Tradyo Wants To Take On...

A number of startups are trying to take on online classifieds giant Craigslist, including Antego , EggDrop , and many others. Tradyo is one of the latest companies to join the group, offering a social, mobile marketplace that allows users to buy and sell items with others around them. The startup’s iPhone app allows users to buy and sell used goods in your area in realtime. The app uses GPS to reveal the items available around you, allowing you to sell an item, search your community for cool stuff, and receive push notifications when an item you want gets listed, or when someone wants to buy what you’ve listed. Tradyo also encourages users to connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts to verify themselves. In addition, Tradyo also offers an in-app instant messaging ability that allows you to see when a buyer or seller has read a message. Finally, if you can’t find what you’re looking for on Tradyo, you can set up an alert and Tradyo will notify you when it is available in the marketplace. Similar to the other startups in the space, Tradyo is piggybacking on the idea that smartphones are going to change the way consumers actually use Craigslist. In fact, the startup compares itself to a “StumbleUpon for tangible goods.” The app is currently available for San Francisco and Toronto. Tradyo is a part of Israeli American startup incubator UpWest Labs .

RentSocial, Launching T...

Looking for an apartment is usually pretty simple: you go on Craigslist, find three apartments that look like they’ve been used to chop up beeves, and then move in with your buddy whose roommate made meth in the basement. At least that’s how it worked for me a few years ago. Now, however, you have stuff like RentSocial. RentSocial is the front end for Yield Technologies property management systems. Yield, for example, makes a product called RentSentinel for property managers to handle renter rolls for large buildings. By plugging into this existing install base, Yield has been able to create a rental research site with real-time updates from each apartment complex, thereby allowing you to find other people who live in a complex you’re looking at or, barring that, read reviews of places people have lived. This, in turn, allows considerably more control over your house-hunting. You can find apartments based on good reviews and star ratings and you can share the apartments with friends. You can also create a private “conversation” about a particular building, thereby allowing your parents and friends to get in on the hunting action. RentSocial launched today and is already connected to over 5,000 rental properties across the country (and soon in Canada). Even if you don’t feel like sharing your apartment hunt with your friends, you have to admit their strategy of selling both B2B and B2C is pretty ingenious. I spoke with Eric Broughton and Andy Hamilton, both of Yield, about their new product and how hard it is to find an apartment without rats.

After Ditching Auctions...

EggDrop , essentially a mobile app alternative to Craigslist, is starting to pick up steam. The company now boasts half a million downloads of its app on iOS and Android, with $8 million in listings from across the 50 U.S. states and the U.K. (EggDrop’s top two markets). The app originally launched last June , backed by $1 million in funding in a round led by BlueRun Ventures and SV Angel. But that first experience doesn’t look much like EggDrop today. In November, the company rolled out a major update (ver. 2.0) which completely replaced the auction format found in the original with more traditional marketplace-style listings. Since then, over 5,000 items have been sold within the app, including electronics, games, furniture, and even grand pianos and wedding dresses. With the first version of EggDrop , the idea was to introduce a somewhat unique pricing model – the “falling price” auction. Instead of setting a price for an item, the seller would enter both a minimum and maximum price. Over 72 hours, the price would gradually fall if there were no takers. As it turned out, that system didn’t prove to be a hit with users. “Sellers tend to be very protective of their minimum price,” explains co-founder Dan Zheng as to why the original model didn’t really take off. “When people put down the price range they always think back to what they paid for it, rather than what the fair market value is.” Now, sellers just create a normal listing with whatever price they want, and leave it up indefinitely, if they choose. In fact, the setting to automatically re-list the item after 7 days is switched on by default, so, unlike with Craigslist, sellers don’t have to continually return to create a new posting. However, if the item is of a time-sensitive nature – like concert tickets, for example – users can configure the item to expire. Currently, EggDrop is proving popular in major metro areas in the U.S., starting with L.A. and followed by (in order) New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, D.C., Detroit and Denver. Outside the U.S., there’s been some adoption in London, Manchester and Birmingham, U.K. and even a bit of uptake in other regions like Australia, Canada, Argentina and Spain. This, despite the fact that the company hasn’t made any efforts at localization, only a bit of translation work to support Spanish. Zheng doesn’t have exact numbers on how much of the user base are in these top U.S. metro areas, but if he had to guess, it would be over half the app’s users. He also notes that roughly a quarter of the users (25%-30%) are either moms or students, looking to clean out closets or save a few extra dollars. Interestingly, one of EggDrop’s key selling points – its ability to cross-post listings to Craigslist – hasn’t had a major impact on the app’s adoption. It’s a very small percentage of users that discover the app that way, something in the “single digits,” says Zheng. Instead, users are finding the app through old-fashioned means: word-of-mouth, app store searches, and, for a week earlier this year, through a “featured” listing on the Google Android Market …Google Play store. While all the above numbers refer to organic listings created by EggDrop users, at any given time, 5% of the listings are from external, third-party sources, namely Craigslist. Zheng says the team is careful not to include too many of these. “I’m pretty mindful of the balance between organic listings and third-party listings because the experience is slightly different. I really don’t want to confuse users,” he says. Over the past few weeks, the company has added a couple of notable features to the app: a built-in anonymous messaging feature that allows buyers and sellers to communicate in real-time without having to share mobile phone numbers, as well as a new section for “Wanted” listings. With the latter, the idea is that EggDrop will be able to match buyers and sellers based on description, price and location. While originally, the company looked like a modernized take on what Craigslist could be if built in the mobile era, recent events have put the app in closer competition with other newcomers like Zaarly , for example. Up until earlier this month, one of Zaarly’s biggest differentiating features (besides its primary focus on tasks, not goods), was the anonymity of its users. But Zaarly’s  revamped reputation system now lets buyers and sellers know exactly who each other are. EggDrop, meanwhile, takes a more middle-of-the-road approach, using badges and “karma scores” to rate transactions, while keeping some aspects of buyer/seller communication anonymous. Note, too, that Zaarly claims to have 300,000 “semi-regular” users – that’s a different measurement than EggDrop’s 500,000 downloads, to be clear. However, while Zheng says that they don’t have an exact user count, they’re definitely in the “hundreds of thousands” along this metric, too. (And some of them only use EggDrop online via website.) Now with five engineers on board, including Zheng and co-founder Brian Lynch, the team at EggDrop is working to roll out an iPad-optimized version of the mobile marketplace. No ETA on that just yet. In the meantime, you can download the EggDrop mobile app here .

FindTheBest Launches A ...

FindTheBest , the startup led by DoubleClick co-founder Kevin O’Connor and backed by Kleiner Perkins’ sFund, has been trying to help consumers make the right decisions by giving them more, and better-structured, data . Now the company is bringing that strategy to a new market — classified ads. “We think classified has a lot of room for improvement,” O’Connor says. “It’s a pretty scary process, and you never quite know what you’re buying.” What’s really missing, he argues, is context. For example, if I were to go online and try to find a used car, I’d have to do a ton of research before I had any idea of what a reasonable price is, what kind of mileage I should be looking for, and so on. That’s where FindTheBest comes in. If you do a search in its classified listings, it brings up the results in its familiar grid, displaying the basic data so you can compare (in the car example) according to price, color, mileage, and so on. Things get a little more interesting when you click on an individual item. You can see a sample listing an Audi A4 in the screenshot above. It shows you the average price, both for that specific year and make, and on a more general level, for all 2011 sedans. (So if the price is considerably higher than average, you’d better be getting something special.) There are charts highlighting some of the key specifications. And rather than forcing you to read a poorly written, randomly structured Craigslist description, FindTheBest automatically generates the description from the data. (So it starts, “This Used 2011 Audi A4 is listed for sale at $36,988, which is $2,410 more expensive than … “) O’Connor says this is a common theme at the company: “Creating narratives that take this factual information and put it into context.” Similarly, an apartment listing can compare the rent with similar apartments in the same city, and a job listing can compare the salary to similar jobs. Of course, none of this data can completely guarantee that you won’t get ripped off. But it puts more data in consumers’ hands, in a way that feels helpful rather than overwhelming. For now, FindTheBest is pulling the listings from several partners, and also getting more data from public sources. Eventually, O’Connor says it will probably add an option to post a listing directly to the site.

Real Estate Site VivaRe...

VivaReal.com.br, a real estate marketplace in Brazil, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a number of angels and investors, including Greg Waldorf, Simon Baker, Shaun Di Gregorio, Wences Casares, Micky Malka, Ariel Poler, Gordon Rubenstein, 500 Startups, Jeff Fluhr, Errol Damelin, Florian Pass, Monashees Capital and Kaszek Ventures. As co-founder Brian Requarth tells me in more developed markets like the U.S., property searchers have the option to find almost all the inventory for sale or rent online. In Brazil, a fraction of the listings are available online and it is still a highly fragmented marketplace. In the U.S., we have the MLS, which is a centralized database for rental and for sale listings, but in Brazil there’s no such mechanism in place. With 57,000 real estate brokers in Brazil, the country’s real estate market is largely offline, Requarth explains. And property searchers are under served since there is a dearth of buyers’ agents in Brazil. There is an information gap, which Requarth says can be filled with an online portal. Similar to how Craigslist, Zillow and Trulia function, VivaReal connects buyers and sellers with properties for sale and rent. Users search for and/or list properties by location, size, rental vs. sale, and more. The company also focuses on helping expats and investors find properties in Brazil with an English version of the site. And the startup plans to deploy mobile optimized versions of VivaReal.com.br for smart phones and tablets this year. After two years, the company is seeing 1 million monthly unique visitors in Brazil, says Requarth. And currently, the site lists properties in 15 cities in Brazil and will be expanding over time.