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Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.

Google helps electric car owners find battery charges, peace of mind

The biggest challenge of owning an electric vehicle aside from having to awkwardly pal around with Ed Begley Jr. all of the time? Finding a place to charge it, of course. The ever-green folks at Google have teamed up with the US Department of Energy and more than 80 companies to form the GeoEVSE Forum, an organization aimed at bringing diverse electric car resources under a single umbrella. Looking for one of those elusive Best Buy charging stations? Use the Google Maps database, helmed by the DOE, which currently offers some 600 alternative fueling stations, including electric charging, hydrogen, and natural gas. Now if only it could help us find a good deal on a Tesla.

Continue reading Google helps electric car owners find battery charges, peace of mind

Google helps electric car owners find battery charges, peace of mind originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Venuetastic Makes Booking An Event Space A Breeze

Finding the right venue space within budget, location and size constraints can be the toughest part of planning an event. And the most time-intensive part of the process is doing the due-diligence around booking a space, from finding contacts to calling event managers to find info about size, price, to signing contracts and more. While hiring an event planner can save some of the strain caused by this responsibility, this can be an expensive undertaking. Today, Y Combinator-backed Venuetastic is launching as an easy to use event venue marketplace. It’s essentially a comparison shopping site for booking event venues.

Venuetastic lists features of event space, ranging from those catered towards corporate events, to wedding spaces. People can search for venues and compare them (based on capacity, location, price, type of space, and type of event), and bookmark venues that are promising.

For venues, Venuetastic is free to list on the site and free to use it. Venues can upload all the information about their space, including photos, videos and more. And Venuetastic essentially automates the booking process, and coordinates contract signing, and payments. The startup makes money by charging a commission on bookings.

The startup’s co-founders Helen Belogolova and Christine Yen (this is the first all-female startup Y Combinator has funded), tell me that the site also aims to bring businesses who don’t specifically work in events (i.e. art galleries) with non-traditional, large commercial space into the mix to provide more options for consumers and potentially give businesses a new revenue stream.

While Venuetastic is initially focusing on the Bay Area, the startup already covers a vast number of potential spaces in the region with over 500 venues listed. And the company has already helped coordinate event space for a number of startups. For example, DropBox recently used Venuetastic to coordinate a arty, explaining that using the service “allowed us to have the free time to focus on making it a good time.”

Venuetastic faces competition from Evenues and Cvent. But event planning and booking is such a large market, there is room for a number of players in this space.

One Man Looks for Love on Facebook — Using Ads

We’ve seen Facebook ads for individuals before, but this guy’s campaign is more personal — and potentially more profitable — than anything we’ve come across in the past.

Meet Matt Simpson of Tempe, Arizona. He’s a web-savvy 30-something, and he’s using Facebook’s self-service ad platform to find a long-term romantic partner.

In the recent past, Mashable staffers have been the target of a few campaigns from people who want to get our attention, either for news coverage or for a job. Facebook’s hyper-specific data on users makes it possible for those ad-buying individuals to narrow their campaigns to reach only a select few targets — the people most likely to respond to the ad.

Simpson has taken advantage of those capabilities in a new way. Since he knows what he wants — an emotionally balanced, intellectually and spiritually mature woman — he was able to set his campaign parameters to include women with an expressed interest in yoga, meditation and books by spiritual authors.

On his blog, Simpson notes that on most dating sites, women are bombarded with requests and messages. Too often, those pings are based on shallow, physical criteria. By creating a subtle way to reach out to women who share his deeper interests — and by allowing them to “opt in” to learning more about him rather than seeing his name in a deluge of suitor-sent missives — he might be increasing his odds of finding love online.

And at a cost of $0.75 per click, he might end up saving money rather than using a dating site or trying his luck in the real world of bars and coffee shops. So far, he’s spent less than $20 for his campaign, where women indicate they’d like to get to know him better; for contrast, a Match.com membership, where women are more on the defensive, would have cost him around $35 per month.

Simpson says he’s had no dates yet, but he was contacted by six women in the first week of the campaign.

“For tech-savvy folks like us,” he wrote in an email, “the gut reaction toward ‘creepy’ is not as strong. However, the public at large seems to have a difference reaction — either because it’s invasive or because it seems desperate.

“I think it’s a promotion-versus-attraction issue. The proliferation of dating sites has helped America accept attraction-based online dating. Promotion-based online dating is new. There’s got to be a reason that the big dating sites don’t offer added profile exposure for purchase.”

What do you think of the campaign? Weird, creepy, interesting — or perhaps even something you’d try yourself?

More About: advertising, dating, facebook, facebook ads, love, relationships

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