Disqus - Latest Comments for ellenthompson

Re: Naked Apartments Strips the Hassle out of Real Estate Hunting

ellenthompson — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:38:26 -0000

Really great for markets where there are brokers that are typically paid fees by brokers, like Boston and New York. In most other markets, this concept may not work because it's the exception rather than the rule that a broker finds you an apartment in the rest of the country.

Re: Fisher Price Launches iPhone Apps For 2-Year-Olds

ellenthompson — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:05:29 -0000

Great marketing ploy to keep the Fisher Price brand in front of mommy who has enough money for an iphone (and lots of toys).

Re: Rental Beast: A Better Way to Search for an Apartment?

ellenthompson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:59:51 -0000

It's a business model that is worth trying again. It's harder than ever to get owners to pay for listings on established let alone new ILSs!

Really frequent datafeeds will be key.

Re: Rental Beast: A Better Way to Search for an Apartment?

ellenthompson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:52:13 -0000

I think it's a very interesting business model and I certainly applaud anyone who takes a crack at this very difficult marketplace.

When we started in 2002, there were agents in Philly who would email or fax you a list of available apartments for a fee. The problem was the data wasn't up to date enough. That's key, and with hourly updated datafeeds, it's closer to possible. However, you still need to rely on agents changing the status of the rental listings. If users pay and then find much stale data, social media outlets will let the news travel a lot faster than in 2002.

Good luck, to Ishay and his RentalBeast cohorts.

Re: PadMapper Aggregates Apartment Listings on a Google Map

ellenthompson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:09:55 -0000

Welcome to the industry! There is always room for good competition. It's an interesting start, but you are definitely violating craigslists' TOS by scraping their site and expect they are going to come after you like they went after Oodle and many others. We checked with our IP attorney and they do have the right to ask you to stop.

Re: Etsy Founders Launch New Company: A Ping.fm for Business

ellenthompson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:02:17 -0000

There is a lot of incorrect information in this review. First of all, the product has a feature that lets you track comments. This is a major time saver, and uniquely available via postling.com.

Second, Postling is much easier to use. For most businesses (even mine with 15 people), $9 is less than a rounding error and even if Postling is a little easier or faster to use (which it is), then it will be a hit with the corporate market.

The team does not have VC funding for this project. It participated in the DreamIt Ventures business accelerator program this summer. The team is otherwise self funded.

Plus, this is the Etsy team. They are rock stars. This is just the beginning of many good things to come in the next few weeks.

Re: Apartment Marketing Ideas

ellenthompson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:09:02 -0000

Link to Econsultancy seems to be broken-can you fix it so I can read the article? You may want to know about postling.com which lets you post to multiple social media services from one platform and will track replies/comments in the next few weeks.