The latest example involves cable ties, AC-DC adapters, radiation detectors and the like. In April of last year, Amazon rolled out AmazonSupply, an e-commerce site featuring such industrial goods. Google followed suit this January, testing Google Shopping for Suppliers, which also helps shoppers find items tailored for businesses.

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Here’s the summary of what Tremor executives will be telling investors:

• Last year they lost $16.4 million on revenue of $105.2 million; the previous year, they lost $21 million on revenue of $90.3 million.
• During that same time period, gross margins improved from 35.2 percent to 41.7 percent.
• Its ads run on more than 500 websites and mobile apps.
• Big backers include Canaan Partners, which owns more than 19 percent of the company, as well as W Capital, Masthead Venture Partners, Meritech Capital, DFJ and General Catalyst.
• Tremor wants to raise at least $86 million, and plans to trade on the NYSE as TRMR.

Video industry officials expect that rival video ad nets YuMe and Adapt.tv may also go public this year; all of them will be looking to compete in a space dominated by Google’s YouTube, along with smaller players like Hulu.

Other carriers also have so-called “below-the-line” fees, named that because they frequently appear at the bottom of the phone bill after the service charges. Such fees help boost revenue growth in a massive organization, but consumer groups criticize them because they are less likely to be noticed by users and allow carriers to advertise lower prices than they actually charge.

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While the subcommittee panel described Apple on paper as an “egregious offender” that has “sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” it took a very different tone while meeting in person with Cook. “So nice to meet you. I have an iPad,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R.-N.H., said while greeting the Apple CEO — a cordial, but fawning, welcome, surpassed only by that of her counterpart, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. who said simply: “I love Apple. … I love Apple.”

All of this was great fodder for Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” team. As Stewart quipped during last night’s broadcast, “Who are those people? What is the opposite of a Genius Bar?”

“Apparently there is nothing Apple can do to get us mad at them,” Stewart marveled. “We could find out they’re using kitten hearts to power iPhones and we’d be like, ‘Well, if it doubles battery life, I’ll take two!’”

Yahoo’s design chief, the effervescent Tim Parsey, will be leaving his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, sources said.

As SVP of User Experience Design at Yahoo, which centralized the task under Parsey, he has been part of a range of redesigns of its major properties, including its homepage, Flickr photo-sharing site, email and more.

As I noted when Parsey arrived in early 2011, “in the 67-ring circus that has been Yahoo’s product organization, design was widely dispersed.”

Translation: It was not pretty, unless you enjoyed the Web stylings of 1997.

Parsey certainly had the cred in the design industry, with stints at Apple, Microsoft’s entertainment and devices unit, Mattel and Motorola. Just before Yahoo, he was a principal at a Seattle-based design firm called shiftalliance.

The British native ran Apple’s design studio for five years in the early 1990s and was the main dude behind Motorola’s freaky V70 switchblade mobile phone in 2001.

It’s not clear why he is leaving now, or where the crackerjack designer is headed. But, amid a lot of Yahoo turmoil since he arrived, Parsey certainly stabilized the design culture at the company.

Also in play, according to numerous sources: New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has a very “hands-on” style with regard to design — she pretty much considers herself the last and only stop on that train, among others, based on her experience at Google running a number of products including its pristine and much acclaimed front page search box. No surprise, then, she has involved herself strongly in the design process.

On his LinkedIn profile, which still lists him as working at Yahoo, Parsey talked about his ethos of design there:

“This is about weaving a global UX and UER organization from the existing 200+ designers and researchers that today support an array of different businesses. It’s part of a rather cool broader corporate transition project. It’s also very much about establishing design as a potent, world-class entity that’s fun to be part of.”

He also notes: “These days I’m very excited about the correlation between internal cultures that are truly ‘meaningful’ to designers ( and other functions ), and world-class design innovation.”

Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

But that plan is now on hold.

“While Facebook works to create a better Facebook Home experience, they have recommended that Orange in France and EE in the U.K. hold off on launching the HTC First at this time,” a France Telecom-Orange representative told AllThingsD.

Facebook is saying that it wants to work on retooling Home before it renews its effort to get the software preloaded on new devices. “As a result of customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding customization features to Facebook Home, and will limit support for new devices at this time,” Orange said.

