To serve up data quickly inside its Neighborhoods feature, Airbnb engineers cycled through a few database choices before choosing Memcached. Read more »
Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Charles and Ray Eames, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — the under cover influences of breakout web star Airbnb. Read more »
Using machine language smarts to screen for a much wider array of fraudulent online behavior, startup Sift Science now has $5.5 million to broaden its beta test beyond a few select companies. Read more »
For many, startups embody the ideals of passion, innovation and agility that can get lost in mature businesses. But John Maeda, president of RISD, says there is also plenty to admire in “end-ups.” Read more »
Five finalists have been chosen in 20 different categories for the 2012 Crunchies awards, and we’re proud to release the worthy nominees today. Voting for the winners starts today, and the winners will be announced January 31st. Read more »
With 9 billion people set to live on the planet by 2050, sharing — enabled by IT — will be one of the most important tools to emerge and companies that build brands now will be well positioned to capitalize on this future. Read more »
Looking for the latest trend in location-based startups? Companies are increasingly looking to the intersection of location and community with the neighborhood, an ideal place to target people for providing information and news, but also a possible target for specific advertising. Read more »
Despite the difficult year in cleantech, there’s quite a few things that excited me this year. Here’s 10 things to be thankful for in cleantech. Read more »
Looking to book a hotel, and want to know what the local neighborhood is like, or what amenities it offers? Hipmunk is rolling out a new hotel booking format on Tuesday, attempting to give users more flexibility around their bookings and tailoring the experience more closely. Read more »
Airbnb, the darling success story of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, began with a few design guys in San Francisco renting out an air mattress to customers, but the service has grown immensely since then, and Joe Gebbia, the company’s co-founder, said it was all about design. Read more »
We’re excited to welcome Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer, to the RoadMap conference, a day long event focused on design in the age of connectedness. Read more »
We’re used to how the social web has disrupted media, but that same wave is moving through other industries, driven by startups like Airbnb, Coursera and Uber — and while regulators and entrenched industries are trying to fight it, the trend behind that wave is unstoppable. Read more »
UPDATED: Room rental service Airbnb confirmed its Series B fundraising round from last year in a filing with the SEC. The company is been rumored to be raising a big $100+ million round at a possible valuation of $2.5 billion. Read more »
Airbnb is reportedly in talks to raise even more money, with a financing round said to be led by Peter Thiel. The cash infusion of $150 million would be more than double what the online room rental service company has raised so far. Read more »
What happened this week in cleantech on GigaOM Pro, our premium research service? — The opportunities and risks in the share economy, the third quarter dreary cleantech figures, Google Ventures explains why it backed Nest, and Calxeda forecasts its next low power chip. Read more »
This quarter Tesla’s production schedule came under fire, and share economy leaders Airbnb raised cash while Zipcar struggled with its membership model. Meanwhile the Indian power outage in July prompted questions about how the developing economy will power itself. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The British company’s Series C includes Accel Partners as well as existing investors Balderton Capital and Index Ventures. HouseTrip has also released numbers that suggest it’s in second place behind Airbnb. Read more »
I was an AirBnB sceptic for a long time, but trying the service made me realize just how disruptive it could be — and how it also shares a lot of the same characteristics of other disruptive businesses that are powered by the social web. Read more »
Owning physical items — cars, apartments, office space — will be increasingly inefficient for a global market. This is driving a greater interest in the share economy. Companies like Zipcar and Airbnb have paved the way here, but a host of startups have surfaced recently, too. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Etsy, Airbnb and the Climate Corporation are all using a combination of Cascading and Amazon Elastic MapReduce to make creating Hadoop jobs as simple as possible. But they’re not the only options for doing so — simplifying Hadoop usage is big business in the IT world. Read more »
San Francisco red-hot startup activity is not only inflating the commercial real estate market, but it is also having an impact on the residential rental market, data shows. Since January 2011 annual rents are up by $5000, but down in Peninsula, rents are up even higher. Read more »
The Berlin startup hopes that a ‘big six figure’ funding round can help it provide a European take on the ‘Airbnb for childcare’ model. But will its emphasis on trust and personal screening mean success — or simply create scaling problems? Read more »
AirBnB, a fast growing person-to-person real-estate rental company, will soon be moving into new digs. It has snagged 170,000 square feet in office space. Its new neighbors include Zynga and Pinterest. The cost of keeping this elite company: about $97 million over 10 years. Read more »
While web sharing sites — like Airbnb and Zipcar — have an environmental angle, potential users of these services aren’t all that motivated by the environmental benefits, according to a new survey. Instead web sharing users are motivated by saving money and by having easy access. Read more »
CasaHop, the first start-up out of former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry’s incubator SoHo Tech Labs, has raised $1.2 million, led by First Round Capital, with participation from Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and a number of individual investors. The site helps users exchange homes. Read more »
San Francisco is truly the test bed for alternative tech-focused transportation. And on Tuesday, folks in the Bay Area will have access to yet another option: SideCar, a mobile app that will offer real time ride sharing. Read more »
Gidsy CEO Edial Dekker says the experience marketplace is working on a relaunch that will make the service more social and take it to new places — but he warns that whatever happens, he doesn’t want to suffer from Europe’s ‘ego problem.’ Read more »
Both Path and Airbnb suffered data breaches and were quick to respond to the fallout. LinkedIn, like most publicly traded companies has been slow to respond. It eventually posted its response and outlined the next steps to take. Read more »
The tragic story in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life, raised a familiar question for the share economy: Who’s responsible? Read more »
UPDATED: The tragic story, reported by The New York Times’s Ron Lieber last month, in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life raised a familiar question for the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
You can’t build an iPhone battery without many rare earth elements and China controls about 90 percent of the rare earth supply. Read more »
The investment firm created by AOL-founder Steve Case, Revolution, has invested in office sharing site Loosecubes. Read more »
Hot Berlin startup Gidsy, which lets people find and book tours, lessons and other offline experiences, is opening the doors on a service in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Read more »
Zipcar’s decision last week to make a strategic investment in peer-to-peer car-sharing startup Wheelz surprised many. But Wheelz is another way for Zipcar to access a young demographic, college students, which it has been courting for some time as a way to build its relationship with ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Austin at SXSW is a prime example of the kind of flexibility that Airbnb can provide to both residents and visitors during a major event. With three weeks left before the conference starts, the San Francisco-based startup has already surpassed last year’s bookings. Read more »
Will car sharing pioneer Zipcar move into the emerging industry of peer-to-peer car sharing, or enabling neighbors to rent out other neighbors’ vehicles? Well, Zipcar hasn’t launched such a service, but it’s invested in one of the new peer-to-peer car sharing startups Wheelz. Read more »
At just 2.5 years old, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a tech industry institution with holdings in Facebook, Twitter, and more. GigaOM talked with Andreessen to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley and the larger tech landscape. Read more »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Startups often rail against copycat companies, arguing that they steal their business and their ideas. But maybe the secret to beating clones isn’t to waste time trying to shut them down — it’s to accept them and focus on being bigger, better and faster. Read more »
