The deal indicates new directions for Klout, which to date had not been particularly focused on mobile or local.

Blockboard made a neighborhood discussion board iPhone app that had only been available in its hometown of San Francisco. Its team of four had previously been at companies like Delicious and Craigslist. When I covered the company, I noted that it has more of a Twitter approach to a local social network, where competitor Nextdoor requires real identities, a la Facebook.

Klout said that Blockboard’s app would continue to be available, and that its team would work to improve Klout’s local and mobile efforts.

Klout received a rich valuation in its most recent funding round, which closed last November but was only announced in January. Blockboard, meanwhile, had raised $1 million in 2010 from Joshua Schachter, Mitch Kapor, Founder Collective and others.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.):

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middle men, and other barriers to entry that have so often predetermined winners and losers in the marketplace. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don’t. They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world.

Legal Team, Red Hat Software:

In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.

The good news is that there is growing opposition from many quarters to these bills. Just this past weekend, the White House expressed serious concerns, opposing legislation — like SOPA and PIPA — that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace:

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace — along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals. We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day. We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association:

“It is increasingly clear that bills causing collateral damage to innovation in the guise of fighting piracy are not politically viable. Now that unreasonable solutions to piracy have been shown not to work, it is time to explore reasonable ones. We urge policymakers to join CEA in support of the OPEN Act — a bicameral, bipartisan and narrowly targeted approach to fighting foreign “rogue websites.”

Paul Hortenstine, Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills:

The legislation targets criminals: foreign thieves who profit from pirated content and counterfeit goods. These foreign rogue websites are operating freely today while legitimate American businesses are opposing legislation that would block these criminal websites from the American market.

The Pirate Bay, a site that links visitors to pirated content and would arguably fit someone’s definition of “foreign rogue Web site”:

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

Ben Greenman, Contributor, The New Yorker:

Dear Spanish speakers, I was only joking when I said you think we’re all protesting soup. Geez: People are so touchy on blackout days

January 18, 2012 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengreenman

Ben Greenman

The Priceonomics Web site, which officially launched on Dec. 21, is aimed at helping sellers and buyers determine the best price for used bikes, cars, phones, TVs and other items, so no one gets ripped off.

But rather than explaining what it does in a press release, Priceonomics wrote an entertaining blog post, entitled “Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage,” detailing its experiments with selling the expensive Herman Miller office furniture in San Francisco.

Trials included finding buyers among its start-up incubator classmates, finding the chairs on Craigslist, borrowing a girlfriend’s car to get them, negotiating a lower price, lugging the chairs back to the office, and then almost losing the sale in the end, when the seller’s $1,800 check didn’t go through.

Priceonomics concludes that a business based on hauling used furniture around won’t scale but that there is a need for a centralized location for pricing information.

From its blog post:

“It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them. However, it was clear that having our price guides were really helpful for identifying what were the good deals on Craigslist and how much to pay for them. So for now, we’ll just stick to building better price guides to help other people buy things on Craiglist, eBay, and other emerging marketplaces like Zaarly and TaskRabbit.”

Priceonomics may be on to something here.

Not too long ago, one way to determine the fair value of an item on the Internet was through an online auction. EBay became wildly popular as an easy way for total strangers to agree on a price for an item. More recently, auctions have become less relevant, and even eBay is decreasing the alliance of used items on its site.

That’s due in large part to today’s free flow of information on the Internet, which makes pricing more transparent. After all, you can just Google it.

Still, determining the price of an item can be time-consuming. To get a good sense of the fair value, you have to cross-check prices on a handful of sites — if not a dozen.

Priceonomics’ price guide promises to help users easily find out if they are getting a good deal, by comparing items across eBay, Craigslist and even full-priced retailers that might be offering a deal.

So, how much is a second-hand Aeron chair worth?

In the end, Priceonomics says, the chairs resell for $400 to $600 in San Francisco. The company was able to acquire four, for $375 each; it then turned around and unloaded them for $1,800, representing a $300 profit.

Coffee & Power, which was started by the founder of Second Life, is launching an online marketplace that allows people to buy and sell small tasks with one another — or even to meet up in person at a company-owned cafe in San Francisco.

The site is a little like Craigslist, but focuses on giving people a venue to sell things such as tutoring lessons, software development services, commissioned art or something as random as Hula Hoop lessons.

The concept draws from the latest trend in making small amounts of money from things you may already possess, through a designated community.

Others examples include Airbnb, which assists with renting out a room in your house; RelayRides, which lets you make money by leasing your car; and Zaarly, another online marketplace for people to sell used items or hire someone for their skills.

