Until now, the Berlin-based service – kind of an Airbnb for activities – has rolled out on a city-by-city basis, officially taking in 13 popular destinations such as LA, Istanbul and London.

But now, with a major platform revamp dubbed ‘Columbus’, that restriction has been lifted. And at the same time, Gidsy has launched those new features it was telling us about a couple of months ago.

Here we’re talking search functionality – by location, date and price – as well as social features such as the ability to see who’s signed up to a future activity, and a messaging platform for organizers and participants.

Organizers also get a new dashboard and toolset in the Columbus release, which will be handy as the revamp is largely intended to help them set up their own business within the platform. The release allows people to request events from organizers, and makes it possible for anyone to book or be paid in their local currency.

“Whether you live in a booming metropolis or a charming village, it’s now possible for anyone to host and book Gidsy activities, anywhere in the world,” the Columbus launch page promises.

Gidsy is one of the most prominent startups in Berlin’s trendy scene, partly through the weight of its backing – investors include Index Ventures and Sunstone Capital, as well as high-profile names such as Etsy’s Matt Stinchcomb and Hollywood superstar Ashton Kutcher.

It’s already soft-rolled out to 60 countries through what it calls an ‘ambassador’ program, which was Gidsy’s way of harnessing the enthusiasm of those who wanted to set up in their own city. But demand appears to have been too great for that approach.

“As there are so many people involved now in all parts of the world, we wanted to speed things up a bit,” CEO Edial Dekker told me.

However, the company is still trying to make sure everything stays safe and secure: Dekker stressed that each activity on Gidsy would still have to be approved by the central team in Berlin.

“We’re also highlighting people who are connected with Facebook, and will also be verifying telephone numbers soon,” he added. “Trust is one of the most important things for Gidsy, even if the events are public for everyone.”

Gidsy isn’t without competition, with services like GuideHop and Vayable offering something similar. Dekker said the contest was likely to come down to execution. “With this release, we definitely think we’re making a big leap,” he said.

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Hewing to the Airbnb model of using the internet to hook people up in the real world, Gidsy makes it easy for people to offer or take part in activities ranging from walking tours to cooking classes. The service, which is evolving into a tourist tool as much as anything else, is about to get a major refresh — so I thought it would be a good time to catch up with CEO Edial Dekker to find out more.

Meyer: What kind of changes will we see in the new release?
Dekker: We’re going to make it a lot more social. It’s not rocket science, but when you think about it, it’s a bunch of people coming together for an activity and paying money for it. They have the incentive, so it was important for us to realise it’s a big social thing. When we go to activities ourselves, people hang out afterwards, so we thought, ‘Why don’t we make it a lot easier for people to connect before, at and after the event?’ So we’re creating a messaging system, and we’ve created a unique URL for each event.

To make it easier to share events? When do we get to see it?
A lot easier – you can also share photos afterwards. It won’t become a social network, but it will become a lot more social. We’ll also have deeper Facebook integration. We’re testing it now.

I must admit, I was intrigued by your Cape Town launch a couple of weeks ago, seeing as that’s where I’m from. How’s expansion going?
Well, Cape Town was the last one and Hamburg is next, this coming Monday. At first we launched in cities where we thought we would personally love to launch, but then there were so many people from around the world who asked us to launch in their city. It’s a lot of work, but we said, ‘We’re going to give you the tools to do that, and if you find enough activities that are good, then we’ll unlock your city.’ Istanbul was first, then Ghent, Hamburg, Cape Town…

So it’s about letting them set it up themselves. Does this mean low overheads?
Yeah, we’re trying to have a system where we don’t have loads of overhead. We’re trying to make our system as flexible as possible. We realized it really is OK: we’re focused on creating tools for people to use so we don’t have to do the work.

I’m curious: as you scale up, you’re going to need to set up regional offices, right?
For sure. That’s definitely where we want to be. Things like customer support work a lot better if you’re there, but there are also things like cultural differences and time zone differences. We need a lot of resources for that.

We’re creating the Explorer program [to recruit] ambassadors, people who want to be part of the Gidsy community. These people get certain advantages – they can go to activities for free and check out new features. We try to reward them for that and also give them tools to help us and themselves.

So you’re holding off from establishing regional offices, in other words.
Yeah – we don’t have those resources right now. Etsy and Airbnb do it, but it takes time. You also have a company culture and you need someone from here moving there, and right now we don’t have anyone we can miss from here. We tried it – we had a small office in New York and had one guy running that, but it’s really tricky to do that right.

Gidsy comes across as one of the idealistic, creative Berlin startups – is that a fair assessment?
It’s a founders kind of thing. If you look at the core team members, they all have amazing hobbies: one guy does drawings, another Arduino robots. That’s important and it fits Gidsy extremely well, and we’re focused on keeping this culture. It’s definitely something we channel. Gidsy is a good way to make a change, but in a sustainable kind of way. And we add a value layer on top so people can make money.

Can that kind of sustainability and growth coexist?
Yes, but it’s very tricky. You need to be big. We take a very small cut – 10 percent – so we need to do a lot of transactions and be everywhere in the world or it’s not going to work. A company that does that very well, and we learn a lot from them, is Etsy. Everyone there still has that vibe of making things more sustainable and nice and friendly and ecological and fair. The core values are still there and they are profitable.

It does require a lot of energy and time from the start, though. You have to be super-aware of this – it’s very easy to slip down a different slope. It also depends on the kind of investors you have [Gidsy's include Sunstone, Index and Ashton Kutcher] and the first people you hire. Also the place. Berlin has a very open mindset. It’s very lifestyle-driven. Lots of people are very aware of how they live, which is a good thing, also for companies.

Many people in Berlin say it’s all about the exit or IPO, though. Do either appeal?
No. This space is super-interesting [and] we want to stay far away from that. Just now, we had lunch together and someone from the Gidsy team cooked. Everything feels right and that makes us happy, and it’s very exciting for us to build a company rather than just building a product that grows extremely fast. We want to build something big – it’s a huge idea with huge potential.

Europe has a small ego problem. We haven’t had many big IPOs. Big ideas are really rare. SoundCloud are a great example: they have no intention of selling out; they really think much bigger. Look at companies like Skype – they could have been huge, but when they sold the first time… it’s sad. They had the opportunity to become Facebook-size, if they had stuck to their core ideas.

So where’s Gidsy going to be in three years’ time?
We’re becoming the place people go if they’re looking for something interesting to do. Gidsy is about real people meeting. We want to move away from the only-digital space. There’s so much more to be done there – not just offering and booking things online, but if there are more things happening offline, that would be great. If we replace Lonely Planet in that sense, for travelers, that would be great.

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Ashton Kutcher may be playing an internet entrepreneur on TV at the moment, but in real life he’s also one of the backers of Gidsy — a platform for hooking up consumers with people offering real-world experiences.

What does that mean? In practice, it’s a place where people sell their time giving tours, teaching, and much more. In Amsterdam, for example, a retired cop offers red light district tours. A London cab driver promises a tour of Harry Potter locations, and a course in Berlin offers to help people create their own sock monkeys. New York options range from walking tours to a lesson in “getting shit made in the USA.”

Basically, almost anything goes, and people seem to be lapping it up: the company only started operations in Berlin and Amsterdam around three months ago, and it’s already rolled out to San Francisco, London and New York.

Trust is crucial

Gidsy has a very simple business model, taking a 10 percent cut of what customers pay for their experiences. The rest goes to the person who’s offering up the activity, making Gidsy something of a micro-employment platform.

Like Airbnb and other services that bridge the divide between online and offline, Gidsy is largely based on trust. The service plugs into Facebook, making it reasonably identity-driven and the company holds fees in escrow — only releasing them to the seller after checking the customers got what they paid for. The flipside is that Gidsy also makes sure the vendor doesn’t have to collect the fees at the event. In theory, everyone’s protected.

The moneymen seem to be impressed. Kutcher’s involvement came along with seed funding from Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, former Nielsen Entertainment CEO Peter Read and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, all in all totaling $1.2m.

Gidsy’s Dutch CEO, Edial Dekker, told GigaOM on Tuesday that experiences lined up for the LA launch will include a Cirque du Soleil veteran teaching you how to breathe fire.

“We’re super excited to be launching in LA and can’t wait to see for which activities Gidsy will be used. It’s really interesting to see that every city has unique offerings that show a glimpse of what the city itself is like,” Dekker said.

In the future, he added, Gidsy aims to go as global as possible, taking in whole regions and branching out to support more currencies. The company also wants to add geo-search capabilities, to make it easier for people to find interesting local experiences.

“Next to the city launches, we’ve been working on a new way for organizers to offer activities through Gidsy, and we’re incredibly excited about this one,” he said. “Launching in LA brings us one step closer to a global community.”

Other LA Gidsy experiences will include a Hollywood sign hike and a course in how to avoid buying processed condiments ever again. Would it be too much to ask to have Kutcher giving a $15 studio tour?

Photograph of Edial Dekker used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Opendata Network

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Inside the offices of 6Wunderkinder

After the visual opulence of Paris, Berlin feels almost dowdy. Drab and dark, the city hardly comes across as one of the great capitals of the world. A city’s importance on a global stage is measured typically by the size and scope of its airport: Shanghai, New York, London, Los Angeles, Frankfurt and Paris are good examples.

Berlin’s Tegel Airport reminds me of another airport from my childhood in India. It is small – very unlike the city, which itself is sprawling and a collection of many neighborhoods. It doesn’t take very long for me to conclude that Berlin is one of the most un-German of German cities. That, it turns out, is its curse and its charm.

Earlier this year, Alexander Ljung, co-founder and chief executive officer, of SoundCloud and Christophe Maire, founder & chief executive, of e-book services company Txtr, separately invited me to visit Berlin. Their argument: something exciting is going on in Germany’s post-unification capital. It is, they insisted, beginning to attract talent and is becoming home to many new technology startups.

I am not the first guy to show up and write about Berlin and probably won’t be the last. The New York Times, Spiegel Online and several others have discovered the Berlin tech-scene. Our European correspondent, Bobbie Johnson makes regular visits to the city and reports for us. However, I wanted to see how real is this Berlin startup ecosystem myself.

Opportunity presented itself when folks from HackFwd (a startup accelerator) invited me to speak at one of their events (Build 0.8) and it dovetailed nicely with my visit to Paris for Le Web 2011. A few hours after landing in Berlin, I was beginning to rue my decision.

The second week of December is not an ideal time to visit, especially for someone who is used to the moderate climes of San Francisco Bay Area. Overcast skies, cold showers and temperatures dipping to 30 F at night are rough on those of us used to sunshine and blue skies. For the locals, it is still comfortable weather.

Minutes after I check into Motel One, one of the fast growing German equivalent of Hampton Inn, I run off to meet a group of HackFwd entrepreneurs and we go for a classic Bavarian meal. Nothing had prepared me for what I saw – a group that looked as if they belonged to TechStars or YCombinator. There are a lot more women entrepreneurs in the room. The energy in the restaurant was amazing, helped I am sure by a liberal serving of beer.

Location, Location, Location

SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung

They are all very young – actually awfully young – and excited by the prospects of technology, most of them are here from across Germany, Poland, the Baltics and other countries east of Germany. In fact, the Pitch in Berlin contest organized by HackFwd attracted 100 applicants of which ten were selected. Three of them were from Poland, including MyGuidie, a start-up that “brings together people looking for a local guide, and locals willing to guide,”  co-founded by three women, won the contest.

And much later when I would assemble my rough notes into a narrative, I would spend a lot of time thinking that Berlin’s proximity to Eastern Europe and the Baltics gives its a natural geographic advantage over rival European hubs like London.

Berlin, even though an old city and stage for many Cold War spy tales, is relatively young in its current incarnation. Since the unification of two Germanys just 20 years ago it has been in a state of constant makeover. It doesn’t have the money – Frankfurt is home to the German bourse and hence the investment banking elite – or the heavy industry. Munich and the south of Germany have become the epicenter of global car business, and those traditional heavy industries that Germany is known for are spread across the south of the country — outside of Berlin. But Berlin does have politicians – a whole lot of them!

The lack of classical German industries means it is a city with fewer jobs than other parts of Germany. It also means the city has lower wages compared to the rest of Germany and much of Europe. The sprawling nature of the city means that Berlin has lots of real estate. And that means low rents – catnip for artists, musicians and yes, the start-up community.

The entrepreneurship is rampant in this city. Some say there are somewhere between 100 to 400 startups in Berlin. I was in Berlin for about 70 hours and I met with over 40. I am pretty sure – if I stuck around for another week — I would have met many more. The central Mitte district that is home to many of these is called Silicon Allee (aka Silicon Avenue.) They even have their own version of Coupa Cafe – Cafe St. Oberholz is a favorite gathering place of the Internet types.

Lars Hinrichs, the founder of HackFwd accelerator, points out that the presence of seasoned entrepreneurs like Marco Borries (who had started StarOffice and Verdisoft and sold them to Sun and Yahoo) is another advantage Berlin has over some of other tech-hubs in Europe. It is one of the reasons why he (and HackFwd) come back to Berlin for their startup school.

Destination Berlin

Pitch in Berlin by HackFwd contest

It is no surprise that young people from across Germany (and Europe) are making a beeline for Berlin. There are a lot of Americans, Australians and Kiwis too. This confluence of fashion, art, music and technology reminds me of Brooklyn and the San Francisco of yore.

SoundCloud’s co-founders are two such transplants. Ljung and Eric Wahlfross are both Swedish by birth, and music lovers. They started SoundCloud as a platform for DJs to remix and share tunes. It has now become a major audio sharing platform and has raised money from uber-VC, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Its success has turned SoundCloud into a poster child of the Berlin startup scene. Ljung, who travels to San Francisco, London and New York almost every month has become Berlin’s informal ambassador.

The success of SoundCloud has helped attract larger (and non German venture capitalists) to take Berlin with seriousness. Atomico, the venture fund started by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis has invested in collaboration and productivity startup, 6Wunderkinder, that has so far released one popular app, Wunderlist. Index Ventures are plowed in money into Felix Peterson and his co-founders’ newest startup, Amen.

