Early? It's three years almost to the day, for a service which, albeit very nice, was basically without a real monetization strategy (at least from what I saw -- I only attend a couple of conferences per year, so I'm not a heavy user or anything). In Europe, such services tend to die much earlier than what Lanyrd managed.

Besides, it makes a lot of sense as an add-on or content-sink for services with a more solid outlook... like Eventbrite. So it's a good move for everyone involved: SimonW and friends get their payout and Eventbrite gets a nice set of features ready to go. Win-win :)