Urban Compass, a New York-based startup that last year raised an $8 million seed round while still in stealth mode, is coming out of the shadows and debuting its first services in public beta: a hyperlocal social network, called the Urban Compass Network, and a housing rentals platform that brings online the whole process of finding, securing and subsequently paying for a place to live. The two services, which debut first in New York, were formally unveiled today at a press conference led by the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.

Ori Allon, the co-founder and executive chairman — and also a search PhD who sold his last two (search-focused) startups respectively first to Google and then Twitter, where he became head of engineering based in New York until he left to start Urban Compass — is trying something new with his latest venture: a “data-driven company” as he describes it, but also one that, fundamentally, will be relying on a lot of human input for the wheels to turn.

In January, alongside an engineering recruitment effort, the company began to hire a cadre of “neighborhood specialists” to act as experts on specific locales in the city, with the request that they also have some kind of experience in customer services. The neighborhood specialists, it turns out, are serving a two-fold purpose. They are data collectors, reporting on the best that a neighborhood has to offer, which will be fed into Neighborhood Guides; these will in turn become the building blocks of Urban Compass Network. And, putting on another, more businesslike hat, those neighborhood specialists are agents, bringing prospective residents to look at potential homes. (And Urban Compass has equipped them with training and licenses for that purpose.) The aim is for 200 people to work for Urban Compass by the end of this year.

The rentals part of the service is already being used in private beta: a large corporate based in the city signed on and started to refer to Urban Compass all of its employees relocating to New York. Those users in turn were able to refer others to the site. With UC taking a percentage of every lease completed through the site, the rentals business has already started to bring in some impressive revenues — Allon says numbers will be made public soon, but he notes that those sales are strong enough that he and the other three co-founders — CEO Robert Reffkin, an ex-banker and non-profit fundraiser extraordinaire; head of product Mike Weiss; and lead engineer Ugo Di Girolamo — will not need to be raising more funding any time in the near future.

(Backers in the seed round included Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, the CEO of American Express Kenneth Chenault, and ZocDoc’s CEO Cyrus Massoumi, among others.)

The rentals part of the site is a fairly disruptive operation in itself: not only does it cut out brokers who have acted as the costly middle man for each rental in the city; but by going directly to those leasing out properties, it’s offering one more way for them to bypass sites like Craiglist.org, creating a simple, one-stop shop for the lifetime of a rental deal. It’s also a direct link to one of Urban Compass’s first big hires, Gordon Golub, a long-standing real estate executive in the city.

Still, combining a hyperlocal social network and an e-commerce focused rentals site may sound like an incongruous pairing: a social network seems to work best when it feels as organic and uncommercial as possible, while a housing rentals site seems like the most overtly of commercial enterprises. But at Urban Compass, not only do the two have the same people working for them, but the they are built on the same platform.

“I like big challenges,” Allon says of decision to introduce the two services together. He maintains that both get equal weight in the companies’ current system, and they will do in the future as Urban Compass adds more features.

Allon describes the social network as “an essential part of both our system and future growth plans,” while the rentals service, which will soon also include homes to buy, addresses a fundamental need, one that goes hand-in-hand with selecting a neighborhood to live in: “We want to help people find a place to live, both as a neighborhood and a home.” The idea, he says, is for rentals to complement other neighborhood-focused services going forward. “It’s true that we’re starting with rentals, but this is the just the first step. We’ve designed the system with large scale in mind.”

In the beta phase of the service, only those who sign up for rentals services will have access to the Urban Compass Network. The plan is for that to open up as Urban Compass’s own services grow to cover other areas.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ch – ch – ch- changes! The six-year-old media startup Tumblr is going through quite a few right now, namely focusing on profitability versus growth in its product efforts — enabling a promoted post feature in addition to just recently launching mobile ads. The company is looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg-type” COO, amidst a series of executive departures and layoffs.

