July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Craigslist is possibly one of the ugliest sites on the web. But you can experience it as if it was Pinterest, as long as you use Mokriya Craigslist on your smartphone.

Mokriya is a design studio that has worked on apps for companies like Hipster, Sidecar, and Path, building cutting-edge, simple, beautiful mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Mokriya Craigslist is its first foray into creating products under its own brand.

“We wanted to build an experience on par with some of the best mobile apps,” chief executive Sunil Kanderi said. “Using Craigslist should be as pleasant an experience as browsing Pinterest.”

So the company reached out to Craigslist — aware of issues companies like PadMapper have had when using Craigslist data — and worked out a licensing deal, then rolled up its sleeves for a six-month design cycle.

The biggest challenge?

“Craigslist has tons of categories and subcategories,” Kanderi says. “Because the challenges to build a mobile app for Craigslist were more than a usual app, we had to innovate on the UI to create a compelling experience. So we use very few native UI elements.”

While the data is straight from Craigslist, the company has been so successful that browsing Craigslist on Mokriya is actually pleasant, and, believe it or not, beautiful.

And it’s not just about the browsing, either.

“You can also post your Craigslist ads via Mokriya,” Kanderi told me. “Just enter the headline, description, take a couple of pictures, pick a category, set a price, and you’re done. Our goal was that you could post an ad within a minute.”

Mokriya is on iPhone and Android smartphones at first, but an iPad version is on the way. It’s a free app, but if you want to post an ad or add favorites (bookmarks on sales that you want to track), there’s a one-time 99 cent charge.

Image credits: Mokriya

Oh, and it’s completely free.

“This is a more civilized option than buying a ticket five minutes before the game on the street corner,” TiqIQ CEO Jesse Lawrence told me last week. “You can see someone’s Facebook icon, click through and see their Facebook page, and decide if you want to make an offer. You can also see the view from the seat and get venue details and location.”

TiqIQ — yes, tiq as in ticket, IQ as in intelligence quotient — started out as a publishing platform focused on blogs and local ticket sellers. Now, the service powers ticket sales for thousands of sites, including the Washington Post and team-specific blogs like Lakers Nation. Lawrence says TiqIQ lists millions of tickets for every major event in the U.S. and Canada, from every major seller, including last week’s Super Bowl.

“We have thousands of sellers and brokers, and we aggregate about nine boards like eBay, TicketMaster, and TicketsNow,” he said. “Last year we sold a Super Bowl ticket group for $25,000 … but this year the average price is down a bit.”

One aspect of TiqIQ’s competitive differentiation from services like StubHub is the massive aggregation on the site, which almost guarantees that tickets will be available for every major event. But perhaps TiqIQ’s most interesting opportunity is its social media tie-ins. While TiqIQ only has about 4,300 Twitter followers itself, via relationships with sports blogs and local personalities, it has an overall audience of over six million followers.

It uses this massive following intelligently, funneling tweets and status updates about tickets and events to audiences who are geographically and demographicly most likely to be interested. Each of those partners, who allows TiqIQ access to his or her Twitter feed or other social media outlets, then gets paid based on performance. And it’s working.

“We sell 30 percent of our tickets through social,” Lawrence told me.

TiqIQ has three ways of selling tickets: fixed price, auction, and make an offer, giving sellers a wide variety of options to attempt to maximize the value of their asset. For example, auction might be best for an in-demand event that is a week away, while make an offer might work for events that are not in very high demand, but might sell at a discount.

All of which adds up to much better opportunity than standing on a street corner hawking tickets.

Updated 12:08pm: TiqIQ doesn’t sell tickets itself; it lists them for sale. Also, it doesn’t list tickets for sale on StubHub. We’ve corrected the story to eliminate these errors.

photo credit: RMTip21 via photopin cc

SellSimple is launching its iPhone app today that people with too much stuff can use to sell it to people with not enough, simply by snapping a picture, adding a price, and selecting any number of marketplaces to post it.

