcoming (upcoming-yahoo.com)
• Eventot (www.eventot.com)

These applications provide calendars to enable people to see which events they and others are going to. Our social networking application will have a calendar of events, but they will be personalised to the user as opposed to letting everyone see everyone else’s events.

Event Scheduling

• TimeBridge (www.timebridge.com)
• SelectTheDate (www.selectthedate.com)

These applications are about enabling people to group together to jointly choose the best date for an event. This is something that our application does not include, and could be an interesting future consideration.

Social Network

• Fyesta (www.fyesta.com)
• Erly (www.erly.com)

These are social networking applications centered around events, Fyesta shares what you are doing with your friends, and Erly maps people based on the events/locations they go to. This shows that others are trying to make social networking applications out of events, neither of these ideas are that similar to our social networking application as ours enables creation of events and organises their travel, therefore it still has a unique edge to it even if there are other social networks created around events.

Seating Chart Manager

• Toptableplanner (www.toptableplanner.com)
• ArrangeMySeat (arrangemyseat.com)

These applications are specifically focused on organising seating charts for events. This is not similar to our social networking application at all.

Other

• Zokos (www.zokos.com)
• Giveamonkey (www.giveamonkey.com)

These applications are also equally different to our social networking application as Zokos focuses on organising and paying for dinner parties before they occur, and Giveamonkey is an online gift listing site.

Conclusion
These event based applications vary greatly in their similarities to our social networking application. Several types of these applications such as the Social Network, Event Calendar, Event Planner and Group Event Organisation share similar features and ideas to our application, but overall none of them match what we aim to do. Even Kuandoo which is by far the most similar application differs from our social networking application in several ways, and offers less transportation based features than we intend to. Having studied 34 different event based applications, in addition to the previous post regarding similar tools, we have yet to come across an application that is really similar to ours and offers the same services. Therefore we still have a unique edge .

References
[1] http://www.appappeal.com/apps/event-planning

In the past, making an event was a lengthy process; even if you only intended to invite your close friends. It involved making numerous phone calls, or sending group emails, or even posting individual invitation cards. Our idea, is to try and solve that issue by creating a social space for managing events; whereby events from different social networking events can be linked, and anyone, irrespective of whether they belong to a social network (or not!) can be invited.

The main services our social networking application provide are:

• creating events
• organising and coordinating travel to provide an intelligent travel organiser.
• inviting friends to events (irrespective of whether they are on a social network or not

Below are some tools that provide similar services:

Event Websites

Facebook [1]
Facebook have made it very simple to create an event listing. You can create ‘Facebook Events’ and invite anyone on your friends list. However the downside to this is that you cannot invite people who aren’t on your Facebook friend list!
Our advantage: using our social networking application you can invite anyone irrespective of whether they are signed up to our network. 

Eventbrite [2]
Eventbrite is a site that is purely dedicated to organising events and even allows you to promote your event and organise tickets for it; and this don’t necessarily require you to have a social networking account to join these events.
Our advantage: our social networking application doesn’t just organise the event, it organises the travel too.

Travel Websites

TFL & National Rail & The Trainline [3,4,5]
These sites offer a ‘plan your journey’ service; whereby the user can input their start location, destination, and desired time of arrival/departure. They even offer a service where they will give you multiple options of transport (e.g tube/train/bus). It also allows you to purchase tickets on the site, in addition to giving you pricing information.
Our advantage: These services are for the individual, whereas our social space is for everyone; and only includes certain public transport options. Our users will input their start destination and preferred method of travel e.g Southampton, and Train. Our system will then suggest to all the ‘train-goers’ from Southampton that they get the same train together, and illustrate what group sharing options are available such as group train tickets. Similarly, for a local event several people who all opted to travel by taxi and live in the same postcode, would get the suggestion that they shared a taxi together.

Rome 2 Rio [6]
This sites enables you to plan a journey from anywhere in the world, and will provide you with the multiple coordinated travel resources that you need.
Our advantage: whilst this site seems similar to our social networking application by way of it’s travel organisation, it is missing the social networking element of our application. Our application provides a travel organisation service for groups of people all wanting to attend the same event even if they don’t necessarily know each other. 

Conclusion
There is a huge market for event based websites (based on the amount that already exist, and the popularity of Facebook events) and our idea will allow everyone to get involved; as well as providing them with easy cost effective travel solutions. Our idea clearly has a unique perspective as whilst there are websites and applications that are similar to certain parts of our social networking application, none of them combine social networking, with travel organisation.

References
[1] https://www.facebook.com/events/list
[2] https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/
[3] http://www.tfl.gov.uk/
[4] http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/
[5] http://www.thetrainline.com/
[6] http://www.rome2rio.com/