July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We all possess a reservoir of unique knowledge and skills, but this expertise does not always pay off. Rewarder, a company that matches people with specific needs with people eager to meet them, launched a mobile app today to keep people fulfilled on-the-go.

Rewarder is a social marketplace where people can solicit advice, expertise, and resources from the community it exchange for rewards. It takes a unique approach to the shared economy by offering a peer-to-peer marketplace for knowledge, rather than products or services. People can offer $50 for a travel itinerary, or $1000 to locate a rare collectible item.

“In the last six months, we have had many conversations with our users on how to improve our marketplace,” he said in an email.  “Not only is our community filled with multi-taskers that want the option to create and submit Rewards on-the-go, but many also felt that inspiration struck when they were out and about vs. at their computers, and wanted to be able to have a way to create Rewards or respond to them instantly with an idea they came across.”

The company launched with $7 million in October 2012 and has since grown by five times, reaching almost 500,000 members. The funding also supported development of the mobile app which will allow people to post rewards from their smartphones. Users submit to win rewards anytime, anywhere. Rather than flipping through an outdated Highlights magazine at the dentist’s office, why not provide a list of romantic anniversary date ideas to a clueless boyfriend? Or search for an original set of Dungeons and Dragons dice?

CEO Kendall Fargo said that Rewarder’s community is already highly engaged. More than $14 million rewards have been offered to date and hundreds are won each week. Each reward receives an average of seven submissions and there is a 250 percent increase in rewards viewed since December. The mobile app will not only raise levels of engagement, but also facilitate expansion into international markets where mobile technology predominates.

Rewarder is backed by Granite Ventures and Radar Partners, as well as Ron COnway, David Lee, and Kenny Lerer. The team is based in San Francisco.

The RealReal has raised $14 million to grow its luxury online resale marketplace, which it claims is “second only to eBay.” The startup’s team of professional stylists and fashion experts hand-select and authenticate pre-owned designer goods from brands like Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier. The goods are sold in 72 hour flash sales for prices at up to 90% off the original cost.

For style mavens who can’t afford to shell out thousands of dollars for a Dior dress or Gucci blazer, The RealReal makes high fashion more accessible. Women also have the opportunity to sell their own stockpile of luxury items, to then (of course) buy different ones.

“We’re changing the way people view their designer wardrobe and luxury items,” said The RealReal founder and CEO Julie Wainwright. “We offer consignors a way to get a return on what they originally paid for their designer items, effortlessly and lucratively.”

When trying to build a marketplace for luxury goods, trustworthiness is key. No one want to pay $400 for a Hermès scarf. The RealReal tackles the uncertainty of buying luxury goods online with its team of “tastemakers” who are responsible for hunting items that “embody timeless luxury” and carefully examining each for authenticity. The stylists also work directly with people who want to resell their designer clothing, shoes, handbags, accessories, and jewelry to assess whether their goods are eligible for sale. Shipping is free and consignors receive between 60 and 70 percent of all sales.

In two years, The RealReal has grown its member base to 750,000 and attracted 1.5 million unique visits in January alone. The startup ships over 15,000 luxury items a month and claims to have a 75 percent sell-through rate for its flash sales. Its revenue has grown tenfold in the past year. The company will use this second round of funding to expand its infrastructure to support this impressive growth.

InterWest Partners led this round, with participation from existing investors Canaan Partners, e.ventures, and Greycroft Partners. Novel TMT Ventures, Panarea Capital, author Suzy Welch, and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy also made strategic investments.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons 

This is a guest post by Oisin Hanrahan, the CEO and co-founder of Handybook, a two-sided marketplace for cleaners, plumbers, and handymen.

Ask a smart investor how they feel about starting a two-sided marketplace, and you’ll likely here the same response: “It’s difficult — maybe impossible.” And they’re right. Two-sided markets, or economic platforms that have two distinct user groups that rely on one another for goods and services, are hard to develop and even more difficult to maintain.

Since co-founding Handybook in January 2012, and a few years prior when I co-founded The Undergraduate Awards, I’ve learned that getting two sides of a market together requires an initial (preferably face-to-face) spark, followed by a unique combination of hack and hustle.

One element of launching a successful two-sided marketplace that is often overlooked is the initial spark, or the little drop of supply and tiny inkling of demand you need to kick your whole idea off into a successful market. There is an over-reliance on using technology to secure these wonderful drips of interest that will eventually turn into the transactions responsible for driving your business.

As a serial entrepreneur, I know we tend to focus too much time on changing increasingly small parts of our product or marketing material, and too much effort on finding ways to scrape listings in the hope that it will somehow negate the need to get out there and just find the right supply. It’s the same as a salesman who thinks that by finding more creative ways to organize his or her files and present materials, it will somehow make the need to do fifty cold calls a day disappear, only to find it won’t — the cold calls still need to be made.

It’s the same with sparking a two-sided market. Technology won’t spark your market. You can scrape listings and figure out clever ways to pull content from other platforms when you’re trying to grow and scale, but you shouldn’t be dependent on these things for multiple transactions. You need something to spark your supply long-term. The right technology and hacks will facilitate growth and scale but it won’t provide that initial spark you need to amplify your supply. You need quality, real-world people who are willing to hustle, both online and in the real world.

When we were first working to develop a scalable two-sided market, it meant going out and scouring to find our initial supply of home professionals. It meant meeting local home cleaning companies and local handymen. It meant spending lots of time in Starbucks buying coffee for maids and asking them who was the best maid they knew and how they cleaned ovens. (I even learned to clean an oven.) It meant meeting local handymen and conversing about the single job they were most proud of.

When Paddy Cosgrave and I launched The Undergraduate Awards, hustle meant we trekked from Dublin to New York to San Francisco and spent time with university presidents, student groups, and professors to explain the value of a global awards program to get our first couple hundred entrants. The tactical way founders of Airbnb, an online community site for finding places to stay, met hosts and photographed spaces to rent in order to build a strong two-sided marketplace. Airbnb’s tactics have since become legendary amongst entrepreneurs.

Is it possible to find this initial spark online? Maybe, but you miss out on so much rich information on the supply side of your market place. If you meet people in person they’ll tell you what they think they want, and from that you can try and infer what they actually think. If you don’t meet them, you’ll miss out on what they think about the other side of your market. But most importantly, by seeking your supply solely online means you compromise quality of your supply, and your future supply will become copies of your current supply. All other things equal, if your current supply is below average then your future supply is destined to be much worse. The bottom line is that you need to find the very best initial supply to seed your marketplace to fuel optimal growth and scalability.

Sparking the right supply on a two-sided market requires an act of magic, as many who have walked the walk can attest. It requires convincing the best supply possible that you will soon have demand and that the initial time-cost of the sign-up and on-boarding process will be well worth it. Then within this tiny window when you have both interest and mind share of quality supply, you need to convince some customers to engage.

A number of startups have successfully launched and maintained two-sided marketplaces, and the ones who took these smart steps from the beginning are seeing the most success now. You can’t start a fire without a spark — and you can’t spark the right supply without hustle.

Oisin Hanrahan is the co-Founder and CEO of Handybook, an online platform for booking household services. Prior to founding Handybook, Oisin founded MiCandidate, a service that provided real-time political content to media companies in 25 European countries. MiCandidate was acquired in 2009. He also founded Clearwater Group, a real-estate-development business in Budapest, Hungary.

Coffee meeting image via LANTERIA/Shutterstock

Balanced, a provider of backend payment solutions specifically geared towards online marketplaces and networks, has added $2 million into its seed round, bringing its total to $3.4 million. Andreessen Horowitz participated in this round, led by general partner Jeff Jordan who formerly worked as the president of Paypal.

“By focusing on networks and marketplaces, we are targeting one of the hardest types of e-commerce,” said founder Jareau Wade in an interview. “There are two sides you have to worry about, and this is important because the value of a marketplace is in a unique and broad inventory. Also, two-sided platforms specifically encourage fraudulent activity and there are significant compliance issues because these networks are risky. We want to continue fulfilling our goal of making Balanced the ideal payments solution for the toughest type of ecommerce model”

Balanced’s API makes it easy to set up a double-sided transaction model. The technology processes payments, holds those funds in escrow, and initiates payouts through one integrations. Everything happens behind the scenes, so consumers do not need to have a Balanced account, and the company takes care of accounting and operations, fraud, compliance, and international currency conversion.