“Using eBay is way too complicated, and Craigslist is a little bit sketchy,” SellSimple chief executive Julian Sarokin said yesterday from West Hollywood, where the company is based. “This is a way to sell from your phone … an easy way to just get it done.”

Letting buyers easily get it done, however, has taken a significant amount of hard developer work getting it done. Initially, SellSimple was just a way to post and sell via your phone on the company’s own marketplace. After initial demos, however, advice from mentors and investors convinced the 21-year-old CEO and his 20-year-old cofounder that posting to multiple existing marketplaces with significant buyer scale was a better idea than starting with an empty storefront.

In other words: chicken, meet egg.

Those mentors and investors include rapper/actor Nas and musician/producer Dr. Luke – who has worked on albums for Katy Perry and K$sha — among others. Together with a few additional angels, they’ve injected $250,000 in SellSimple, making it more than just another app. Which Sarokin is well aware of.

“There’s a really big distinction between an app and a company,” he told me. “Our goal … is that we would become the new eBay or Craigslist.”

That’s of course no small goal. SellSimple wants to achieve it through user experience, a built-for-mobile buying and selling experience that is better than existing sites. And by providing an initial benefit of listing everywhere with one simple tool, easily. In addition, it has built the capability to buy items from eBay, Craigslist, and other sites right into the tool.

One question I had: Will eBay, Etsy, and Craigslist be OK with SellSimple posting listings to their sites and selling items from their services? Craigslist, for one, has had numerous disputes with companies like PadMapper that tapped into its listings.

“We haven’t actually talked to anyone at Craigslist yet,” Sarokin said. “But there are some other apps that do this, and I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem. PadMapper was pulling data, while we’re adding data.”

The app went live yesterday in anticipation of the the launch today, and Sarokin said that the reception has been unexpectedly good: #18 in the list of top free iPhone apps for lifestyle, without any promotion.

He expects to monetize the app with shipping integrations, a 5 percent fee if items are sold via SellSimple’s own marketplace, and commissions on sales of products on eBay or other listing sites. Items sold via other marketplaces, however, are free (minus any fees those sites might charge). And if you list your items for sale via SellSimple, the service will delete your postings on all site as soon as your items are sold.

Here’s a look at the app via video:

“Craiglist was an innovator at one time,” says 3taps chief executive Greg Kidd. “But time has moved on, and the concept of what the open web is today has evolved.”

Craiglist, the massive online classifieds site where the internet is still 1997, has had a wildly tumultuous 2012.

In June Craigslist blocked a third-party service, PadMapper, from scraping its apartment rental listings and presenting them in a more 2012 way. Then in July, when PadMapper found a “legally kosher” way to access Craigslist postings via 3taps (which essentially sucked the data right out of Google), Craiglist sued PadMapper and 3taps … and then bizarrely amended its terms of service, telling users they were not permitted to cross-post their sales items anywhere else on the internet.

Effectively, Craigslist was claiming complete and total copyright of its users’ content.

That died its inevitable death in early August, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation — on whose advisory board Craigslist founder Craig Newmark sits – got involved. Since that strategy failed, Craiglist went thermonuclear on all content scrapers, blocking all search engines from accessing the site.

At which point, you might think, it would just be easier to play nicely with others. But the core question remains: Who owns the data in Craigslist listings?

“Public facts are public property,” says Kidd, who is also an advisor at Square and was a first-round investor in Twitter. “Our view is that facts are protected by the First Amendment.”

Facts, of course, are not copyrightable, at least according the U.S. Supreme Court. That means no one can copyright the fact that Hitler lost World War II, or that you’ve got a slightly-used sofa for sale for just $299, no tax, no refunds.

And if that’s the case, says Kidd, how can Craigslist “own” its users’ listings? Kidd cites James Boyle from the Center for Public Domain at Duke University, who says that a Craigslist-style view on facts and copyright would “break the internet.” And not just 3taps, either. Giants like Google would also be affected.

“People seem to feel that scraping is a bad word,” says Kidd, referring to the often ethically controversial practice of electronically capturing data on other organizations’ websites. “But Google’s whole model is based on scraping.”

He doesn’t see any law, Kidd told me, that says Google can do it but no one else. And he has a real problem with Craigslist deciding who is a search engine and who isn’t.

So 3taps is suing Craigslist to force the courts to define what is public and what is private, and what can be copyrighted. In addition, 3taps will be suing Craigslist under the Sherman Antitrust Act, claiming that Craigslist is a monopoly acting in monopolistic ways to reduce competition in the marketplace.

“You can bully people that aren’t well-resourced,” says Kidd. “But that only works until it doesn’t work.”

He’s had no contact with Craigslist — and, despite repeated requests on this occasion and others, Craigslist has not responded to VentureBeat’s attempts to get its perspective — saying it refuses to talk to anyone.

“I don’t know what goes on in their heads,” Kidd told me. “I just wish they’d stop suing everyone else.”

photo credit: jox. via photopin cc

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Ubokia, the reverse Craigslist where buyers tell sellers what they want, is releasing a new capability called Ubokia Everywhere, which will enable any site on the Internet to create its own unique marketplace of wants.

And the new update seems to be a direct response to sort-of-kind-of competitor Zaarly.

But where Zaarly is focused more on services and activities, like finding a neighbor to set up your Christmas lights, or getting a custom treehouse built just like that one you saw in House & Home, Ubokia is focused on stuff and places: an Android phone with a micro-SIM and at least a 4.5″ screen, or, a vacation rental in La Jolla, on the beach, for August 5-10, 2013.

The story of Ubokia

The site launched in November of 2011, but to little fanfare. Ubokia chief executive Mark Pine, a former VC at Sigma Partners, wanted to build out the service more completely before hitting the marketing gas too hard.

So Ubokia focused on building out key categories: sports, musical instruments, vacation rentals, automotive, housing, and more. You post what you’re looking for; sellers compete for your business.

But Pine wanted to move beyond the website.

Now he has, and today is the first public announcement of Ubokia Everywhere, which allows sites to create an ecommerce channel right on their site, focused on their niche. Golf site? Now you can help your members buy and sell clubs, memberships, tee times. Home-school mothers site? Now your readers can swap lessons and resources.

“There’s two primary advantages,” Pine says. “One, it allows you to create a customized market for that specific site or vertical. And two, you perform everything on that site … you don’t have to leave it.

In other words, Ubokia is bringing the marketplace to the buyer, instead of forcing the buyer to come to the marketplace.

After very softly launching the service, Ubokia has 160 partner sites signed up and running, mostly tiny niche sites like Saving Cents with Sense and Clever Housewife. Partners share in the transaction fee that buyers are charged, but currently Ubokia is taking nothing. Only later, at scale, will Ubokia take a slice of PayPal’s transaction fees — two to three percent — and start to monetize.

Of course, Mohammed can still come to the mountain if he wishes. All items for sale in any individual site’s marketplace are also cross-posted to the main Ubokia store.

And the strategy is working. Ubokia is now adding 1,000 new users daily. The service now has 220,000 members and 400,000 unique visitors a month. Compete.com, which isn’t perfect but is usually close, agrees:

The competitive landscape

It’s only now, as Ubokia starts to stretch its legs, that Pine is opening his mouth.

Zaarly, he says, “is very good at marketing … they’re making a lot of noise. But really, Zaarly Anywhere is just an affiliate marketing program with a slight kink.”

Source: Zaarly

A cupcake that you can find on The Fancy and get made via Zaarly

And he’s not impressed with the integrations that Zaarly has announced with companies like TheFancy and Cookstr.

“The examples seem like toys,” Pine says. “I’m on Cookstr … I see a recipe … and then I’m going to get someone to make it for me? I see that as kind of a joke.”

I asked Zaarly about Pine’s comments, and co-founder Eric Koester replied:

“We are obviously very bullish on this person-to-person space and believe there will be a number of exciting companies built in it — we certainly hope to be one of them.

The Zaarly team continues to hear some amazing feedback from our buyers, our sellers and our partners, so we’re continuing to follow their lead and build something they love that helps them buy and sell with each other right in their own neighborhoods.

With any new sector, there is lots of innovation still to come, but thus far it’s great to see more entrepreneurs and companies working to empower person-to-person commerce.”

The bigger question

I guess the bigger question is this: both Ubokia and Zaarly have two massive, entrenched competitors in eBay and Craigslist. Why not focus on them? At least first?

In fact, both Ubokia and Zaarly are getting traction and making partnerships. You might almost argue that a partnership of a buyer-side marketplace of services and a buyer-side marketplace of things would be a marriage made in heaven.

One thing I will add …

The Ubokia model of embedding a store in every site is a real winner. Zaarly, are you up for some shameless stealing of great ideas?

photo credit: szeke via photo pin cc

First, Craigslist blocked PadMapper and sued the one-person apartment-search startup. Then it changed the license under which users post ads to the site, making it exclusive, all in an attempt to ensure that what gets posted on Craigslist is only available on that site.

Now Craigslist has gone completely thermonuclear by preventing even search engines such as Google from accessing the site. At least, according to 3Taps, a service for accessing Craigslist data:

At about noon on Aug 6, it seems CL may have instructed all general search engines to stop indexing CL postings - effectively blocking us...

—
  (@3taps) August 07, 2012

The reason?

Source: John Koetsier

Craigslist’s robot.txt file

PadMapper — and other services — were circumventing Craigslists’ terms of use by buying listings data from 3Taps. And 3Taps, which still advertises “9,778,643 real-time postings from Craigslist worldwide,” got the data from Google.

Because, of course, in order for Google to find what you’re looking for, it has to have found that data first itself. And stored it, and indexed it.

That’s the job of Googlebot, the search engine’s spider, which traverses the web, finding and reporting information.

It was a solution Paul Graham, legendary technologist, found innovative and “ingenious.”

There’s a way to squash spiders, however: robots.txt.

Put this file at the root directory of your web server, add some code to indicate what is and what is not allowed, and good spiders will do what they are told.

In Craigslist’s case, that means: don’t index our listing. And Googlebot, being a good corporate citizen, obeys.

This really is the thermonuclear option, however, because telling the world’s leading search engine to stop indexing your content is going to result in literally millions of fewer listings on Google … and potentially a huge concurrent drop in traffic.

Only a very confident — and very angry — company would do something this bold, this risky.

Craiglist has shown that it does not want any other parties using its listings and is ready to sue seemingly at the drop of a hat. And it’s not without supporters, including here at VentureBeat.

But if the company keeps jumping on rivals, it may have to drop the peace icon that shows up when you visit the site (see the screenshot above).

Because if there’s one thing the little company with big traffic has besides a virtual lock on the free listings market, it’s plenty of fight.

A quick note:

I just checked Craigslist’s top-level robots.txt file and I’m not seeing how listings are being blocked.

The third chunk of text applies to all robots, which would include Googlebot. Areas that are disallowed, however, do not seem to include /apa/, which is Craigslist’s top level category for apartment listings, for instance.

However, sites do sometimes have multiple robots.txt files, and this is what 3Maps is currently reporting on its home page:

At approximately noon on Sunday August 5th, Craigslist instructed all general search engines to stop indexing CL postings — effectively blocking 3taps and other 3rd party use of that data from these public domain sources. We are sorry that CL has chosen this course of action and are exploring options to restore service but may be down for an extended period of time unless we or CL change practices. As soon as we know more, we will share it here and on our Twitter account.