At the launch of Facebook Home, the social network talked about a program to get more phone makers to preload the software. It showed a slide listing other hardware partners, including Samsung, ZTE, Lenovo, Sony, Alcatel One Touch and Huawei, in addition to launch partner HTC.

Neither AT&T nor HTC has commented directly on sales of the HTC First, though the carrier has dropped the price to 99 cents with a contract, down from the initial $99 sticker price.

Whether the HTC First will ever see the light of day in Europe remains unclear, though Orange said it still wants to work closely with the social network.

“Orange remains committed to bringing our customers the newest and best mobile experiences, and we will continue to build on our strong relationship with Facebook to provide these new experiences in the future,” the carrier said.

News flash! Netflix still hasn’t provided numbers about “House of Cards.”

There was a brief suggestion to the contrary on Wednesday, when the Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos. In the Q&A, Sarandos compared the audience for “House of Cards” to that of AMC’s “Walking Dead,” which caused a few of us TV-watching-watchers to wonder if Sarandos was saying that “House of Cards” had a similar number of viewers as “Walking Dead.”

If so, that would be a pretty big deal, since “Walking Dead” is one of the most popular shows on TV. The cable TV show drew nearly 12.5 million viewers for its season finale this year, and frequently beat out big broadcast shows throughout the spring.

Netflix, meanwhile, has about 30 million U.S. subscribers, period. It would be amazing if nearly half of them were watching a single show, right? And it would also say a lot about the future of TV.

Maybe one day, it will. For now, though, we will have to keep guessing about the “House of Cards” audience.

Via email, Netflix PR head Jonathan Friedland said that Sarandos was not talking about aggregate numbers when he said that “viewing is much more on par with the large-scale mainstream things like ‘The Walking Dead.’”

Instead, Friedland said, Sarandos was talking about the show’s demographic appeal, which Netflix said is wider than it might have thought. “He was saying that the viewing audience is broad, in the same way that ‘Walking Dead’s’ audience is larger than horror fans,” Friedland wrote.

That makes sense. It would be much more surprising if Netflix decided to deviate from a pledge it made loudly and often a few months ago.

For the record, here’s the full excerpt of Sarandos’s chat with THR’s excellent Lacey Rose:

THR: You’ve been reticent to share ratings data, but tell us what you have learned about the “House of Cards” audience.

Sarandos: The major international appeal for “House of Cards” was kind of a surprise because it’s a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global. Corrupt politics is not new in Latin America, as it turns out. (Laughs.) Within the U.S., you could have argued that most people who watch “Mad Men” would watch “House of Cards.” But the viewing is much more on par with the large-scale mainstream things like “The Walking Dead.” It was much younger than we thought. One of the things that surprised me was that women love the show because they love Robin Wright. And younger people love Kate Mara. Everyone is able to gravitate to this show for very different reasons.

Ben Ling, a longtime Silicon Valley angel investor and Internet exec, has joined Khosla Ventures as a venture partner.

Ling is the second hire of high-profile operating execs by Khosla. Former Square, Slide and PayPal exec Keith Rabois — who is a close friend of Ling’s — joined the firm in February.

In an interview today, Ling said he has been contemplating his next move, and the idea of becoming a VC after years of operations was appealing.

“I thought a lot about the ability to have impact across a broad set of companies, and was attracted to Khosla’s model of venture assistance,” said Ling, who added that he will focus a lot on the mobile ecosystem. “When I was younger, I thought it would be fascinating to be an investor, and here I can help a lot of companies grow and scale.”

Ling is a former Google and Facebook product exec, as well as an active investor in 80 startups, including such high-profile ones as Fab.com, Square and Quora. He was most recently COO at Badoo, but left the company last fall.

At Google, he worked on search, YouTube and local products, and was closely linked with former Googler Marissa Mayer, whom he followed internally when her responsibilities shifted there. Many thought he might next pop up at Yahoo, where she is now CEO.

Not so, but also not a surprise; Mayer provided Khosla with a lovely statement about Ling: “Ben is an amazing entrepreneurial leader and has a great eye as an investor for both talent and ideas. I’m excited to see him join Khosla Ventures to find and foster the next set of entrepreneurs who will define the technology world.”

That’s a massive amount of product to move in the first month after the device’s commercial debut. But, as noted here last week, this number doesn’t refer to devices sold to consumers, but to carriers: “The S4 may well be selling much faster than its predecessor, but not so much faster that there will be 10 million units in consumer hands next week. Some will still be sitting on carrier shelves awaiting purchase.”