Balanced first started as PoundPay and participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 class. In November of 2012, the company publicly launched and announced a seed round of $1.4 million from Ashton Kutcher, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky, Yishan Wong, Y Combinator, and SV Angel.

Since then, Balanced has seen significant growth growing an average of 30% each month, and 37% over the past two months. 112 new marketplaces have activated production Balanced accounts since March 1st, 2013, as well as businesses outside this niche such as ad networks. This new traction attracted new investors. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, Collaborative Fund and several Facebook alumni.

While there are many players in the payments space, most notably Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal, Wade said that Balance’s unique focus and expertise on two-sided payments distinguishes it from the pack. Clients include Reddit, GroupMe, Vungle, and Crowdtilt.

Balanced has ten employees and is currently based in San Francisco.

This new initiative is called Sell it Forward. You sign up and receive a postage pre-paid mailer for gently-used clothing, shoes, and handbags. eBay will sell what they can and deposit proceeds into your PayPal account. The rest, assuming no one wants to pay money for your decade old Disneyland sweatshirt and worn out Keds, goes to Goodwill.

Many people (myself included) would love to offload the crap piling up in the back of the closet and under the bed. Yet the process of listing individual items for sale and managing the responses seems far more unpleasant than simply letting them collect dust, particularly when the returns won’t be that high. Selling a Chanel purse for thousands is one thing. Selling a bag from a crafts fair is another. With Sell it Forward, eBay is offering to do the legwork for you.

If Goodwill thinks an item can be sold within two weeks and for $10 or more, it will list the item for sale. You, the seller, will get half of the proceeds from any items sold during that 14-day period; the rest goes towards helping fund Goodwill’s operations. Unsold items will be donated directly.

Sell it Forward is the latest in eBay’s attempts to expand its inventory. The success of the marketplace depends on a strong user base that actively lists items for sale, but many find the prospect intimidating or simply don’t have the time or motivation. Earlier this year, eBay attempted to address the issue with a series of pilot programs. These programs are not only intended to expand the number of items for sale but also to achieve greater engagement in local communities.

The company has tried sending vans to people’s homes to pick up their stuff so it can deliver it to experienced sellers who would attempt to offload them in exchange for a portion of the proceeds. eBay also set up kiosks at a few malls where people could drop their items off.

These programs all underscore eBay’s greater focus on having a physical presence. eBay Now, a same-day delivery service, is another example of this effort to become a part of people’s day-to-day lives and spending habits, rather than just their online experience. Making the services more accessible to the average person, who may not be particularly tech-savvy, creates more opportunities to expand the number of users and cement eBay’s role in the e-commerce world, which is increasingly dominated by younger, innovative companies.

In the past few years, developments in consumer shopping habits, social media, and payments technology has opened up the world of online re-sale. Startups like Threadflip, Tradesy, Poshmark, 99dresses, The Cools, The Real Real, and Twice all offer secondhand marketplaces, but with fancy sharing features, beautiful design, white glove services, or a mobile-first focus that provide a compelling, more user/fashion-centric alternative to eBay’s auctions.

eBay is experimenting, innovating, pivoting, shifting, and doing all those other things tech companies need to do to stay relevant and valuable to consumers. Right now, Sell it Forward is only available in the San Francisco Bay Area, but if it takes off, it could expand into additional regions.

Photo Credit: Lara604/Flickr

Zaarly started out as a “mobile Craigslist” that focused on the buyer. Its members posted goods or services they were looking for with a certain time frame and price, and people on the other side of the marketplace would fulfill the tasks. In September, Zaarly released “Storefronts” where sellers can display what they do and offer it for sale. This update shifted focus to its best sellers. At the time, Zaarly said the “want engine” that allowed people to request anything would still be available.

However, a report in TechCrunch this morning tipped us off that Zaarly’s core product — the request-anything-buyer-centric marketplace — is no longer available. The storefronts are now the whole shebang.

A post on Zaarly’s blog said that the ‘The Seller Project’ began a year ago. The team realized that there was a select group of active sellers who were building a group of loyal fans and decided to create a platform to help them market their services. “Request Anything” would  be phased out, and Zaarly Storefronts would be the main product.

Zaarly started out in 2011 as a competitor to CraigsList and TaskRabbit. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers led a $14 million round, and current HP CEO Meg Whitman joined the board of directors. Since then, the company added integration with social commerce site The Fancy and released a “Zaarly Anywhere” button that connected products or services on the web directly to Zaarly’s marketplace. The company seemed to be searching for a model that stuck.

Now, Zaarly more closely resembles Etsy or Shopify as a place where people can showcase their unique crafts and skills.

Unfortunately, Zaarly is now a little late to the game for this type of marketplace. Maybe the pivot will prove to be a smart move and help many small business owners boost their marketing and sales. Maybe. But as a consumer, perusing the marketplace, I see a lot of things that look cool, but that I would never buy. I am all for juice cleanses, apartment cleaning, and I bet my boyfriend would appreciate a week of homemade “Bro Meals” delivered to our door, but I don’t see anything that encourages me to buy or that I can’t find anywhere else. That said, next time I am desperate for a fully assembled terrarium with a bonus animal, I know where to go.

Photo Credit: Screenshot

Prosper.com announced today that it has raised $20 million from the prestigious venture firm Sequoia Capital. It’s slated this funding to “accelerate Prosper’s growth at a time when the market for peer-to-peer and business-to-peer finance is rapidly expanding.” In short, to help Prosper out-prosper its competitor, Lending Club.

Prosper also announced it has appointed Stephan Vermut as the new CEO, the former founder and managing partner of Merlin Securities that was recently acquired by Wells Fargo.

“I’ve watched with great interest over the past few years as the peer-to-peer lending industry has grown substantially, and I believe Prosper is in a unique position to offer both borrowers and lenders unprecedented access to financial opportunity,” said Vermut in a statement.

People traditionally take out loans with banks. Prosper eliminates the middle man by connecting people who want to invest money with people who want to borrow money. Borrowers list loan requests between $2,000 and $25,000, and individual lenders invest as little as $25 in each loan and earn returns on their investment.

Prosper has enabled more than $400 million in personal loans since it pioneered this type of service in 2006. Over the years, it has hit some road bumps with the SEC, shutting down in 2008 after receiving a cease-and-desist letter for not properly registering under the Securities Act. The company has come back, however, and now claims to be growing at 100 percent year-over-year in revenue and loan originations. There have also been some product changes that inspire more confidence, and this money will take the Prosper into “its next phrase of growth.”

This is Prosper’s sixth round of institutional funding and brings its total to $94.7 million. Previous investors include a laundry list of venture firms, including Draper Fisher Jurveston, Crosslink Capital, Accel, and Benchmark.

Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hugely popular handmade marketplace Etsy has launched a slick new Android app to help connect mobile buyers, the company announced today.

The app lets users of the service browse through more than 17 million items from 800,000 sellers around the world. Thankfully, the app supports English, German, French, and Dutch, so many folks worldwide can immediately take a dive into the mobile experience. While the app is great for browsing items, some reviewers noted it could use some serious work to help sellers.

Etsy’s launch on Android follows launches on the iPhone and iPad, showing how important mobile is for future growth.

New York-based Etsy has raised about $91 million from investors including Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Accel Partners.

Check out more photos of the new app below:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular platform-as-a-service Heroku has updated its add-on marketplace with more features to help developers and cloud tool providers get more out of the service.

The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) sector of cloud is still relatively small but growing quickly. Four CEOs of PaaS companies just attended our CloudBeat 2012 conference last week and had a lively discussion on the future of PaaS. They agreed that it was only a matter of time before major enterprises would invest a lot of cash into PaaS. Heroku is one of the largest PaaS providers, so they are definitely worth keeping tabs on.

