Category: Tech news

Mechanical engineering community GrabCAD is announcing $1.1 million in seed funding today, from Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture, Next View Ventures and angels John McEleney, Alex Ott, Angus Davis and Jon Stevenson.

Founded in 2009, GrabCAD is like an oDesk or an eLance specifically for mechanical engineers, with the added benefit of offering a free CAD model library. Boston-based and with a development team in Estonia, the platform helps connect over 7,500 mechanical engineers with the manufacturers and product development companies that need them. The company has tripled the number of engineers in its community in the past month.

Co-founder Hardi Meybaum plans on using the money for expansion and hiring, ” Our plan is to be the biggest mechanical engineering team in the world.”

When asked what the deal is with all the Estonia-hype lately, Maybaum said that it primarily stems from Skype’s recent Microsoft acquisition, “Skype has played a big role in this, about half of our [Estonia’s] companies are ex-Skype employees.” Case in point: Half of the GrabCAD team also used to work for Skype.

Eco-Fashion is definitely more than just a fad. More and more consumers are looking to purchase eco-friendly and natural products in the fashion, beauty, personal care and toys industries. Enter LovingEco, a recently launched flash sales site which is essentially a Gilt Groupe for eco-fashion and natural goods.

LovingEco, which was founded by Justine Lassoff and Melinda Moore, features daily sales on discounted eco-friendly, natural items. For example, one of today’s sales is for organic cotton clothing. Another sale features handbags that are made from inner tubes collected at local truck stops.

Similar to OneKingsLane and Gilt, LovingEco features ‘tastemaker pics,’ where celebrities and environmental experts curate their favorite products from the sales. The site also features a V-Wall for the community to share their donations and eco-friendly content.

And LovingEco takes sales a step further and donates 3 percent of net proceeds from each purchase to a ‘tastemaker charity’ to help support a social or environmental cause.

LovingEco, which faces competition from Pure Citizen and Blissmo, has raised a seed round of funding from angel investors that include Allen Debevoise; CEO of Machinima; Emily Della Maggiora, VP of comScore Marketing Solutions; Douglas Abel, former VP at Sapient; and Jackie Wilgar, SVP Marketing at Live Nation Entertainment.

Are you tired of paying for games? Me too. But the fact is that they tend to cost money, and that’s that. But that used to be the case for TV, and now we watch our favorite shows for free on Hulu and other services. Why shouldn’t we be able to play games using a similar ad-supported model? This is the question being asked by online game marketplace GamersGate, which launched back in 2009 as an alternative to established services Steam and DirectDownload.

Creating a free-to-play platform for modern games seems to present a plethora of problems, but of course other free services have presented similar problems and worked out fine. GamersGate isn’t giving up too many details yet, but here’s what we know.

Continue reading…

As I aimed to convey in my “Day In The Life Of A Liveblogger” post back in March, liveblogging a big ol’ event can be… interesting. When you’ve got tens of thousands of people tuned in and waiting for news the very instant it breaks, issues that might otherwise seem trivial can bring your entire operation to a grinding halt.

Such was the case on Monday, while MG and I liveblogged Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote. One little thing — or, more accurately, lots of one-little-things that came together into one big bastard of a little thing — nearly wrecked it. And it’s sort of Google’s fault.

First, a bit of background: back in May, Google held their annual I/O conference at the Moscone center in San Francisco. Every year, Google gives attendees a gift or two for coming out — and this year, they went all out. They started by giving everyone 10.1″ Galaxy Tablets — then they announced that everyone who showed up would be getting one of Google’s fancy new Chromebook laptops in the mail. When folks went to go pick up up their Galaxy Tabs, however, there was one more surprise: a Verizon 4G Hotspot, complete with an LTE SIM good for 3 months of service. Hurray!

So, what the hell does this have to do with WWDC?