Business Insider confirmed this with Tumblr board member and Sequoia Roelof Botha, who will take the stage with founder David Karp at TechCrunch Disrupt New York next week to talk about Tumblr’s future and perhaps even announce the COO new hire (we hope!).

In any case, the talk will probably be illuminating after a week filled with tough but optimistic decision-making, ”The team usually walks out of those meetings feeling a little beat up. But your best teachers were probably your hardest teachers. Your best coaches were your hardest coaches,” Botha told BI.

Karp and Botha join our amazing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Dennis Crowley, Bill Gurley, Chamath Palihapitiya, John Donahoe, Limor Fried, Ron Conway and David Lee.

Tickets are available here. Worth it.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

David Karp
Founder, Tumblr

Tumblr founder David Karp was born and raised in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science before dropping out at age 15. An internship at Frederator Studios led to a gig leading product at UrbanBaby. When CNET acquired the company in 2005, Karp started his own development agency, Davidville. In 2007 his team launched Tumblr, now the home and platform for more than 100 million creators. As a top 15 US network, Tumblr serves an audience of more than 170 million people worldwide.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chicago-based social gifting service Boomerang, which has been inching away from its consumer-facing product over the course of 2013, is now expanding its B2B platform with today’s launch of Boomerang Rewards. An extension of its previously launched gifts platform for business, the new Rewards service now brings similar gift-card sharing options to publishers, including those on web and mobile.

Boomerang arose from the ashes of Gtrot, a social travel planner later turned local discovery service, and then a consumer-friendly gifting service similar to competitor Wrapp. But while the Boomerang counterpart to Wrapp still lives on iOS, the focus for the business as whole is no longer primarily on being a consumer service.

Instead, explains CEO Zachary Smith, the consumer app is now “just another channel for distributing gift cards. Although, he adds, it helps to show Boomerang’s capabilities to the company’s B2B partners.

But the real movement now is in working with businesses, including as of today, publishers. With the recently launched business platform, brands have been able to send out gifts directly to their established customer bases via email, social media, or both. At launch, the company was working with around twenty businesses, including Ghirardelli, BeautyBridge, Diamond Candles, Vlado, City Winery, Urban Adventures, and others. Today, it’s grown to 60 businesses, adding Seamless, ModCloth, Shutterfly, ProFlowers, One Kings Lane, thredUP, MeUndies, and many more who are participating directly.

Now with Boomerang Rewards, the company wants to put the distribution of those same gift cards not only in the hands of the brands and businesses themselves, but also with publishers.

“We said, ‘if advertisers can use this, why can’t publishers use this as a way to better engage and monetize their audience?’ Instead of Ghirardelli Chocolates sending out a Ghirardelli gift card to their existing customers, why not go to ChocolateBlog.com and Foodie.com and get them to send out the gift cards to their customers?,” explains Smith. (Side note: sadly, ChocolateBlog.com is not a real thing.) 

Publishers who promote Boomerang Rewards – whether it’s in a blog post, a sidebar, or as a tool to get users to compete online surveys, perhaps – get a portion of the revenue share of the purchases made by converting customers. Smith says Boomerang passes back on average 4%-5% of the net sale.

While Boomerang’s business platform has been shown to boost campaign revenue by 80 percent on average, compared with an brand’s previous promotions, the company claims, not as much data was available regarding the new white-labeled Rewards option. Smith cited one case study involving Jebbit.com. where 10.5 percent of the publisher’s user base made a purchase on ModCloth. “On a CPM basis, they made 8 to 10 times the normal CPM,” he says. “That was really powerful.”

The site is now doing a full Rewards integration along with launch partners, Jebbit, Lab42, Squarz, and RIVS.

“Anyone who wants to monetize a user base can find an excuse to give away gift cards as a reward,” says Smith of the product. “It doesn’t feel like an ad – it’s not replacing any of your existing ad space – we’re simply providing you new tools to generate incremental ad revenue.”