Heroku’s add-on marketplace launched three years ago with 12 add-ons. Since that time, 85 service providers have launched add-ons, attracting more than 4 million installs from developers. Companies offering add-ons include Amazon RDS, Cloudant, Loggly, New Relic, SendGrid, Xeround, and Zencoder.

“Three years ago we launched Heroku add-ons and created the concept of a marketplace for cloud services,” Heroku COO Oren Teich told us via email. “We envisioned a world where developers focus their efforts on their unique value and consume cloud services from third parties to build out common capabilities. This vision has become reality, with great examples including having Memcached, Redis, search, performance management, and so much more all available today as add-ons.”

The updated add-on marketplace claims to offer the following services:

• Self-service interface – Providers can create and manage their add-ons, features, benefits, and plans, allowing them greater flexibility for testing and marketing products. Services can be deployed, configured, and integrated into apps with one-click.

• Marketing best practices – New listing pages provide customization for each add-on including best practices on marketing and customer engagement. Templates are included for creating new documentation, embedding documentation into sales pages, easy plan comparisons, personalized branding and visibility into analytics and marketplace performance so that no dedicated team of marketing specialists is required.

• Complete billing services – The program takes care of all aspects of the billing process for users including failed payments, declined cards, fraud, and payment and bank transaction fees. This protects providers from financial risks associated with integrating with payment gateways, fraud, and failed, declined, or expired credit cards.

• Dedicated support – Heroku’s support team will provide dedicated developer support, saving providers time by handling integration issues for them. A dedicated sales team is also available to help sell the Heroku platform along with providers’ integrated services.

Heroku is owned by Salesforce, and more than 2.5 million apps are currently deployed on the service. A year ago it had just 200,000 apps on it. Heroku customers include Walmart, Macy’s, Activision Blizzard, and GroupMe.

Marketplace businesses: they always seem great on paper, but it’s so insanely hard to solve the chicken-or-the egg problem.

Every founder I meet who’s building a marketplace business basically says the same thing: “It’s so much harder than I thought to build a two-sided marketplace.“

Of course, it can be done. There are plenty of examples of success. Ebay did it, we did it at oDesk, OpenTable is famous for doing it, and Airbnb is killing it. What I’ve noticed in the success stories is the basic theme that I call liquidity hacking.

What is liquidity hacking?

It’s the strategy and tactics that successful marketplace businesses employ to reduce the challenges associated with low transaction volumes. It often requires narrowing the scope drastically of the offering until sufficient scale allows you to expand to achieve a broader marketplace.

This type of hacking is completely necessary in my opinion. The thing with marketplace businesses is that they work great at scale. Once you have hundreds of thousands of users on the supply side and the demand side then everything works great. The challenge is almost always, how do you get there?

The main themes of liquidity hacking are:

• Provide value to one side.
• Find aggregators.
• Curate one side.
• Narrow the focus.
• Use hamsters.

Provide Value to One Side

Offer portfolios: Many different people like to showcase their work online. In the olden days, this would be done with a custom and personalized website. Nowadays, there are free portfolio tools for almost every type of individual. Once a site is successful in gaining users for their free portfolio tool, you end up having solved your initial supply challenge. See: Behance, Dribbble, Carbonmade

Build community: If you can establish a healthy and vibrant community on either side of the equation, you’ll end up with the potential for a great marketplace. See: StackOverflow

Offer tools: If you can get a lot of people to use your free tools, then you’ll have a highly engaged user-base on one side of the equation. See: Github, OpenTable.

Find Aggregators

Find physical aggregators: There are various aggregators in the real world that provide really novel ways to hack liquidity. These are physical locations that contain a concentration of supply or demand.

College campuses are one awesome aggregator; word spreads lightning fast and student labor is crazy cheap. I’ve seen some marketplace businesses that start focused on campuses and figure out the formula for getting significant penetration. Then just go to the next campus and repeat. Basically same deal with large office buildings and even high-rise apartment buildings. The great thing about large office buildings is you can sometimes convince the HR manager that your service is so cool that they should email the entire company about the offering. Now you have a trusted recommendation to try a service and you get free distribution to all employees. See: MyEatClub

Find an enterprise client: Enterprise clients often have lots of money to spend on the demand side. Sweet. A single contract can get you off the ground and running and focusing all your efforts on building the supply side and more product. The risk of this is that the enterprise feels like they own you and demand increasingly complex product features that could ruin your platform for other buyers. If the relationships are managed well, it’s a good way to get started. See: Gigwalk.

Find supply aggregators: Let’s say you need a whole bunch of freelance developers (hypothetically speaking of course). You have a vision of cutting out all middlemen and creating real value in the world. But you know it’s going to take a long time. So, you look for some supply aggregators like a web design firm in India to offer the supply you need to get off the ground. Or maybe you have a vision that anyone should be able to rent anything from anyone else. That’s great, but you need a lot of rental supply to get things started. What better source than places like Home Depot for power tools and REI for camping gear to get you off the ground with a solid supply. Then you can spend your time worrying about demand and worry about getting supply from individuals or owning your own supply later. See: Getable

Narrow the Focus

Narrow the problem: In almost all cases, it helps to really focus the efforts of the business. You have very limited resources to get to a sustainable marketplace so you should concentrate your resources on small areas.

Focus on a geography: This is kind of obvious. See: Every local marketplace ever.
Focus on a Niche community – Beanie baby collectors. See: Ebay.

Focus on a vertical Started with anything. Now making a standardized offering around housecleaning. See: Exec.

Curate One Side

One way to make things function reasonably well at low volumes is to curate one side. There is a question of whether a “curated marketplace” is really a marketplace at all, but so what.

Curation is really important. The reason it’s so important is that it greases the wheels of the marketplace. It allows the marketplace to move from a listings model to an open-call transactional model. This brings a lot of efficiency to the process and lowers the effort required by the buyers.

YourMechanic is a great example of this; rather than just have a directory of mechanics that you have to review, they presented me with just two options and their calendar of availability. I didn’t have to think about who to hire, I just clicked on the first available slot since they both looked like great mechanics. See: YourMechanic

Use Hamsters

When all else fails, use hamsters.

This is basically what I was for my first year at oDesk. It’s the brute force method, you just throw bodies at the problem until you have enough scale that you can reduce the manual requirements in the process.

At oDesk we always had the vision to be kind of what you see today, but in the beginning we acted more like a staffing firm, and I was the recruiter that would talk to the customers to take the job requirements and then go on a manual search to find candidates to fill the position. We just had to hustle like crazy, because you only have ~24 hours before the demand side loses interest and realizes that you have nothing. See: oDesk, AirBnb.

Josh Breinlinger is a venture partner at Sigma West. Prior to venture capital, he was the 4th employee at oDesk and helped grow the marketplace over 5 years in a variety of leadership roles.

Top image courtesy of leedsn, Shutterstock

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I learned growing up with a pet beagle that some dogs are easier to care for than others. My beloved Cody was not very social, required lots of exercise, and regularly defied forces of nature to steal snacks. For dogs of all shapes, sizes, breeds, and proclivities and their owners, DogVacay is here to help.

DogVacay is a marketplace where pet owners can find qualified local caregivers. The company has raised $6 million to expand its vibrant community and roster of services nationwide. 

DogVacay eliminates the need to put pets in kennels by supplying individuals that can watch the dogs instead. Experienced and qualified hosts create profiles with information about their home and pet owners can browse, book and pay online. The rates are cheaper than that of the typical kennel, and pets benefit from staying in a comfortable environment.

There is significant interest on both ends of the platform, both for owners who need help caring for their pet, and for suppliers who can feed their bank account (and their soul) by indulging their passion for dogs. Along with supervision, DogVacay offers complimentary insurance, 24/7 emergency veterinary care, customer service, and daily photo and video updates.

The business was founded by husband and wife duo Aaron and Karine Hirschorn after seeking kennel alternatives for their own dogs, Rocky and Rambo. Before starting DogVacay, they watched over 100 dogs in their home and saw there was high demand for this type of service. The company has since acquired thousands of hosts and users across the country, paid over $1 million to pet-sitters, and logged 50,000 doggie nights.

