As someone who is leaving for college in a few weeks, Getaround seems to me like a quality service for someone under 25 who needs to rent a car. Considering many of my friends are attending colleges that are a good driving distance away, its assuring to know that with the click of a button I could go visit them at any time. And if I decided to rent out the extra car sitting in the driveway, I could pay for most of my books without needing to stress myself out first semester scrambling for a part-time job while trying to acclimate to my new home.

A few weeks ago, PandoDaily managing editor Nathan Pensky had a foosball table to get rid of, and wanted to sell it on the Internet. This was clearly intern work, but Sarah Lacy (being the angel that she is) suggested I make a story out of it. So for the past month, I’ve been going from cyber door to cyber door to sell Nathan’s foosball table, posting it as well as four other items donated by the staff onto a bevy of “sell your stuff” sites. 

News sites like ours would have you believe the Web has come a long way since the time when eBay and Craigslist were the only options, with sites tailored towards selling all kinds of things. But while huge strides have been made on the listing experience and the look and feel of these sites, if our experience is any indication, this nut hasn’t been cracked. Put simply: No one wanted our stuff.

Is it us or them? Read about my experience and you be the judge.

The items, and the sites I attempted to sell them on, were as follows: PandoDaily’s illustrator Hallie Bateman offered a Gunne Sax vintage dress to be sold on Etsy for all of the lovers of quirky items. Nathan’s Foosball table would go up on Ebay, a place where I assumed anything you needed to get rid of could easily be sold. PandoDaily’s general manager Oni Rovatti graciously let me post her one-of-a-kind Cartier Train Traveller on Threadflip, a site that I hoped would appreciate the rarity of such a bag. Whitney Phanuef offered her lightly used speakers to be sold on Krrb, a place that promised that a “neighbor” would want such an item. Finally, I would sell Sarah Lacy’s unopened “Game of Thrones” Season 1 (Blu-ray) on Zaarly, which she offered due to her lack of a Blu-ray player. Surely — given the “Game of Thrones” mania–  someone would want this discontinued item?

I tried to sell Mr. Pensky’s table on Ebay, but the process put me through such a rage that I am surprised every table in my home is not flipped over and stomped on. Frustrated by everything from the needless hurdles in building an Ebay account to the requirement of yet another account on PayPal, there was no way I was going to make it to the step that allowed me to actually sell my item. Hence, I decided to sell it on Krrb, and gave the speakers a new home to be sold at: Amazon. 

Each site (after I ditched eBay) had a very simple and streamlined process of how to post items on their site. After uploading a picture, pricing, and posting details, they were ready to be sold within minutes.

I was highly impressed with Threadflip’s ability to cater this process to the specific items they sold. Being able to drag and drop photos, categorize by brand, color, and size, was everything I needed to post Oni’s one-of-a-kind Cartier bag with all of the necessary details.

Etsy allowed categories such as “hippie” and “vintage” to clearly describe Hallie’s billowy dress, showing me that for people interested in fashion, it is all in the details. At Zaarly and Krrb, their processes were more geared towards getting me on and off of the site as quickly as possible, giving me no more than a text box to describe what I wanted to sell. At Amazon, I needed to create a “Seller” account but the site carefully guided me through the process, making it far less painful than my previous experience with eBay.

Yet, even with my fantastic posting skills, no one seemed to be interested in purchasing the Cartier bag, or any of the items for that matter. On the fashion sites people would “like” or “love” the white-lace prairie dress, or comment on what a magnificent piece the Cartier bag was, but no one was willing to spend a dime on what I wanted to sell. My PandoDaily virtual garage sale was — it seemed — stuck in a Pinterest/Facebook world where we had lots of fans but no buyers. Thumbs up and pins don’t pay the rent — or clean out the garage.

After some time had passed, I decided it wasn’t the sites’ fault for my lack of success. It was my inability to put the items on sites where people would want to actually buy them. On Etsy there was an array of Gunne Sax dresses being sold, but maybe it was the fact that my “store” only sold one item that people did not come to take a look. On Amazon, out of the top 10 items sold in Electronics, half of the list is comprised of Kindles. In the cases of Zaarly and Krrb, maybe it was just the people in my area that simply had no interest in my items. For Threadflip, the bag was a tad pricey compared to the rest of the fashion pieces.

I decided to move some of them to different sites to see what would happen.

Both the vintage dress and the Foosball Table would be sold on applications on my iPhone, so as to alert me once they sold, at Ketup and Yardsale respectively. “Game of Thrones” Season 1 would be put up for sale on Amazon, a place I thought someone looking to purchase Blu-ray discs would look first. And last but not least, the Cartier Train Traveller would be sold on Refashioner, another fashion site that was interested in the bag’s rich backstory.

Ketup and Yardsale can boast the fastest posting times. I took the picture, gave it details, and posted the items all in one shot. Unlike selling items on my computer, there was no need to wait for the picture to upload, or clicking through multiple pages to get to that glorious button that lets you start the selling. You could start the selling as fast as the application itself downloaded.

That was perfect for me, the seller, but again where were the buyers? On Refashioner it was still all about people loving the item and its backstory, but unfortunately no sales were made. Yardsale ended up being a convenient and mobile way to sell the Foosball Table on Craigslist (as in the application just sits on top of Craigslist, listing your item on it for you), and I found with the dress that people still only chose to enjoy its presence on their screens without any inclination to have it in their closet.

It seemed all hope was lost until finally, one item sold: “Game of Thrones.” HBO inept digital strategy be praised! Maybe it was my genius move of pricing it slightly lower than all of the others being sold on Amazon, or maybe it was the fact that it was a discontinued product, but it sold within 48 hours of being put online. I hoped I was on a roll when one woman on Etsy was genuinely interested in purchasing the Vintage dress, but unfortunately her size and the dress did not match up.

Many companies have found ways to make selling your unwanted items as easy as possible. In fact, you can put an item up for sale within my record: 45 seconds. The issue is not that it is complicated to sell something, the issue is that these environments are not places that people want to actually purchase your items.

It is clear that when people put an item for sale, it is because they want it out of their homes as soon as possible, but that doesn’t mean that anyone wants to buy it with the same amount of desperation.

It turns out that creating an environment that entices people to purchase an item is a hard thing to pull off, especially with “like” buttons that let people enjoy the lovely picture on their screen, giving them no notion to reach towards their wallets. It creates a culture of “cyber-window shopping” where commenters are praised for their desire for an item rather than kicked out of a physical store for loitering without any intent to purchase.

This is not a bad thing. Heck, I frequent sites such as Pintrest to do just that: to ogle at items and let my imagination run wild. But when I need to actually buy a dress my instinct does not tell me to go to a “sell your stuff” website. Instinct tells me to drag my butt to the mall to try on a dresses that will fit in all the right places. And at 18-years-old, I’m in that grew-up-with-computers demographic.

On the other hand, when I am looking to buy a movie, who wants the hassle of driving from store to store looking for a place that still sells DVDs? It becomes a far simpler task to click a button on my computer to find exactly what I am looking for.

There are many sites that are trying to do this, and in theory their numbers show that it is working, but if “sell your stuff” sites truly want to make quality places for people to buy and sell, they either need to create an environment that betters both, or change the way I, as a customer, think about online shopping.

Maybe we had lame stuff. But it’s likely no worse than the things in other people’s garages they want gone.

[Yardsale image via Ecoki]

Being able to control a computer screen with your finger is no longer just a mediocre superpower. Its what over 26,000 developers are dying to be a part of.

Today, the San Francisco based Leap Motion is releasing its developer application numbers to the world. They have “developers in 143 countries and all 50 US states,” the company says, and the variety doesn’t stop there. CEO Michael Buckwald is impressed by the the sheer diversity of applications. They have an astounding range of “use ideas from developers [including] translating sign language, driving a car or airplane, supporting physical rehabilitation and special needs, manipulating photos and videos, and creating new art forms and thousands more,” says the company.

The technology’s potential is endless, and the company is looking for the highest quality developers to fulfill that potential. Leap Motion has been very selective in choosing people building applications “true to to the spirit of what [they're] trying to do,” says Buckwald. The company would pick quality over quantity any day (although that doesn’t mean applications aren’t rolling in with quantity).

With each new application, it’s amazing to see them move from ”emulating the touch screen” into “trying to take advantage of 10-finger interaction as well as the three dimensional nature of the device tracking,” says Buckwald. For consumers it will be a refreshing change of pace, using a new product built to work in the same way we interact with the real world.

“We have always been very clear that we are not trying to build technology that seems cool, we are trying to build technology that is a better way of using a computer,” says Buckwald.

n a field dominated by software, this hardware company is looking to create true innovation, which gives them a far better chance of changing the world than the next “hot an flashy social network for my cats pajamas*.” Unfortunately, this cutting-edge 3D motion-control technology will not be shipping to us non-developers until February 2013.

“Applications poured in at an average rate of 1.55 every minute” their first week of accepting applications for their free software development units, and by the end of the week they had received 15,000, says the company. To put this number into perspective, Buckwald estimates that “there are about 400,000 iPhone developers right now,” which is a product that has been around since 2007.

With the “tremendous excitement to build for a platform that has 100th mm tracking…that is extremely small…that has a lot of enthusiasm” Buckwald predicts that the rate Leap Motion is accumulating new applications does not look like it’s going to slow down any time soon.

*This is not a real social network, although it’d be interesting if it was.