Jump forward a month to the WWDC keynote. We’re about 1/3 of the way through — so far, so good. Last year’s Keynote was plagued with WiFi issues so bad that they resulted in cataclysmic on-stage demo failures. The issues, it’s thought (or at least, so said Steve on stage), were caused by the number of MiFis and other portable WiFi hotspots being used in the room — a circumstance which Penny Arcade summed up rather aptly. Fortunately, Apple put a ridiculous amount of effort into their network this year, so the WiFi was pleasantly speedy and seemingly rock solid.

Until it wasn’t.

Somewhere around the 40% mark, the conference center’s WiFi suddenly started crawling. It still worked… just at sub-56k speeds. Wuh-oh. When you’re trying to upload high res images and blast out quotes as they leave the speaker’s lips, thats not okay. At that second, it seemed like every reporter in the room had the same idea: Hotspot time! People reached into their coat pockets and laptop bags, and the little Hotspot status lights flickered into view all around me.

Now, for those who don’t spend their days caring about boring stuff like how WiFi works, just know this: the more WiFi spots you have in the same area, the harder it is to actually use any of those WiFi spots. Think of an access point like a crazy shouting person. If there’s just one crazy shouting person, you might be able to figure out what they’re saying. Throw in another crazy shouting person, and it gets more difficult. Throw in 10 more, all speaking in different pitches and different languages, and it’s nigh impossible to pluck out a single intelligible word.

Those 56k speeds we had before? Obliterated, with each page request now resulting in an immediate browser error. The WiFi status indicator in my taskbar starts shuffling around as it searches for signal amongst the noise, and the guy next to me turns to check if he’s alone on this island of disconnection.

We’re somewhere around the 2-minutes-without-connectivity mark at this point. While I let my laptop try to work its issues out for itself, I pop onto my iPhone — in worst case scenarios, I can usually still liveblog, one tiny keystroke at a time, from that. I jump into the WiFi screen just for kicks, and this is what I see:

Each of those “Verizon SCH-LC11″ WiFi access points? Those are Verizon 4G Hotspots.

The very same Verizon 4G hotspots that Google gave out at I/O.

At the very same convention center. To many of the same people who were sitting in this audience.

There were dozens of them. That screenshot only shows a few, but there must have been at least 30 — and that’s just what was within signal reach of my chair in the auditorium. And, based on the grumbling and cursing going on all around us, no one could connect to any of them. A billion little boxes, collectively canceling out everyone else’s ability to connect to their own little boxes — and, in turn, canceling out everyone else’s ability to connect to the conference center’s primary WiFi network. I’ve spoken to others who were seated elsewhere in the auditorium — outside of the corner of the theater where Apple ushered the media — and all of them said their WiFi held strong and hasty throughout. Only in this little corner, crammed with a mountain of crazy-shouting-people boxes, did things go dark.

Fortunately, MG’s stars aligned in such a way (or his chair was just in that perfect spot) that he’s able to pull down juuuuuust enough bandwidth to fire off an update or two, mostly masking the fact that we’re having any technical difficulties. Then magic happened.

I don’t know if Apple summoned some sort of WiFi God to come down and smite away the hotspots one by one, or if people collectively realized they were just making their own problems worse — but over the course of about 2 minutes, the number of “Verizon SCH-LC11″ clones dwindled. As it hit single digits, the primary WiFi network found its way through the noise. After nearly 8 minutes of scrambling for every bit of bandwidth we could scrounge (and playing off the whole thing quite undetectably, I must say), things were back up and running.

Whether Google knew it or not (and I’m highly doubtful that they did… though they did make sure to give out the hotspots on the last day of their own conference, after all of their big announcements were well over), their nice little parting gifts would act as itty-bitty Trojan Horses at WWDC, bombarding the airwaves and knocking much of the reporting crowd offline for a time.

If someone at Google actually did plan this: Good job, you friggin’ evil genius.

Spotted At CES 2011

On Thursday night, 60,000 people will fill up Central Park to watch the Black Eyed Peas in concert. Tickets are sold out (through Eventbrite, natch), but you can watch it here streamed live in glorious 360-degree vision at 7PM ET. The Black Eyed Peas first used the 360-degree cameras in their iPhone app that puts you inside a music video, but this will be the first time they will try it live. The concert will be filmed and streamed using 360-degree cameras from Immersive Media. This will be the first time a major music concert is streamed live in 360-degrees.

The cameras used are an advanced version of what Google uses to capture its Street View, except this shoots video instead of still photos. They use 11 cameras built into a sphere, shooting simultaneously, and stitching together all the different shots, encoding it, and streaming it with a 2-second latency. Viewers will be able to pan around and control the angle.

The concert will be broadcast by Livestream and all proceeds will benefit the Robin Hood Foundation, which fights poverty in New York City by partnering with the most effective non-profits that invest in schools, homeless shelters, job training programs and more. Last year Robin Hood distributed $110 million to other non-profits (donate here).

Earlier this year, we heard about how startup Manilla has plans to disrupt online account management. Today the company is fully launching its service, which has been in close beta for the past three months, to the public with new partnerships with Citi Cards, Duke Energy and others.

Manilla, which was incubated and backed by Hearst, is a free web-based service that helps consumers better manage all of their household accounts, including financial, utilities, subscriptions and travel rewards programs, in place online. It’s sort of like Mint.com for your bills.

Manilla will send users text and/or email reminders to pay bills and will keep an unlimited storage of account documents. And Manilla promises that it takes minutes to set up all of your accounts through the platforms.

With the launch today, Manilla allows you integrate accounts from four major categories: finance, household/bills, magazine subscriptions and travel rewards programs. In these categories, Manilla can integrate with over 500 services at national and local levels. Partners include Citi Cards, Comcast, and Duke Energy.

Netflix is great. I feel like I have to say that, now that it’s the single largest source of Internet traffic in North America. But, really, Netflix annoys me. I’m cheap, so I’ve opted for the streaming-only service, but the selection stinks, and I spend most of my time debating whether I should upgrade to the DVD service. And now that I’ve been rating movies for years, its recommendation system has become more refined, but I’m being told by Netflix that I should “discover” some movie featuring The Rock that I’d really rather not discover.

Like many others, I supplement my movie and TV consumption with Amazon Instant, Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, and more. The problem is, the experience is fragmenting. When I’m looking for a specific movie, I have to go search each of these services individually, and when I’m looking to discover new movies, I generally fall back on Netflix, but the recommendation system isn’t perfect.

This is why I’ll be turning to Matcha to help reduce the pain, the woes, the heartbreak. Matcha, a startup launching in beta today, is bringing the social graph to movie and TV recommendations and aggregating the millions of movies, TV shows, and clips floating around the Web for an enhanced search and discovery experience.

Matcha pulls in your video subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and more — along with Facebook — to give you relevant recommendations for video content that you’ll actually enjoy. And you can click to watch right from the page.

Traditional recommendation engines that use collaborative filtering (users who liked “X” movie will like “Y” movie) have been around for awhile now, but results are often generic and superficial, often missing the personalization experience we’ve come to expect. When applied to video, which some would argue is social by nature, recommendations from those we know and trust is almost always preferable.

On the flip side, relying on friends for social recommendations only tells half the story. But with their powers combined, recommendations become more powerful and more personalized. After a year of algorithmic tinkering, Matcha has created a technology that relies both on users social graphs as well as traditional methods to provide a more augmented search and discovery mechanism.

In practice, this means that Matcha offers deep indexing of long-form online video sites (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, etc) as well as indexing of crowdsourced video sites like YouTube. It also tracks online activity, collecting usage and preference data from YouTube and Facebook “likes”, what you’ve shared, and what you’ve watched on over 100 video sites that Matcha indexes.

Matcha then serves you recommendations in an intuitive UI that offers “Top Picks” based on its social recommendation engine, as well as a timeline-based “Friends Feed” that shows what your friends are watching (and liking) in realtime. Users can also visit friends’ profiles to see what video content they’re consuming.

And because Matcha indexes over 100 video sites, users can search for specific movies, TV shows, or clips, which alleviates the pain of having to search individual sites for that obscure movie not offered by Netflix streaming. The search function also integrates with the social graph so that results will include content from your friends.

While co-founders Paul Petrick, Guy Piekarz, and Ilan Ben Zeev have built what appears to be a great service, it won’t be around for very long unless it finds a way to make money. The team is still defining the optimal revenue model, but it looks like display or in-video advertising might be in Matcha’s future. I think we’re all pretty tired of in-video advertising, though, so I’d prefer to see telegraphed “featured recommendations” — or paid recommendations — instead of a slew of video advertising, but maybe that’s just me.

TechCrunch readers can get an early taste of Matcha’s service by signing up for the beta here. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Music streaming service Spotify (more convenient than piracy!), long enjoyed in Europe and long longed for in the U.S., may finally finally have its ducks in a row. If a number of interdependent deals come together, the service may soon be available to U.S. users, Facebook Music might finally become a reality, and a new round of venture capital may be injected into the company.

As usual, it all hinges on the music labels.

For years Spotify has promised a U.S. launch that would include a free version of the product like they have in Europe. Promises for a U.S. launch were made almost since Spotify first appeared in 2008. But we had to learn to be patient as a never ending stream of “coming soon” promises failed to become reality.

Still, Americans want to believe. They want to believe so badly that way too many people immediately accepted Paul Carr’s April Fool’s blog post that a U.S. launch was imminent as true. And many Europeans were also duped by the notion that Spotify would have to close down European operations to fund that U.S. launch. Spotify even had to send out a few Tweets to people to make sure they knew it wasn’t true. Good times.

Spotify almost came to the U.S. in early 2010. Google and Spotify were in deep negotiations to launch in the U.S. via Android. Later that year we learned that the companies were also talking about a billion dollar acquisition, but the deal fell through over label deals and a walk away fee.

Spotify trudged on. And started talking to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, long looking for a solution to Facebook’s music problem, was already a Spotify fan.

Fast Forward To Today

Spotify is pulling off a hat trick. They have a pending deal with Facebook to finally launch the service in the U.S. And they have a pending venture capital deal with DST and Kleiner Perkins that will value the company at $1 billion or more.

Both of those “pendings” require the successful completion of U.S. music label negotiations. The labels finally agree, it triggers the Facebook deal and the venture capital deal and Spotify will finally fulfill that promise.

For years we’ve heard that those music label deals are coming. “Just a few weeks away,” is something sources have told me more times than I can count. But now, say many sources, it’s really happening. Perhaps even within the next, well, few weeks. And this time, it’s for reals (maybe).

VantagePoint Capital Partners, a global cleantech fund focused on energy and efficiency, today revealed that former Best Buy executive Kal Patel is joining the firm as partner. Patel is expected to grow VPCP’s “European presence,” and lead its international “strategic partnerships” according to a press statement from the fund.

At Best Buy, Patel worked as executive vice president and president of the comapny’s Asia regional business. He lead a major acquisition of a Chinese company, worked on building Best Buy’s business in transportation, mobility, health and home energy management, and helped run the Best Buy Capital Alpha Fund.

VantagePoint Capital Partners has investments in over 30 energy and efficiency businesses including BrightSource Energy, Genomatica, Tesla Motors, Solazyme, Bridgelux and Switch Lighting. Yesterday, the fund announced its series d investment in Liquid Robotics– a Hawaiian company that makes wave-powered, unmanned marine vehicles.

One of the best parts of the iPad 2 is the colorful, magical smart cover that comes as a peripheral. Lift the cover and your iPad turns on, drop it and it goes to sleep. It’s kind of addictive. But what if someone actually built an app around that fidgety behavior?

Well, Evernote just did. It’s called Evernote Peek, a free app for the iPad 2 that is designed around the smart cover. It is the first smart cover app, and it may even make you smarter.

Evernote Peek is a simple Q&A quiz app. You lift the cover a little and to see a question like “How fast does light travel?” or “Who was the fifth President of the United States”? Then lift the cover a little more to see the answer. Yup, people are going to be killing a lot of time in coffee shops with this app.

The general trivia questions don’t’t really have anything to do with the main Evernote apps, other than the fact that it reinforces its slogan, “Remember Everything.” But you can also connect the app to your own Evernote notebooks and turn them into study guides. Your note titles become the clues and the text of the notes becomes the answers.

It’s time for another day of live video down here at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Today we’ll be covering the massive South Hall, where we’ll find the big publishing houses showing off their latest. But first, we’re dropping by the Sony booth (signal permitting) to spend a little time with the Playstation Vita, their powerful new handheld. After that, a quick tour of the Nintendo booth, then it’s off to South Hall to see what’s what.

Right inside the door is EA, and then there’s Activision, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and a couple dozen other publishers who are just aching to demo their new games. We’re going live just a few minutes past 10 (once we’re past the crush at the door), so point your browsers towards the CrunchGear front page and let the liveness stream. Remember, you can always contact us by tweeting with hashtag #e3crunchgear!

Angst! Raised Eyebrows! Distinct feelings of discomfort!

So go the reactions to a feature on Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to help users tag their photos. It has people so upset, in fact, that it’s just sparked a probe from European Union privacy regulators.

The uproar revolves around a feature that’s been around since December, so the technology itself isn’t particularly new. But regulators are only getting upset about it now after a Sophos report pointed out that Facebook has recently turned the setting on by default, apparently continuing the social network’s habit of encroaching on user privacy without asking for permission.

Except this time, the complaints seem to be about issues that aren’t new — and humans are still very much involved in deciding who gets tagged.

First, let’s run through exactly what the feature does.

When you upload photos to Facebook, you’re prompted to tag your friends in those photos — your friends will then be notified about the photos they’re tagged in, and depending on their privacy settings other people may be able to see them as well. This feature is relatively ancient in Facebook terms, and is actually one of the key reasons why the site got popular on college campuses (and later, with everyone else) in the first place. Facebook easily has more photos than all of the other photo hosting sites combined, and as of last December people were creating 100 million tags per day.

But while tagging is hugely popular, it’s also a pain. For a long time you had to do every single tag manually — click a face, type in the person’s name, repeat for each face, and click onwards to the next photo, where you get to do it all again. It’s tiresome.

Which is where Facebook’s facial recognition comes in.

The first feature that incorporated this technology made it easier to tag the same person in multiple photos. Say, for example, you were at a friend’s birthday party and the same eight people showed up in each photo. Using facial recognition, Facebook can ask you to identify each of those friends once, and then automatically tag them throughout the rest of the photo album.

The more advanced facial recognition feature, which launched in December, goes one step further: instead of initially asking you to identify each of your friends’ faces, it looks at your Facebook friends to see if any of them seems like a likely match. You then confirm those suggested tags (each possible match shows a thumbnail that you can ‘X’ out), and have to do a lot less clicking.

That’s it. We’re not talking about a sinister site-wide facial recognition feature that will let your boss find incriminating photos of you taken at a bachelor party. It just makes tagging less tedious. And no, it is not fully automated.

Which brings us back to the privacy issue.

Here’s a quote from Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, taken from the Bloomberg article on the EU probe.

“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Lommel. Such automatic tagging “can bear a lot of risks for users” and the group of European data protection officials will “clarify to Facebook that this can’t happen like this.”

Now, Lommel has a point: if you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, you do not get to approve that tag before it shows up in your ‘Tagged Photos’ album or in friends’ News Feeds — you have to detag photos after the fact.

But this is how Facebook Photos have always worked (in fact, it’s how all of their features work, which is why you can be tagged in groups you’ve never heard of, or at places you’d rather not be tagged in). And, as Facebook always points out, if you’re worried about it, you can hide tagged photos from other users using the site’s privacy options.

In other words, it isn’t a new issue, and it isn’t related to facial recognition at all. Your friends have always been able to tag you in photos without your prior consent. Sure, these features make it easier to do so, but presumably they’re not going to suddenly start tagging you in incriminating photos just because it takes fewer clicks.

To reiterate: the EU may conclude that Facebook users should be able to pre-approve their tags, and I don’t necessarily think that would be a bad thing (I’m sick of tag spam, for one). But conflating this with the spookiness of facial recognition seems like a mistake — we should save that outcry for when companies really do start doing creepy things with the technology.

