Another funding raise for a collaborative consumption startup: Spain-based private sales club Privalia, which sells branded clothes and accessories at discounted prices to members in the five markets it currently plays in, has closed a new €25m round ($32.3m). The company did not specify which round this latest raise falls under but has previously raised a total of $218m in two rounds. → 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
Hot on the heels of an acquisition by Avis announced earlier this week, Zipcar will be piloting a no-fee membership option beginning today in Toronto and Vancouver. The new ‘Access Plan’ pilot project carries no annual driving fee, like its existing ‘Extra Value’ membership plan, but doesn’t require the Extra Value plan’s minimum of $50 in driving per month. As a trade-off, it also offers the same… → 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
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
The auction giant eBay today is taking one more step in its transformation into a wider online marketplace. It has launched a new service in the UK called Secretguru– a concierge-style service where people can buy time from professionals in areas ranging from cooking to business mentoring and beauty. The move puts eBay into the territory of collaborative consumption services like TaskRabbit, … → Read More
The rise of online accommodation booking services like Airbnb and HomeAway has given way to a lot of attention to, and faith in, the idea of giving up your private home to total strangers. One early mover in this area, Montreal’s Luxury Retreats, is today announcing that it is also riding this wave: it has picked up $5 million in funding, led by iNovia Capital, to further build out its business. → Read More
Parking Panda, the startup that lets individuals rent out their unused parking spaces and allows garages to discount their lots during slow periods, is now available as a mobile application. The app currently supports a parking finder function in 25 cities, plus parking rentals in the service’s early markets of Baltimore and Washington D.C., as well as new additions San Francisco and Oakland. → Read More
Getable, the artist formerly known as Rentcycle, started out with a mission to bring the rental industry online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers along with business management tools for local rental shops. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that found almost immediate support from investors. Since then, Getable has been hard at work developing its web and mobile cloud-management… → Read More
Attempting to bring a brick-and-mortar industry online is no easy feat. It takes time, investment, and a willingness to roll with the punches. San Francisco-based startup Rentcycle graduated from Founder Institute in 2009 with a mission to bring the “rentals industry” online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers and cloud-based business management and product listing solutions for… → Read More
Everything, it seems, is becoming collaborative. From Airbnb to RentCycle to Zipcar, we are swapping our cars, our homes, even our clothes with each other. According to Lauren Anderson from Collaborative Consumption, this change might be as profound as the industrial revolution. It will result, she told me when we met at Fast Company’s Innovative Uncensored event, in a world driven by… → Read More
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