Klout Acquires Local An...

Flush with new capital , Klout , the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn , YouTube, Foursquare , Google+ and other social apps, is making its first acquisition. Klout is purchasing mobile and local neighborhood app Blockboard . Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Blockboard develops a neighborhood app through which neighbors can interact with one another. They can report potholes and graffiti directly to the city, alert each other about crime and vandalism through a Blockwatch, post general observations about the neighborhood, ask their neighbors questions, and post pictures of lost and found items. Basically, the app is focused on creating a community within real neighborhood. Blockboard was co-founded by Dave Baggeroer, Stephen Hood and Josh Whiting , who worked as an engineer at Craigslist and Delicious (Delicious founder Joshua Schachter is an investor in the startup). The company raised a $1 million in seed funding in 2010 from Schachter, Mitch Kapor, the Founder Collective, Battery Ventures, Harrison Metal, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. So how does this fit into Klout? The company says that the technology and team will be used to invest in local and mobile product efforts. Klout has yet to come out with native mobile apps and will be using Blockboard’s expertise in local and mobile to further develop mobile products. Details haven’t been revealed on how the mobile apps will work, but perhaps there will be a local element with the addition of Blockboard. As Klout writes in its blog post: To keep driving toward our mission of unlocking every user’s influence, we need to make Klout useful and accessible wherever they are – whether they’re at home or on the go. For background, Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. The company topped 10 billion API calls in December, which is up from 100 million API calls in January, 2011. The company has more than 4,000 API partners, up from around 100 in early 2010. And it has indexed north of 100 million public profiles. Klout also just raised around $30 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and others, with partner Chi-Hua Chien joining the startup’s board. Here’s a demo of Blockboard from last year’s Crunch-Up:

Garage Sale App Rumgr R...

Three Zappos alums are trying to replicate the garage sale experience on your smartphone — and their startup  Rumgr just raised a $500,000 seed round from a group of investors that includes Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Co-founder Dylan Bathurst says the basic idea came from his own attempts at selling furniture before a move. When users open the app, they’re presented with a list of goods that people nearby are offering for sale. If they see something they like, there’s a public chat associated with each item, where they can ask the owner questions. And if you’re ready to make a purchase, you can negotiate the price, then go to a private chat to work out the hand-off details. An early version of Rumgr is already live, but the startup is launching an update today that includes a separate screen for making offers, a map of nearby sales, and new tabs for tracking what you want to buy and sell. (It’s currently iPhone-only.) Now that Bathurst and his team are actually launching a company, they’ve discovered that there are, in fact, other garage sale-type services out there — and of course there’s always Craigslist. The difference, says co-founder Ray Morgan, is that Rumgr wants to fundamentally reinvent the experience for a new device. “We’re not trying to replicate Craigslist on the phone,” he says. For one thing, Rumgr is trying to make the listing process as easy as possible. You just upload a photo and that’s it — no description necessary. And the app doesn’t allow users to search for a specific category, like couches or beds. It sounds like the company isn’t completely ruling out a search feature in the future, but Morgan says that’s not the point. Instead, users are supposed to stumble on random, cool stuff, just as they would at a garage sale. Bathurst and Morgan admit that it may be a challenge to attract enough people in each location for the app to be useful, but they say Rumgr can become a vibrant community with a relatively small core of engaged, connected users — which is what happened in early tests, with only 40 or so of the team’s friends and colleagues. In addition to Hsieh, Rumgr’s investors include Zappos CTO Arun Rajan, Fred Mossler, and Andrew Donner, CEO and owner of Resort Gaming Group. Following  Hsieh’s vision of revitalizing downtown Las Vegas  and turning it into a startup hub, Rumgr is based in Las Vegas. (After all, as former Zappos employees, Bathurst, Morgan, and their third co-founder Alex Morgan already live there.) Among the items in their office? A whiteboard purchased off Rumgr.

SittingAround Launches ...

SittingAround , a new service that allows parents to quickly and more easily find and schedule a babysitter, is launching today. The business is the creation of CEO Erica Zidel, a former management consultant in the Boston area (and mom) and CTO Ted Tieken, who, like Zidel, is a Harvard grad.  What’s unique about SittingAround is how it leverages users’ social networking connections – like those on Facebook – in order to build trusted relationships between parents and sitters. If you’ve ever used a traditional childcare-finding service, like Care.com , for example, or even Craigslist, you know the feeling of having to wade through dozens of listings, without really knowing which caregivers are better than others. Who have your friends used? Did they like them? Traditional sites can’t tell you. However, on SittingAround , the site pulls in data from popular social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, to help you immediately see who your friends would use and recommend. “Babysitting is a complex and unique problem. You have a need that is irregular, generally, but you also want a high level of trust,” explains Zidel. “What we do is we allow people to see how they’re connected to each other, including the people in their community, the sitters that they use, and how the sitters are connected to each other, to really pass trust along the social graph. You’re able to form your own network of sitters.” SittingAround, which grew out of an earlier site that helped parents find local babysitting co-ops (parents who trade sitting duties with each other), doesn’t just help you find a sitter – it also helps you schedule them. Using the site’s free tools, parents can send out a single message to their network of sitters when they’re in need. To reach sitters not on SittingAround, the site supports entering email addresses, to save you time. The sitters themselves can also maintain their own schedules on the site with calendars showing their availability, allowing parents to quickly see whether their favorite sitters are free that day or not. While those are the main points, SittingAround has many other notable features that give it a unique edge. For example, it has partnered with a service to provide free background checks to sitters and parents alike, which will help immediately weed out less desirable quotient. (After all, if it’s free, why wouldn’t someone do the background check?) They’re also working on curating daily deals for select areas, to provide a source for “date night deals,” which could help SittingAround expand from just a care-finding resource to an entire “night out” planning tool. For now, SittingAround is a freemium service. For $15/year, you can eliminate ads and have access to priority support. But the business model is still in the experimental phase. SittingAround’s initial product, a babysitting coop, now has 3,000 families in 6 countries trading care with each other. The sitter-finding aspect to the service, meanwhile, is launching now in New York, Boston, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, where it has a waitlist in over 1,000 sitters. While not officially live in other locations yet, the Sitter Marketplace is open and available for anyone interested to sign up. The service will launch both a mobile web version and mobile apps (Android first) in early 2012. The company is currently in due diligence with angels in the Boston area, while raising a $600,000 round of funding with a targeted close in February.

Popular Barcode Scannin...

ShopSavvy , which you probably know as the barcode-scanning, price comparison app, is  launching a major new feature today: SavvyListings, a mobile marketplace. With the addition, the company is hoping to turn its user base of some 20 million into customers who buy and sell items directly with each other. To use the SavvyListings feature, you simply scan the barcode of product in question, then head to “Options,” and “Sell this Item.” (You will need to sign in with your ShopSavvy account). ShopSavvy, thanks to its database of pricing information, will be able to suggest a price for each item you choose to sell. It will also default the item’s condition to “gently used.” Like a dumbed-dumbed version of Craigslist (yes, it can get even more basic, if you can believe it!) listings don’t have to include images, descriptions, categories or shipping costs. It’s just “I have this item,” essentially. Potential sellers can then reach out the buyers to make any sort of pickup and delivery arrangements they choose. From then on, the item will appear under the “Local Stores” section until it’s sold. The result transforms ShopSavvy from just a utility for comparing prices into a country-wide mobile yard sale. Only one problem? If you have second thoughts after listing the item, there doesn’t seem to be an option to delete it from within the app itself. (So no, my copy of “ 20 Under 40 ” is not actually for sale, but thanks for asking).

WalkScore Raises $2M To...

You might have seen the subtle brag at the bottom of Craigslist apartment searchposts — WalkScore 99! WalkScore 100! WalkScore 85! Well, why should you care about whatever a WalkScore is? Because the score rates accessibility by foot to things people want to access by foot like restaurants, theaters and public transit for any address in the US, Canada and New Zealand. Useful right? Well it made sense to investors, who’ve just angel funded the company to the tune of $2 million — those investors included Shel Kaphan, Rudy Gadre, Edward Yim and Geoff Entress. Today over 10,000 real estate sites like Zillow and Estately use the rating to bulk up their listings, even though “for the most part, the experience of trying to find a place online continues to be all about price and bedrooms,” WalkScore CEO Josh Herst t old GeekWire . As someone who just snagged an apartment, I can safely say that it is also about cool places close by, accessibility to friends and fun things to do in your downtime. WalkScore, ftw.