And that’s worth noting. Because while many handset vendors like to tout shipments into the channel as sales, there is some variation. Apple, when it posts quarterly earnings, reports iPhone “sell in” numbers to retail partners. But when it makes its annual “First Weekend iPhone Sales Top TK” news release, it’s referring to sales to consumers. So, when Apple said last September that it sold more than five million of its iPhone 5 in three days, it wasn’t referring to devices sitting on retail shelves, but to those purchased by end users.

In a key hire, Jawbone said today that it had hired Mindy Mount, a top corporate VP at Microsoft, as its president.

The move by the San Francisco-based maker of wireless, music and wearable devices is part of what has been a major upgrading of its management and board. Recently, Jawbone added Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Rob Wiesenthal of Warner Music as directors.

Jawbone has also recently done a big acquisition — purchasing BodyMedia, a wearable health and fitness company, for $100 million. The move comes just a couple months after it bought data and digital-design companies Massive Health and Visere.

All this expansion requires tight organizational efforts and Mount has a lot of financial and operational experience, having held several key jobs at the software giant. She was most recently corporate VP and CFO at Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which includes Bing, MSN and Microsoft Advertising. Before that she held a similar job at the Entertainment and Devices Division, which has the Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone units.

Previous to that, Mount ran AOL’s U.K. unit, worked in strategy at Time Warner and also was an exec at Morgan Stanley. She has an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business and an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In an interview today, Mount said that what attracted her to Jawbone was the challenge of scaling the fast-growth company, which is helmed by CEO and co-founder Hosain Rahman.

“Right out of the block, I’ll be spending time on business operations, since the scale and scope and complexity of Jawbone has really increased,” she said. “What really attracted me to the role is that it is a really meaty one … It’s a company with great products, where I can come in and have real impact, because consumer electronics companies really have to execute.”

Jawbone products include Jawbone wireless headsets, Jambox speakers and the Up personal fitness wristbands. The company has raised a lot of funding, totaling about $210 million from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

Asked about his favorite apps, Kutcher pulled out his phone to look at his home screen.

“I use Facebook and Twitter a lot,” Kutcher said at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas, adding that he also spends a lot of time using Flipboard, Path and Couple — three companies he has invested in.

The actor and investor talked about the importance of mobile, and its current challenges when it comes to user experience and app discovery.

“I don’t think anyone has mastered mobile,” Kutcher said.

Kutcher is the wrap-up speaker at what will be the last spring show for CTIA, which is going from two shows a year to one, with next year’s event planned for September, back in Las Vegas. The final fall show focused on enterprise wireless will be in October in San Jose.

Lenovo’s solid results stand out in the global PC industry, which is struggling with weak demand as more consumers turn to tablet computers and smartphones. Global PC shipments in the first quarter fell 14 percent from a year earlier, according to research group IDC.

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According to an internal memo and now on his LinkedIn profile, Yahoo has just hired longtime McKinsey exec John DeVine as SVP of global operations. He has worked in the marketing and sales practice at the consulting firm since 1999 and has been an advocate there of “how companies need to embrace the customer experience.”

Devine will report to COO Henrique De Castro — who also worked at McKinsey — and will be helming a wide swath of operations, such as advertising solutions. DeCastro has also been searching recently for a head of the key U.S. ad unit and has tried to hire former AOL sales chief Ned Brody. That hire is limbo now, due to Brody’s 14-month non-compete contract with AOL; CEO Tim Armstrong shows no signs of letting him leave sooner.

But DeVine is on board at Yahoo, so to speak. The former submarine officer in the U.S. Navy also has a masters degree in nuclear engineering — batten down the hatches for incoming at ATD HQ! — from the University of California Berkeley and did his undergraduate work at the U.S. Naval Academy.

It’s a huge round for the company, which is much loved for its community spirit and pink “carstaches,” but has also been much questioned for its practice of having regular people essentially act as city taxicab drivers in their own cars.

The deal was a speedy one; it was negotiated over the course of the past week, said Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer.

And it brings Lyft to $83 million in total funding, having just raised a round about six months ago.

Why so much money so fast? It’s to try to get Lyft to the next level, given the expansion, competition and regulatory challenges it faces. “We can scale globally in the next 12 months,” said Zimmer.