This first institutional round of financing came from Benchmark Capital and will be put towards expansing the community and roster of services nationwide. Other investors include First Round Capital, Science, Quest Venture Partners, Baroda Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and angels.

DogVacay is based in Santa Monica, CA and has 20 employees. The other dog on the block is Rover.com, which also helps owners find dog sitters.

The internet has woven instant gratification into the fabric of American existence. With just a finger tap, anything can be delivered to your door. Shared economy startups are cropping up left and right, filling the streets with Postmates, TaskRabbits, Execs, and Uber drivers ready to respond to our beck and calls.

Another startup launched today, backed by venture funding, to match individuals with needs to people eager to fulfill them. Rewarder is a social marketplace where people can solicit advice, expertise and resources from the community in exchange for rewards. It essentially gamifies the now familiar shared economy platform.

On Rewarder, users post requests for anything from crafting a customized diet plan to finding a rare collectible item. They also offer financial incentives, and members have the opportunity to respond and win money. It differentiates itself from the errand-centric sites mentioned above, which focus on local and time sensitive tasks.

“One of the reasons we are so excited about Rewarder is that it recognizes the unique knowledge and expertise each person has and rewards them for sharing it to help others,” said Kendall Fargo, Rewarder founder and CEO in a statement. “We believe that by mapping the world’s expertise, Rewarder will offer a more personally meaningful e-commerce experience.”

While in beta, Rewarder has acquired more than 100,000 active users that have posted $10 million in collective rewards. Now it is available to the public, so anyone can search for a specific item of clothing, for ask of help finding a job on a cruise ship.

Its early traction helped Rewarder secure $7 million in its first round of funding. The investment was led by Granite Ventures and Radar Partners and includes participation from angels Ron Conway, David Lee, and Kenny Lerer.

The team is based in San Francisco.

HouseTrip, a British clone of Airbnb, has raised $40 million in its third round of funding.

Like its American doppelganger, HouseTrip is community-driven marketplace for accommodation. Residents post their property on the site as available to rent, along with a profile, price, and reviews. Travelers looking for a place to stay search through the listings and book a rental for their trip. This model benefits the host, who can generate extra income, as well as the visitors who stand to gain more meaningful, personal travel experiences.

“We empower thousands of property owners to make money from their homes and investment properties,” said founder and CEO Arnaud Bertrand. “In Europe, this is of great importance as the economic crisis has impacted so many lives across the Continent. HouseTrip also empowers guests to travel to destinations where they can fully immerse themselves in local culture by literally living like a local, and we reduce the cost of their experience by providing better value.”

Bertrand started HouseTrip after he struggled to book a rental for a getaway to Scotland with his wife. The available options for finding and booking accommodation were inconvenient and outdated, consisting mostly of classified ads and requiring phone calls and wire transfers.

Since then, HouseTrip has built up a selection of 130,000 properties in 15,000 destinations, and the company expects by the end of the year to have helped book more than 3 million nights’ sleep. It has focused its efforts on Europe, and has options ranging from Italian villas to New York apartments.

The investor team also hews closely to European roots. This Series C was led by Accel Partners, with previous investors Balderton Capital and Index Ventures also participating.

“We are a European centric business,” Bertrand said. “Europe is the largest market globally for vacation rentals, and 60% of Europeans travel within Europe. This is the first time Europe’s three largest VCs have come together to back a European player.”

While many Airbnb user list their primary residence, Housetrip targets properties that are consistently available to rent. The team also offers management and calendar tools for the hosts, so they can keep track of their bookings and offer a reliable alternative to visitors.

“Booking entire properties requires the same traveller to scour multiple niche listings sites or to call travel agents, real estate companies and even homeowners directly,” said Accel Partner partner Sonali De Rycker. “Often the same guests have to send a substantial deposit before they even have sight of the property with little guarantee or recourse if the property is not as advertised. The better the service HouseTrip offers to guest, the more likely they are to make a booking which in turn means better business for the hosts – these network effects only reinforce themselves as the company scales.”

This investment will be used to fuel the company’s international expansion. This brings its total funding to almost $60 million, following a $17 million Series B last November.

HouseTrip is based in London, with offices in Switzerland and Portugal.

I have always thought it would be nice to have a ninja at my disposal to take care of tasks like protecting me from attacks, stealthily breaking into ice cream shops once they are closed, and infiltrating covert tech companies to gather top secret information.

This dream may never come true, but I at least I’ll be able to hire a Flinja.

Flinja is a startup that uses the talent, energy, and financial need of college students to create a freelance workforce. On the marketplace, students post services they want to provide, which alumni and staff can directly book. The site provides an opportunity for students to build their professional networks, find jobs and internships, and make a little extra cash.

“As freelancers ourselves, we wish there had been a platform like Flinja around when we were in college that allowed us to make money off our skills and hobbies as well as network with the right people,” said CMO Rebecca Bahr. “With the economy the way it is, Flinja helps students earn money doing what they love and gives alumni and staff within their college network the capability to give back to their alma mater by hiring students for the services they need at an affordable rate.”

So far, the most popular tasks are tutoring, babysitting, driving, and language translation.

For security and networking purposes, the marketplace is only available to people with a .edu email address. The team shared that alumni have even asked for their old college email addresses back so they can sign up. The site securely processes all transactions with a third-party payment system and escrow facilities.

The exclusivity ensures safety, but also provides alumni the opportunity to stay connected to their alma maters.

“We are all proud of the universities we went to,” Bahr said this morning at DEMO. “Flinja allows us to give back to that college without having to write a check, connecting students to alumni one job at a time.”

The company is launching on a school by school basis. It is already available to the University of Southern California community. So far, 12 percent of the current USC population are registered Flinjas, with significant adoption from members of the class of 2016. An official Flinja student association is also on campus.

On Sept. 24, the platform debuted at University of California, Los Angeles and is available at Stanford on Tuesday. Plans for expansion include the rest of the of UC schools, followed by a national campaign. Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group said that this network could be a game-changer.

“I really, really want this company to succeed,” he said. “I think there is a huge opportunity here to tie the campuses to the wealthy alumni, creating a network and being bale to drive that network for jobs and money. This is a trojan horse.”

The five person team has extensive experience in tech spanning PayPal, Google, eBay, and Cisco, as well as other startups. They are based in San Francisco.

Flinja is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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

The eBay for unique goods marketplace has grown dramatically recently, pulling in $525 million in sales last year. When startups grow, challenges are inevitable, and one of them is ensuring that the company’s culture and vision survive.

Source: Etsy

Charming “Human Teeth Bracelet,” by Deathany97

So Etsy laid down the law this past week, updating its prohibited items list.

Definitely out are skulls, bones, skeletons, and bodily fluids. Preserved tissues or organs are verboten too, so that freakishly awesome white devil scalp you inherited from your ancestors will just have to stay in the family a little longer.

Teeth continue to be kosher however, so you will still be able to purchase this tasteful Human Teeth Bracelet from the cheerfully-named up-and-coming artiste Deathany97.

For some reason, drugs are also not something Etsy wants to sell. (Probably a non-compete contract with stealth-mode South American entrepreneurs.)

That includes drug paraphernalia such as hash skillets and tobacco products. But tobacco pipes are still allowed, provided they do not have carburetors.

(Google helpfully informed me that a pipe carburetor has absolutely nothing to do with a internal combustion engine.)

Speaking of which, Etsy does not want to sell your motor vehicle, boat, or RV. And hazardous materials such as mercury, matches, and lighter fluid are out too.

Cool cat nap his-and-hers pillowcases? Still absolutely and defiantly in.

Source: Etsy

His-and-hers cat nap pillowcases

Image credit: DM7/ShutterStock

Which one is more convincing: watching an infomercial for the latest juicer, or watching a guy on YouTube pulverize 12 apples into a tasty beverage?

We all know Jack LaLanne is awesome, but Looqiloo is betting that peer reviews on its user-driven video marketplace will move more product than cheesy infomercials.