[Image courtesy of Leap Motion]

As with many stories in history, Springboard was started by a few people who were pissed off with the way things were. Kay Koplovitz and Amy Millman wanted to know why VCs weren’t backing more women. The answer they got? They just weren’t seeing many pitches from women to begin with. That, they decided, was a problem they could solve.

The result was Springboard, an accelerator program for growth stage companies run by women. Since 2000, it has backed over 400 women led companies, which have raised more than $5 billion in equity financing, with their successful alumnae including  Robin Chase of Zipcar, Helen Greiner of iRobot, and Gail Goodman of Constant Contact. ”We look for great investment opportunities, great entrepreneurs, and great companies, and they all just happen to be women led,” says program director Joshua Henderson.

This week Springboard announced 11 new seed and growth stage deals for their 2012 class as well as a a new 40 person advisory council. They include companies focused on ecommerce, B2B, cloud, digital media, entertainment and financial services, and council members such as Gilt Groupe founder Alexis Maybank, former CEO of Reader’s Digest Mary Berner, co-founder of TRUSTe and Match.com Fran Maier, former CEO of Huffington Post Betsy Morgan, and investors like Sonja Hoel Perkins, Sharon Weinbar, Patricia Nakache, Cindy Padnos, and Heidi Roizen. The full list of companies is below.

The class chosen for this year is full of promising companies. One of the companies called Consensus Point in particular is doing something a bit different than years before. Based out of Tennessee, this B2B company just closed a round of funding, which means they are not in dire need of cash to get their company off the ground. They are taking advantage of this accelerator not necessarily to close a round of funding but to accelerate growth by making strategic connections with potential customers, potential partners, and leveraging the Springboard network in a different way. Consensus Point really “speaks to to the value of the network effect” says Henderson. Because Springboard crafts a handpicked team around each company based on their stage and their specific needs, companies can get a lot of value out of this process that is more than money can buy.

“Hey, my new show airs tomorrow, and I hear we’re in the same time slot. I’ve always dreamed of sharing a night with you…”

“is ur bed is big enough for steven, randy and jen too? ;)”

If you can believe it, that first line was said by “Golden Girl” Betty White, and the next by host of “American Idol,” Ryan Seacrest. (Clearly, Seacrest writes his own Tweets….and needs Nathan Pensky.) Of course, this conversation was not one overheard at a hot night club, rumored by TMZ, or even thought to be possible by the laws of the universe. This glorious moment was captured in the Twitterverse.

But to be aware of its existence, ordinarily one would have had to turn to such celeb gossip mainstays as People or Perez Hilton, or at least follow the concerned parties on Twitter. But what if I told you there was a plethora of these juicy celebrity conversations all aggregated in one handy online source? Such a website exists, my friend, and it’s called CelebJuicer.

CelebJuicer is a site that compiles the best of celebrity conversations on Twitter. At a first glance, its vibrant colors and “Freshly Squeezed” Tweets are enticing. At a closer look, your desperate and irrational need to be an insider of the celebrity world is enabled…and then some.

CelebJuicer may be in competition with celebrity gossip sites, but taking hundreds of pictures of Britney Spears on coffee runs is not quite on the same level as being a fly on the wall watching her conversation with Simon Cowell, in which he states that she “has claws,” and she responds, “And I’m not afraid to use them!” “There is really nowhere else where you can have direct interaction with celebrities the way you can have them on Twitter,” says Alicia Liu, CelebJuicer co-founder.

CelebJuicer also highlights celebrities that tabloids are just not interested in covering. Call it a long tail of gawking. Case in point, I dare you to find a moment between William Shatner and Nickelback on any other celebrity gossip site.

Of course, Nickelback is big time compared to, say, Robert Scoble. Today it started to feature “celebrities” outside of Hollywood, including techies and chefs.

The masterminds behind the site, Michael Kovacs and Liu aren’t 12-year-old girls. They are actually fairly serious people with engineering backgrounds and a bigger purpose.

After meeting each other last August and attempting to build a few different products, they created RivalMetrics, a monitoring platform for Twitter where they help companies discover and keep on top of their competition. CelebJuicer is a sexy application meant to show off what RivalMetrics’ technology can do.

Based in San Francisco, this bootstrapped duo is planning to apply RivalMetrics toward a portfolio of products in the social media space.

RivalMetrics is a service targeted towards product managers, marketers, and CI professionals in order to track competitor activity on Twitter. It reveals all sorts of details about the competition, keeping you up to date on big announcements and showing you who is implementing the enemy’s product.

Although CelebJuicer could come off as flashy and frivolous, it is the ultimate Trojan Horse for RivalMetrics’ well-crafted technology. It uses an incredibly appealing interface and irresistible content to lure you into their algorithmic magic.

[Image courtesy Wikimedia]