Ik kan iets, jij hebt iets: het nieuwe barteren

Een deeleconomie is helemaal niet paradoxaal, schreef ik twee weken geleden. Het is eerder dubbelop, een pleonasme. Economie gaat juist over het delen en verdelen van schaarse goederen tussen mensen en de keuzes die ze daarbij maken. Economie is de studie van ruil in de ruimste zin van het woord. Swishing Dikwijls wordt daarbij geld […]

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With 4M Apartment Rentals Viewed On Its Site, Lovely Is Breaking Free Of Litigious Craigslist And Raising A Series A

lovelyLogoLovely, the apartment search service that was initially built as a better and easier way of finding available apartment rentals originally listed in the large-but-feature-light Craigslist.org, has now racked up 4 million apartment listings on its site (1 million in the last 30 days) as it tackles the $10 billion residential rental market as an aggregator of other rental listings services — once described to me by founder Blake Pierson as the “Kayak” of rentals. Now it is raising money for a Series A round — amount still unspecified — to add to a previous angel round of $2 million from investors that include Keith Rabois of Square; Ben Ling (formerly of Badoo and Google), Walter Kortschak (Summit Partners), Tom Byrne (Loopnet), Colin Evans (Stubhub), Alex Zubillaga, 500 Startups, Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel and others.

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Lovely Goes From Craigslist Target To The Kayak Of Apartment Rentals As It Launches Nationwide

lovelyLogoThe Craigslist crackdown on usage of its listings data by third parties has had some fairly strong fallout. Some have shut down operations after getting cease & desist orders; some, like 3Taps and PadMapper, are now in court defending themselves on copyright infringement allegations. But here’s news of another taking a third way: Lovely, a site based around a map interface that helps people find apartments, created to aggregate Craigslist and other sources of apartment rental data, is today launching nationwide.

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3Taps Files Countersuit, Says Craigslist Is Anticompetitive. ‘We Just Want To Use Data Without Fear Of Being Sued’

craigslist-logoCraigslist may have a peace sign as part of its logo, but the war over its data continues. As TechCrunch reported it would yesterday, 3Taps has today filed a countersuit against Craigslist in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, responding point by point to Craigslist’s allegations of copyright infringement and further levelling counter-accusations at Craigslist of uncompetitive and antitrust behavior. We’ve embedded the full suit below.

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3Taps Is Planning To File A Countersuit Against Craigslist Tomorrow, Citing Antitrust Laws And Uncompetitive Behavior

powered by 3tapsThe legal fight between mega-listings site Craigslist and third parties that have used its data in their own applications looks like it is taking on a new dimension this week. 3Taps, the company sued by Craigslist in July over 3Taps’ Craigslist data API, is planning to file a countersuit against Craigslist, citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state antitrust laws, TechCrunch has learned. The suit will be filed in Federal Court in the Northern District of California on Monday.

At issue is the claim that the information on Craigslist is already publicly available through searches on sites like Google. Here’s one example:

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Craigslist Tries To Improve Its Image(s): Inline Photos Appearing Alongside Listings

Screen shot 2012-08-10 at 12.41.21Craigslist has been making a lot of moves to ensure that third party developers get off its lawn, but the listings giant is also, it seems, trying to make that lawn a little more attractive for residents. At some point not too long ago it seems, the site quietly introduced a feature that lets users view images inline, on the same page as category listings, and when you hover your cursor on the thumbnail image, it enlarges. In the past, users would have had to click through to specific entries to see those pictures; this feature makes that no longer the case, at least in some categories.

It’s a small move, both figuratively and literally. But it’s a sign that Craigslist itself is incorporating some of the features that third parties have been developing for sites that utilized listings “scraped” from Craigslist. The improvements come at the same time that Craigslist has been making a lot of moves to restrict how its content gets used elsewhere. Most notably, it has sent cease and desist letters to those sites that scrape its data to use in third-party listings services; and some of those have progressed into actual lawsuits. Craigslist also cut off the ability for Google and other search engines to index its listings in its cache, by excluding high-level categories in its robots.txt file. And last week it began to display an exclusivity clause for all new postings, although now that exclusivity clause has been removed again.

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Y Combinator-Backed Local Marketplace App Yardsale Launches Nationwide

yardsaleYardsale, a mobile app to help folks sell goods to local buyers, is now available throughout the U.S., after a long, long period of testing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The latest version of the app, which hooks into Craigslist and enables users to easily list items for sale, hopes to take on other local marketplaces by reducing the friction associated with creating listings, and then dealing with flaky buyers afterward.

The Yardsale guys believe that everyone has some shit they’d like to get rid of, if only Craigslist and eBay weren’t such a pain in the ass to deal with. On Craigslist, you’re faced with buyers who’d rather spend time haggling than actually buying your stuff. And when you do agree on a price, you never know whether your buyer will actually show up to, you know, buy the items. As for eBay, well, you are up against a growing number of small businesses, which have cropped up to largely make individual sellers seem irrelevant. In either case, it’s not a good user experience.

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