Today Finervista came out of beta mode with a press release announcing full production availability. This is another search engine for upcoming and recorded webcasts/webinars. Simplicity seems to be the keyword here. You get to enter a search term, which scans against the title and short descriptor on the events in their database. Click on an event and you go to the landing page for that webcast. That's it.
Finervista chooses which events are stored in their search database. The sources seem to be WebEx and a few portal sites that have web event listings. Interestingly, I found several events sourced from Insight24, which could be said to compete with this site in functionality! Although I think Insight24 is still listing only archived recordings, while Finervista offers upcoming live events as well. There is no information listed to help companies submit an event or a set of events for inclusion in the database.
I was pleased to find some of my recorded public web events in their database, but searching for them was frustrating. One came up under a search for "Molay", another in a search for "Webinar Success", and a third was found only by a keyword in the topic, without either of the other terms having any luck. Because the source listing mentions the portal site from which the event was taken, you can't always be sure of finding the company or speaker doing the presentation itself.
I could find precious little information about Finervista itself. No phone number is listed on their website and no corporate information is found on the About Us page other than the fact that it is based in San Francisco. The press release goes into slightly more detail, saying that the company was founded last year by Felix Litman, who previously held a position in product management and marketing at WebEx.
What I can't figure out is the business profitability angle on this venture. There doesn't seem to be any advertising on the site, although there are two events listed as "Featured"... so maybe they pay for the visibility. It's free to all end users for searching, and I certainly can't think of any reason not to use the functionality!
I'm all for anything that helps to promote and improve the usefulness and acceptance of webinars in the business world. One of these utilities is going to gain some market attention and build traffic - at which time it is going to be bought out in a flash by a major search engine. But the race is still wide open at this point!
Good luck, Finervista. I hope you have more success than I did with WebEventSearch.com!
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Technorati Tags: Finervista, search, search engine, Felix Litman, web conference, web event, webcast, webinar