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Posts Tagged ‘seattle-based’

An interesting tidbit from today’s Naked Truth event in Seattle: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said his company just turned profitable. Since I was sitting next to him on the panel, I asked him off microphone what revenues were. He said the run rate is around $15 million. 2007 revenues were $5 million, 2006 revenues were $1 million.

That’s great news for everyone except the real estate industry. The Seattle-based startup represents buyers and sellers in home real estate transactions for far less than the entrenched industry rates that take 5 of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell brokers. On the buy side they reimburse 50% of the fee they receive back to the buyer. On the sell side they charge a $5,000 - $7,000 flat fee. The normal broker fees on a million dollar house are up to $60,000, so the savings are obvious.

The company was profiled favorably by 60 Minutes in 2007, but real estate agents and brokers have known about the company for far longer. Even as far back as 2006, Kelman told me, they’ve had to deal with “threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals.” Now that Redfin has shown that their model works profitably those threats will likely become worse.

Disruption is never fun for those being disrupted. The DOJ is hitting the real estate industry from one side, and Redfin is hitting them from the other. The result? A better deal for the rest of us.

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Well it appeared to be signed and sealed when news leaked back in April that two icons of the UK’s tech startup world were joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. But it gradually emerged that the actual name of the project would change and there were no real details, not even a web site to explain how it would work. But at last night’s Europas Awards in London, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman (Lastminute and mydeco) announced the launch of the fund they’ve now set up together: PROfounders Capital. It’s understood that Birch, who exited from Bebo when it sold to AOL last year for $850m, is the prime investor, however they hope to double the “founder-lead” £30m fund over the next few months.

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The Europas, the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, were held last night, Thursday July 9, 2009 in London. Check out our live blog from the event. For these inaugural awards, over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and the results merged with those from 19 expert advisors from across Europe. Here are the winners, highly commended and finalists in each category. Congratulations to all!

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The Data Portability wars just got a little more interesting. Power.com, the service that lets users aggregate their social networks into a single hub, is countersuing Facebook for restricting users’ ability to export and move their own data. The company is claiming that Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things. This should be fun.

It’s been over six months since we last heard about these two duking it out, so here’s a quick refresher: Power.com launched last August, offering users the ability to import their latest updates and user information from Facebook, MySpace, and a number of other social networks. It did so by tapping into the social networks’ APIs when available, but also by scraping user data when they couldn’t access it through other means — a big no-no for most social networks, as we saw with the Scoble/Plaxo fiasco. It didn’t take long for Facebook to file suit against Power.com for scraping user data and storing user credentials (another violation of Facebook’s ToS). A week later we heard that the two parties might be close to a settlement, but apparently that didn’t work out — the suit is still pending.

Power.com CEO Steve Vachani likens the current situation with Facebook to one the cell phone carriers saw before they allowed for number portability. In the case of the cell phones, users were effectively locked into a certain carrier because they had spent so much time building up contacts and giving them their phone numbers, and it would be too much effort to switch to a new one. It’s an analogy that has been drawn since the data portability movement began, and while it may make sense, there’s no guarantee the courts will view phone numbers and a user’s social network data in the same light.

That said, Power.com is making some good points. The idea that users aren’t allowed to input their username and passwords into other services is particularly hypocritical, as that’s exactly what Facebook invites you to do to import contacts from services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Facebook can point to its efforts with Facebook Connect, which lets you log in with your Facebook username at third party sites and import some select data from your profile, as evidence of its openness. But this isn’t true data portability, it’s just a new walled garden — third parties are generally only allowed to cache your data, which means that you’re still tethered to Facebook.

Of course, while we may not like the current situation, there may well not be anything illegal about it — that’s up to the courts to decide. We’ve all agreed to the Facebook Terms of Service, and there’s no question that Power.com breaks them. We’ll be following the upcoming case closely.

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