In a surprising move, online real estate brokerage Redfin is entering into partnerships with real estate agents from more than a dozen other brokerages in areas that Redfin's in-house agents can't reach. Redfin appears to have changed its tune from its founding when the firm wasn't really getting along with real estate agents. In fact, Redfin seemed to be founded with the mission that consumers could avoid fees associated with hiring and using a real estate broker. With the real estate market contracting and credit tightening, Redfin has been forced to reconsider its business model. It seems that these partnerships with real estate agents was necessary for Redfin to expand throughout the country without having to hire more agents. Full story...
We've talked a lot this week about the so-called "Location War" brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow.
Zimbalam, the digital music distributor from Believe Digital, launches in the US today. The service lets artists submit and distribute their music through 25 of the most popular music platforms, including Apple's iTunes and Spotify, in addition to "several hundred additional stores worldwide".
The official Foursquare account just sent out a tweet letting everyone know that today is already the service's biggest day ever.
There are no shortage of location-based services launching this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp.
It's getting tough to keep up with all of the location-related developments leading up to this year's SXSW, and they just keep coming.
This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores.
Most people in the world hear Hewlett-Packard and think "printers." And who can blame them? Since the relatively recent emphasis on the "HP" instead of "Hewlett-Packard," and the general consumer move away from printers, HP hasn't really done anything noteworthy — well, other than thrive despite the decline of the business in which they made their fortune.
Apple has set the standard that once every year they will release a new version of the iPhone.
As I've made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas.