You can make that case for crowdsourced mesh-networking company Open Garden and over-the-top IP communications provider TextMe, which plan to announce an alliance on Friday.

Here’s the problem: TextMe turns devices that weren’t intended to be phones into phones. Its downloadable clients for the iPod touch, iPad and Android tablets bring text, voice and video chat capabilities — all linked to phone number — to what were previously data only devices. Those devices depend on an internet connection, but in most cases are only capable of receiving Wi-Fi signals: Being able to text and talk doesn’t do you much good if there’s no network connection to be found.

Open Garden has created an app that allows consumers to share their connections to the internet through a Wi-Fi mesh – sort of a utopian community that works together to ensure everyone gets the best possible connection. However, for Open Garden to really get going, it needs scale. The more devices its client is loaded into, the more broadband options are available to everyone.

So, TextMe and Open Garden have linked their apps. Starting this week anyone downloading the TextMe app to an Android device (it already has 8 million installs to its credit) will also be given the option to download the Open Garden software as well.

When the TextMe app is active — but there is no direct Wi-Fi connection to be found — it will activate the Open Garden client, which will seek to establish a peer-to-peer mesh connection with other nearby Open Garden-enabled devices. If successful, TextMe will be able to text and call freely using another device or PC’s cellular, Wi-Fi or wireline connection.

Open Garden Co-founder Micha Benoliel

Right now most people use Open Garden (it has 2 million installs to date) as a way to link  their own devices together, allowing their various gadgetry to take advantage of an optimal shared connection, but Open Garden founder Micha Benoliel said the goal is to achieve the scale necessary to create truly massive crowdsourced networked By partnering with company’s like TextMe, Open Garden can reach that scale.

This might sound terrible unfair if you’re a smartphone user suddenly giving up your 4G connection to a bunch of freeriding text-happy tablet users, but Benoliel said you have to change your mindset. No one is truly unconnected, so everyone will have the opportunity to share their connection at some point whether they’re logged into a coffee-shop Wi-Fi network or connected to a home broadband line. Eventually, though, Open Garden to plans to introduce controls that will allow users to limit how much bandwidth they give up.

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The company actually logged $8 million in new funding for this round, but that could grow another $3 million, if it adds another business as a strategic investor.

The cloud storage market continues to percolate — and the entry of Google Drive this week should keep things lively for a while. Symform’s cloud is different in that the company aggregates unused storage from third parties that contribute storage space in return for free or flat-fee cloud storage. As GigaOM previously reported, users can get up to 200 GB of free storage if they register, contribute disk space or refer others to Symform’s service. The use of that peer-to-peer model is what prompts the Skype analogy. Symform’s  service targets small business and the value-added resellers or VARs and managed service providers (MSPs) that support them.

The new money which brings total funding to $20 million. Symform plans to use the money build its global reach and capacity and to make its technology more easily linkable to on-premises storage devices and other IT solutions. It closed

As of now, the company claims users in 138 countries, up from 46 at the end of last year and said customer accounts more than doubled quarter over quarter.

Symform also launched an advisory board that includes  Jon Gacek, CEO of Quantum; Dimitris Achiloptas, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Santa Cruz; and Grant Peterson, CTO and Vice President of Engineering at DocuSign.

Peer-to-peer cloud storage is not totally new. A few years ago, Wuala, a Zurich-based startup helped pioneer this sort of  technology. LaCie bought Wuala in 2009.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user redjar

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Cloud storage has been a hot market, as consumers have long embraced the idea of putting their digital documents, music and photos on cheap storage outside their homes. But now it is heating up even more as corporate CIOs are finally willing to trust at least some company data to cloud providers.

In Symform’s case, the cloud in question is different than it is for the others in this arena: The vendor has put together a peer-to-peer storage network that allows users to contribute their own unused storage space to others on the network in return for free or flat-fee cloud storage. These users can get up to 200 GB of free storage if they register, contribute disk space or refer others to the service. So basically, it’s free, in return for some of your storage real estate or the names of your friends and colleagues. The service target small businesses and the value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers (MSPs) that support them.

Symform CEO Matthew Schiltz has likened Symform to Skype, which gutted traditional long-distance calling prices with its cheap peer-to-peer telephony. As cheap as many cloud storage alternatives are, Schiltz still thinks they are overpriced.

The Seattle-based company claims its user base has grown 800 percent in the past six months.

Given the clamor for cloud storage, the opportunities are ripe for innovative vendors. But given the sheer number of such vendors out there, competition will remain fierce.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user redjar

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Arbor Networks said it saw traffic begin to drop fairly sharply in Europe after about 7 p.m. GMT and 2 p.m. EST, when the site was estimated to have been shut down on Thursday. I’ve asked if it also saw a spike in other types of traffic, such as peer-to-peer traffic that might indicate that burned MegaUploaders were turning to BitTorrent, but a spokeswoman said so far, Arbor hadn’t seen anything like that.

Meanwhile, Sandvine has released data showing MegaUpload was indeed one of the more popular sites on the web for storing and sharing content. It ranked as .98 percent of the total web traffic in the U.S. and 11.39 of the total web traffic in Brazil. It garnered 1.95 percent of the traffic in Asia-Pacific and a less substantial .86 percent in Europe. The chart below shows how it ranked among other services of similar ilk:

Sandvine also showed the abrupt fall-off in its traffic after the raid:

We’ll update this story if more companies report back.

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Tim O'Reilly

As the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on from Silicon Valley to Washington DC, a number of the technology industry’s most influential leaders have come out against the proposed legislation, which would give the government and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet for any alleged copyright infringement.

On Thursday, I interviewed Tim O’Reilly about why he believes SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. His concerns fell into five main categories:

Piracy is not a real problem

The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair. If you have a relationship with your customers, and they know you’re doing the right thing, they will support you.

The people who are pirating are most likely the people who would never give you a nickel to begin with. Piracy serves people on the fringes who are not being served adequately by legitimate markets. Frankly, if people in Romania can download my books and enjoy them, more power to them. They weren’t going to pay me anyway.

SOPA protects the wrong people

I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the experience with piracy is different for people in the movie industry. Maybe — I’m not a movie producer. But I do know that right now the entire content industry is facing massive systemic changes, and to claim that declining sales are because of piracy is so over the top. Any company that is providing great content online in a way that’s easy to use with a fair price has a booming business right now. The people who don’t are trying to fight that future.

So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future. Why should the government be intervening on behalf of the people who aren’t getting with the program?

SOPA ignores history

If you look at it from a historical perspective, the American book publishing industry as a whole began with piracy; there are lots of documents of Charles Dickens and the like taking a stand against these American pirates who were stealing their work. But America went on to become the largest publishing and copyright market in the world. Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets.

More recently you can see this in what happened with the music industry. For a while, music companies were fighting peer-to-peer file sharing. But once Apple came out with iTunes, which was an alternative that was easy to use and fairly priced, it became a huge business. Our policy makers need to encourage the people who get it right, not protect people who clearly didn’t get it right. They need to protect our future.

Tech and lobbying don’t mix

Certainly, the tech industry needs to do a lot more lobbying in Washington, DC. But the whole notion of lobbying is anathema to so many tech people, and for good reason. We’re used to a world in which people design products that have a purpose, where your work speaks for itself. So yes, the tech industry should try to communicate more with the people in DC, but at the same time, congresspeople need to use more of their own independent judgement.

[Update: O'Reilly has expanded upon the topic of tech industry lobbying in a Google+ post, which can be found here. A portion of his additional comments has been added below.]

For example, when I talked with Nancy Pelosi at [San Francisco] Mayor Ed Lee’s inauguration on Sunday, she assured me that she was opposed to SOPA, but that the bill couldn’t just be voted down because of the concerns of the movie industry. I had this bizarre image of the Google Search Quality team meeting with content farms before rolling out the Panda search update to “take into account their concerns.” In the end, Google was making changes that they knew were in the best interest of their users, and the fact that this would hurt the business of various companies producing low-quality content shouldn’t (and presumably didn’t) enter into the equation.

… This isn’t a matter of simply weighing the concerns of one set of lobbyists against those of another, but using a standard of care and independent judgment about what is best for our society. If Congress isn’t knowledgeable enough to make that determination, they need to be consulting independent experts, not lobbyists for one side or the other.

The US needs tech innovation

Laws like SOPA make us sclerotic as a country, where we have all these extra burdens that provide little benefit. In general it makes America less competitive. If SOPA goes through, it could very well force certain innovative companies to go offshore. There are incumbent industries that will always protest every new technology; but any forward-looking country needs to protect its emerging industries.

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Thanks to a combination of peer-to-peer networking and big data algortihms, cable or satellite providers could significantly reduce the costs of serving content while also improving the accuracy of personalized recommendation — and it relies on the omnipresence of set-top boxes.

Opera employees working under the team name Media Moguls developed the model as part of the company’s annual Opera Open challenge, in which employees compete to create the best product that utilizes the company’s analytics technology. Media Moguls won the competition.

How it works

According to team member Carmine Mangione, chief software architect at Opera, the problem facing most providers of streaming video is one of choice vs costs. While they might want to provide the largest libraries possible, that’s a very expensive proposition. In order to provide an effective streaming experience and provide features such as rewinding, Mangione explained, content needs to be served from memory rather than on slower, but cheaper, hard disks. On average, a single server could effectively serve about 100 people watching the same movie at the same time.

That’s not too bad a ratio if a provider is hosting a small libary, but Mangione said it gets exponentially more expensive as providers try to address the long tail of subscriber interest. More content doesn’t just mean adding more servers, but it means adding enough servers to maintain performance levels even in the case of unexpected traffic, thus drastically reducing the number of viewers each server actually supports.

In an email, Andrew Grant, Akamai’s senior manager for entertainment industry marketing, described the problem to me as in this manner:

For VOD content, as content libraries get larger – i.e. As more and more of the ‘long-tail’ of video content is made available for consumers to enjoy – the system must be architected to support a projected average amount of streaming per title, and then over-provisioned to support the unpredictable traffic associated with an outlying event. Think when Michael Jackson died and suddenly traffic for old concert footage suddenly spiked. Building a system to support this level of ‘flash crowd’ traffic would require leaving a large amount of server capacity under-utilized a large part of the time.

By Mangione’s math, a 100,000-movie library would cost about $1.4 billion a year to operate, as opposed t0 about $10,000 for a 10,000-movie library. Akamai’s Grant noted that his company’s CDN (which is one of several that serve Netflix’s streaming service) is built in part to adjust to such spikes by adding capacity as needed. Akamai’s services, of course, aren’t free either.

Mangione realized that cable providers could actually save themselves infrastructure costs and add more content by leveraging the CPU and memory present in their set-top boxes. By creating a P2P network of subscribers’ boxes, providers wouldn’t have to build as much infrastructure because their servers would get hit a lot less. Once subscribers downloaded movies, their set-top boxes and Internet connections would handle most of the subsequent downloads from other subscribers.

But there’s a problem with such a simple approach: Movie files are large, and P2P networks can be slow because traffic might have to traverse multiple network hops. Even if they offer fewer titles, streaming services such as Netflix might look more appealing because their use of CDNs allows them to deliver content so much faster.

Enter big data

The solution to this problem, Mangione decided, is to determine subscribers’ particular interests and then create geographically logical clusters of subscribers who share the same interests. The benefits to this approach are twofold:

1. It decreases the chances of having to hit a provider’s central server because the chances are higher that someone (or multiple people) in a user’s cluster has that title.
2. It improves the accuracy of recommendations because the system primarily analyzes what people with the same interests are viewing and doesn’t have to filter through as much noise from the overall subscriber base.

Such private networks scale to about 10,000 users, Mangione said.

Aside from classifying users into groups based on what they watch, Media Moguls captain and Opera principal scientist Frank Elliott noted the system also could determine the genre of movies more accurately based on who’s watching them. Ideally, the algorithms would maximize P2P traffic and minimize server load by accurately pointing subscribers to new content they want but don’t have, and that’s on other set-top boxes in their clusters.

Opera does have some clout when it comes to talking about recommendation algorithms: A team that included several Opera employees came in second place in the Netflix Prize competition in 2009, although it and the winning team finished in a statistical tie.

Is it viable?

It is, of course, up to cable or satellite providers to determine the viability of Opera’s model and implement it, but the signs point to that happening. For one, Opera CEO Arnab Gupta said his company’s plan is to commercialize the technology through a media-industry partner that already has the data, infrastructure and distribution plans in place. Ideally, that would be a cable or satellite provider (Dish Network is ramping up its streaming service), but conceivably could be an Internet-only device that has adequate hardware specs.

And although set-top boxes might be relics of the past as new boxless viewing methods come into existence, mainstream ubiquity could be a way off. Adopting the Opera method would let providers leverage their existing networks of set-top boxes in the meantime, and its relevancy might well carry into future viewing methods. Whether customers are streaming content from other devices (e.g., game consoles, Roku, etc.) or straight through their TVs, providers still have to worry about the backend costs of storing and delivering all that content.

In any case, licensing content is also a hurdle, but all the hubbub about the Stop Online Piracy and Protect-IP Acts might end up proving to be a blessing in disguise. If the public outcry against these bills is enough to kill them in the House and Senate, it might well serve as a signal to content owners to focus on new, legal distribution channels rather than on lawsuits. Something like this, done through existing cable or satellite partners, could be one good option.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user PascalSijen; other images courtest of Opera Solutions.

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There’s no arguing that Google has big ambitions to expand further into the wireless space. Not only did it build an overnight sensation with Android, it’s exploring the cutting edge of handset technologies with its Nexus line and will broaden its device scope with the purchase of ailing Motorola Mobility. the search giant is one of the biggest players in mobile apps, and remains a looming presence on the mobile Web. So why wouldn’t it want to complete that dominance by controlling the pipes that the deliver its services?

There’s a big difference between delivering applications, services and devices and selling raw connectivity. Nowhere does this difference shine brighter than Google’s relationship with Verizon Wireless. Verizon benefits from the traffic that Android and Search deliver, and Google benefits from all of the Android devices that Verizon sells, but beyond that their common ground disappears, as the recent dust-up over Goggle Wallet shows. As an operator, Verizon has to carefully ration access to its network in the form of data caps and restrictions in order to make its profits. If Google were to buy T-Mobile it would be forced to do the same. As an apps and services innovator rationing bytes and bandwidth is the last thing Google wants to do.

But let’s play the hypothetical…

If Google did buy T-Mobile here are just three of many, many problems it would face:

•  Schizophrenia: How does Google balance the needs of the services and devices it develops against the bandwidth constraints of the network it purchases? Video apps like YouTube and Hangout consume a massive amount of data, and Google’s developers, I’m sure, are hard at work building more powerful applications to take advantage of new 4G network speeds. Consumers will expect Google to use T-Mobile as a showcase for its newest technologies, but as T-Mobile’s lack of an LTE roadmap exemplifies, its network resources would be severely limited. Google would likely invest in alternate access technologies like Wi-Fi and white spaces to supplement its capacity cheaply, but at a certain point it runs into a wall erected by physics. The limitations of T-Mobile’s network would curb the pace of Google’s service innovation.
• A sense of history: If any company can attest to the fickle tastes of wireless consumers, it’s Google. It became a monster in the smartphone sector in the space of a few years, as Apple did before it. What happens when the tides shift? What if Windows Phone takes off like a rocket eating into Android’s market share. Does T-Mobile not sell Nokia or other WP phones? If Apple reduces itself to offering an iPhone for T-Mobile’s AWS bands, does Google ignore it? In the last decade, we’ve seen multiple titans in wireless devices and software fall, replaced by new giants, many of which have since also tumbled from their pedestals (just ask RIM, Ericsson and Motorola). What happens when Android’s star dims? Google can’t subject T-Mobile to the whims of its applications business, but if that’s the case, what would be the point of buying T-Mobile at all?
• A customer relations nightmare: When was the last time you called Google customer service? The big-iron world of wireless base stations and towers, switching offices and utility trucks is radically different from the server-centric world of Internet services. There are lots of moving parts in wireless networks and they often fail, as Verizon can attest to given its recent string of LTE failures. When the iPhone first bum-rushed AT&T’s network, how much vitriol was directed at Apple for its un-ambitious choices in 3G technology and its decision to sacrifice RF design for industrial design? Not much. Whether it’s a justified perception or not, tech companies like Google are the darlings of the broadband age, while the operators are the evil gatekeepers preventing mobile data services from meeting their full potential. I think the carriers have come to terms with this perception as part of the course of doing business, but I don’t think Google is quite ready to deal with millions of tweets declaiming “f#@king Google’s network is down” whenever it has a problem.

What about Clearwire, 700 MHz and Google Fiber?

I’m anticipating some push back on this post, pointing out that Google has made numerous attempts in the past toward becoming an operator. Google invested $500 million and still remains a large investor in Clearwire. It entered the 2008 700 MHz spectrum auctions and bid heavily on the 4G spectrum Verizon eventually won. And Google has launched a fiber-to-the communities project designed to bring1 Gbps connections to the home.

These are all red herrings though. In every case, Google pursued these projects not with the intention to become a legitimate wireless or broadband provider. Rather, it used its enormous resources to upset the established order in telecom, thumbing its nose at operators in the process. Google invested in Clearwire because it wanted to prop up an alternative to the walled-garden data services that operators were then offering. It bid up that 700 MHz spectrum in order to force Verizon to accept open access provisions that would clear the way for its Android services in the future. And Google readily admits its fiber project is an experiment to show broadband providers and consumers just what’s possible with a lightening-fast connection.

Google doesn’t want to be a telecom service provider. It just wants to influence carriers to adopt business models and technologies more amenable to its business plans – either by shaming them by example or using its cash to force change. If it did buy T-Mobile, Google would join the carrier club and it certainly wouldn’t be able to pull such shenanigans anymore.

I don’t claim to be prescient here. SNL could very well be right, and Google may be making a legitimate bid for T-Mobile. If that’s the case then Google is suffering from hubris, somehow believing it could be ‘different’ then the rest of the wireless industry. But if Google does buy T-Mobile it may well wind up being a bigger disaster than AOL’s failed merger with Time Warner.

Book image courtesy of Flickr user crazytales562
Cash image courtesy of reserved Flickr user zzzack

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Not surprisingly, the number of viewers that are considering canceling skews higher the younger the respondents are: Nineteen percent of “leading Millennials” — those aged 23 to 28 — said they were considering canceling cable, with 13 percent of Gen Xers saying they were thinking about doing so. Of baby boomers, only 7 percent said they would consider cutting the cord, and older respondents were even less likely to do so, at just 5 percent.

The findings come as a greater number of viewers are catching on to free and subscription-based video services available online and streaming to their TVs and other devices. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they had watched their favorite TV show on a free online video source, and 21 percent said they had viewed that show on its own video site. The good news for networks is that those views are increasingly coming from legitimate sources: That compares to 15 percent who watched on a video sharing site or 4 percent who watched on a peer-to-peer network.

Viewers are also becoming more comfortable with watching TV shows on other devices: Nine percent watched shows on a gaming console, compared to 6 percent a year earlier. Smartphone viewing — up to 6 percent from 5 percent — and tablet viewing — 3 percent vs. 2 percent — also increased.

With movies, viewers are even more connected, according to the survey. Deloitte reports that 42 percent of users had streamed a movie in 2011, which was up from 32 percent a year earlier. Twenty-five percent did so as part of a paid subscription like Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Videos. That’s significantly higher than those who streamed as part of a onetime purchase, which 9 percent of viewers did.

While Deloitte makes the point that greater accessibility ultimately means more people accessing more content, it also means more people are realizing there are more choices for content outside the traditional cable model. As that happens, we expect even more to consider cutting the cord and finding their content elsewhere.

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Their plan, they said, was to upset the payments industry by making it radically more simple and less expensive to move money from one country to another.

It wasn’t a message the audience particularly wanted to hear — after all, many of them profit handsomely from wire transfers and exchange markets — but the company got a fair reception, according to co-founder Kristo Kaarmann. “There were a lot of smiles in the audience,” he says.

Chances are those smiles were covering up some uncomfortable feelings, however, since Transferwise is one of those startlingly simple ideas that has the potential to be incredibly disruptive.

Here’s why.

Traditionally, people who want to send money to another country and in another currency (say from American dollars to Indian rupees) will go to a bank or an agency such as Western Union to organize the payment. They will pay money to the broker, who will then wire the money into the recipient’s bank account or destination for a price — usually at an exchange rate significantly worse than the underlying market figure, and often with fees or commission charged on top.

Transferwise makes things simpler by making the process much more transparent.

Instead of wiring the money into the recipient’s foreign account, it handles the back end by simply having accounts in the countries and currencies it needs to. That means when a customer wants to send some money, she pays it to Transferwise at one end, and the company can then pay it out to the recipient at the other end from a different account, directly in the target currency.

In order to minimize its own capital needs, the company tries to match payments on one side to payments going the other way. But if there are no matches it simply hands over money from its own coffers.

It is a simple idea that sidesteps the usual red tape and delays around international transfers — and allows the company to operate at lower costs, too. Those savings are passed on to the customer: There are no expensive wire fees and no cranked-up exchange rates. Instead users get charged a flat fee (£1, around $1.56) on small transactions or a small percent on larger sums.

It’s peer-to-peer payment — a sort of Skype for currencies.

The Skype analogy is no accident, either: The other co-founder, CTO Taavet Hinrikus, was an early employee at the telephony firm and has experienced the thrill of using the Internet to challenge a huge, expensive industry from the inside.

Since launching quietly over the summer as a self-funded startup, he says, the company has saved users £250,000 ($390,000) in bank charges and organically grown a core of regular, dedicated customers who are helping spread the word.

Just getting started

Today the service is small, not least because it only works between two currencies: sterling in the U.K. and Euros. The team plans to roll out soon into new areas – first low-hanging fruit like the Swiss franc and the Polish zloty but then hopefully into other, more lucrative markets with very large expat communities. It is eyeing the Australian dollar, the South African rand and ultimately the U.S. dollar and Indian rupee.

That expansion will require a lot of regulatory work, since the company must comply with financial rules and laws to prevent its being used for money laundering (this is one significant benefit of starting in Europe, where a single regulatory burden covers 500 million people, 27 countries and 14 currencies).

But it will also have to work hard to outflank the banks, which are unlikely to be happy to lose any custom, and gain user trust — something that the team knows is going to be tough.

Kaarman says this is an area where Transferwise is moving carefully, because “the day you lose your first customer’s money, you are in trouble for a long, long time.” He’s right. A false step could easily kill off a startup.

So what comes next?

More currencies, more users, more awareness are all important — and to get there, funding could be high on the agenda.

So far the company has been self-funded, and it only has a skeleton staff. Scaling up will require more investment. If nothing else, it needs significant capital in each country it enters in order to guarantee prompt payment. However, given how straightforward and useful the service is, I don’t think it will be too long before there is some significant investment coming in.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Seedcamp

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The new round, which serves as TaskRabbit’s Series B, was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners. The San Francisco-based company’s existing investors all pitched in as well, along with two new investors: Allen & Company and The Tornante Company, the investment firm led by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

The money comes just seven months after the nearly four-year-old TaskRabbit closed on its $5 million Series A round. According to the company, it’ll just serve as fuel for its already impressive growth: Since May, TaskRabbit says its net revenue and monthly task volume has tripled, while its customer base has increased seven fold.

TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque

The sizable new round also comes just a couple months after TaskRabbit swapped out its founder Leah Busque in the CEO role for a more seasoned executive, Hotwire co-founder Eric Grosse. Big investors often push for a CEO with some “grey hair” as a startup gets bigger, so the recent leadership change may well have been a factor considered — or even suggested — by the folks who participated in this latest batch of funding. Either way, it bears mention that Busque is still with TaskRabbit full-time as chief product officer, and is by all accounts quite happy with the move.

One thing is certain: With big money comes big responsibility, and TaskRabbit has ambitious plans to keep up the growth in the months ahead. The company says it will use the new funds to expand its service both in its native US and abroad (right now TaskRabbit brokers tasks in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Orange County, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago) and on hiring more staff.

The past year has been a really strong one for the peer-to-peer space: TaskRabbit competitor and online marketplace startup Zaarly just nabbed its own $14.1 million funding round, for instance, and new startups in the space are cropping up regularly. It now looks like the excitement will definitely continue well into 2012, and probably beyond.

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