There are already apps that are tackling either the what-should-I-do angle (WillCall, Thrillist). And there are established players in ticketing on the iPhone (StubHub). But Applauze sees itself as a service for both use cases and thinks it can stand out because it is selling tickets directly, not through an affiliate model. Also, the app has some incentives built in, including attractive pricing, to get users on board.

It doesn’t do discounting but Applauze sources tickets from a variety of brokers and venues so it surfaces the latest and cheapest price for each event. Applauze is also banking on the appeal of exclusive access: it’s struck deals with some venues (for now just in Los Angeles and Chicago) that allow Applauze users to sign up for VIP tickets. The venue can choose what that means, but in most cases it means not waiting in line with other ticket holders, getting access to a VIP area or a pre-show meet and greet, and usually a free drink, founder and CEO Kiran Bellubbi told me.

After using the app, I found some really interesting and potentially great things about it, including:

• It’s pretty diverse: Applauze is not just aimed at twentysomethings or music lovers; it’s for concerts large and small, for college and professional sports events, plus free community activities that might appeal to families or parents too. Bellubbi says, thanks to established relationships from Band of the Day, his company has access to “every big event in the U.S. right now.” Under the nearby tab in my city (Philadelphia) I’ve seen everything from a Rihanna stadium concert and an Emmylou Harris concert at a music hall to a Midsummer Night’s Dream performance, the Philadelphia Flower Show, comedy shows and free cultural events at the Franklin Institute and Barnes Foundation — in other words, a wide range.
• It learns about you: The app learns about your preferences as you use it. If you like a particualr event and you rate it, bookmark it, or share it, Applauze interprets that as you like either the venue, the artist or the music category, so the list of events you are shown in the future will more closely align with your tastes. This means that you might eventually see different seats from some venues, for instance, if you have expressed interest in orchestra seating in the past.
• It’s beautifully designed: The design flourishes are really nice, from the pop-up wheel of event categories to Applauze’s custom-designed expanding scroll list. Applauze is very clearly made by a group of interface designers who know what they’re doing. (Band of the Day was runner-up for Apple’s App of the Year in 2011.)
• It’s inherently social: But it doesn’t require you to add new friends to the service. You connect it to your Facebook account so you can invite friends — either via Facebook or your phone’s contacts — from within the app. When you look at an event, if your friends are using the app too, you can see if they are — using the app’s parlance — “in” to attend.
• They’re launching pretty widely right away: The app will be live in 25 cities starting Tuesday.

There are some other things to appreciate about Applauze too, like it doesn’t hide ticketing fees. When you scroll through events, the price you see is the ticket price plus any processing fees or any fees associated with shipping physical tickets (if needed). You also can do everything inside the app: from browsing events, to making the purchase in a few taps, to inviting your friends, adding the event to Passbook, and adding it to your mobile calendar. Applauze has the mobile-first ticketing idea nailed.

The service is starting out in the U.S. but has international aspirations. Bellubbi tells me the U.K., Germany and Dubai are set to have access to Applauze in the next six months.

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I talked with co-founder and CEO Kevin Hartz in Lisbon, Portugal this weekend, where we were both speaking at the Switch conference — and he explained how the company was going to expand: first Europe, then the world.

Having told the crowd that Eventbrite’s Portuguese version would be coming next month, Hartz explained to me that the company was translating the service into a variety of different languages that would all be rolling out soon. And based on the evidence seen by the site’s English version over the past six years, he said, he expects to see dramatic growth once local users across different countries can use the site in their own language.

“The English-speaking countries — England, Australia, Canada, Ireland — took off organically, and that’s been our mindset,” he said. “One of the main drivers for why Tiger Global got involved last year was the international aspect of it: it’s typically reserved to mobile applications where you see that sort of adoption. But Eventbrite, the service itself, we’re doing about 20 percent of our business outside of the U.S., so we’re leaning into that and ramping things up in the U.K. and on the continent and the rest of the world.”

And of course, just because you’re launching in a European language doesn’t mean your only targets are European countries. Launching in Portuguese, for example, gives you potential presence in Brazil; launching in Spanish hits much of Central and South America. And while French and German may not have such large base of speakers, they’re still significant.

“It’s about awareness. Where we’ve started raising awareness, we’ve seen fairly predictable growth. When you see adoption of the free service, we look very closely. That’s driven our past and present decision making on where we want to go, but we are seeing a lot of interesting growth in developing countries.”

To get where it wants to be, Hartz said, the company was looking to hire a managing director for Europe and was heading off to catch a plane to Germany once we’d spoken. Read into that what you will, but he promised that more announcements would be coming soon.

Having just passed the landmark of generating $1 billion in ticket sales, you can see plenty of opportunity for growth — especially as the site is increasingly becoming about live events of all sorts. That’s one reason it started producing its own card reader for use at gigs and suchlike.

