Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Techrunch is live-blogging the Techcrunch 40 conference. So far, I like TripIt best.

TripIt creates an easy-to-use travel itinerary for you when you send them the confirmation emails you receive from airlines, hotels, car rental companies and the various online travel websites. TripIt automatically adds maps and weather forecasts to the itinerary. Then, you can add notes, more destinations, etc.

The problems I see are:
1. Getting people to use TripIt. I can't see how you get people to remember to use the service. It's the kind of thing that travel junkies might use, but I can't see regular travelers thinking, "Aha! I'll just forward my confirmation email to TripIt". I guess one possibility would be to do deals with the airlines so that the airlines build TripIt into the confirmation process - maybe with an opt-in from the customer.

2. More importantly, I don't see the business model. I assume TripIt is looking to monetize the service via a combination of display ads and lead gen for airlines. Either way, I don't see how the volume gets high enough to make this exciting, except possibly as a feature set for a larger travel site. So, to me, this looks like a build-and-flip.

Overall, a nice feature set but I'm not sure it's much of a business. Which is a little surprising, because the founding team is really impressive.

B / B+

Labels: grades, travel, TripIt

New feature: Grade the business model.

Techrunch has the winners of Seedcamp, the Euro incubator challenge.

One, in particular, takes the cake for worst idea I've seen in a good long while: Rentmineonline.com ("RMO").

First, the back-story: The founder has been set on doing a company for years. He moved to Silicon Valley, worked in VC, went to b-school, moved to Amsterdam, bought a boat to house the business, and launched RMO. So this isn't some rookie coming into the game.

What we have here is an attempt to create an "eBay for rentals". But what do most people rent? The high gross merchandise classifieds verticals (where a classifieds / marketplace business makes most of its money) are: homes, cars and jobs.

Homes - A highly competitive market with specialized businesses, including Rent.com (an eBay subsidiary), competing with traditional classifieds platforms.

Cars - The insurance issues alone would stop anyone from being able to rent out their personal car to strangers. A personal car rental site would require serious, specialized tools to make this work. [Come to think of it - this might be a pretty good business idea itself. Many people who own cars in cities would be happy to give their cars up for 2-3 days per month to cover 1/3-1/2 of their car payment. And you could under-cut the big rental companies.]

Jobs - I guess you could imagine a site where people rent themselves out for odd jobs. However, no one is going to get rich taking a 5% transaction fee on three hours at $8 per hour. Plus, the kind of people who make a living in this way are not exactly spending their time on the internet. Finally, you would run into insurance / background check issues pretty quickly. So - another vertical which would require considerable effort / specialization to do well.

For RMO to have a chance, it will need to focus on one vertical and try to out-compete existing players. However, its generalist branding, late entry into the market and relative lack of capital place it at a major disadvantage.

I can't believe this is one of the six best companies Seedcamp could find to fund.

Grade: C- / D+

Labels: C-, D+, grades, Ratemineonline.com, Seedcamp