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Zvents Names Luke Lu Principal Architect

Co-founder and Chief Architect of Wink Brings Personalized Search to Zvents.

San Mateo, CA - July 3, 2007 -- Zvents, the local search engine for things to do, today announced that Luke Lu has joined the company as Principal Architect. Lu, who was previously co-founder of people search engine Wink and a senior software engineer for Yahoo's Inktomi search index, will lead the design and development of Zvents' event, restaurant, and movie search products.

"Luke's capabilities and previous experience are a tremendous asset for Zvents as we continue to deliver relevant, personalized results to people looking for things to do," said Ethan Stock, Zvents CEO and co-founder. "His experience with search architecture and delivering relevance at scale to consumers will extend our leadership position and help us deliver the future of local search."

Lu is co-founder of community-based social search engine Wink, the people search engine, which allows users to find people across social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and MySpace. Prior to Zvents, he served as Chief Architect, responsible for the design and development of PeopleRank and advanced search technologies, which derive relevance not just from machine algorithms, but directly from user input such as social bookmarking and ratings.

Prior to Wink, Luke was a Software Engineer and team lead at Inktomi, where he designed and implemented the second generation Inktomi search index and rewrote the indexer tool-chain. This major improvement over Inktomi's initial search solution was implemented by Yahoo! Search, components of which are still in use today. Following his role with Inktomi and before joining Wink, he designed and implemented the mail/text classification and spam detection systems for Proofpoint.

"Zvents is reinventing local search, and it's exciting to join the team at this early stage to solve the challenges associated with creating an intuitive local search experience," said Lu. "This is also a wonderful chance to work again with former colleagues and some of the best minds in search."

Lu joins Zvents' exceptional search team including CTO Gordon Rios, a former Yahoo! Search scientist, Clem Wang, a former AltaVista and Yahoo! Principal Software Engineer, previous Verity, Inktomi, and Kosmix engineer Doug Judd, and Hewlett-Packard search marketing executive Paul O'Brien.

About Zvents
Zvents helps users discover things to do. As the leading event search technology company and developer of the Zvents Media Platform, Zvent's events search engine powers media and publishers with dynamic local event content and a reverse publishing platform. Zvents provides a complete and compelling user experience, enabling users to find, contribute, share and promote events. The company aggregates rich event information from the open web, user-contributed content, and links high-quality editorial content from partners with its local event index. Zvents is based in San Mateo, California. For more information, visit www.zvents.com.