But isn’t working on hardware a distraction? Wouldn’t partnership be a better idea? Although Hartz said he’d love to partner with the likes of Square to deliver the same service, he says it doesn’t seem to be a big priority for the payments company right now… and that’s left Eventbrite to go its own way.

Still, there are areas where Hartz and his colleagues won’t get distracted — including one particular international market that he is keen to avoid for the time being.

“We looked really closely at the Chinese market, and I spent a lot of time wondering whether we should create a joint venture or a subsidiary, but we decided not to for various reasons,” he says. “You can win the world and not win China, but it’s not the opposite way around — if you win China, it doesn’t have a bearing on the other parts. There’s certainly governmental issues and so on, but essentially we’re looking everywhere but China.”

Photograph of Kevin Hartz used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Randy Stewart / Stewtopia

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Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur

And don’t forget as well that our very own Structure — the top cloud computing event, now in its fifth year — takes place this week in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area, there are a few tickets left.

LeWeb London, London, June 19-20
The Paris-based LeWeb has been Europe’s biggest, most influential startup event for several years: now it’s spreading its wings and heading to London for a sister summer event. It’s been encouraged by the British government, but shouldn’t be overbearingly cheerleading for the U.K. scene. And an added extra: I’ll be doing some on stage interviews!

Future Entertainment Summit, London, June 20
Also in London, this event has a great lineup of digital media executives if that’s your bag. Keynotes from the likes of BSkyB, Microsoft, and the British communications and culture minister, and much discussion of apps, second screen services and other shifts in the business.

2nd Digital Agenda Assembly, Brussels, June 21-22
A get-together for all kinds of companies, individuals and organizations involved in the digital scene across Europe, dedicated to helping shape policy and response. May not sound like the most exciting thing, but with speakers including legendary investor Yossi Vardi, Alcatel-Lucent boss Ben Verwaayen and high ranking European politicians, it’s a high-powered affair.

Photograph of Loic Le Meur used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Joi Ito

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Here’s my pick of three you should look out for.

Bitspiration, Krakow, Poland, June 12-13
It’s not just the European football championships taking place in Poland right now: this new conference hoping to foster ambitious entrepreneurial culture in central Europe has a great line-up, with a range of local experts and US imports including YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, Google developer advocate Don Dodge, and John Draper (better known as Cap’n Crunch). Regretfully I couldn’t make it, but would have loved to see what they had to say.

Red Innova, Madrid, Spain, June 14-15
Recognized as one of Spain’s best startup conferences, this two-day affair brings together some extremely high-powered speakers — such as José María Álvarez-Pallete López, the head of Telefónica Europe, serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky and GigaOM’s very own CEO Paul Walborsky. But it’s also a great opportunity for networking.

Switch Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, June 15-16
Still in Iberia, this event — last year named one of the continent’s top 10 events by Wired UK — focuses on ideas and entrepreneurship for an international crowd. I’ll be there, speaking on the theme of “connecting the dots” and meeting as many of the hundreds of startups and technologists in attendance as possible.

Photograph of Ireland fans used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Dullhunk

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Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur

Started more than seven years ago, the event now claims to be the industry’s most international shindig, and now it’s about to see its first spin-off, to be held in London next month.

But when I spoke to Le Meur a couple of days ago, he admitted to me that just a few months back it wasn’t the English Channel he wanted to cross with LeWeb — it was the Atlantic. He’d just started exploring the idea of starting a LeWeb for the Bay Area, where he has lived for the past five years.

“We had started to think about doing one in San Francisco,” Le Meur told me. “But then Cameron stepped in.”

By “Cameron” he means David Cameron, the British Prime Minister.

Reports have long suggested that the British government — keen to score a victory over their rivals in France — wanted to lure LeWeb to London. Le Meur says those rumors are accurate, but he never intended to move the entire conference away from Paris. However, he says, in the end, British politicos offered such a range of assistance that eventually meant the decision to set up a second, London-based event, was easy to make.

“It was a special request from Mr Cameron,” says Le Meur. “Last year I was was a Founders’ Forum event and I was very impressed because he shook me by the hand and said ‘Loic, you need to move Le Web to London.’ We’re not moving Le Web, and we had no plans for London just two months ago. But they’ve been so helpful that we couldn’t refuse.”

That helpfulness extended to a financial commitment, too, with Tech City Investment Organization (the body charged with drumming up publicity and investment for London’s startup scene ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games) acting as the first major sponsor for the event.

But anyone concerned that the U.K. government may end up underwriting the whole affair as it tries to woo European startups to London are misplaced, says Le Meur.

“They took a top-level sponsorship, but I would say it’s about 10 to 20 percent of the whole budget,” he says. “It’s very nice and one reason we decided to go to London, but we’re still taking a risk.”

That chimes with what TCIO chief Eric van der Kleij told me last month.

Le Meur said that the early takeup for the event, which takes place on June 19th and 20th, shows there actually is “room and demand in London for us”, and that there is enough going on in the startup world to warrant a spinoff.

“Everything moves so fast in six months,” he says. “At LeWeb, nobody was talking about Pinterest. Instagram was on stage in Paris, but nobody cared very much.”

Photo of Loic Le Meur courtesy of Joi Ito on Flickr. Photo of David Cameron user under Creative Commons license courtesy of World Economic Forum.

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Here’s our pick of some of the week’s most interesting events.

GOTO Copenhagen and Amsterdam, May 21-25
International software development conference across two cities, for coders of all stripes: lots of different tracks, gathered together under the theme of hearing real stories from actual people. May 21-23 are in Copenhagen. The Amsterdam event runs on 24-25 of May.

Digital Shoreditch Festival, London, May 21-June 1
Rather than pick out one event from this smorgasbord of happenings, we’ll just point you at the whole thing: this week there are events with advice on careers and funding, for example.

MySociety Data Day, London, May 23
Britain has one of the most developed civic hacker cultures — largely based around messing about with data, as mySociety has been doing for years. This day-long event brings together those who want to do something innovative with public information with the group’s developers.

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But here’s our pick of events around Europe over the next seven days.

Got anything coming up? Leave details in the comments or email them to bobbie@gigaom.com

Heureka, Berlin, May 7
Busy week in Berlin, kicking off with this startup-focused conference (today) that promises to tell you everything you might need to know about building a company and going global.

Next Berlin, May 8 & 9
Not to be confused with the Next Web conference, this two-day event for the digital industry has been based in Berlin for the past three years. A tonne of speakers, many of whom we’ve written about over the past year.

Mobilism, Amsterdam, May 10 & 11
Fantastic lineup at this conference dedicated to mobile web design, which attempts to explore a range of issues about apps, design, development, browsers and the future of devices.

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Delegates at the TimesCenter, New York, will get to hear how Harry Potter, the Financial Times and European newspapers are re-imagining their industries, wrestling with challenges and attracting consumers from:

• Tomas Bella - CEO, Piano Media
• Rob Grimshaw - Managing Director, FT.com
• Charlie Redmayne - CEO, Pottermore

And that’s not all. At this event bringing together entrepreneurs, innovators and disruptors from across media, book and magazine publishing, entertainment and information, we’ll hear from others including:

• Jon Miller - Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corp
• John Paton - CEO, Digital First Media
• Fred Wilson - Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
• Vivian Schiller - Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
• Mark Johnson - CEO, Zite
• Jonathan Shar - GM, Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble

But, like the very media we are all reinventing together, this is no one-to-many conference – as ever, all our delegates are encouraged to participate in the discussion.

Check out the full event site, schedule and register here.

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• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
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But here’s our pick of events around Europe over the next seven days.

Got anything coming up? Leave details in the comments or email them to bobbie@gigaom.com

Aalto ES with Mårten Mickos, Espoo, May 2
The founder of MySQL may now be pushing ahead with cloud service Eucalyptus, but he’s taking time to deliver a keynote and Q&A in Finland this week. Always good value.

re:publica 2012, Berlin, May 2-4
This conference dedicated to examining the way digital society works has a host of great speakers — Zeynep Tufekci, Isaac Mao, and EU commissioner Neelie Kroes are some of the key names on a very busy slate.

SourceDevCon, London, May 3-5
Now known as “Sourc{“, this three-day event is aimed at giving app developers across mobile and desktop a host of new information and tools to do their jobs better.

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Here are three particular events you might want to look at.

London Book Fair, London, April 16-18
An annual shindig for the publishing industry, this year’s event includes an entire “Digital Minds” conference, chaired by Evan Schnittman of Bloomsbury, and including input from various publishing industry mavens… plus Andrew Steele of Funny or Die.

Etsy Start-up Nights: CodeAsCraft, Berlin, April 16
Etsy’s John Allspaw is giving a talk at the company’s European HQ on how you deal with system failures as a startup. Previously of Flickr, Friendster, Infoworld, and Salon, Allspaw literally wrote the book on scaling.

Devoxx France, Paris, April 18-20
Just as Oracle and Google go head to head over Java, the Devoxx community conference — an annual European event for Java developers — has its first spin-off in France. The schedule promises four themes over three days: that includes thinking about the web, mobile and cloud. Around a quarter of the presentations are in English, the rest in French.

Got an event coming up in Europe? Let us know by emailing bobbie@gigaom.com.

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