500 Startups put its own unique spin on the accelerator demo day on Wednesday, debuting 30 companies in its fifth batch of startups. Here were the five that caught my eye. Read more »
42Floors, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Friday announced an expansion to New York and a $5 million Series A round of funding. The company, which launched in San Francisco in May, provides businesses with a search engine for finding office space to lease and sublease. Read more »
Looking for a new way to search for apartments in San Francisco? It’s worth checking out Lovely, a relatively new site that’s rolling out a mobile app Wednesday and is showing just how antiquated Craigslist really is when it comes to searching and narrowing real estate options. Read more »
Real estate listing company Zillow announces Wednesday that it’s acquired Buyfolio, a NYC-based company that allows prospective home buyers to organize and communicate with brokers as they go through the home search process. Zillow went public in 2011 and focuses on real estate sales. Read more »
Making money off mobile advertising isn’t an easy job, but Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff said Friday at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference that being a real estate company gave them a leg up on this challenge, since most users can actually benefit from the ads they see. Read more »
Everyone likes the idea of a thriving website sustained by a community of local readers. But too often “local” has been the stuff of journalistic ideals rather than real-world business plans. Real estate blog, Curbed, appears to be bucking this trend. How? Read more at paidContent »
To say that Silicon Valley real estate market is hot would be an understatement. Start-ups are are pushing the rents to stratospheric heights in parts of Silicon Valley. Thanks to fast growing companies like Pinterest, the real estate market is going to get even hotter. Read more »
What are the big differences between the mid-west and San Francisco for an entrepreneur? DotLoop founder and CEO, Austin Allison explains the challenges of founding a company in Cincinnati and why he’s making the move out west. Read more »
Five key technology sectors are enabling the smart city: smart grids, smart transport, smart water and waste management, smart building systems, and the enabling ICT platforms for the smart city. Key players like IT companies, telcos and utilities must learn how to harness those technologies, and quickly. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new startup called 42Floors is devoted to taking away some of the pain of searching for commercial real estate, making your search for office space more like searching for your next apartment, with a web-based interface to scan based on price and location — and pictures! Read more »
Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a datacenter at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. Read more »
Trulia, the San Francisco-based real estate search company, has added two new executives with public company experience as it moves toward an initial public offering of its own. Trulia has named former PayPal exec Sean Aggarwal as its first-ever CFO, and Scott Darling as general counsel. Read more »
My organization, The Carbon War Room, has put together a consortium to tackle, as was reported this week: “one of the nation’s biggest energy problems — waste in older buildings — without new money from Washington.” Read more »
Real estate listing site Zillow received a warm welcome from public market investors after its IPO Wednesday morning. Zillow’s stock hit the market at $57 per share, more than double its $20 IPO price. But the stock proved volatile within a few hours of trading. Read more »
Zillow, the real estate search website, has priced its initial public offering at $20 per share. The stock will begin trading under the single-letter ticker symbol “Z” on the Nasdaq exchange on Wednesday morning. Zillow will raise a total of about $75 million in the IPO. Read more »