For those paying close attention, Lyft was formerly known as Zimride, and it continues to operate a long-distance ride-sharing service under that brand, but it changed its name a month ago to reflect the momentum of the Lyft business, which is a year old.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Weiss, who led the investment, contended that Lyft differs from competitors like SideCar and Uber, which are both based in San Francisco as well and have been expanding nationally. He likes that Lyft’s mission is around “taking cars off the road,” not replacing or augmenting existing systems.

Weiss said Andreessen Horowitz was motivated to swoop in and make a deal because Lyft “looked and smelled so much like Airbnb.”

Weiss noted that he’d been following Lyft closely, and saw the service grow from 14,000 rides per week two months ago (mostly in San Francisco, but expanding in other newer cities like Los Angeles and Chicago) to 30,000 rides per week now. Plus, he said, more than half of the company’s passengers are women, which says something about safety.

“With the risk of the Samwer brothers [who infamously replicate consumer Internet businesses for the European market] and the copycats, you can’t let grass grow under your feet,” Weiss said. “You have to grow it as quickly as you can, and that’s where we come in.”

Here’s their latest attempt: “TV ad targeting,” which promises that it can find Twitter users who saw a TV ad, and then show them another ad from the same marketer when they come to Twitter.

The basic idea: If you were watching the Super Bowl, and you tweeted about it while you were watching, and Samsung ran an ad during the game, Twitter could let Samsung find you on Twitter and show you another ad, later.

If that sounds like a lot of ads to you, the TV-watching Twitter user, well … all this stuff is free, right?

Here’s a video that shows how it’s supposed to work:

The most obvious limitation here is that, for now, the program is only supposed to work if you tweet about a show while you’re watching it. And since most regular humans don’t write tweets while they watch TV — most regular humans don’t write tweets, period, though they may read tweets — that caps the available audience for this sort of thing. (And, by the way, if this works, then Facebook would really benefit from this, since even Twitter executives acknowledge that it has a much larger audience of people commenting about TV shows than Twitter does.)

You may also wonder if someone who watches a TV show actually sees the ad, what with DVRs and bathroom breaks and lots of second screens and all. Twitter has an answer for that, in a blog post announcing the campaign: “We believe a user engaged enough with a TV show to tweet about it very likely saw the commercials as well.”

The big picture: As it has been doing for several years, Twitter is trying to connect itself to the TV industry by telling both advertisers and programmers that it can help them boost the stuff they’re already showing.

Note that Twitter’s pitch is different from some other platforms that want TV money, notably video platforms like YouTube, that tell TV advertisers the audience they want isn’t watching their stuff. Instead, Twitter wants TV spenders to think about spending additional money with them.

Think of it as “Twitter times TV,” Twitter ad chief Adam Bain told marketers today, “with Twitter being a force-multiplier.”

The stuff powering all of this, by the way, comes from Bluefin Labs, the startup Twitter bought for $90 million a few months ago. At our D: Dive Into Media conference in February, Bluefin founder Deb Roy showed off the way his company connects Twitter and TV, and if you watch the clip below, you can see a direct connection between it and the program Twitter launched today:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/like-that-tv-ad-you-just-saw-twitter-wants-to-show-you-another-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130523/analytics-is-not-a-strategy/?mod=atd http://allthingsd.com/20130523/analytics-is-not-a-strategy/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 15:30:03 +0000 Benjamin Alamar http://allthingsd.com/?p=324498 I have been working in sports analytics for nearly 10 years, and still, virtually every time I tell someone what I do, they say some variation of “Oh, you do moneyball.” While my normal response is “yes, something like that,” the truth is that there is real difference between “sports analytics” and “moneyball.” As I’ve written elsewhere, sports analytics (or just plain old analytics) is a set of tools, while “moneyball” is the term coined by author Michael Lewis in his 2003 book to describe a strategy that employs the tools of analytics. The tools of analytics have advanced significantly since Michael Lewis’ book, yet the “moneyball” strategy is unchanged.

Analytics involves the tools of data gathering, data management, statistical analysis, data visualization and information systems to deliver better information, more efficiently, to decision makers within an organization. Clearly the technology behind these tools has advanced rapidly in the last ten years with tools such as Hadoop, R, Qlikview and the like all making the utilization of the mass amounts of data that are now available to organizations possible.