Rebtel considers itself to be one of the biggest threats to the Skype empire, so I was interested in learning from the company’s CEO, Andreas Bernstrom, how they felt about Microsoft acquiring their main rival for $8.5 billion in cash.

Unsurprisingly, Bernstrom said the acquisition ‘validated the market’ but he also had some more interesting things to say, mainly about VoIP and mobile telephony in general, and how financially sound the Rebtel business currently is.

For your background, Rebtel was founded in 2006, quickly raising $20 million in its first round of venture capital from investors like Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures. The company routes international calls made from from any mobile phone or landline to local numbers to minimize the cost of calling someone abroad.

Since their Series A round back in 2006, the company hasn’t raised a dime of outside capital, because, as Bernstrom says, they simply didn’t need to. In 2009, the company booked $18 million in revenues, more than doubling that amount the year after ($40 million).

Today, with a staff of roughly 60 employees, Rebtel boasts an annual revenue rate of $60 million and is profitable. For your comparison, VoIP company fring was founded earlier than Rebtel and currently has an annual revenue rate around $10 million.

To scale the business faster and ride the momentum in the VoIP space following the Skype acquisition, Rebtel is now considering raising more financing and has even loosely explored the possibility of taking the company public in the future.

Rebtel is banking on VoIP companies like Skype not iterating fast enough on providing services for smartphones users. Skype does offer mobile applications, but it has been rather slow in launching and improving them. Bernstrom points out that when the Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype closes, Rebtel will be the world’s largest independent mobile voip provider with more than 11 million mobile users and offering its services in over 200 countries.

Rebtel offers mobile applications for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry handsets.

Bernstrom has a lot of respect for companies like Viber and the speed at which their mobile applications have gone viral, but posits that the dependence of its users on WiFi and 3G connections will make for a poor user experience.

What Rebtel aims to do is “offer the best of all worlds in a seamless integration”.

“VoIP is essentially an improved fixed line service. Mobile VoIP, however, has not been cracked due to the limitations of the data network. The next 12-18 months will determine who the winners are”, said Bernstrom.

Online ad spending keeps ramping up thanks to an upswing in display advertising. A new forecast from eMarketer puts online ad spending at $31.3 billion this year, up 20 percent. That is double the 10.5 percent growth rate it put out last December for 2011. The new forecast shows online ad spending reaching nearly $50 billion in 2015.

What is driving this growth is display advertising. Brand-friendly ad formats such as banner ads, sponsorships, and video ads are all growing even faster than search. This year, video ad spending is estimated to grow 52 percent, sponsorships are growing 26 percent, and banner ad dollars will increase an estimated 22 percent, while search will grow 20 percent. When you add it all together, eMarketer predicts that display ad spending will surpass search by 2015.

Here’s how that $31.3 billion is estimated to break down in 2011:

• Search: $14.4 billion
• Banner ads: $7.6 billion
• Classifieds: $3 billion
• Video ads: $2.2 billion
• Rich media: $1.7 billion
• Lead gen: $1.4 billion
• Sponsorships: $900 million
• Email: $160 million

“If your company is ever used as the subject of the “X for Y” analogy, that’s success. AirBnB used to be the eBay for vacation rental. Now other companies are the Airbnb of things.”
– far33d, Hacker News

With Airbnb about to enter the billion-dollar startup club, we’ve seen an influx of “X is Airbnb of Y” headlines. While the “X for Y” trope is extremely common in the notoriously unimaginative realm of tech reporting, the real reason “Airbnb for X” has become a cliche is that it’s a lot easier to write (and read) than “collaborative consumption.”

The collaborative consumption space, which basically includes almost all marketplace startups that provide accoutrements like payment and reputation platforms for users who want to buy and sell from each other, is SO HOT RIGHT NOW.

As Forbes writer Nicole Perlroth put it, “The Airbnb of office space!, The Airbnb of tutoring! Airbnb for cars! And my personal favorite, Airbnb for experiences!” (Note: I am probably the worst this offender on the TC team).

Airbnb seems to be the one that got away for many investors, who are now closely watching the roster of startups that are slowly disrupting certain sections of Craigslist (and in the case of Airbnb, doing this literally).

With over 60K listings on the site and 50% bookings growth monthly, its no surprise that the pioneering peer to peer accommodations marketplace is raising 100 million in funding. And its no surprise that collaborative consumption startups like Taskrabbit, Vayable, Skyara, Tutorspree and Getaround are also generating buzz and cash.

Getaround (Airbnb for cars) founder and TC Disrupt winner Jessica Skorpio tells me that the “Airbnb For X” phenomenon rests on the fact that getting used to the idea of one means that you’ll get used to the idea of others, “When users adopt one collaborative consumption service like Airbnb (new way to travel/offset housing cost) other collaborative consumption services are preferred like Getaround (new form of car rental/offset vehicle costs).”

And where users go investors follow. Skorpio tells me that she feels that investors are more likely to invest in Getaround because of the success of Airbnb.

Investor Fred Wilson admitted to making a mistake ignoring the model in March:

“We couldn’t wrap our heads around air mattresses on the living room floors as the next hotel room and did not chase the deal. Others saw the amazing team that we saw, funded them, and the rest is history. Airbnb is well on its way to building the ‘eBay of spaces.’ I’m pretty sure it will be a billion dollar business in time [Editor’s note: Good call Fred].

We made the classic mistake that all investors make. We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do … The cereal box will remain in our conference room as a warning not to make that mistake again.”

Vayable (Airbnb for experiences) founder Jamie Wong explains the rush of investor interest surrounding the space, “It’s interesting that these two side-by-side questions seem to be dominating tech discourse right now: “Are we in a bubble?” and “What’s up with all this collaborative consumption?”  I think the latter helps answer the former. Startup entrepreneurs interested in ecommerce and consumer products are gravitating toward collaborative consumption models (or in tech jargon, “The Airbnb for…”) because it provides a sustainable economic model.”

According to TaskRabbit  (Airbnb for services) founder Leah Busque, “2011 will be dubbed the year of The Sharing Economy.  I think we are finally at a place in time where technology has become savvy enough to provide solutions to stale business models.  People are getting more and more comfortable with sharing their space (instead of booking hotel rooms), sharing their cars (instead of purchasing their own), and utilizing people sharing their free time and skills (instead of hiring a personal assistant).”

And perhaps Airbnb itself will save us the pain of having to use “Airbnb for X” repeatedly in headlines? In an interview Brian Chesky did with Om Malik in February (when the pressure of a $1 billion valuation wasn’t so high) he alludes to his company expanding into other verticals.

“I’ve seen the Airbnb for tutoring, I’ve seen the Airbnb for food, the Airbnb for cars. I think that our model can work for a lot of verticals. Very candidly I think that we’ll probably enter some other verticals as well. I don’t think we’re going to get to all these verticals. There wasn’t an eBay for stamps, and eBay for collectibles, and eBay for cars.  There was just eBay.”

It’s easy to talk about an expanded vision, and hint that your company will enter other categories in 2011, but it remains to be seen whether the practical execution of “entering other verticals” in this case means either acquiring or getting into the markets of other collaborative consumption startups or just limiting your model to lodgings (the company plans on launching sublets soon).

Chesky told me in an email, “We think that this new economy of consumption, which Airbnb pioneered, will eventually consolidate into a few marketplaces, rather than having the ‘Airbnb for’ hundreds of categories.” When repeatedly asked the (pretty annoying) ‘Does Airbnb want to become the Airbnb of X?’ question marketing director Chris Lukezic told me that company is currently focused squarely on accommodation and wouldn’t elaborate further.

Fair enough. They’ve a hard time enough making sure all those headline writers aren’t spelling it “AirBnb” (true story). In the meantime, please leave your suggestions for alternate ways of writing “The Airbnb Of” in our headlines, in the comments.

Image: Andrew Parker