“Amazon and eBay allow you to buy products and read reviews. YouTube lets you watch video reviews but not buy. And you can watch videos and buy from QVC, but the videos aren’t created by consumers,” said chief executive officer Bruce Crair in an interview with VentureBeat.

Looqiloo allows anyone to create and upload a product review video and share it with the Looqiloo community. As on YouTube, people can watch the videos; but should anyone have the urge to buy, he or she can do so right from the video page.

The company splits revenue from a sale between the product distributor, itself, and you, the video creator. Crair pointed out a Nielsen report showing people’s trust in television advertising had dropped 24 percent. People just don’t believe that buying Old Spice will give them a baritone voice and a perfect happy trail.

On the other hand, if a friend or peer suddenly smelled like the man your man could smell like, you’d be waiting in line at Walgreens right now.

The company sees its target market as all those who upload product reviews to YouTube. Crair explained that a search for “iPhone 4S review” turns up around 62,500 results. There are definitely fanboys and girls who love to walk you through every step of their beloved new gadget, but it’s a stretch to say all of those reviews are positive and aimed at selling the product. That said, Crair wants to create a community and even welcomes the negative videos.

ExpoTV.com allows you to upload similar videos and get rewards, but Looqiloo doesn’t see that site as a big competitor. Instead, it wants to compete directly with Amazon and other big retailers.

The startup made a presentation at DEMO in Santa Clara, Calif., today. Venture capitalists on a judge panel noted, “Affiliates already don’t get paid a lot, and now you’re taking a piece of that piece. It’s hard to make it work unless you have an immense amount of volume.”

Another VC said, “I liked a lot of it… There’s a bunch of cleverness here, but where is the money?”

Looqiloo was founded in 2011 and has so far been bootstraped by its founders, Crair, Wendell Brown, and Mark Klein. The company is headquartered in Irvine, Calif. and has five employees.

Looqiloo is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of Andresr, Shutterstock

Craigslist may be on the smartphone already, but Fribi wants to kick the classified-ads space up a notch using the power of Facebook, coupons, and the cameras on our mobile-devices.

“Fribi is like a more personal twist to Craigslist, making the service more personal, relevant, safe and fun,” said chief executive officer and co-founder Morten Isachsen in an email to VentureBeat.

Fribi (pronounced free-bee) is a mobile, local-focused marketplace that allows you to sell and trade your unwanted items. So, yeah, Craigslist. But to set itself apart from the giant elephant in the room, Fribi hopes to offer a speeder listing process, social integration, and offers from businesses right within the app.

To list an item, you take a picture with your smartphone’s camera, assign a title, description, and a few other details, and upload. You can decide who can see the listing (only friends or public) as well as how long the listing will stay live. Like Craigslist, you can search specific neighborhoods and items, though Fribi lets you connect the app to Facebook and see friends who are posting items. If a friend interacts with an item through the social network, Fribi will automatically show the interaction in the app. Isachsen says Twitter integration will be coming soon.

Fribi has an opportunity to monetize as well, allowing local businesses to run deals and offers in the app.

Other services are doing similar things, however. Poshmark allows users to take photos of clothing they no longer want with their phones and upload a listing to the app. These are then sold through “Posh Parties,” or mini-mobile-trunk-shows. TradePal also lets you buy, sell or trade items with people around you, however this is done off the mobile phone and on a regular website. Inevitably, Craigslist will also be a big competitor for Fribi, given how many people already use and (mostly) trust the service.

Not to mention eBay, though it is on a much bigger, less localized scale than Fribi.

The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Isachsen does say the startup will be moving its operations to Palo Alto, Calif. So far Fribi has not taken on any funding.

[Update, the Sage Panel following the presentation assessed how Fribi came off on stage. Jolie O'Dell, a writer at VentureBeat and moderator of the panel, noted that the pursuit of a better shopping and selling site than Craig's List is a good idea. But Dana Stalder, a general partner at Matrix Partners (also on the Sage panel), said it will be very hard to overcome the "network effect" advantage that Craig's List has, even if its features aren't as good as another site's. He said he desperately wants to find entrepreneurs that can do that.

Jason Krikorian, general partner at DCM and another member of the Sage panel, said that the app was really well executed.]

Fribi is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

This is a guest post from Dave Lifson, co-founder of Postling, a unified social media dashboard for small businesses. It originally appeared here. 

I believe e-commerce can make Tumblr over $100M a year. I’ve shared my thoughts with the Tumblr team directly, but I figured I’d share it with all of you as well. It comes in two flavors: independent stores (bottom up) and retail partnerships (top down).

Independent stores are like Etsy, but not limited to handmade – Tumblr users can sell what they craft, draw, photograph, and compose directly to their followers. Tumblr facilitates the transaction via credit card or Paypal, taking a modest 5% transaction fee. Not only does this generate meaningful revenue, it creates a really amazing virtuous cycle for user growth: sellers promote their tumblogs offline to drive business, which drives more users registrations, which create more sellers, who then promote their shops, etc. At least, that’s what we saw at Etsy.

At last estimate, Etsy did ~$3M/month in revenue, an easily attainable goal for Tumblr. The integration is non-instrusive: Tumblr users can choose to add a “Purchase” button to the bottom of their post that is tied to an item they’ve added to their tumblr shop (also viewable at user.tumblr.com/store). Followers who click the button input their billing and shipping info via an overlay to purchase, then are returned right to where they were in the dashboard. Like at Etsy and Ebay, Tumblr processes the payments but otherwise leaves transaction coordination to the buyer and seller. Down the road, Tumblr could aggregate all of these items together into a Tumblr Marketplace, for people who want to exclusively browse the items for sale by all Tumblr users.

Retail partnerships would work like this: Tumblr does custom integrations with the major retailers (Barneys, Nordstrom, Gilt) so that every time a post containing a link to a partner’s product page is detected, a “Purchase” button is embedded at the bottom of the post. Clicking the button leads the user through a purchase pipeline. Tumblr gets a 5-15% affiliate fee. I believe Tumblr can negotiate very aggressive revshare deals because of the volume, the incremental revenue, and the demographic. The reason why nobody can do this except Tumblr is because Tumblr’s users are curators, and curators are the missing component. Amazon is great at selling books but is awful at softlines (retail speak for fashion items) because there are so many items and they go out of style every 3 months. (Read my post for more detail.) Tumblr’s community of curators is the secret ingredient that I believe can bring e-commerce’s current single digit share of the $225 billion US fashion market into the double digits.

Here’s the math: Tumblr claims 60M posts per day or 22B per year. If we assume 0.1% of posts fall into the e-commerce category, each post gets viewed by 200 followers, 1% of those followers buy something, and Tumblr makes a $2.40 transaction fee per sale (8% on $30 item), that’s $105 Million per year.

Given a small team with the right skills, Tumblr could get this going in 3-6 months. The $100M question is, why aren’t they already doing this?

Image via Flickr user InaFrenzy

Craigslist has long been the go-to place to buy and sell stuff locally, but the web site isn’t the least bit visually pleasing.

Hipswap hopes to capture some of Craiglist’s market by offering a website full of pictures of items you can by from people around you. Every item listed on the site has a picture attached, so you can see what you’re buying and avoid surprises. Like oh-so-many sites these days, it’s design looks a lot like Pinterest, and people can create collections of their listings with a certain theme such as woman’s heels or coffee tables.

Hipswap also offers local delivery and shipping over longer distances for those who are nervous about meeting up with a complete stranger to sell or buy an item. Local delivery is limited to Los Angeles now, and your stuff arrives in a cutesy pink vehicle with a moustache on the side.

Instead of paying with cash only, or hoping the guy you’re buying from has Square, Hipswap uses PayPal to process payments and charges a three and a half percent transaction fee to make money.

Hipswap faces competition from Craigslist as well as Etsy, because it presents item listings in a similar way and offers second-hand and vintage items for sale. Etsy also uses PayPal for payments, but shipping is up to the seller.

The company is based in Santa Monica, Calif. and is currently seeking funding.

Garage sale cat figurine image via Flickr user megaul 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris has struck a privacy agreement with the top six companies she believes facilitate the creation of the most mobile applications: Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Microsoft, and Research in Motion. The agreement states that all mobile apps that collect any sort of personal information must create and distribute a privacy policy.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” said Attorney General Harris in a statement.

Mobile apps have gone without much regulation for some time, but Harris wants to bring them in line with the “California Online Privacy Protection Act,” which requires commercial websites, including mobile sites, to post privacy policies. The policy should be viewable before downloading an app, as opposed to after, when an app has already been opened.

This means app marketplaces will need to have a separate area for each application to show that particular company’s privacy statement and any other information it would like to disclose. This was already recommended by the Federal Trade Commission in a study on parents, privacy, and downloading apps for children.

Users will also soon be supplied avenues to report companies who are not following the agreement. Those found in violation could be prosecuted under California’s Unfair Competition Law or its False Advertising Law.

In the last few weeks, social photo-app Path spurred a conversation around mobile privacy when a developer found it transferring people’s address books to its servers. Soon after, a number of other companies were discovered doing the same thing, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and others. Apple released a statement saying these companies were in violation of its guidelines. Explicit prior permission is required in order to transfer such information, though it doesn’t specify the need to encrypt it.

The guideline reads, “Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used.”

With this new agreement, companies like Apple must go beyond just setting guidelines. Now, they must require the more than 50,000 app developers currently active in their platforms to create privacy policies, in addition to any newcomers. Currently, the companies are working to deploy the agreement’s guidelines across their mobile app ecosystems.

Attorney General Harris will meet again with these mobile leaders in six months to consider more ways of making mobile privacy more transparent.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

App store photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Even with the advent of online marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist, it’s far too easy to accumulate junk that you’d be better off selling. Now there’s an easier way to sell your aging and neglected collection of vintage records.

ShopSavvy, maker of the popular mobile bar code scanning apps, is today announcing SavvyListings, a service that will let you offer anything for sale simply by scanning a bar code. Afterwards, you only need enter the price (ShopSavvy offers recommendations for prices of similar products in your area) and product condition to make it available to the company’s 20 million users. There’s no need to add a lengthy description or product photos.

Adding the ability to sell items right from within the ShopSavvy app was one of the company’s most request features, co-founder and CEO Alexander Muse told VentureBeat in an interview. Coming hot off a recent funding round of $7 million and a major app update, Muse said that the company wanted to deliver a valuable new feature to tide over users as it worked on tablet and web versions of ShopSavvy.

The new service shows that ShopSavvy still has plenty of room to grow and experiment — not bad for something that started out as a fairly simple Android app. Now ShopSavvy is one of the most widely used shopping comparison apps around.

The first iteration of SavvyListings functions like a mobile-focused version of Craigslist, as Muse describes it. The service focuses on local interactions, since it’s far easier to sell things to people who live nearby, and it also offers an obfuscated way for buyers and sellers to communicate. Best of all, ShopSavvy is offering the service completely for free, and it won’t be taking any fees from transactions.

Muse says the company is also working on adding product buyback capabilities to SavvyListings eventually, so if nobody wants to buy your iPhone at your set price, you’ll be able to sell it back to the manufacturer or a gadget reseller right from within the app for less. The company has formed an agreement with the same firm that powers the popular reseller Gazelle, which means the buyback feature will likely function smoothly once implemented.

Eventually, Muse says that SavvyListings will be able to complete the entire transaction from within the app.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco, Calif. and Dallas, Texas, and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million. It’s most recent funding round was notably led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

Gidsy, a new company from Germany, could be a way for you to make a few bucks from your more unusual talents.

Gidsy is a “marketplace for authentic experiences,” and it just landed a $1.2 million investment from a combination of Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), and the actor Ashton Kutcher.

Are you a dumpling expert, urban survivalist or DIY manufacturer? If so,  Gidsy may be for you.

Gidsy’s founders were running a design studio in Berlin when they came up with the idea. “We were looking for someone to go mushroom picking in Berlin because we wanted to make a mushroom risotto and we couldn’t find anyone who could help us with that,” says co-founder Edial Dekker. “That’s when we came up with the idea of Gidsy. How great would it be if anyone could organize a robotics workshop, city walk or cooking class?”

Gidsy places great emphasis on naming the individual organizing the experience, although these organizers may sometimes be running small businesses. “Individuals run the Gidsy marketplace, so Gidsy activities end up being very much about the hosts’ personalities and quirks,” Dekker says. “The experiences are better because they’re expressions of an individual’s personality and passion. Instead of attending a yoga class at a gym, for example, you’ll find an expert on Gidsy offering candle-lit yoga classes on a rooftop.”

Gidsy launched in New York, Berlin and Amsterdam in November and will expand to London and San Francisco in the next two weeks. ”There is a lot of demand from other cities but every new city requires a lot of resources,” said Sunstone Capital Partner Nikolaj Nyholm. The new funding will be spent on rolling the service out globally.

It’s free to create an experience listing. Gidsy takes care of money transaction fees, customer support, cancellations, refunds and marketing in return for a 10 percent service charge. If a cancellation occurs more than one week before an experience, organizers keep 50 percent of the charge; if it’s less than two days, then the organizer is paid in full. To protect users, organizers do not receive payments (via Paypal) until at least 24 hours after the experience. The minimum charge for an experience is $5.

Gidsy is not alone in this space. 500 startups investment Vayable already operates in Berlin, New York and several other cities. It charges a 15 percent service fee while another rival Sidetour takes 20 percent. Gidsy’s founders claim that their service offers superior tools for organizers and social utilities for users. “We are very much focused on group bookings and connecting people,” explains Dekker. “If you have booked the same activity, there’s a high chance these people have something in common. We try to spark that conversation.”

The Dekker brothers (Edial’s brother Floris is also a co-founder) are imports to startup hotspot Berlin, hailing originally from Amsterdam. “It’s been said before, but the city of Berlin feels very much like a startup,” Dekker told me. “It’s changing all the time, it’s chaotic, exciting and disruptive. Add a bunch of amazing startups such as Soundcloud, Amen, Readmill and 6wunderkinder to that and you have the most exciting startup city in Europe.”

Gidsy was founded in 2011, is based in Berlin and has 6 employees.

Gidsy isn’t the first of Kutcher’s Berlin investments. He is also an investor in Soundcloud, which recently received $50 million from Kleiner Perkins and Amen. In fact, the actor has proved to be a surprising savvy tech investor although he has been criticized for promoting his own investments on his sitcom “Two and a half men” and as guest editor of Details magazine. His previous punts include AirBnB, Foursquare, Path and Flipboard. “We were specifically looking for someone with a non-technical background, but strong product understanding, and Kutcher certainly qualifies here, ” said Sunstone Capital partner Nikolaj Nyholm. Kutcher has also been spotted out on the town in Berlin, so presumably he likes the place.

We recently reported on the discontent of many indie developers with the new Xbox Live dashboard . The main complaint was that Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) are now so well hidden on the new dashboard, that they can easily be missed.

Weapon of Choice developer Mommy’s Best Games has run with this theme, basing an entire XBLIG game around the advertising-heavy new look dash. The game’s title, ‘Game Type’, is also the moniker of the dashboard tile that Xbox users need to select, in order to find and download indie games on their console.

The game itself is split into two parts. The first part involves actually finding your way to the game through an ad-ridden spoof console dashboard. The main game then starts up, revealing a side scrolling shooter, in which the dashboard adverts have come to life and need to be shot down. The lead character in the game is ‘hoodie girl’, described as the “idiotic stock photo” that Microsoft decided to assign to the ‘Game Type’ dashboard tile.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Nathan Foults of Mommy’s Best Games says “I’ve been thrilled Microsoft created the special dashboard tile just for our game.” He continues “with the incongruous stock photo of a woman in a hoodie doing a jump-kick, and the forgettable ‘Game Type’ title, it’s good to know Microsoft was advertising our poorly-named game, and not trying to label the console’s entire digital game storefront. Otherwise, it’d be a horrible match that would simply make no sense and generally lead fewer gamers to find the store and browse on their own terms.”

Hidden in the first part of the game is a wall of text which describes the motivation behind the game:

“The Xbox 360 menu system (or dashboard) controls how gamers find digital games on this console. The Fall 2011 update to the dashboard relegated the main path to browse all new digital games – Arcade, Indie, and Games on Demand – to a single, ill-named tile. This tile is called “Game Type”.

Between the terrible name and the absurd picture, it seemed no one really thought too hard about the game portal. In addition, TV and Movies are first on the menu. Bothered (and subsequently inspired) by this, I made Game Type.”

Despite the humorous nature of this protest, there is a real concern from many indie developers that their titles are being brushed to the side. Microsoft has stated that it is listening to feedback from developers, and is taking it into account for future programs. In the meantime, it is good to see that satire is alive and well on the XBLIG channel, whose content is not controlled directly by Microsoft, but rather by peer review.

Game Type is available to buy for 80 Microsoft points. If you can find it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gidsy makes it easy for you to offer a tour or other experience in New York, where the service launches today. You could call it the Etsy of experiences.

Gidsy started in Berlin, where the founders were running a design studio. “We were looking for someone to go mushroom picking in Berlin because we wanted to make a mushroom risotto and we couldn’t find anyone who could help us with that,” says co-founder Edial Dekker. “That’s when we came up with the idea of Gidsy. How great would it be if anyone could organize a robotics workshop, city walk or cooking class?”

Gidsy places great emphasis on naming the individual organizing the experience, although these organizers may sometimes be running small businesses. “Individuals run the Gidsy marketplace, so Gidsy activities end up being very much about the hosts’ personalities and quirks,” Dekker says. “The experiences are better because they’re expressions of an individual’s personality and passion. Instead of attending a yoga class at a gym, for example, you’ll find an expert on Gidsy offering candle-lit yoga classes on a rooftop.”

It’s free to create an experience listing. Gidsy takes care of money transaction fees, customer support, cancellations, refunds and marketing in return for a 10 percent service charge. If a cancellation occurs more than one week before an experience, organizers keep 50 percent of the charge; if it’s less than two days, then the organizer is paid in full. To protect users, organizers do not receive payments (via Paypal) until at least 24 hours after the experience. The minimum charge for an experience is $5.

Gidsy is not alone in this space. 500 startups investment Vayable already operates in Berlin, New York and several other cities. It charges a 15 percent service fee while another rival Sidetour takes 20 percent. Gidsy’s founders claim that their service offers superior tools for organizers and social utilities for users. “We are very much focused on group bookings and connecting people, ” explains Dekker. “If you have booked the same activity, there’s a high chance these people have something in common. We try to spark that conversation.”

The Dekker brothers (Edial’s brother Floris is also a co-founder) are imports to startup hotspot Berlin, hailing originally from Amsterdam. “It’s been said before, but the city of Berlin feels very much like a startup,” Dekker told me. “It’s changing all the time, it’s chaotic, exciting and disruptive. Add a bunch of amazing startups such as Soundcloud, Amen, Readmill and 6wunderkinder to that and you have the most exciting startup city in Europe.”

Gidsy was founded in 2011, has 6 employees and is privately funded.

“A lot of businesses are struggling now to get all the work they need done with small budgets, and a lot of students are looking for ways to get exposure.” RentAStudent CEO Morgan Dierstein told VentureBeat. “We help both parties connect.”

RentAStudent’s purpose is to connect students and businesses for any imaginable project. Companies that may not be able to afford established freelancers, but are willing to take a shot with a college student, are the big winners here, especially in this tight economy. Students are helped because taking on a single project is easier than signing up for an internship and there’s money in it.

The company makes money by taking a 15 percent cut of each transaction. Dierstein said that it’s a slightly higher cut than some competitors, but said it’s worth it because RentAStudent pre-screens the students and companies offering projects. Because there is more accountability, Dierstein argues both sides are both more likely to be happy with the results of the project.

“Companies don’t want to work with complete strangers, so we help them get to know their prospective student workers,” Dierstein said.

Dierstein (pictured) first came up with idea for the company in 2006 while he was a college student in Los Angeles, looking for ways to make money. The idea intensified in 2009 when he unsuccessfully looked for jobs during the downturn and realized how strapped businesses were for cash as well.

RentAStudent officially launched in France — Dierstein’s home country — in January, but the team just made the site available in the U.S. this month. Dierstein said the company has taken in more than $40,000 in revenues this year and with the U.S. launch added in, he thinks the number could continue to grow considerably. The site has taken off mostly in France and has signed up more than 1,000 screened students, but now Dierstein and one other employee have set up shop in New York to get the word out.

At present, RentAStudent is self-funded, but Dierstein is using his company’s new placement to talk with VC firms and attract some essential funds to help the company grow and market itself.

“It was difficult to find funding in France,” Dierstein said. “I’m not sure if it’s cultural or strictly about money, but if you’re a startup, you’re more likely to find help in the U.S.”

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“Three difficult days ago, I returned home from an exhausting week of business travel to an apartment that I no longer recognized… With heart pounding and stomach churning, I slowly swung the door open as both a pungent odor and the full realization of what had occurred washed over me: this wasn’t just a random break-in. My home had been burglarized, vandalized and thoroughly trashed by a ‘traveler’ I connected with via the online rental agency, Airbnb.com,” wrote San Francisco resident EJ on her personal blog June 29.

Airbnb’s service pairs travelers seeking a unique experience with locals (like EJ) willing to rent out their spaces for a fee. But as EJ learned, the company does not insure any damages incurred during the renter’s stay.

Contrary to statements made by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky in a public letter published by TechCrunch, EJ claims that the company hasn’t been in close contact with her since the incident. According to a follow-up blog post written July 28, the only interaction she claims to have had was through correspondence with an unidentified Airbnb co-founder, who is described as more concerned with the company than her awful situation.

In the follow-up blog post, EJ writes:

I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases with me, as the investigation was ongoing. He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist” of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”.

It’s difficult to give much weight to EJ’s accusations, since she’s chosen to remain anonymous. However, both the San Francisco Police Department and the San Francisco Chronicle have confirmed part of her story as credible.

Airbnb declined VentureBeat’s request for an interview to dispel misinformation about the situation and clarify the company’s future intentions.

A company spokesperson gave the following statement:

“We were shocked and disturbed to hear about this unfortunate situation and since that moment have done everything in our power to assist EJ. We have offered assistance with accommodation, transportation, and financial support to help EJ find some sense of security in light of such tragic circumstances. We have also been assisting the police with their investigation and have confirmed with the SFPD that they have a female suspect in custody that they are investigating for vandalism and theft. Safety and security are our utmost priorities and we are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”

Plenty of people will be watching Airbnb’s next steps. The company cannot afford to have another incident like this happen without causing concern among investors. But the startup still has lots of potential (as evident from the number of copycat competitors) and many options to help keep its users safe from vandalism. It also has millions in the bank to figure out how to factor a vandalism safety net into its business model.

Founded in August 2008, the San Francisco-based startup has $119.8 million total funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, DST, General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, Ashton Kutcher and others. The service has seen incredible growth of 800 percent in the last year and had over 1.6 million local homes booked since it launched in 2008.

The site plans to facilitate commercial transactions by letting individual buyers and sellers expose their social capital on Facebook and, later, Twitter, Tumblr and other sources. In other words, if you have a lot of friends on Facebook, your friends there effectively vouch for your identity on Copious.

“That will give me a huge amount of comfort that you are who you say you are,” said Copious cofounder and operations chief Jonathan Ehrlich. “That transparency should make the experience a lot more engaging, trustworthy and better for both buyer and seller.”

Copious joins the growing ranks of socially-driven commerce startups. Groupon is the big fish in this pond, with $713.4 million in revenue in 2010 and a $750 million public offering planned for later this year. Other startups, such as Egg Cartel and Yardseller, also attempt to bring a social dimension to commerce. Facebook is likely to be adding payment features, having recently started a subsidiary called Facebook Payments. Meanwhile, eBay has a social dimension — with buyer and seller reputations — but has been struggling for years to make that system work effectively.