I’ve asked a number of search engine optimization experts for their opinions and will update this post when I hear back.

[ update ]

Here’s an explanation from search marketing specialist Graeme McLaughlin:

There are a few ways you can disallow bots.

Explicit and wildcard via robots.txt – Craiglist is using both and the wildcard will apply to Google.

AND …

Meta Robots in the HEAD section of the HTML.

The “*” is a wildcard and means that robots can NOT crawl the directories listed beneath it. For Craiglist to do this they must be confident that their brand in the free listings niche will continue to drive traffic for them.

They are allowing the geo home page for each city to be indexed. This covers them for users doing branded / navigational searches which are becoming more common with browsers such as Chrome and the new Safari using the URL bar as an omni search box.

The robots txt file stops engines and bots from crawling the site but Craiglist is also using on-page meta tag robots commands on their listings pages. Example:
<meta name=”robots” content=”NOARCHIVE,NOFOLLOW”>

The NO ARCHIVE prevents a cached copy of the page being available in the search results and NO FOLLOW instructs bots not to follow the links on the page.

They are using a combo tactic to isolate the pages they don’t want in the index and in affect blocking them from the third party tools.

“With Craigslist gone, PadMapper is likely missing a lot of the best sublet/small landlord options, so I’d really like to get small landlords to list directly,” DeMenthon said this morning on the PadMapper blog.

VentureBeat reached out to DeMenthon for comment, and he responded by email while boarding an airplane.

PadLister supports multiple listing services. New rentals are automatically listed on PadMapper, of course, but users can generate formatted content to post on Craigslist as well, said DeMenthon: ”It just generates HTML in a nice layout that you can copy and paste.”

In addition, PadLister helps you get your listing on other rental sites. ”It syndicates your listing to some other services, including rentBits and Oodle.”

Summer is peak apartment-hunting season, DeMenthon said, so he is hoping to reach as many landlords as possible.

He is still hoping to get Craigslist data back via some form of licensing, but is pursuing PadLister as an alternate option in case that never happens. He is not yet sure what the revenue impact of losing Craigslist rental listings might be.

When asked if Craigslist might block data generated by PadLister, DeMenthon said he’s not certain:

“It’s very possible, but this doesn’t give them any reason to do it. It doesn’t link offsite or anything like that to generate site traffic.”

PadLister is a free service for landlords who wish to list a property. The site does charge a fee for screening potential renters, if landlords choose.

VentureBeat has reached out to Craigslist for comment and will update this story if we get a response.

Image credit: ShutterStock

[ Updated 10:26 PM with a comment from DeMenthon ]

Popular online classifieds service Craigslist has blocked apartment-finding site PadMapper. PadMapper Chief executive Eric DeMenthon said today on the PadMapper blog that all Craiglist-sourced rentals are being deleted from the PadMapper database.

PadMapper is an apartment rental search engine that displays available “pads” on a live Google map background (as shown in the screenshot to the right). The site pulls its listings from sources such as Apartments.com, Rent.com, and, until recently, Craigslist.

But the site has fallen afoul of the Craigslist terms of service, which do not allow “copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist.” Any service that provides access to Craigslist content without permission is prohibited.

As DeMenthon mentions in his blog post, Craigslist allows “mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites.”

DeMenthon believes that PadMapper’s use of data was good for users, but he wasn’t able to make that case to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark or CEO Jim Buckmaster. PadMapper received a cease and desist letter from a Craigslist lawyer, and it has been forced to comply.

For DeMenthon, who is the entire team behind PadMapper, this is a tough blow. The reality is that PadMapper is in violation of Craigslist terms of service, so he doesn’t have much recourse. The site is not the first to be shut down by Craigslist lawyers; both the aggregator Craiglook and vertical search engine Oodle are among the sites that have previously incurred their wrath.

There are other sources of apartment listings, and PadMapper will be pursuing those, according to the blog post. DeMenthon invited users of the service to make their feelings known to Craiglist but has asked them to “keep it civil.”

“Perhaps if they see how many people PadMapper has helped, they’ll be willing to consider changing their minds,” DeMenthon writes.

One would hope that as a community-minded site, Craigslist would at least take the time to meet with him and consider the possibility of working out a deal. However, it is of course the company’s prerogative to reject any content-sharing deal, as defined within their terms of service.

VentureBeat has reached out to both Craigslist and PadMapper for comment; we’ll update this post if we receive any news.

[ update ]

The early version of this story said that PadMapper does not appear to make money off the listings. DeMenthon clarified in an email to VentureBeat that the site does make some money “in some limited ways, just not in any way that makes the experience worse.”

Update: Moisés Chiullan, chief sales and marketing officer for N-Control, Inc., got in touch to let VentureBeat know that this Craigslist ad was merely one in an ongoing smear campaign by unknown entities:

We did not post these ads (we found out there was another one), nor do we know who did. We have asked Craigslist to remove them, and they have. We have experienced a number of phishing attempts and harassment over the last month, and that’s what I expect this was as well.

Like I mentioned on the phone, all I use Craigslist for is hard-to-find DVDs, not recruiting employees. Rest assured that I have been personally recruiting my sales team for the Avenger line.

Original Story: If you’re not already familiar with last year’s Ocean Marketing debacle, VentureBeat’s previous coverage sums it up nicely. To make a long story short, a one-man PR firm committed very public seppuku when he attacked a customer over email using a language that even unicorns can only explain as “magical,” then proceeded to argue and threaten the co-creator of Penny Arcade, who immortalized him with a single post. The whole thing ended up being the Super Bowl of internet entertainment — if the Super Bowl was only 15 minutes long and starred one guy who was essentially the amalgamation of every character on Jersey Shore.

The e-pocalyptic lash-back saw Ocean Marketing (aka Paul Christoforo) released from the employ of the creator of the Avenger game controller peripheral, which is manufactured by N-Control. Now it seems the company is looking to recruit. And where has the Avenger team taken its search for suitable staffers? Craigslist.

Love Gaming and Selling Great New Products? Look No Further

Do you have what it takes to sell the hottest new video game adapter to stores and distributors worldwide?
If you do, we want to talk to you. N Control, an innovative gaming technology company, has created one
of the hottest new gaming products on the market. And we need you to help us sell it. We’re looking for
talented sales people who love video games and are ready to earn generous commissions each month
–part- or full-time) by selling a product that gamers everywhere will want–if they see it on the shelf of
their favorite gaming store.Our main product, the Avenger, is an Xbox 360 and PS3 adapter that provides
the winning edge to gamerswho want to win more often in a highly competitive environment. You’ll need
to cold call to small shops so you will have to be good at it. And good at following up once you’ve gotten
the account. You’ll also need to be able to make presentations to distributors.

The market the Avenger serves is growing faster we expected. And we need help. With Modern Warfare’s
newest version had over a billion in sales 2012. Demand is fast exceeding supply. The market for any hot
video game is also the Avenger’s target market. The stores and distributors who buy from you will want
what you can give them.Get in on the ground floor of something insanely great. Let us know if you are
one of the people we are looking for. Become part of a gaming industry breakthrough. Join a great company
with a bright future.Don’t wait. We expect hundreds of responses to this ad. Contact us now.

Look, I don’t want to tell someone else how to run their company, but … I once tried to sell my comic book collection on Craigslist and woke up in the middle of the night with a man in a giant bear costume standing over my bed, so I’m not sure it’s the best place to find anything, let alone someone who isn’t going to publicly humiliate you and irreparably damage your brand. Again.

We’ve reached out to authenticate the posting, and to find out more about these “generous commissions.” I’ll have the nearest nail salon selling Avenger products if it helps me with my freakin’ car payments.

Thanks to James Pikover for the tip.

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