Bedly raises $2.7 million to make renting an apartment a little less horrible

Craigslist is great for serial killers and spear-phishers, but less than ideal for anyone looking for housing.

As a platform for renters, Bedly aims to take some of the pain out of the housing-rental process — and it’s hoping that’s a draw for landlords too. Co-founded by Martin Greenberg, formerly of IBM’s cybersecurity team, and Benjamin Chester, Bedly takes care of all the annoying stuff on both ends. For renters, that means furnishing apartments, screening roommates and setting up utilities. For landlords, that means attracting young professionals who don’t want to deal with the hassle of logistics, and offering property rentals through a clean, navigable platform.

Like Airbnb in its frictionless ideal, Bedly instead concentrates on medium to long-term stays (think 3 months, 6 months and so on) rather than a per-night model. Once a renter is in Bedly’s network, the company wants to make it easy for them to move around if a place isn’t quite the right fit. Because 95 percent of its listings are pre-furnished, that’s not as much of an ordeal as it would be with a traditional rental. On top of furniture, Bedly unit pricing factors in furnishings (even bed linens and kitchen items), Wi-Fi and secure access via a pre-programmed digital lock.

“Landlords haven’t changed their products in a very, very long time,” Bedly co-founder Martin Greenberg said. “The old way is antiquated and makes no sense for the new generation of renters.” Greenberg emphasizes mobility for its renters, boasting that the company does away with the concept of a 12-month lease altogether. “You’re not locked in, from a flexibility perspective.”

Read More

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog