Joobili: Great Web 2.0 Travel / Events Website

We’ve all seen a lot of travel / events website that is web 2.0, the differentiation for each becomes really hard to see. I did, however, find a great website that features events that happens in Europe. The website is called Joobili, which is a new startup events website that is somehow different. What I found that is different from similar websites…

… is that the design of the website is really awesome, the interface is a good mix between flash and ajax. You could interact with the homepage, choosing which months and day with literally zero loading time using flash technology. You get to choose which dates to view to see what event is up. When clicked an ajax (lightbox) pops up which serves as the page and again the loading time is really fast.

What’s also great about it is that events can be posted for free. There are also the Joobili pro, where your event is more promoted but for a fee (that is not disclosed unless queried). The events are shown with details, a Google Earth map and attendees for the event. There’s also a community feature which allows Profile, internal messaging and upload photos. The best thing that I found that this website does is similar to Plentyoffish.com (Free online dating making $10 million a year), where they cover the events for free but uses affiliate marketing for booking Hotels, car rentals and flights and also to buy book guides. The monetization strategy is great, and mixing it with free events makes it attractive for users to use.

Overall, I found that this website might really do very well. The interface is so easy to use, that regular users will be able to use it with ease and with extremely fast loading. The monetization strategy is also very admirable (lots of web 2.0 websites have this problem) which I believe they could make easily. I do believe that it could do better by linking it to social networking websites, using developer API to tap into the Social networks and show more events happening in Europe. It’ll be nice to see how this goes, it might not be long before it gets funded by investors.