Freddie Pikovsky came to The Brandery last summer with a vision to fully develop a digital product that would be to today’s tech-savvy travelers what the Lonely Planet brand has been to a generation of wanderers since the 1970s.

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Canada.com - Planning a road trip online is simple. Enter your start and end destinations into a map site and it spits out the fastest way to get there. What’s missing is the spirit of the road that makes a trip memorable. That’s what Roadtrippers will do for you.

“Read More”: http://o.canada.com/2013/02/22/travel-website-of-the-week-roadtrippers/

Rentshare graduated from the Brandery in our class of 2011. They relocated to New York City where they are growing an empire to take over the online rent payment industry.

Ian Halpern is the CEO at RentShare, and started software engineer who was recruited out of college at the age of 20 and was thrown into the startup explosion in NYC. After working in startups for a few years, on the concept that you never know your full potential unless you take a chance, he quit to work on his own passion projects, the latest of which is RentShare.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration for Rentshare?

“A lot of people would assume our inspiration came from living with roommates. That isn’t actually why we got into this. It was from the fact that the only check I was writing every month, or really for anything, was for rent. Every other monthly bill you could pay online. I wanted to figure out why that was the case. It sounded like an interesting problem and I saw potential for a big opportunity.

After we dug in a bit, what we found was that it wasn’t just us paying paper checks for rent, but about 70% of renters in the US still paid with paper. The biggest part of our project is getting the technical aspects in-line. For landlords, online payments are complicated and they didn’t want to pay credit card fees. Also, in most cases they don’t want to accept payments until all roommates have paid. If only two of the three roommates pay, it’s a problem because the landlord wouldn’t be able to evict the tenants after accepting part of the money. The friction with the landlords comes from a lot of things—the challenges with payments, but they’re also an “older” group who rents the buildings most of the time.

The rental industry is an incredibly fragmented market. Landlords are all over the map- big, small, the random guy down the street. The large real estate groups hold about 20% of the market, but the long tail of the market is the smaller landlords down to the guy down the street who doesn’t have much business experience and isn’t a formalized company. All these factors played in to why the market is so behind in the online payment space.

It’s the last frontier. That’s how we got the inspiration.”

“We have one direct competitor in Chicago. Other than that, the big players in online rent payments have gone after the big companies, the ones that own 20% of the market. For them, it’s a long sales cycle, but if you get one big guy, you do pretty well.

As for us and our target market, there’s not much competition. A lot of people have seen the opportunity, but it’s tough to get into because the payment infrastructure is a big hurdle. There are a lot of new payment technologies that should make it easier, reducing the barrier to entry, but also making it easier on us.

Why are we the best? We have built a consumer model where roommates can pay with their credit card/bank account without ever having to talk to their landlord. It is hugely powerful because the landlords have been the challenge in the past. We removed that hurdle. Now the tenants have all the power and it opens us to the 100M renter market immediately. There’s no one who had figured it out yet.”

“Interestingly enough, it’s our relationship with landlords. We built our platform to not involve them, but they are approaching us now. Landlords are actually getting really excited by the idea. For about 1-in-6 tenants who use our service, a landlord will give us a call to request the use for all his properties. It is surprising and exciting.”

“There is a lot of commotion in the technology for payment system and real estate technology. The industry is definitely behind, fragmented, and disorganized. There is so much opportunity, especially with the 70% of the smaller/mid-sized landlords. A lot of startups are doing big things with big data analysis and payment systems that will transform the online rental payment industry. Also, there will be a lot of changes as the older more traditional landlords are handing down their control to the younger generations who better value technical solutions.“

PeterGreenberg.com - One resource to check out is RoadTrippers.com, the brainchild of James Fisher and Tatiana Parent. Plug in your starting point and ending point and the site automatically generates destinations and suggestions of weird and wacky places you can go along the way–everything from lodging, to roadside attractions, nature, bars, pubs, restaurants, venues, amusement parks, for wherever your four wheels might be taking you. Each suggested place has its own review written by travel experts and local writers, and people can login, save their trips, share them via social networking and more. Love it!

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Brandery grads have been making waves in the startup world. Some videos were released by news stations this past week to highlight their achievements.

Impulcity is makes finding events in your area simple. The Impulcity team relocated to Cincy from Louisville to build and release their app. They have raised a strong seed round led by local firm Cincy Tech. Last week, Impulcity released their app to the apple store. You should go download it. Now.

“We take everything going on around town and we give you the best things to do. You can open the app and instantly find your favorite concerts, sporting events, nightlife, things to do with the family. The really cool thing is we let you see what’s going on everywhere… We want people to spend less time looking and more time doing the things they enjoy.”

- Hunter Hammdonds, CEO and Co-founder Impulcity

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“I think it’s a great idea. I talked to some people about it and they all said, ‘Yeah. Why didn’t somebody think of it earlier?’”

- Derek Broker, FlightCar customer

Telegraph Travel - As travel becomes more accessible, many today look to the internet to help them discover new and exciting holiday options.

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They turned the key to a great idea.

They’ve sparked in San Francisco Airport.

Now, we wait, to see them ignite and take over the car-sharing economy at airports.

On February 1^st, FlightCar opened their first hub at San Francisco Airport. San Fran is a pilot program that will allow them to revise their strategy, learn best practices, and create a template to expand their services to airports across the country. On one hand, these guys are flying by the seat of their pants, pulling the pieces together. Their small team does jobs as packages, like “CEO and Driver” or “Developer and Car Washer.” For them, it’s all in a days work and all for the betterment of the company.

Rent a FlightCar. Save money. Join the movement.

On the scale of frighteningly ambitious startup ideas, taking responsibility of a stranger’s car and handing it over to a second stranger is pretty high up there. Welcome to the basic premise of FlightCar, and to the world of the sharing economy.

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Here’s an ideal that may appeal to some of you frequent travelers…
What if you could drive to the airport, hand your keys to a valet, get free parking for as long as you wanted, and have your car washed and cleaned. Oh, and you’d get a free gas card when you returned to pick it up?

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Airport car rentals are a $10 billion business. But until recently, most travelers were stuck with poor customer service and high rates from the incumbent rental car agencies. Y Combinator-backed startup FlightCar wants to offer a much cheaper alternative to those companies in airports around the country, and it’s starting in San Francisco.

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Airport-based car-sharing is a win-win, because: 1) people don’t particularly like paying to park their cars when they leave for other places; and 2) people like to rent cars when they arrive in new places.

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When he drove to San Francisco International Airport for a recent flight to Los Angeles, Garry Tan could have shelled out $18 per day to park his car. Instead, he let someone else rent it.

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