Going forward, the focus will be on expanding distribution and improving the APIs for better use on mobile. Currently, the platform is mobile-friendly, but the APIs aren’t quite there yet. But the plan is to make it possible for mobile publishers to distribute gift cards via apps – for example, as rewards in a game for beating a level. That would put Boomerang up against others doing similar things, including Kiip and more recently, Gyft.

More details on Boomerang Rewards are here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s search results in Europe could soon look a bit different if a number of new reports about the company’s settlement with the European Union’s competition commission are correct. After a three-year investigation into its potentially anti-competitive practices, Google submitted its proposal for an agreement with the EU last week, but the details remained under wraps. According to reports from the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, however, Google’s proposal includes a number of changes to how it will do business (at least in the EU).

According to these reports, Google has offered to “make users clearly aware” when it is linking to its own specialized services and vertical search engines. Every time Google promotes one of its own links, it will also show “at least three links to rival, non-Google sites that have information relevant to a user’s query,” the Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati reports. So whenever a search on Google would naturally highlight a result from Google+ Local, Google would also add links to sites like Yelp, UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor or other relevant sites.

This part of the agreement would at least cover Google’s search services for restaurants, finance and shopping. Results from Google News, the Financial Times says, would “merely need to be labelled and separated.”

Under this proposed settlement, Google will also offer sites the ability to easily remove 10 percent of their content from its vertical search engines (though it’s not clear how this would actually work) and make it easier for advertisers to move their campaigns to other search engines (similar to what Google is doing in the U.S. after its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year). Google’s search algorithm itself would remain untouched in this agreement.

If the EU agrees to these terms, Google will avoid the large financial penalties that the EU could have levied against the search company. The proposal, if the reports are correct, would be binding for five years, and a neutral third party would ensure that Google doesn’t stray from the agreement.

Google competitors, whose official complaint started this investigation, were probably hoping for larger changes, and fines will probably not be in favor of these relatively small changes Google is offering to make. Last week, FairSearch.org already filed another complaint against Google in the EU. This time, the organization, which is backed by Microsoft, Expedia, Oracle, TripAdvisor and 13 other search and technology companies, argues that Google is abusing its power “to dominate the mobile marketplace and cement its control over consumer Internet data for online advertising as usage shifts to mobile.”

Even if Google does settle this latest investigation with the EU then, chances are we haven’t heard the last of this.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

EAT Club, a Palo Alto-based food delivery service launched in fall 2010, has raised $5 million in Series A funding in a round led by August Capital. Also participating in the round were First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Mark Vadon (Zulily and Blue Nile co-founder) and other angel investors.

As a result of the new funding, Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital will now join the company’s board of directors. EAT Club had previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by First Round in summer 2011.

CEO Frank Han admits that the market for food delivery startups has become somewhat “frothy” as of late. There are a number of competitors in this broader food delivery space, including menu aggregators like GrubHub and Seamless, B2B-focused caterers like Cater2.me, Waiter.com and ZeroCater, Postmates’ Get It Now, and even new entrant Chewse, which also this week announced a $1 million seed round for its own lunch catering ambitions.

But Han explains that EAT Club is different for a few reasons: It’s trying to build a consumer-facing brand, not a B2B service; it’s curating menus from local restaurants to offer new dish selections daily; it works with restaurants that do and don’t deliver themselves; and it’s aiming to take the service national.

However, EAT Club, as it stands today does sound a lot like Chewse, in terms of the menu-curation aspect. Like Chewse, it also works with various “foodie” experts who team up with the restaurants to find the best dishes for local customers. That said, it’s not solely focused on signing contracts with businesses to be the lunch provider for the companies. Of its “tens of thousands” of registered users, EAT Club has around 100 companies where that’s the case.

“Our vision is to make great food accessible to everybody,” says Han.

Han had joined the startup in September 2011 to help it grow and scale. Co-founders Kevin Yang and Rodrigo Santibanez had actually launched EAT Club right after graduating from Stanford. ”They were trying to solve the problem of ‘crappy lunch,’” Han explains. “So they started this business of lunch ordering for office people.”

EAT Club hasn’t done a lot of press, the CEO tells us. Instead, it wanted to focus on building up the business first. Since he joined, things have been picking up steam. “We’ve been growing like crazy. Since the middle of last year, we’re double-digit, month-over-month growth,” Han says.

He declined to provide hard numbers in terms of order volume, saying that would tip its hand as to revenue. Generally speaking, he places revenue below the big menu aggregators, but above some of the newer, seed-funded startups.

Currently, EAT Club targets consumers in the Bay Area (on the peninsula, mainly), offering delivery to 1,500 companies, with customers who have included Chegg, Bloomreach, Gunderson Dettmer, and IMVU. Each day, members receive an email with 10 to 15 lunch suggestions at $8-$10 each. They can order in the morning, or up to five days in advance, and receive their lunch by 11:30 to 12:30 pm. Meeting delivery times is important to EAT Club, which touts its 99.7 percent “on time” rate.

The system is currently most popular on the web, though it offers an iOS application for orders, as well. The average customer orders 1.5-2 times per week, and 50 percent of those who are active in the month return the following month to order again.

Unlike when you order from a pizza chain, for example, EAT Club’s operational model involves technology on the backend for order processing and routing, which allows its network of part-time drivers to deliver a hundred meals at a time, going from one company to the next. It also relies on direct outreach to businesses and word-of-mouth referral programs to help acquire customers.

The plan is to use the funding to hire people to help with marketing and expansion and, as always, this startup needs more engineers. Eat Club has 20-some, full-time employees and wants to add about 10 more by the end of the year.

EAT Club will open its next market this fall, but Han declined to say where for competitive reasons.

On the product side, the focus will be on refining the mobile app on iOS rather than building for Android. The plan is to use more push notifications in order to track demand and remind users to order. As Han explains, on mobile, EAT Club could ping users who didn’t place an order that morning, allowing them to place their order later in the day – closer to lunch than what EAT Club is capable of now.

“We want to be closer to on-demand. If we get closer to on-demand, the market gets even bigger,” says Han. “You’ll see us getting more aggressive with iOS in the next few months. We’ve already started,” he adds.

Interested Bay Area users can sign up for EAT Club here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fosbury, a new startup helping companies design iOS Passbook campaigns, is launching its online DIY design and distribution platform today, which is being made available on a pay-as-you go basis. Although quite a few services in this niche have sprung up since the announcement of Apple Passbook’s mobile ticketing and couponing app last June, Fosbury’s angle is that it offers not just Passbook design tools, but rather an end-to-end platform for creating, managing, distributing and analyzing Passbook campaigns.

Plans to supports Samsung’s Wallet are also in the works.

The company provides assistance with template design, even allowing the import of assets from a user’s Twitter account. Customers can also upload their own images, adjust the pass and font’s colors, and more. After filling in details about the campaign, like the name, description, and number of passes you want to make available, for example, Fosbury then lets you add location-based notifications to the campaign.

That means that users will receive push notifications when they arrive at any of the locations entered. The passes can also be shared to social services like Facebook and Twitter, or the business can use an HTML-based code to place an “add to Passbook” button on their website or within their email newsletters.

Once the campaign is live, Fosbury’s online dashboard lets the company track how many passes have been opened, installed and deleted, and businesses can add or view credits to a campaign, as needed. (Credits are used to pay for the passes Fosbury helps distribute).

The company only charges for the passes which are installed, and offers 500 credits for free. From there, it’s $39 for 1,000 credits, $69 for 2,500 credits, or $99 for 5,000 credits.

“Every iPhone has Passbook, but the challenge is getting the coupons on the device,” explains Fosbury co-founder and CEO Lucas Tieleman. “Fosbury allows brands and retailers to easily create a mobile coupon that works with Passbook – and also enables users to distribute and analyze campaigns. Some tools focus solely on designing Passbook campaigns, but Fosbury covers the full spectrum,” he adds, explaining the difference between this, and many of the other Passbook solutions on the market today.

The company competes with a host of other services, including but not limited to, Passdock, PassSource, PassK.it, Passhop, WalletKit, PassRocket, and PassWallet, for example, as well as Urban Airship acquisition PassTools (from Tello).

Crittercism, the San Francisco-based makers of a performance management and error monitoring system for app developers, announced today that it has raised $12 million in series B financing. The round was led by Google Ventures, with contributions from existing investors, Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital. As a result of the new financing, Google Ventures General Partner Wesley Chan will be joining the startup’s board.

The same three investors led Crittercism’s $5.5 million Series A round last June, and participated in its $1.2 million seed financing as well, which the startup raised after graduating from AngelPad the previous summer. Kleiner Perkins and Aol Ventures also joined the usual suspects as investors in its seed round, which, all told, brings its total capital to just under $19 million.

What is it that has these investors jazzed up about this app performance management startup? Well, when Crittercism launched in early 2011, it was initially focused on providing mobile developers with a platform to identify and analyze snafus, crashes and bugs in their mobile apps, while enabling them to provide speedy customer support. Since then, the startup has set its sights on becoming a full-service app performance management solution by not only offering standard crash reporting and diagnostics but by providing mobile developers with extras, like realtime views for “app loads, system logs, handled exceptions and transaction tracing,” as we wrote at the time.

The idea has been to create a platform that caters to both smaller, indie developers and enterprise customers in kind, providing a hosted, third-party system for app performance that can help companies reduce spend on engineering resources, allowing them to focus on the important stuff. (Like making the best check-in app for cats on the market.)

With its platform now powering performance monitoring for mobile apps on more than 500 million unique devices which have logged more than 50 billion app sessions — for customers like Netflix, LinkedIn and AT&T — Crittercism is now looking to evolve into a serious Big Data company. With its new funding, co-founder and CEO Andrew Levy says that Crittercism will look to scale quickly, growing its team of 23 to over 60 by the end of the year, particularly in the engineering department.

Levy says that, in spite of the rapid growth of mobile technology and the growing ubiquity (and processing power) of our mobile devices, mobile apps are still a black box for most mobile developers. With the app economy bursting at the seams, it has become increasingly critical for app developers to have access to flexible, scalable technology that can allow them to maintain uptime and keep the mobile experience speedy and reliable.

While there are plenty of options out there, Levy thinks that there’s still significant demand for tools that can not only monitor performance but provide insight into how that performance affects their bottom line. Today, mobile developers have come to depend on third-party platforms not only for distribution, but for everything from hosting, data processing and storage to location and payment processing.

So, with its new capital and Big Data ambitions in tow, Crittercism announced today that it will be adding a new service to report on the performance of outside cloud services and network conditions — those that are critical to the performance of their Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8 and HTML5 apps, whether it be Amazon hosting, Stripe for payments or Urban Airship for location services.

The new service is designed to monitor network conditions in realtime, Levy says, allowing Crittercism to report when cloud platforms like payments or location services are underperforming or failing so that developers can stay up to date and fix those issues on the fly. The network monitoring service is currently in private beta, but Crittercism is now accepting requests from mobile developers looking to test drive the new tools.

The startup is looking to turn itself into a leader in the mobile performance monitoring space by providing a system that monitors not only app performance but the entire ecosystem. Considering that has come to power over 500 million unique devices over a relatively short period of time (having launched in March of 2011), the startup’s ambitions are at least somewhat justified.

After all, the mobile performance monitoring space itself is growing fast, as it saw Twitter scoop up its crash-reporting competitor Crashlytics in January, and newcomers like Torbit and Bugsnag have been able to find traction almost from the get-go.

Of the market opportunity, Levy says: “For many of the biggest brands in the world, mobile apps have become their most important channel for communicating with customers to increase engagement and drive brand loyalty. Across all industries, organizations are recognizing the critical role of performance management to their mobile strategies and that’s only going to continue.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

South Africa’s Naspers has agreed to merge its two Russian online classified Web site with Avito in a $570 million deal that will make Avito the world’s third biggest classified site after Craigslist and China’s 58.com.

