Airbnb Alternatives and Competitors Compared in Consumer Apps

Writewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada's largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Whitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they're passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.

View 3, an active clad-alignment splicer with the world's highest fiber image magnification rate, is the most dependable fusion splicer.

Socialmoth is a community to post your thoughts anonymously. You can view postings (mostly gossip and secrets) from the whole community as well as get updates for when someone in your group of friends makes a post. The vast majority of their members appear to be women, with over 600 posts being made per day. These guys will also be taking a new spin on their idea, launching Disenchat.com, a place to post anonymously about your workplace. The system will verify your organization by email address (like Facebook) and let you start riffing. Outsiders will be able to see the existence of the forum and volume of posting, but not the specific comments.

Heysan was a free mobile messaging and community based in San Francisco, California. Initially Heysan provided free messaging between phones and computers, bridging IM with SMS. The service expanded into launching a mobile community and has over 1 million users doing tens of million of monthly messages. In the summer of 2007 Heysan raised a seed round from Khosla Ventures and Atomico, the venture funds of Vinod Khosla and Niklas Zennstrom. Heysan was acquired by Good Technology in May 2009.

Xobni makes your inbox and address book smarter. Xobni, and its Smartr product suite, discover all the people you've ever emailed, called or SMS'd, and instantly access a full view of each contact, complete with their photo, job title, company details, email history as well as updates from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can download Smartr for Gmail, Android or iPhone; and Xobni for Outlook and BlackBerry - or connect them all with Xobni Pro.

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Scribd

Consumer Apps

Scribd gives you access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and more, all in one place, for one price. OUR VISION Inspire the world through stories and knowledge. OUR MISSION Build the largest and most accessible library connecting storytellers with their audience. If you love working with smart, motivated people, you’ll love working at Scribd. We value our employees, we demonstrate accountability, and we take action. We’re one team with a common goal: helping our customers flourish.

OMGPOP is a leading developer of social games for facebook, iphone and the open web. With games on multiple social networks as well as its own destination site, the company is recognized as a leader in creating real-time game experiences. Based in New York City, OMGPOP is funded by Spark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Jamglue is an online community allowing users to listen or mix music from a library of user-contributed music.

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Thinkature

Consumer Apps

Thinkature is a SaaS solution for businesses. Founded by Y Combinator alumni, this platform provides innovative tools and services to help companies streamline their operations and achieve their goals. Built with modern technology and user experience in mind, Thinkature offers scalable solutions for teams of all sizes.

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Shoutfit

Consumer Apps

We tried to build a social network around clothing. Also briefly built a search engine for clothing.

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Pollground

Consumer Apps

A social polling site. Pollground allows you to easily create surveys and allow the “wisdom of the crowd” to answer your questions. Questions and comments can be posted anonymously.

Anyone can create their own beautiful catalog pages of products that they want to editorialize and recommend to others. Authors earn a portion of the referral bonus for products sold. Shut down in 2007.

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Likebetter

Consumer Apps

An online personality test game, where you look at two photos and choose which one you “Like Better”.

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Jumpchat

Consumer Apps

A platform bridging mobile text messages, email, and IM communication without needing to download anything. Users can send mass messages on any of the platforms and JumpChat will send it to the platform the receiver activates. They are currently focusing on mass mobile messaging, where users can shoot off mass messages to the groups they define.

Inkling, based in Chicago, Illinois, offers collective intelligence solutions to help organizations make more informed decisions. Inkling's products have been implemented by industry-leading corporations and government agencies worldwide to reduce operational risks, improve forecasting, and gain insights about the organization.

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Clustrix

Consumer Apps

Clustrix provides the leading scale-out relational database engineered for the cloud or data center. ClustrixDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL and an ideal solution for high-transaction, high-value workloads typically found in businesses such as ad tech, e-commerce, gaming, and large web and mobile businesses. Our customers use ClustrixDB for critical business applications that support massive transactional volume. ClustrixDB delivers more than twenty-five trillion transactions per month for customers including AOL, Nielsen, Match, MakeMyTrip, Photobox, Rakuten, and Symantec. Headquartered in San Francisco, Clustrix is funded by HighBar Partners, Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, ATA Ventures, and Y Combinator. ClustrixDB is available in software that runs on commodity hardware and on any cloud. Visit www.clustrix.com to learn more. Follow @Clustrix on Twitter and "like"​ us on Facebook! #BetterSQL

Snipshot is a photo editor that lets you start editing any photo with one click of a bookmarklet. You can use Snipshot to crop, resize, adjust colors, an automatically enhance you photos within your browser and then save it back to the web. There are a couple other photo editors in this category and Photoshop plans to get in as well.

Finding wedding vendors is hard. In 2007, a couple started Project Wedding to tackle this problem and eventually grew it into a full-featured wedding planning site. Now part of the WeddingWire Network, Project Wedding strives to make wedding planning easier, less stressful, and more fun! Over 1 million brides come to Project Wedding monthly to interact with our supportive community and to read our curated editorial content. We know that today's weddings are all about showing off personal style with creative elements, gorgeous color palettes, and unique details. We also know that the contemporary bride is incredibly busy and wants to take care of all of her wedding planning needs in one spot. Enter Project Wedding!

Wufoo is a web application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. No coding required! Founded in 2006, Wufoo was created by Chris Campbell, Kevin Hale and Ryan Campbell on the belief that forms were the starting point for building anything useful on the web. The problem they saw was that one of the most efficient and used interfaces for collecting data, wasn’t very efficient to create. So they decide to fix that by creating Wufoo! In 2011, Wufoo was acquired by SurveyMonkey, the leader in web-based survey solutions, to help complement their growing suite of services to offer amazing data collections tools to their customers.

Flagr enables users to share places, adding photos, video and descriptions from their mobile phone. They can then create maps and embed them on any website.

AudioBeta develops web-based applications that helps bands communicate with fans and make informed decisions when planning tours. AudioBeta is a U.S.-based company that was founded in 2006 by Altay Guvench.

Loopt, based in Silicon-Valley and backed by leading venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, has created an interoperable social-mapping service that allows individuals to use their location to discover the real world around them, enabling them to find and enjoy the people, places, and events that mean the most right here and now using their mobile phones. With Loopt, individuals will always know who’s around, what to do, or where to go

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TextPayMe

Consumer Apps

Founded in 2005, TextPayMe is an SMS payment service that lets you send money to other people using cell phone text messaging. TextPayMe lets you send money to anyone else in the US with an SMS-capable cell phone, and while phone carriers may charge for the actual text message sent/received, sending and receiving money is free while TextPayMe remains in Beta. In July 2006, the TextPayMe team started working for Amazon and, as of 2011, the site redirects to an Amazon's mobile payment website. There was no press release related to this event but it's assumed the company was acquired. Sending and receiving payments through TextPayMe is easy: simply write a text message to [email protected] with "pay amount phonenumber" in the body (i.e. to send $5 to 123-456-7890, text "pay 5 1234567890"). The service is secure as well, as each payment needs to be confirmed by a user-created PIN. To fund your transactions, TextPayMe lets you add money directly from your bank account and now also lets you link your credit card as well. Currently, the maximum amount that can be sent or received per month is $500.