Fiverr - like Etsy, but for services

Fiverr is a new open marketplace for buyers and sellers of services.

Sellers offer a particular service that they will carry out for $5.

Examples include anything from proof-reading a CV, to creating a simple website, to creating an 'Avatar' style pic from a photo, to help in filling out immigration forms, to burning an effigy of your enemy.

I imagine that if you had a particular skill like photoshopping, and some creativity in selling a specific task you could make a reasonable amount of money. (Last night there were some 'nude photo' type offers, but they seem to have been removed now. The site owners need to police it to keep these sorts of listings off it. Although no doubt an Adult services version would be phenomenally popular)

It's effectively like Etsy, but for services. The idea that everything costs $5 is inspired, because it's a good way to get a taster of whether someone is genuine and does a good job. Once you're in touch with them after the first job, I'm sure more complex projects can be discussed.

It's also a bit like Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdsourcing platform, where you can recruit people to tasks like tagging huge numbers of photos, but more fun and interesting.

Update - and here's an 'Andy Warhol' version of a picture of me, made by Shirley for $5.

Fourwhere - Foursquare + Google Maps

Fourwhere (by Sysomos) is a mashup of Foursquare and Google Maps. It lets you see all the comments and checkins locally on a map, and in doing so it makes Foursquare about 100x more useful.

Fantastic!

Fiesta Movement hits stage 2

The Ford Fiesta is about 60 days away from it's US launch. Ford has been pioneering lots of social media approaches in this launch, under the banner of Fiesta Movement.

The first stage involved letting bloggers drive the cars and record their experiences. Stage 2, just launched, uses teams of two people in different cities around the US to create events for others to take part in.

This is the Detroit team looking at their Fiesta for the first time. "She needs a British name..."



In doing this they're focussing on location, and local inititives

Local - lots more online activity is now local, or location based. By setting up teams in different areas, they can get more people involved in the team that's local to them.

For example here's the profile of Vanae and Francis, the San Francisco Team

Location - The next step from local is to location, by giving the teams missions to complete, around specific locations, putting things onto a virtual map.

For example the Boston Team are:

"highlighting 10 of these amazing locations in a colorful, vibrant, and creative graffiti mural to be unveiled at a massive live event and gathering... which will coincidently be held at their #1 location of their 10 favorites"

This all looks like it's going to be fun!

Secret London

One of the companies presenting at last week's Mashup Event was Secret London.

Secret London have got a great story. Starting as a Facebook group in January they now have over 200,000 members. A couple of weeks ago some volunteers recruited through Facebook built this site, for users to share their London tips (blog post on how they built the site here).

So far it's pretty good, if a little free for all (I know, that's the point), and with no search. It's also bound to get confused with this site which is the top search result for 'Secret London'.

So far Secret London looks very much like LondonByLondon, from a few years ago. They clearly have strong ambitions - look at all of the other cities that are in the pipeline. Let's see how it develops.