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Partners turn festivals into online small busines

By Dale Neal, (Asheville, N.C.) Citizen-Times

Kurt Irmiter calls himself a serial entrepreneur. Starting out with ice cream, he's ended up with the Internet. (Festival Network Online)

Atually, Irmiter knows the festival business inside and out. He started dishing out homemade ice cream in the early '80s at weekend festivals across the Southeast. He's run craft booths, booked performers and managed stages.

But Irmiter and his partner Connie Morris were frustrated getting the necessary details about entry fees and deadlines to plan for upcoming outdoor arts shows and music festivals and other events.

Why not build a database?

From that brainstorm, Irmiter and Morris have built a burgeoning business that survived the dot-com crash of the late '90s, and showed yet another way to make money on the Internet.

In the early '90s, Morris collected some 2,000 entries for different festivals, and together they began publishing a regional printed guide for artists, musicians, jugglers, comedians and vendors — anybody who needed the information.

But the business really took off with the advent of the World Wide Web, Irmiter said. "We grew from a couple of thousand entries to 10,000 entries by the time we launched on the Internet in 1997."

Now Irmiter and Morris are no longer making the festival rounds, but work full time with Festival Network Online (festivalnet.com), the nation's largest real-time Web portal for information on festivals across the United States and Canada.

The Web site now sees more than 35,000 visitors each month with one million searches. The site has just added a new "radius" search that allows visitors to check out the festivals within specified distances of a certain zip code. Basic information is free to casual festivalgoers.

Festival professionals who want more details on deadlines, entry fees and other information subscribe for annual fees of $49 or $89, depending on the access.

Irmiter runs the database on a simple dial-up modem out of his Weaverville, N.C., home. The database is stored on a server farm in New England.

Morris also works online with two researchers, collecting more information each week. Irmiter is not sure how many festivals, music events and other shows are out there to be documented.

"It may be as high as 30,000," he said. "There's a real industry with all these people involved."

Irmiter sees the Web site perhaps partnering with the tourism departments of various states who see the attraction of festivals to bring visitors and money to their communities.