Urban Compass, a New York-based startup that last year raised an $8 million seed round while still in stealth mode, is coming out of the shadows of the city and debuting its first services in public beta: a hyperlocal social network, called the Urban Compass Network, and a housing rentals platform that brings online the whole process of finding, securing and subsequently paying for a place to… → Read More
Zillow today launched the latest version of its Rentals mobile app for Android. The app includes a number of new features, such as integrated 3D maps from Google, but it also marks the company’s first foray into offering foreign language support. The Zillow Rentals app now features Spanish-language support in an effort to “better serve the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking community in… → Read More
Zumper — the online home rentals startup and TechCrunch Disrupt alum that quickly raised a $1 million seed round from a list of top-shelf VCs that included Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, CrunchFund and more — is growing. Today, it is announcing that it is adding Chicago as its next city, after debuting in San Francisco and expanding to New York last year. → Read More
The business of holiday home rentals has been one of the most natural areas to migrate to the world of e-commerce — the ability to search for and view lots of properties makes it a significant improvement on whatever it was that people used to do in the past (magazines? vacation agencies? brochures?), and that has helped the online rentals industry to blow up. One area that hasn’t evolved very… → Read More
42Floors, the Y-Combinator-incubated startup that has built a search engine for the office rentals market, has raised another $12.3 million — funding that founder Jason Freedman says the company will use to take its service to markets outside of San Francisco and New York, including its first international move to London by the end of this year. The Series B round was led by new investor NEA… → Read More
Lovely, the apartment search service that was initially built as a better and easier way of finding available apartment rentals originally listed in the large-but-feature-light Craigslist.org, has now racked up 4 million apartment listings on its site (1 million in the last 30 days) as it tackles the $10 billion residential rental market as an aggregator of other rental listings services — once… → Read More
It’s no secret that real estate site Zillow has been putting quite a bit of emphasis on the rental side of the housing market recently. Today, the company is expanding its portfolio of tools for rental professionals with the launch of its free property management websites for property managers and rental agents. → Read More
Zillow just announced the launch of Zillow Rentals, the company’s new ad free marketplace for rental professionals and landlords. Zillow Rentals, the company says, will allow it to help serve rental professionals to better market and manage their listings. → Read More
The Craigslist crackdown on usage of its listings data by third parties has had some fairly strong fallout. Some have shut down operations after getting cease & desist orders; some, like 3Taps and PadMapper, are now in court defending themselves on copyright infringement allegations. But here’s news of another taking a third way: Lovely, a site based around a map interface that helps people… → Read More
Real estate search company Trulia is adding to its mobile lineup today with the launch of Trulia Rentals for iPhone. The app joins its Android rentals-only counterpart, which launched back in September. Like the former, the new iPhone app will also offer a dedicated view of nearby rentals, including property details, photos, as well as other neighborhood rental info, including where restaurants… → Read More
Looking for an apartment is usually pretty simple: you go on Craigslist, find three apartments that look like they’ve been used to chop up beeves, and then move in with your buddy whose roommate made meth in the basement. At least that’s how it worked for me a few years ago. Now, however, you have stuff like RentSocial.
RentSocial is the front end for Yield Technologies property 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
When you’re just a wee babe, the idea of a new toy is the most exciting thing ever. Then you grow up, and “toys” become ridiculously expensive. You want a Chevy Corvette C6 Z06? That’ll be $70,000, please. You’re interested in picking up a 2011 Roehr 1250sc motorcycle? $40,000.
Though I’m sure plenty of our utterly successful readers have no problem throwing out cash like that, the vast… → Read More
Direct2Drive, the digital download service for PC games, has started a rental service. It’s $5 for five hours of gameplay, which, doing some maths, works out to $1 per hour. There’s a small catch: only three games are available to rent right now: Grid, Divinity 2, and Silent Hill: Homecoming. The future, Conan? → Read More
Right about now, as college students across the country start to go back to school for the Spring semester, things are starting to pick up at Chegg’s 600,000 square foot warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. The warehouse sits right next to the main UPS shipping hub and across from a Zappos warehouse.
The textbook rental company sees its busiest times peak twice a year at the beginning of each… → Read More
We were discussing in the chat room a little while ago how fantastically awesome it would be to be able to rent games from Steam. Allow me to explain. → Read More
Netflix has convinced some 500,000 people to subscribe to its Blu-ray rental service. Netflix is all “Look how well we did!” because it charges a $1 premium to be able to rent Blu-ray discs. The question was, would it be able to convince people to pay a premium (even though $1 is hardly a premium, I think) in order to rent the high-def discs? Well… Keep in mind that Netflix has some 8.7… → Read More
TiVo and Disney-ABC have forged an agreement to allow users to rent movies from the Walt Disney Studios catalogue later this year. Some of the movies will be available in high definition, although it’s unclear just how much of the catalog will be hi-def versus standard definition. Rentals will be facilitated through CinemaNow and will work on all Series 2 and Series 3 TiVo boxes. Full press… → Read More
Remember DIVX? Not DivX the codec, but DIVX as in Digital Video Express — from Circuit City — the ill-fated self-destructing DVD system from lo those many years ago. A similar idea just might be able to succeed where DIVX failed. Or not, who knows? Anyway, whereas DIVX relied on special DVD players that could play DIVX discs (and also regular DVDs), a new disposable DVD coming from a… → Read More
[photopress:Picture_6.png,full,pp_image] I may pipe in once in a while about physical media coming to end very soon, but I still like it and use it. I haven’t purchased or rented any movies on iTunes yet, but 99 cents is a drop in the bucket for some entertainment during dead times. But who has the patience, time or the brain of an elephant to remember to check what’s in the 99 cent… → Read More
[photopress:itunes_1.jpg,full,center] Today marks the first update to iTunes 7.6, which brings it up to 7.6.1, promising better compatibility with Apple TV’s “Take Two” software and bringing special 99-cent Move Thursdays, where a movie may be rented for less than a buck Thursdays through Mondays, with a new featured movie each Thursday. Cool! Regular readers will recall my… → Read More
[photopress:noupdate.jpg,full,center] I’ve got my Apple TV all ready to go. I want to update for the “Take Two” upgrade that will grant me HD movie rental, fulfilling the promise of the Apple TV/iTunes duo. But no. I go to update and it’s telling me I’m up to date. Which, of course, I’m not. Other owners: Success? Failure? Movie rentals? Beers? → Read More
I’ve been using GameFly for the past few months and I can characterize it as, and I quote, “nice.” The company’s just announced that it’s added a third distribution center in Tampa to complement the ones in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. I live in Boston and haven’t had much trouble getting games relatively quickly (generally takes two days from when GameFly… → Read More
I’ll be honest, Apple is starting to weird me out a little bit. I picture Steve Jobs like the paranoid Mr. Burns in that Simpsons episode where he owns the casino and he stops shaving and starts wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet because he hates germs. It’s just that some of the recent decisions behind certain products and services don’t make much sense, like charging iPod touch… → Read More
Already pretty high up on a short list of airports offering free wireless internet access, Denver International has just upped the ante a bit. The same network provider, FreeFi, is now offering movie rentals over the local network. So simple, yet so brilliant. → Read More
[photopress:padivx.jpg,full,center] As always, Penny-Arcade flies above all of our stupidity to make a point: what makes the iTunes Rental service so different from DIVX, the failed disc format? That all-mighty, all-knowing Apple is behind it? That it has the support of all the studios? Are you really going to stop downloading movies from the usual places? ::Taps nose:: What Goes Around… → Read More
I’m sure that when Apple announced their long-rumored movie rental service, the collars in the Netflix boardroom got a little wet and salty. After all, Apple and iTunes are a force to be reckoned with in the on-demand media world. But the NY Times makes a good point when it suggests that the two services can coexist due to their different aims. Netflix offers low-cost access to a large… → Read More
Two hacks came to light last night that enable the overly excitable to grab streaming and rented movies for longer than the alloted time period. First, you can add a bit of Greasemonkey code to Mozilla to download streaming video from Netflix. 1. install the Greasemonkey add-on for firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748. restart firefox after installing. 2. unzip the… → Read More
[photopress:movierentalsalmost_1.jpg,full,center] They were this close from getting me to stop pirating movies. Next year, maybe. The just announced iTunes Movie Rentals isn’t a bad deal at all. For $3.99, you can download standard-def “new releases” (more on that in a moment) and watch them on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod, and whatever else in the iTunes family. Older releases are… → Read More
The iTunes Movie Rental Store, rumored for so many weeks, is real, as Mr. Jobs just announced. Here’s what’s up. • Every major studio, including Sony, Warner, Paramount and Universal, has signed up. So much for them hating Apple. • New releases hit the Rental Store 30 days after their DVD release. • Rentals last 24 hours, You have 30 days from the time of purchase to… → Read More
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