The new hot thing from Berlin is Gidsy, a marketplace for “experiences” that was started by Dutch migrant entrepreneur Edial Dekker and his brother Floris, along with Philipp Wassibauer. They are said to have attracted big dollars from some well-known VCs but they are keeping it all very hush-hush. There were many whom I didn’t even get a chance to meet. Like Pipe, which is still in stealth is going to launch next month at the Midem music industry conference in Cannes, France.

Another company that didn’t find time on my calendar but be one worth looking out for: Uberblic Labs that is building a platform to link data across APIs (Factual.com competitor) and a mobile product to use that cross-linked data.

What is really impressive is the diversity of startups in Berlin. Over a much-welcome Turkish dinner organized by local tech blogger Nikolas Woischnik, I met with UPcload, a company started by Israeli entrepreneur Asaf Moses. The company has developed a technology that uses your laptop’s webcam to capture your body shape and share it with an online retailer and offer you the best fit for your clothes. It is already getting traction in Germany. Aupeo is a personal radio platform (somewhat like Pandora) that is targeting the connected car business and is finding a lot of traction in Europe.

Creative + Techies

A few members of Berlin Geek Squad

Holger Weiss who started Aupeo a few years ago is bemused by new interest in Berlin. In his opinion, it is the easy availability of engineering talent that makes Berlin very attractive for a company like his, which has to develop its product for multiple automobile platforms. Verena Delius, chief executive of Young Internet, a kids-focused game maker, shares that sentiment. Delius is rebooting her company to focus entirely on tablets: her company bet its future on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices. Berlin’s blend of techies and creatives has helped the company make a fast transition to the new platforms.

Berlin, in my short visit, seems like a city that has a lot going for it.

I am pretty sure that technology is the best option for the city to overcome its disadvantaged position and its dependence on handouts from larger and richer parts of Germany like Bavaria. It needs to – otherwise the city will continue to suffer from the problems that come with high unemployment rates.

The Road Ahead

But to be candid, I think Berlin is a long way from being a booming tech-town. Even though it has a lot of entrepreneurs, the city still lacks a formal venture capital structure. The bigger slugs of money in city’s promising startups have come from outside investors – Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures is a big investor in SoundCloud for example, while Index Ventures of London & San Francisco has bet on Amen.

Berlin needs to show that it has staying power — it keeps attracting newer, hungrier folks with start-up dreams. However, in order to keep attracting more dreamers, Berlin needs a big company to rise from the rubble. Berlin needs one such big company to emerge in next few years – one that employs hundreds (if not thousands) of people.

And in order to do that, the city needs a mature venture capital infrastructure. That robust VC ecosystem has helped startups thrive and eventually grow into larger operations in non-Silicon Valley locations such as Boston and New York. Israel is another example of a country that has a robust VC ecosystem.

When I asked Hinrichs of HackFwd about whether we will see something like Tumblr or Pinterest emerge from Europe, he didn’t take long to say that those two companies “wouldn’t be funded in the Europe” as it would dismissed as just another cool idea.”The venture capital investors are not comfortable with the very idea that something might just be a col technology and could eventually become something bigger,” he added. The solution is more entrepreneurs turned investors (like himself and team Atomico) start making investments. “It is because we have a higher risk tolerance as such and know that sometimes you just have to try and build something bigger,” said Hinrichs.

The other issue Berlin needs to overcome is that of scale and international growth. Today it is commonplace for startups to talk about serving the global market almost from day one, but the reality is quite different. It doesn’t matter where you are based, but as a startup or any other business you need a domestic market which in turn can be used to grow overseas.

Silicon Valley startups have two advantages – the domestic U.S. market that has enough early adopters willing to try new Internet services. This gets the attention of tech media, which in turn allows companies to get more people signing up for their products. (Twitter, according to a MIT study, is a good example of this virtuous cycle.) That sets off a chain reaction and gets companies the global attention.

The overseas companies are on the opposite end of the spectrum. If a company is based in Berlin (or Paris or London), it doesn’t have the large domestic user base to get similar attention and adoption. That makes it difficult for companies to cross the proverbial borders. This, I sincerely hope, is a short term problem — one that can wither away with continuous emergence of clever ideas and great startups.

Despite many of its challenges, I am quite optimistic about Berlin. At the end of my brief visit, when waiting for my flight to Helsinki, I was jotting down my final thoughts. And as I did, I couldn’t help but listen to my intuition — there is something happening in Berlin. I can’t quite describe it. I can just feel it — it is electric. And it wants me to go back… but probably in the summertime.

Here are some photos from my trip to Berlin. Check them out if you have a few minutes.

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