My pal Joe Gebbia’s got a really cool site called AirBed & Breakfast… it’s sort of like an up-market version of Couchsurfing. It lets users rent their apartment to people traveling to their city, and travelers get a cheaper stay than a hotel, and some local flavor.
Their marketing strategy for the site, by the way, is spot-on. Instead of trying to attack the entire world at once (and spreading themselves too thin, with cities upon cities with no listings) or concentrating on one city at a time (slow), they’re latching onto popular events and conferences.
By creating campaigns around design and political conferences and major events, they make it temporal, and relevant. In one stroke, the site is worth talking about and blogging about for anyone who’s talking or blogging about that event. Smart.
My friend Joe started this thing called AirBed & Breakfast for a San Francisco design conference when all the local hotel rooms were booked up. He and his roommate figured they could roll out some airbeds, charge way less than a hotel, and toss in some first-hand knowledge of the city and camaraderie from fellow conference attendees to boot. People loved it.
They launched a new site just in time for SXSW so anyone can offer up airbeds. It’s an idea very much in line with Jelly, bringing like-minded awesome people together.
My pal and Jelly-er Jamie Wilkinson has been teaching an awesome class at Parson’s on how to achieve Internet fame. It’s tailored towards art students for whom these skills are extra important in getting their work out there.
I didn’t know this before, but apparently the final grades are dependent on each students internet fame at the end of the semester. (Or, I assume, change/improvement in their frame.) Beautiful.
Here’s a choice quote:
Durtsche [a student] says the class has helped him to look differently at the Internet, at how quickly famo comes and goes… “You have to be creative, especially in this class to get an A. Why do you think I’m talking to you? This story is going online with my name, isn’t it? That’s more famo, right there.”
My friend (and former roommate) Andrew Sloat made this video and it’s been making the viral video rounds. It’s *beautiful* and I hear it was shown at AIGA Next in Denver. Congrats, Andrew!
My friend Ben Lerer and his buddies run a city-based email newsletter for guys. Kind of like an edgier, meaner version of Daily Candy. It’s daily and finds cool nuggets about your city.
Here’s a quick video made from photos taken at the Photojojo photo booth when we held bARTer (our awesome art auction/party) at Etsy last month. Watching it makes me happy, as there are a lot of awesome NYC peeps featured.
His latest project is Photojojo. If you like photography, you will like Photojojo.
Before Photojojo, he was a founder of The Daily Jolt, an online community on 100 college campuses, helped create a non-profit called ChangeThis with Seth Godin, and brought the technology un-conference BarCamp to NYC. He also started a weekly casual coworking session called Jelly.
And he's consulted for companies such as Pearson, Apple, and Creative Good and co-authored The Big Moo, a WSJ best-seller, with Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and others.
My pal Joe Gebbia’s got a really cool site called AirBed & Breakfast… it’s sort of like an up-market version of Couchsurfing. It lets users rent their apartment to people traveling to their city, and travelers get a cheaper stay than a hotel, and some local flavor.
My friend Ben Lerer and his buddies run a city-based email newsletter for guys. Kind of like an edgier, meaner version of Daily Candy. It’s daily and finds cool nuggets about your city.
I’m really excited that 