To use Copious, you log on using Facebook Connect. The site, which has a Facebook-esque light blue theme, lets you browse buyers or shop for goods. For each item offered for sale, Copious displays a meter — it looks like orange cellphone signal bars made out of person-like icons — that shows the strength of your social connection to the seller. For instance, if you’re friends with someone who is friends with the seller on Facebook, it might show five bars — or only one bar for someone who’s not in your social circle at all.

To facilitate connections, Copious will let sellers offer incentives to buyers, such as $5 off a purchase if you follow them on Twitter or share the product listing with your own followers. That, the founders hope, will help encourage relevant product recommendations — even if you’re not looking for something.

“One of the great things about the early eBay was this idea of serendipitous discovery,” said Ehrlich. “You’d go there to buy a pair of shoes and wind up buying an Elvis toaster.”

Ehrlich wants to help bring back the era of spontaneous Elvis toaster purchases by making it easier to find sellers with the kind of stuff you’ll find charmingly quirky, or quirkily irresistible, and he hopes that social connections are the way to do that.

The site will launch with little more than a selection of handbags for sale. That’s because, Ehrlich said, handbags are something people are passionate about, there’s a lot of variety, and you need to trust that the seller is not trying to sell you something counterfeit. These are all things Copious can help with.

The founders hope sellers will shortly offer a wider variety of products.

The company plans to integrate Twitter and Tumblr social networks soon after launch and is working to incorporate eBay reputations as well.

Serial entrepreneur Jim Rose is the chief executive officer for Copious, and Rob Zuber is the company’s chief technical officer. Copious has eight employees in all and is based in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.

Foundation Capital led the investment round, with Embarcadero Ventures, the BlackBerry Partners Fund, Google Ventures, and angel investors. The advisory board includes two Facebook employees, Javier Olivan and Alex Schultz.

Photo credit: Dylan Tweney, VentureBeat

Etsy started in Brooklyn, New York. CEO Rob Kalin had drifted through five different colleges before finally ending up at NYU and sharing an apartment with Stinchcomb. “He thought he wanted to be a philosophy major but he loved making furniture. He was one of those people who was annoyingly good at everything that he did,” said Stinchcomb. “He was just looking for a place to sell his own stuff and there really weren’t any good options. Rob was coming at it from the lens of someone who is a maker. He wasn’t coming at it from the point of view of ‘what’s the best business model?’ He wanted it to be cheap for creative people because they don’t have any money and he wanted to make it easy to use.”

Etsy’s products are mostly handmade. In 2010, it listed more than 6.7 million products of which the most popular categories were jewelry, art supplies and vintage. In contrast with marketplaces like eBay or Amazon, most Etsy products are sold by their makers. The market is built around “the idea of having a connection to the products in your life, products that aren’t anonymous. Knowing where they are coming from resonates on a human level.”

Etsy’s mainly female users tend to be very passionate about the site. I dropped into an Etsy meetup in Amsterdam last year. The atmosphere was halfway between an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and a gospel revival. This was particularly unusual to see among the sober and level-headed Dutch. Each seller told the group what she sold on Etsy and why. People brought samples and presents for Stinchcomb (Etsy offices are partly furnished with gifts from sellers). One couple explained how their Etsy shop was now paying their mortgage.

Buyers are equally enthusiastic. Prolific Etsy shopper Jennifer Hicks told me, “I discovered Etsy about five years ago when I was looking  for a specific type of earrings. In fact, I remember the search terms to this day ‘Ottoman style earrings’. The first site that came up was Etsy. I did not know at the time what Etsy was and to be honest, didn’t understand how it could work, how someone could make for me exactly what I wanted, out of the material I desired and just ship it to me anywhere I was. Since then, I use Etsy for just about everything when it comes to jewelry and clothing.”

Etsy’s founders continued to plough their own unique furrow. “Rob hired me to do marketing and I have no experience in marketing,” admitted Stinchcomb. “But I actually think that was also really good for the company. At the time I was in a band (The French Kicks) and he said, ‘Well you made your band have an audience and be somewhat successful. Why don’t you do the same thing?’”

In fact, most of Etsy’s first employees had neither a technical or business background. Many early Etsy hires were sellers who had been successful on the site. “We took an unconventional approach from the beginning where we really focused on trying to build up the community around Etsy because 1) we didn’t have a big marketing budget and 2) the more I read marketing books the more convinced I became that direct marketing was just a waste of money,” said Matt.

The tech press never really “got” Etsy. A 2009 TechCrunch interview featured that site’s editor, Michael Arrington, asking questions like “Is it all really crappy handmade jewelry?”. In fact, Etsy’s ambitions are broader than those of most tech companies.

“When you get to several hundred million dollars in sales and realise that 96.5% of that is going back to individuals working from their homes you start to realise that this is a bigger idea than just a place to buy and sell stuff,” said Stinchcomb. “We think there is a more sustainable model which focuses on micro-enterprise and micro-economies.”

Etsy will run a conference on small businesses and sustainability in Berlin this year.

Stinchcomb hopes that in a couple of years from now, Etsy will not just be about handmade and vintage goods but also about agriculture, music, entertainment, services and even local currencies. Etsy could support community supported agriculture projects so you could invest in a local farm. According to Matt, “a farmer’s market is just an Etsy event offline.” Already, Etsy users can buy wool directly from a seller who has a flock of sheep.

“I would love to see Etsy connecting more with the real world where we could allow people to source materials locally and ship locally and allow people to filter searches by carbon footprint,” said Stinchcomb. “What gets really interesting locally is also the idea of local currencies. I would love to see an Etsy currency evolve. We could create a whole new economy of micro-economies.”

One criticism which as been leveled at Etsy is that it doesn’t have more male users because most sellers don’t make much money. Only 25 percent of Etsy sellers describe themselves as professional artisans. Matt told that part of the reason the site is more than 90 percent female is that the marketing was mainly word of mouth and women were the first users. The site is trying to encourage more male sellers and products for men. Etsy’s new focus on personalization may also help there.

That is in itself an interesting technical challenge. Many of the objects you can buy on the site defy categorization, making search difficult. Last year, Etsy acquired a company called Adtuitive to improve discovery and personalization. A new feature called the taste test, a sort of “Pandora for Etsy”, is being trialed. Social graph features, which tap connections between people from services like Facebook and Twitter to better understand users’ tastes, are also being rolled out.

Finally, I asked Stinchcomb what advice he would give to new tech entrepreneurs. His response: “Always be honest and do what you think is right, not what will make you the most money.”

And it seems many teachers are biting — the company paid out over $1 million to educators in 2010, more than sales in its first four years combined, founder Paul Edelman told VentureBeat.

The site allows educators to buy or sell teaching materials across all grade levels. Not only is it a great way to earn some extra cash on old lesson plans for sellers, it also allows buyers to get a leg up when teaching new material. Popular items at the moment include a set of attendance questions to better engage students at the start of class, and a “Family Feud”-style PowerPoint game template. Teachers can also buy and sell hard goods, including items created by other teachers and used educational material. The site also has a section for teachers to request specific items.

TeachersPayTeachers offers two subscription levels for sellers: A free option, which entitles them to 60 percent of any sales, and a $60 annual option, which lets sellers keep 85 percent of the sales price. The latter option accounts for around 25 percent of sales on the site.

Edelman says its best-selling teachers earn over $1,500 a month. One Georgia-based teacher, who has over 900 followers on the site, managed to more than double her salary by earning over $45,000 since the start of the school year in September. That’s certainly an edge-case, but it shows potential for other teachers.

With over 320,000 registered users, TeachersPayTeachers is one of the largest education marketplaces online. WeAreTeachers, a competing site, also offers lesson plans for sale. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were around 3.5 million teaching positions in the US in 2008, so the site’s current user base accounts for nearly 10 percent of all teachers in the country.

Edelman, a former New York City teacher, founded the site in 2006 with his own money. It was acquired by Scholastic later that year, but he ended up buying back the site in March 2009. He tells us it’s been profitable since then.

Edelman works out of France, but TeachersPayTeachers has a technology team based in Queens, New York. Like many startups, a team of coders in India performs additional work.