Last week, we reported on a disturbing story of a woman who returned to her San Francisco apartment to find it utterly burglarized, terrorized, and mutilated by someone who had rented it via Airbnb for a week. Read the shocking details of the burglary here. READ MORE
Google Offers, the daily deals service Google launched in June that now operates in the New York City, San Francisco and Portland areas, will soon be benefiting from the company’s acquisition of Dealmap, a site that posts aggregated deals, discounts, and coupons to a local map, reports ZDNet. Dealmap says it has more than two million users of its web, mobile, social and e-mail products, and more than 85 million monthly visitors to its partner network. READ MORE
Welcome back vacation warriors! You picked a great time to be away last week. Outside of tech, there was really only one story to pay attention to: Washington continuing to fiddle while the deficit burned. High drama was not limited to the political sphere, however. It was drama and not Apple, Google or Facebook dominating the tech world last week. Here’s an update of what happened while you were… Off the grid! READ MORE
If you’ve wanted to use Customer Relationship Management software but haven’t because you can’t afford the investment, now is a good time to try it out. Assistly, which provides cloud-based CRM and customer support software to the likes of Yelp, Etsy and Pandora, announced last week that it’s now giving any company a free (and full-featured) Full-Time Agent license along with version 2.0 of its SaaS software. The software is $1 an hour for each additional part-time agent, or $49 a month for every additional full-time agent. READ MORE
This week, we learned about the one major blemish on Airbnb’s otherwise-spotless record: On June 26, a woman named “EJ” returned to her San Francisco apartment to find it completely ransacked, burglarized, and vandalized by someone who had rented it via Airbnb for a week. Read the shocking details of the burglary here. READ MORE
Airbnb, a website that helps users find short-term accommodations in the living rooms and recreation rooms of cities around the world, announced today that it has raised $112 million in second round funding from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst on a valuation of $1 billion. The company’s previous round of funding totaled $7.8 million. READ MORE
Offline Labs, a young start-up comprised of ex-Slide developers and $1 million in rapidly acquired seed money, has now released its new product: Sōsh. Developed under the codename Project Dragōn, Sōsh provides curated activities with the goal to provide an ultimate online guide to local activities . Bridging the gap between social media and real life interaction, Sōsh decides the best activities available in a local area via an algorithm based on user interest and in-house curation. READ MORE
Hot on the heels of the daily deals model, June 2011 start-up Crowd Seats is offering deep discounts for users in a new niche market: sports tickets. With the tactic of group-buying in mind, the super-young start-up aims to give users the ability to score sweet deals to their favorite sports stadiums, 50 to 90 percent off of face value, without breaking the franchise’s bank. READ MORE
Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s vice president of commerce, visited VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco to discuss her company’s plans for mobile and online payments. Tilenius, who is responsible for Google Wallet and Google Offers, the company’s payment system and “daily deals” loyalty program, respectively, believes the company is just getting started. READ MORE
If news of Dropbox‘s latest funding round is true, the cloud storage service has achieved the same overall valuation as Twitter. According to TechCrunch, DropBox is raising between $200 million and $300 million in its latest round of funding, which would place the company’s valuation in the $5 billion to $10 billion range. READ MORE
