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Posts Tagged ‘vacation’

Vacation home rental site HomeAway is acquiring BedandBreakfast.com, a site for finding bed-and-breakfast properties all over the world.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but BedAndBreakfast.com will continue to operate as a separate site from HomeAway.

Austin, TX.-based BedandBreakfast.com lists more than 10,000 B&Bs across 100 countries. HomeAway, which is also based in Austin, was valued at $1.15 billion back in 2008 when the company raised a massive round of $250 million. The site has acquired at least twelve vacation home rental sites, including Homelidays, VRBO, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr and OwnersDirect.co.uk.

Rumors were recently swirling about a possible IPO for HomeAway, but the company was quick to dismiss the possibility of a public offering this year. HomeAway also aired a SuperBowl commercial in January, which proved to be popular amongst viewers.

No, we’re not exactly moving into the wedding announcement space (yet). But we’d like to take this opportunity to wish Dave Morin, who watches over Facebook’s Platform as senior manager, and Brittany Bohnet, a Google Product Marketing Manager who has worked on products like Maps, Earth and iGoogle, all the best for the future. The couple just got engaged in some extremely sunny location.

We’re a little disappointed in both geeks though, for not actually doing the proposing on Twitter, but we’ll give them some props for announcing the acquisition deal on Twitter. Unfortunately, the terms were not disclosed, but we’re digging for more information.

Best of luck to both from the entire TechCrunch team!

Oh, and if those faces look familiar to you: Morin and Bohnet both starred in the infamous Cyprus party video that marked the ‘death of Web 2.0′ for many as the vacation video was recorded right around the time the global economy started falling apart.

Yes, I wanted to see it again too:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

There are a vast amount of sites, such as VRBO, that serve as a platform for owners to rent out their vacation homes to vacation goers. But the main drawback to these sites is the risk of renting your home to someone who you don’t know or have any personal connection with. Second Porch hopes to mitigate this problem with its Facebook app that lets owners create a free property listing that can be broadcast to your Facebook friends.

The app is fairly simple. Once you list a property via Second Porch’s application, this will be published in your feed with a link to the listing. The app itself aggregates all listings onto a map (owners can also choose to let anyone on Facebook see their listings) and lets people search for rentals by location, rate or amenities. And of course, you can search or filter by properties owned by friends. Currently, the app has over 700 listings for rental properties.

Second Porch plans to introduce a paid service which requires owners to pay $99 per year to provide additional marketing for the listings including redirecting your inquiry stream to a property manage and let owners link to information like a Flickr photo album, another Facebook page, a property web site and a Twitter profile.

I think the app is fairly useful and I like the idea of using your social graph to both advertise and find rental properties. If the app is able to gain a solid user base, it could prove to be a popular destination to both advertise and find rental properties.

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If the Internet has made one thing crystal clear, it’s that physical borders and geographical distance are no longer necessarily an absolute barrier for conducting business.

More and more companies are getting accustomed to the idea of being able to do business with companies on the other side of the world using nothing but digital communication means, or to have entire business units or projects led by teams made up of people located all over the globe.

Hence the popularity of services such as oDesk and Elance, websites where you can outsource given projects to registered programmers, designers, writers, legal experts and whatnot. Another player in this market is GetAFreelancer, an Australian company that’s been offering freelance jobs online since it was founded back in 2004.

Today, the company is announcing that it has changed its name to the far better-sounding and undoubtedly more memorable Freelancer.com. They bought the domain name from a private individual who used to run a magazine called Computer Freelancer over 15 years ago, for a ’six figure sum’. All in an effort to increase its visibility and profile.

GetAFreelancer CEO Matt Barrie tells us that the site recently hit a big milestone and now boasts over 1,000,000 registered professionals and businesses from 234 countries and territories worldwide. Over 475,000 jobs have been posted on the website to date, for a sum of over $43 million.

Not too shabby for a bootstrapped venture.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Earth Day is in full swing. Have you offset your carbon emissions yet? Well, there are plenty of apps and Websites out there ready to help you do just that and more. Green is the new black. Speaking of which, if you want to be green, you’d better avoid black cars and Websites with all-black backgrounds (like goth sites and sometimes even Google, although thankfully not this year). And don’t even think about printing out an e-mail (not that you would—unless it had really important information on it that you needed hard copy of like a contract or a map, in which case, be my guest).

Seriously, green apps are great and we fully support them here at TechCrunch. The first step to dealing with a problem is often to measure it. And theer are plenty of Websites that let you measure your carbon footprint such as Co2Stats, (for Websites) and Zerofootprint (for people). But all too often these turn out to be nothing more than green vanity apps, designed to make you feel good about being green, but not really impacting the environment one way or the other.

For instance, consider a Facebook app just that launched called GoRecycle411 (developed by Jerry Kelly, the former VP of finance at Mark Cuban’s 2929 Productions). You enter how many cans, bottles, newspapers, or office paper you’ve recycled and it tells you how much energy you saved and posts your achievement to all your friends via the Facebook News feed. It keeps a tally, and translates your energy into how many barrels of oil, trees, gallons of water, pounds of carbon dioxide, kilowatts of electricity, and cubic yards of garbage you save. It also keeps track of how much everyone using the application is saving.

The more you recycle, the more virtual points you get which you can spend on virtual gifts for friends like a polar bear, a windmill, or a tree. Of course, you can enter whatever numbers you want, and you still get all those good green karma points. All in all, it is better than a lot of other Facebook apps. Not only do you get to show off how green you are, but you get to shame your friends into recycling at the same time.

Another example is Greenbookings, a Dutch travel site that calculates the carbon emissions caused by your vacation and offsets that at the end of the year by investing in green energy projects. You pay nothing extra for the offsets, but you get to feel good about it and Greenbookings uses that as marketing lure to get you to book flights, hotels, and rental cars through its site. Why not, right? It is easier for one company to offset a years worth of travel-related carbon emissions than for each traveler to do so individually, and probably cheaper too. Except that who knows what Greenbookings is going to invest that offset money into. Last year, it put the money into a hydroelectric project in China. Water power is certainly cleaner than a coal plant, but isn’t China notorious for creating huge hydroelectric projects that wreak all sorts of other environmental and human havoc? I guess you just have to trust Greenbookings on that one

(Photo by Steve Jurvetson. Yes, the venture capitalist. Is it me, or is he channeling Thomas Kinkade, the “Painter of Light” in this image?)

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So StumbleUpon , a social bookmarking site that lets users browse and discover new websites by clicking a button, was a subsidiary of eBay for just less than two years. The acquisition made the startup’s founders extremely wealthy, given that they raised just $1.5 million in venture capital, and sold for $75 million. You’d think that the founders (Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Justin LeFrance) would be quite content to go into semi-hibernation at eBay and contemplate their vacation homes for years to come

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StumbleUpon, A Case Study In The Efficient Allocation Of Resources