Users are getting increasingly comfortable with the idea of booking and even listing spaces on Airbnb through their mobile phones. The company has tried to reach that demand through on mobile devices with frequently updated iOS and Android apps. Today, the Android app gets an update aimed at making the experience for hosts better than ever. → Read More
As a peer-to-peer marketplace for people’s homes, Airbnb’s success still relies on ensuring that its users trust one another. Today, it took another step toward that goal, with the introduction of Verified Identification, which will connect users’ online and offline identities. → Read More
Airbnb today announced that it is open sourcing Rendr, its library for running Backbone.js apps seamlessly on both the client and the server. After launching its Chronos cron replacement a few weeks ago, this marks the company’s second major contribution to the open source ecosystem this year. Airbnb originally developed Rendr for its mobile site. A few months ago, Airbnb talked about how it… → Read More
Airbnb just announced that it has open-sourced Chronos, the company’s replacement for the standard time-based Cron schedule that is probably familiar to everybody who has ever used a Unix-based system. Chronos runs on top of Apache’s Mesos cluster manager and allows developers to execute shell scripts at set intervals and, unlike Cron, you can also trigger jobs by the completion of… → Read More
Singapore-based short term home rental marketplace, Travelmob is pushing steadily into the space with new features on its site. Today, it released a way for home owners to list last-minute discounts to travelers. This follows an earlier feature released last year which allowed travelers to find listings by descriptive tags. The company is yet another in the quickly crowding Airbnb-style space… → Read More
When we last caught up with Getable, the startup formerly known as Rentcycle, it was announcing that Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph was joining Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro and OpenTable founder Chuck Templeton on its board of directors. → Read More
Airbnb has seen amazing growth over the last year, doubling the number of listings and nights booked on the platform in 2012, and the company sees even more opportunity on the horizon. But surprisingly enough, the company only has 50 engineers right now. To help scale that team, Airbnb has hired former Facebooker Mike Curtis as its new VP of engineering. → Read More
Average boat owners only use their vessel 14 days a year. That’s why Boatbound is brilliant. It’s a peer-to-peer boat-renting startup that lets you book everything from kayaks to catamarans to yachts for a day at a time with a $1 million Lloyd’s insurance plan. In his first interview about Boatbound, founder Aaron Hall lays out his plan to make boating more accessible to everyone. Ahoy! → Read More
Airbnb has released some interesting growth figures this morning, proving that 2012 was the year that Airbnb stopped being something people were talking about and started to be something (a lot of) people used.
The company announced that 4 million total guests have now used Airbnb to book a night’s stay on the peer-to-peer lodging marketplace. A whopping 3 million of those guests used the… → Read More
Airbnb was one of the trailblazers of the sharing economy, and so, when CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky today accepted the award for best collaborative consumption service — the first time the category has been a in the Crunchies — he dedicated the award to everyone: “I want to share this award with all of you,” he said. → Read More
Facing stronger competition from disruptive travel startups like Airbnb and the behemoth of Priceline/Kayak/Booking.com, Sabre-owned Travelocity is looking to up its game with extras. Today the company announced that it would launch a new concierge service, offering restaurant reservations, driving directions, tickets to local events and more. The service, it says, is free for users who book… → Read More
Taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people will be travelling during the next week and a half — and assuming that at least some of them are not organized enough to have booked their accommodation yet — Airbnb today released a new version of its iOS mobile app with some significant updates. To better target weary travellers and innkeepers this holiday season and beyond, Airbnb is adding… → Read More
Airbnb is announcing that it has acquired Localmind, a startup that allows users to post questions about specific locations, which are then answered in real time by by local experts.
Airbnb has acquired the company’s three-person team and its technology. Apparently Localmind will be working on some sort of “social initiatives.” Co-founders Lenny Rachitsky and Beau Haugh were pretty vague when I… → Read More
Quoting Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Mike Olson told the crowd that, by the end of this year (December 31st), the company will be filling more room nights than Hilton Hotels. For those unfamiliar, Hilton operates an international chain of luxury hotels and resorts, which according to its corporate overview, currently operates more than 3,200 hotels and 525,000 rooms in 77 countries, including more… → Read More
Editor’s note: David Haber is an analyst at Spark Capital. Prior to Spark, David helped launch Locus Analytics, a start-up asset management business.
