Boston: The Hidden Hub of Music and Technology

Tourb.us
Headquarters: Cambridge, MA and Ashland, MA
Year Launched: 2006
Developers: Mike Champion, Gary Elliott

Live-music search engine Tourb.us (one of those sites, like del.icio.us, that cutely incorporates the “.us” top-level domain into its name) helps members learn about upcoming music events in their areas. It’s initially focused on the music scenes in Boston, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Registered members can submit information about bands or upcoming concerts, receive e-mails when their favorite bands are about to perform, and make tourb.us badges that can be embedded in their blogs or MySpace profiles. The listings seem fairly comprehensive: for Thursday November, 15, 2007, Tourb.us showed 16 live music events in the Boston area alone.

“Tourbus is the response of two guys who like music a ton but are dissatisfied by the services out there to track bands and find new, live music,” the founders wrote last year in their blog. “We live outside Boston, which has an energetic music scene, but one that can be tough to keep track of. And, believe me, I’m lazy with a capital L. Lots of bands I like play at the MidEast, but I’ve missed shows because I don’t check their page that often…And the less said about the quality of the emails I get from Ticketmaster and ClearChannel the better. There should be a better way.”