VentureBeat

Sunday is a new company offering remote 24/7 personal assistance for life’s more minor tasks.

If you need reservations at a restaurant but have to send off 25 e-mails, call back two clients, and vet the presentation you’re giving in an hour, the recently launched New York-based company wants to lend a hand.

Anyone with too much to do in not enough time would love to have a personal assistant, but the majority of us simply don’t have the cash. But now, thanks to the efficiencies of outsourcing and a back-end that Sunday’s founders say can effectively manage and distribute task requests, some of us (well, some of you) now might be able to afford our own.

Back in 2000, a company called Quixi also tried a similar model, but after a round of early hype, and an infusion of around $27.5 million, the company seems to have disappeared. Currently, there is Circles, which offers big companies a concierge service to pamper its key employees. For the less elite, there are companies like DoMyStuff, which let you post tasks and have people or companies bid to do them, and VirCierge, which, like Sunday, offers personal assistance, but the former is somewhat arduous and the latter is relatively expensive, costing $20 per month for five tasks and $50 for fifteen.

For $29 for 30 task requests or $49 for 50, a Sunday user can simply write an e-mail to requests@asksunday.com and have hard-working Indians, called “agents,” do any of a number of banal tasks. You can send your travel itinerary and they’ll book you flights, a hotel, and car. You can give them the name of your dentist and get an appointment, or have them track down tickets to a sold-out show.

Some of the tasks Sunday offers to do sound somewhat ridiculous, but were popular in its testing phase, according to the founders. For example, Sunday’s agents will give you a wake-up call in the morning and tell you the weather, or send you an e-mail in the middle of the day to update you on sports scores.

Other, more complicated tasks make more sense to us. In one instance, a VP at a private equity firm wanted to play a round of golf with a handful of colleagues and clients, but the club only took reservations exactly one week in advance. Sunday’s agents made note of the date, made the call at the appropriate time, researched train schedules, and reserved a taxi from the train station.

Sunday has created a portal for its agents that enables them to access selected password-protected accounts without having your passwords, so they can reserve you movie tickets at Fandango, make gift purchases on Amazon, use your frequent flier number when booking flights, etc, though we’re not sure we’d be comfortable with this aspect of the service.

There is also a messenger service (for NY City only) that will make deliveries as late as midnight on weekdays. More interestingly, Sunday also has “time services.” For $20 per hour, you can have someone run your errands, pick up groceries and — our favorite — wait on line for you at the DMV.

The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from undisclosed sources.

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