The Internet provides the perfect medium to aggregate the long tail of fragmented and illiquid markets. This dynamic has made the opportunity for creating online marketplaces so compelling → Read More
Airbnb took a while to roll out its international businesses — for example, officially launching Airbnb.co.uk only in February 2012, despite being around since 2008. But in a sign of how Airbnb is focused on its wider business expansion, today the company began to promote its Neighborhoods feature, announced just four days ago, across some (but not all) of Europe. Neighborhoods offers… → Read More
Today in San Francisco, Airbnb announced the launch of Airbnb Neighborhoods. The new product allows users to find the experiences they want based on their interests and the particular parts of a city that that they want to stay in. Today, it’s coming online with more than 300 neighborhoods in seven cities. → Read More
Over the past few years, there’s been some question about what effect peer-to-peer lodging marketplace Airbnb has on the hotel and tourism industry. Now the company has some research to show that it’s not having a negative effect, and in fact is actually contributing more to the tourism trade in San Francisco — especially to neighborhoods that aren’t usually visited by the typical tourist here. → Read More
We’ve seen a few companies rally behind the victims of Hurricane Sandy, and today Airbnb joins the fold.
The peer-to-peer home sharing startup has decided to waive all of its fees for both hosts and guests in Sandy-affected areas. They are also encouraging hosts to lower prices and take in refugees who may be without power, water, or a home at all. → Read More
We knew that the Dailybooth team, creators of photo sharing app Batch, moved on to greener pastures at Airbnb. The acquisition was to bolster the mobile apps and presence for Airbnb. What we didn’t know is what the fate of its products would be, but now we do.
Today, the “Batch team” sent out an email to its users informing them that they should download their photos, because the service will… → Read More
In September we broke the story about how the short-term accommodation-sharing site Airbnb was in the process of raising a significant third round of around $100 million. A Form D filed with the SEC today shows that it’s raised north of that: $117 million (or $117,051,696, to be exact). Airbnb says that this filing, although made only today, is part of last year’s Series B. → Read More
Great design and developer talent is, as so many know, hard to come by. So online social club Grouper is launching what it calls a “Hackation” in which it plans to offer select developers a free, week-long trip to New York City. On this week-long trip, thanks to partnerships with Airbnb and Hipmunk, developers and designers will get the opportunity to visit NYC (which means free airfare from… → Read More
Airbnb has been pretty disruptive to the hospitality industry by allowing guests to find non-hotel lodging provided by other human beings, like, in their house or apartment or whatever. It’s awesome! And I’m a huge fan. But today we’re not going to talk about Airbnb’s lodging marketplace, which is already hugely successful. Today we’re going to talk about Airbnb’s interest in recommendations of… → Read More
Airbnb is raising a whole lot of money at a big valuation, we reported yesterday, as the company continues to see hockey stick-like growth. But as quickly as its web usage is taking off, the company is seeing even faster growth among mobile users, specifically those using its mobile apps. → Read More
Editor’s note: Navin Chaddha is a Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, whose portfolio companies leverage the drivers of cloud/SaaS, mobile, social, energytech and big data. Some current Mayfield Fund investments include Appcelerator, Fab, Marketo, Poshmark, Solarcity, and Zimride.
The U.S. e-commerce… → Read More
On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg named a few products that he is impressed by. In particular, Spotify, Airbnb, Nike+ and Runkeeper caught the attention of Facebook co-founder and CEO.
The first company he named was Spotify. He was straight to the point by stating that “Spotify is killing it right now.” → Read More
Airbnb founder Nate Blecharczyk, Brit + Co founder Brit Morin, TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, and Lyft co-founder John Zimmer took the stage here at Disrupt SF to talk about their experiences as disruptors of already-disrupted industries, but the first question from the audience was a doozy — how did each of their respective services capture their first 10,000 users? → Read More
The hazards of renting your apartment out to people you don’t actually know remain, whether you use the Internet to do the renting or not. But Airbnb’s runaway success in convincing users to rent their homes via the platform is continuing to throw up cases of abuse that we might never have heard of otherwise.
TechCrunch has been passed the story of two women with an apartment in Stockholm who… → Read More
Loosecubes, the community marketplace for shared workspace, has today announced that it has secured $7.8 million in series A financing, bringing its total funding to $9 million. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates and Revolution Ventures, with participation from previous investors, Accel Partners and Battery Ventures. As a result of the round, Tige Savage of Revolution Ventures and Alex… → Read More
As people become increasingly comfortable using web platforms to swap homes, cars, and everything in between (spouses?), some have said that the collaborative consumption movement has the potential to be as profound as the industrial revolution. But, before that can happen, marketplaces and platforms that deal in collaborative consumption need to recognize the importance of ensuring consumer… → Read More
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