In sports, the most significant leap forward in technology is in data gathering, where companies such as Stats llc and Catapult Sports have utilized advances in technology to fundamentally change the size and scope of data available from practice and competitions. Stats llc utilizes cameras and optical tracking technology to capture the position of everything that moves on a basketball court 25 times a second, while Catapult Sports utilizes GPS, accelerometers and other wearable technology to track player movements and physical characteristics such as heart rate. Both technologies have shifted the type of data available in sports from the count of specific on court actions (attempted shots, for example) to the continuous movements of every element on the field of play.

Despite this massive increase in the availability of data, Moneyball remains unchanged, because Moneyball is a strategy for utilizing analytics. Moneyball is the value investing of building a successful sports franchise. The concept is to utilize data to identify undervalued players so that teams with lower payrolls can still compete at a high level. The Oakland As — and, to some extent, the Tampa Bay Rays — have followed this strategy successfully for 10+ years. But, just as there are a multitude of investment strategies, there are countless strategies for building successful sports teams. Moneyball can be effective, but that does not make it the best use of analytics for every franchise. Analytic systems can require a significant investment in tools and personnel, so it is the strategy for employing those systems within the organization that determine how successful the organization with their analytics.

The key to successfully employing analytics is not to simply invest in analytic systems and blindly apply the strategies that have been made famous through popular books and movies. The key instead is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and seek to find the areas that can best utilize analytics as you build them. The Dallas Mavericks and the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association, for example are both highly analytic teams, but they also have approached analytics differently, applying their analytic resources strategically to areas that make the most sense for the team.

The San Antonio Spurs were one of the first NBA teams to hire a statistical analyst and an applications developer. They employed these personnel assets along with any technological investments, at least initially, on assisting with player acquisitions. The general philosophy of the organization from a personnel side has been to buy low and sell high — acquiring players who fit the style of play of the organization well — typically through the draft — and then trading them for other assets once the rest of the league has seen the value that the Spurs did. This is similar to the Moneyball strategy employed by the As, and has produced a team that is currently in the Western Conference Finals, with only one player picked in the top 10 of the draft.

The Dallas Mavericks were pioneers in analytics in the NBA as well, but employed a very different strategy for maximizing their investment in analytics. The Mavericks hired the first statistician in the NBA to function as part of the coaching staff. Instead of focusing primarily on player acquisitions like the Spurs, the Mavericks focused first on in game decisions, believing that is where analytics would be most impactful in their organization. The guiding philosophy for the Mavericks was that since there are a lot more in game decisions made during an NBA season than personnel decisions, the benefit to them would be best realized focusing on that part of winning games. The Mavericks won the NBA title with statistician on the coaching staff and were in the playoffs for two of the three seasons since the hiring.

Most businesses, like most teams, have limited financial resources to spend on analytics. This constraint makes it vital for organizations to not just invest and “do analytics,” but to create a strategy for maximizing the return on their analytic investments. While there is no one strategy that works best for all organizations, any organization can be helped to make better decisions by having better information.

Benjamin Alamar is a researcher, consultant, and author in the field of sports analytics. His book “Sports Analytics: A Guide for Coaches, Managers, and Other Decision Makers” will be published in August, 2013.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/analytics-is-not-a-strategy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130523/taskrabbit-would-like-to-be-your-new-temp-agency/?mod=atd http://allthingsd.com/20130523/taskrabbit-would-like-to-be-your-new-temp-agency/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:26 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=324708 TaskRabbit today is announcing a new tool for businesses that want to hire its workers for extended stints, which it says should serve as a more modern temp agency with lower fees.

TaskRabbit CRO Anne Raimondi said that 30 percent of TaskRabbit revenue already comes from small businesses, and many of them are trying to use the platform to do much more than posting simple one-off tasks like building Ikea furniture. For instance, companies have used TaskRabbit to find a temporary office manager while theirs is unavailable for a few weeks.

So, for organizations who want a “Rabbit” to do more than 15 hours of work per week, TaskRabbit will now handle W-2 forms for a fee of 26 percent (compared to its normal 20 percent, and compared to perhaps double that for a temp agency). And the process of finding an applicant will be significantly more transparent than it might be with an offline middleman.

TaskRabbit now has 11,000 prescreened workers in nine U.S. cities on its platform. It plans to open in London later this year. Some 10 percent of those workers earn all their income on TaskRabbit.

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