As part of the deal, Naspers’ Web sites Slando.ru and OLX.ru will be merged into the Avito brand, reports the Financial Times. Naspers will also invest $50 million in cash into Avito, giving it an 18.6 percent stake in the newly created group. Other investors include Kinnevik Investments and Vostok Nafta, both Swedish investment funds, Northzone Ventures (an early investor in Spotify).

Avito, which launched in 2007, is now expected to hold 25 percent share of the Russian classified market in terms of traffic and 15 percent share in terms of revenue. Last year the company generated $30 million in sales. Now that it has secured a large and stable user base, the company plans to start focusing on revenue generated from users and advertisers. The Web site currently has 140,000 users listing items each day, 40,000 of whom have never used the Web site before. In order for Avito to boost its revenue, it needs to have more sales coming from professional sellers who set up “stalls” to sell used goods on the site. About 4,000 small businesses currently pay for that kind of service, while it is free for consumers to list an item (they can pay for extras such as highlighted ads or more prominent search results).

Boosting its reach is also an important part of Naspers’ growth strategy because one of the major challenges facing Russian e-commerce businesses is the lack of online transactions, since most deals are completed offline. Avito’s main opportunities for growth comes from increasing Internet penetration in regions outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Last May, Sonali de Rycker, a partner at Avito investor Accel Partners, said that 90 percent of Russia’s growth in Internet usage will come from the regions–and that users outside of major cities will be especially keen on Avito.

“Classified works well because of the urban concentration and lack of retail services in the regions,” de Rycker told the Financial Times. “We like the model because once you are number one it has a snowball effect–it’s really a winner-takes-all market.”

Russia surpassed Germany in late 2011 to become the largest Internet market in Europe. Domestic companies–including search engine Yandex, Mail.ru–dominate in Russia, creating an insular online marketplace similar to that of China’s. Investors are eager to grab a slice of the Russian pie–last May, Avito raised $75 million from local private equity firm Baring Vostok and Accel, along with existing investors Kinnevik and Northzone.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In Mexico’s drug-war-torn cities, a small number of Twitter users affected by narco violence are acting as war correspondents to the masses, providing a public-safety alert system of sorts, according to a recent research paper from Microsoft, called “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare.”

These “curators,” tweeting with hashtags like #mtyfollow, #reynosafolllow, #saltillo and #verfollow, produce an inordinately high number of tweets compared to other users, informing people about recent violence, clashes and other news in regions where traditional news outlets have engaged in self-imposed blackouts to avoid narco violence.

“Twitter in particular and social media in general have become important elements of the information ecosystem. They have not replaced traditional news media, but they have certainly extended it in new ways,” Andrés Monroy-Hernández, one of the report researchers, tells TechCrunch. “Social media is more participatory and democratic than the existing mainstream media, which is one of the reasons why it has emerged as a form of public sphere — like a networked version of the public plazas.”

The report noted that of the 34 million people with Internet access in Mexico, 20 percent use Twitter. About 4.2 percent of Mexico’s online population has posted about the drug war on Twitter, according to the report. These users tend to use Twitter on desktop, and occasionally mobile, Monroy-Hernández says.

Twitter’s adoption in the cities most affected by violence and studied in the report — Monterrey, Reynosa, Saltillo and Veracruz — paralleled the rise of violence there. And the volume of tweets in these cities continues to mirror violence-related events there, according to the report.

Because the use of Twitter in these cities revolves around the drug war, a big chunk of tweets are actually retweets, users notifying their networks about the danger. Hence, the importance of the core group of “curators” who work independently, or with their own sources, to tweet out information to the masses. For example, in Monterrey one Twitter user was responsible for 3 percent of the city’s total tweets, two users responsible for 2 percent and seven users who were each responsible for 1 percent of the city’s tweets.