Coffee & Power was started by Philip Rosedale, the founder and former CEO of Second Life, a virtual world that flourished into a small economy, where players buy and sell items made within the game.

Rosedale explained to me how Second Life overlaps with what he’s doing at Coffee & Power:

“Second Life became more inspiring for me than anything else — not because it was an unbelievable Lego set, but because of what people did economically with the Legos. People were able to use it to create new jobs and inspire themselves to do new things with their skills they weren’t doing previously.”

For instance, Rosedale said, a person might be a software engineer in real life, but on Second Life, they might design women’s shoes and make $2,000 a month selling them to other players.

“We saw that in Second Life, and if we are right about Coffee & Power, we can affect even more people,” he said.

The site first went live in April, but is relaunching today. In that time, Rosedale said that 2,000 people have used it, completing 700 so-called “missions” — which are transactions — for a total of $10,000. The average value has been $15.

Some of the missions include offering to shop at Trader Joe’s for $25, or asking if someone could turn a suit into a zombie costume. Rosedale’s son will bake you brownies or teach you card tricks.

With all of these sites, there’s potential for fraud or deceptive practices. Airbnb had the most public example, when an apartment was ransacked by a renter and the owner’s identity was stolen.

Coffee & Power is employing some of the usual tools to help verify a person’s identity, such as allowing users to link their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. But the most original part of the company’s concept is funding a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco, where members can meet up to exchange items and drink coffee for free. The cafe at 1825 Market Street is the first site, and Coffee & Power plans to open up additional spaces in other locations as it expands.

Another twist is that Coffee & Power does not let people transact in U.S. dollars. As with Second Life, all missions are conducted in a virtual currency.

Coffee & Power will charge people 15 percent to cash out whatever they earn, which in turn will encourage people to keep the money on the network and spend it on other items in the community.

The company raised $1 million in funding early this year from angel investors, including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who also invested in Second Life. It has three founders and one full-time employee, and has gotten most of the development work accomplished through hiring software developers online.

Even for a hermit like me, it seems evident that there are local social opportunities beyond deals and check-ins. It’s an area ripe for social Web and app development.

Today, a start-up called Nextdoor launches an authenticated network of social networks for neighborhoods. The service is utilitarian and carefully focused on fostering small private communities.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia pitched his site to me like this: You have Facebook for your friends and family, LinkedIn for your business network, and Twitter for your interest graph. But what about your local community?

Nextdoor itself is kind of like Facebook, which started out requiring student users to authenticate with their .edu email addresses, and still requires real names. The Nextdoor site is built to be a safe haven for sharing personal information with a small, relevant audience, and it verifies that users actually live in a neighborhood, using postcard codes and phone listings.

But do you really want to share so much of your identity with your neighbors? And do you want to depend on a site like Nextdoor reaching critical mass so that you can talk to people who live down the street?

Another local social start-up, Blockboard, is taking a different approach. It’s more like Twitter, where users can represent themselves however they want. It’s also focused on mobile, and has so far only launched in San Francisco.

Blockboard’s authentication is much simpler than Nextdoor’s. The first time someone uses the Blockboard iPhone app, it validates via GPS that they are located in a particular neighborhood. (Once they’re registered to that community, they don’t have to be physically there to post.) Users usually use pseudonyms.

Blockboard CEO Stephen Hood — whose team comes from the laissez-faire community sites Delicious and Craigslist — said he thinks real identities aren’t that important to communicating local information like event postings, apartment listings, and lost and found.

Plus, keeping local information private is a bit of a red herring, Hood argued. “People aren’t interested in pretending to be in neighborhoods they’re not in, because the content is not relevant,” he said.

Hood thinks a successful local social network must start on mobile devices in order to become a resource when people are out and about in their neighborhoods.

And maybe someday, if all goes well, those local social network users may put down their phones and actually talk to each other.

As with Jetsetter’s other travel offers, the inventory will target the high end, offering properties ranging from a five-bedroom house in Crete for $310 per night to a palatial 14-bedroom mansion on a private Caribbean island for $53,000 per night.

To date, the New York-based company has focused on selling discounted hotel rooms and other accommodations in exotic places around the world for a short period, or until inventory runs out. It shares the flash sales model with Gilt, its parent company, which is focused mostly on apparel and related items.

With this latest endeavor, Jetsetter will focus on renting out vacation homes owned by individuals, who might otherwise find vacationers through sites such as HomeAway.

HomeAway is one of the dominant players in the space, owning several Internet domains, and is now valued at close to $3.3 billion after going public this summer. But others also dabble in all sorts of niches in the space, including Craigslist and Airbnb, which lets owners rent out rooms in their homes to travelers and just launched longer-term rentals.

Jetsetter will add its own twist by picking five to 10 homes to feature each week and mark down by 20 to 50 percent off.

To start, it will have an inventory of more than 200 homes, which will be available in locations such as the Caribbean, Mexico, California, France and Italy.

Jetsetter will also act as the intermediary, keeping track of when the homes are available, taking photos and getting travel writers to craft unbiased descriptions of the properties, so that renters know exactly what they will be getting into. Jetsetter will also accept the payment.

This is in contrast to other rental sites, which simply connect travelers to property owners, who may or may not respond to inquiries or keep their calendars up to date. Payment is usually sent in the form of a check.

With this approach, there’s no room for haggling, or any awkward chitchats among strangers or surprises when you show up and get the keys — in other words, it’s oh so civilized.

In a release, Drew Patterson, Jetsetter founder and CEO, explained: “As anyone who has researched and booked a vacation home knows, the process is archaic and time consuming compared to hotels, flights and rental cars.”

A couple of other examples to drool over:

• La Maison Blanche in the Loire Valley starts at $1,430 per night for five bedrooms.
• Villa Encantada in Costa Rica starts at $700 per night for four bedrooms.
• Villa Mariposa in Mexico has two bedrooms for $280 per night, while Casa Theodore in Mexico is $1,800 per night for nine bedrooms.

For a limited time, Jetsetter will offer all of the homes for 10 percent off.

Airbnb, the fast-growing online accommodations service, is expanding an offering to allow users to more easily book longer rentals of a month or more.

The San Francisco-based company said in a press release that it had seen a “marked increase in users seeking and booking long-term stays.” So now, after already booking 3,000 monthly rentals, Airbnb said it is improving the functionality and expanding the long-term market on the site.

“Searches for reservations of a month or longer will now display the total monthly price directly in search results,” said Airbnb.

The move will add more competitors to Airbnb, including huge sites such as Craigslist, which specialize in longer-term rentals. Until now, the well-funded site — which has just recovered from a recent controversy over a booking gone bad — has focused on shorter, hotel-like offerings, but at people’s homes.

“Selling something should be as easy as taking a picture on your phone,” said Zheng. And, so, he and a few partners have built a start-up — EggCartel — that does just that. The company’s EggDrop marketplace is designed to allow anyone with something to sell to snap a few pictures with their iPhone or Android device and list it for sale.

The other unique tack that EggDrop employs is a “falling price auction.” Those listing items choose a starting price and a floor, with the price dropping over a 72-hour period until an item is either sold or reaches that lower limit.

That, Zheng said, should allow EggDrop to appeal to both bargain-hunting buyers as well as sellers who are more interested in getting rid of unused items than getting every last dollar.

“It eliminates haggling so you don’t have to argue back and forth,” said Zheng, EggDrop’s CEO.

EggCartel, which has raised $1 million in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures and SV Angel, among others, is launching its Web site on Tuesday and already has the iPhone application in Apple’s store. The company hopes to have the EggDrop app for Android available on Wednesday.

The biggest challenge for any marketplace start-up is, of course, gaining enough scale to make the market work. To address that, EggDrop allows users to post their items to Twitter and Facebook, as well as to Craigslist from within their application.

Zheng also said the scale issue, though a challenge, is not as big a hurdle as one might think.

“What you are going to find, surprisingly, is you don’t need millions and millions of users to get to the point where local marketplace is liquid,” he said.

In general, Zheng said people tend to sell a few key categories of stuff — furniture, toys, games, electronics. “They tend to have a more general appeal compared to collectible items you see on eBay,” he said.

EggDrop also isn’t charging listing or transaction fees, though it might someday offer paid-for premium services.

Zheng points to the alpha test that the company did last year with only a couple thousand users. All the items, he said, were sold, including two cars, which surprised even Zheng.

For now, EggDrop is starting small. There are only seven employees, Zheng said, “including the intern.”

Although users from anywhere in the U.S. can sell items, Zheng said the marketing efforts will center around the company’s hometown of San Francisco and perhaps a few other major cities.

It’s just the latest challenge for Zheng, who worked at Google from 2002 until early last year, working on everything from Android, to paid ads, to Google Video, to building operations in China with Kai-Fu Lee.

“Every year and a half I love to work on something different and challenging,” Zheng said.

(Editor’s note: I misspelled Zheng’s last name in the initial version of this story.)