
Investors Pump $90 Million Into Airbnb Clone Wimdu - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/investors-pump-90-million-into-airbnb-clone-wimdu/
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patrickgzill
Can I just point out that Airbnb has a far superior name and domain name? I
mean Wimdu sounds like a character from Star Wars, while Airbnb has the "bed
and breakfast" abbreviation built right into the name.

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georgemcbay
This is a totally subjective thing, but they both have terrible names, IMO.
Airbnb is slightly more memorable but equally horrible to actually say aloud.

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tbrooks
Every startup prides themselves on being the disruptor the industry until "me-
too" clones come along and they get pissed because the disruption is short-
lived.

Build a good product users want, treat those users well, and you'll be fine.

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pandakar
At some point, shouldn't the readers of HN consider themselves the market
makers? This constant hearsay about who is making money and who
isn't...tiresome.

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HSO
From a fake interview with McLuhan:

"The attention of consumers can shift instantly and make the most profound
investments obsolete in just a few years, soon to be sped up even further. We
will see economic empires crash within hours, and new ones arise just as
quickly.

The task of the economic manager now is to try to hold monopolies in place
just long enough for economic transactions to occur."

I first read this while still in high school and it left a huge impression on
me. (Big enough that I still remembered it just now, over 15 years later...
wtf?!)

\--> <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/channeling_pr.html>

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pitdesi
What I don't understand about this is - What makes Wimdu a clone of AirBnB,
but AirBnB not a clone of Homeaway/VRBO?

I'm not trying to be flippant, really wondering what is new about AirBnB
(other than a much better interface)

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hvs
From the article, it sounds like these new sites are _literally_ clones. They
are scraping Airbnb listings and posting them on their own sites. They aren't
just using the _idea_ of Airbnb, they are using the _content_.

That's just what I can glean from the article.

~~~
pbreit
I didn't see any mention of scraping.

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kinkora
While i've nothing against Wimdu (or AirBnB), I am against putting insane
amounts of money into something that not only is a "clone" of another
business, it is also what I define as a business that does not exactly "push
humanity forward".

I could give a myriad of better uses for that $90 million:

\- Keep the SETI initiative going (and along with a few arrays)

\- Any tpe of medical (cancer, genetics, etc) research

\- Next generation wireless infrastructure networks

\- Any viable cleantech startup

And the list goes on and on and on and on..

~~~
hvs
At some point, each person decides how much value something provides to
themselves or others and acts accordingly. You put a lot of value in the items
that you list, others put value in things like Airbnb. To claim that because
Airbnb doesn't "push humanity forward" (by whatever measure you imagine that
to be) that it is somehow a waste of money is a bit much. For one thing,
$100MM sounds like a lot of money, but in the big picture of "pushing humanity
forward" it is almost _nothing_. Secondly, as a society, we aren't going to
put 100% of our wealth into those items, or any other list that one person
considers "important". So why is it so terrible that it is going to something
that provides many people real value (as they define it for themselves)?

~~~
kinkora
I wasn't referring to AirBnB specifically but the gist of my comment is I
don't see how an AirBnB clone can justify $90m worth of capital.

So maybe my usage of the term "pushing humanity forward" may be a lil bit
grandiose but i certainly didn't mean giant leaps straight off. For example, i
consider Google/Wikipedia to be an invention that "pushed humanity forward"
because it raised the collective IQ of the human race (with access to it of
course) by a few notches. Both companies certainly didn't need $90m worth of
capital initially to start off but benefitted from a few angel investments.

What i probably should have said is that the $90m could have better been
allocated to things that are more worthwhile to humanity and not investing in
just another "clone" of something.

But I guess kristofferR is right. At the end of the day, the only thing most
investors care about is making money and since it is their money, it is fully
in their right to choose what they want to invest in.