Yet, because of the nature of these tweets, curators are also anonymous, which at times means it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of the information in the tweets. This legitimacy issue is something Monroy-Hernández sees as part of the evolution of social media in Mexico.

“I see an emerging trend of civic media technologies playing a central role in public life, especially those technologies that build on everyday social media practices,” he said. “I expect this is going to become a very rich space — not only in Mexico, but across the world.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ride-sharing startup SideCar is getting serious about expanding into new cities throughout the U.S. The company just acquired Austin, Texas-based Heyride to help it improve its product and introduce service in that market, and is announcing plans to roll out ride-sharing in Los Angeles and Philadelphia this weekend as well.

SideCar offers a set of mobile apps that allow users to electronically hail rides, basically connecting drivers and passengers with one another. It also manages identity and ratings of drivers and passengers, ensuring users aren’t getting into cars with drivers who are dangerous, unsafe, or otherwise creepy. And it facilitates payments (ahem, donations) for those rides, so that passengers can seamlessly give cash for the transportation provided.

After launching in San Francisco last summer, the startup has seen a fair amount of success. Now it’s looking to take its service into new markets. SideCar rolled out in Seattle in the fall, but plans to very aggressively enter a number of new markets over the next few months.

That expansion starts this weekend, as SideCar will being offering service in Philadelphia, Austin, and Los Angeles. At first, SideCar will only provide rides on the weekends, as it recruits drivers to support demand in those new markets. Not long after, the company expects to launch in other cities around the country, as it is actively recruiting drivers in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

In addition to new launch markets, the company is announcing the acquisition of Austin-based startup Heyride. Like SideCar, Heyride has built mobile apps to enable ride-sharing services. While providing support in Austin is a nice bonus, SideCar founder Sunil Paul said the acquisition will help improve its own apps and service.

“We are bringing on this talent to improve our design and user experience in the app and in the vehicle,” Paul told me by phone. “If you play with the [Heyride] app, it’s really beautifully done.” SideCar is adding four Heyride employees to its roster, including two who will become part of the San Francisco team, and two who will stay on in Austin. The company will also have a city manager to handle local operations in that market.

(As a side note, SideCar plans to be fully operational in time for SXSW, which will be a blessing for anyone who has ever had to get from one place to another in that city during the week-long convention.)

SideCar’s expansion comes not long after raising $10 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Google Ventures. But it’s also being announced as competition heats up in the urban transportation market generally, and among ride-sharing services in particular. After raising $15 million of its own, San Francisco-based competitor Lyft entered a second market by launching its ride-sharing service in parts of Los Angeles late last month.

Meanwhile, emboldened by a deal with the California Public Utilities Commission, on-demand car startup Uber said it, too, would get into the ride-sharing business. And that’s not mentioning the fast emergence of taxi e-hail apps like Flywheel and Taxi Magic, all of which will provide a number of alternatives for residents in urban areas.

But it’s not just the competition that SideCar has to worry about: Like Uber before it, the company is also likely to face regulatory scrutiny in many of the new markets it enters. It’s notable that local authorities in New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C. all took issue with Uber when it launched in those cities.

While SideCar has briefed local officials in many of the cities it intends to enter, Paul said he is lawyered up and ready to fight any regulatory battles that the company will face. “This is a new idea and just like other technological battles in the past… new innovations almost always have to battle against the status quo,” he said.

That said, SideCar continues to stress that it is a legal service, according to ride-share provisions in most locations. For one thing, drivers aren’t supposed to make a profit over and above the cost of operating and maintaining their vehicles. Also, unlike some other services, both driver and passenger have agreed on a destination that they’ll travel to before the passenger is picked up. “We’ve always maintained that what Sidecar does is legal and we’ve set up a system that enables drivers to comply with ride-share rules in all 50 states,” Paul told me.

We’ll see if regulators and local governments agree. In the meantime, isn’t it fun to watch all these startups battle it out, and at the same time, fundamentally change the way we all get around?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch