One of import•io’s early adopters, Barnaby Clark (CEO of Planvine) was recently interviewed by Rich Wilson (import•io VP Sales & Marketing) to uncover how the technology has helped Planvine become the hot events startup it is today.
RW: Can you give us a little background to Planvine?
BC: We started Planvine about a year ago, with the aim to create the ultimate place online for people to find things to do. So if you are looking for an event or activity in a city, you could come to Planvine and we will give you some ideas of what is going on, recommend things you might be interested in.
RW: What were the big challenges you faced in setting up the business?
BC: The biggest challenge we had was how were we going to get all of the data, for all of the activities and events that were happening in various cities, into one unified feed that we could then use to power the platform, giving recommendations and suggestions. We were looking to aggregate data from hundreds and thousands of different event data sources. How we did this was the biggest challenge we faced.
RW: How would you have done things without import•io?
BC: Without import•io we would have had to manually integrate every single source of data that we wanted to have on the site. That would have required a lot of technical resources and it would have taken us considerably longer to create the level of detail and the complete feed that we know have.
RW: What was the benefit of using import•io’s technology?
BC: The biggest benefit of using import•io was time saving. Instead of it taking a couple of days to integrate a new data source, it takes us a few minutes. The other major benefit is that we do not need technical resources, so it is lot cheaper for us to do the integration.
RW: Will you continue to use import•io?
BC: Yes, we are going to carry on using import•io to add more and more different data sources to our platform.
RW: Would you recommend import•io to others?
BC: I’d definitely recommend import•io to anyone who is looking to aggregate data from a number of different sources across the web.
RW: How has the overall experience of working with import•io been?
BC: Working with the import•io team has been really great. The team has been very responsive and worked with us to fix any problems that we have had. The product does exactly what it says it should do and works really well.
We would like to thank Barnaby for taking the time to talk with Rich and wish Planvine all the success in the future. Reduce the time it takes your business to integrate online data sources by registering for import•io here.
by Alice Nutbrown