Startups

The right celebrity can add credibility and boost branding for a travel startup or lifestyle brand, but it is ultimately up to team, with their heads down executing, to bring a concept to startup stardom.

Altimeter Capital's new venture capital fund won't be exclusively devoted to travel startups, but expect to see it making news along the lines of Concur's larger Perfect Trip Fund, which indeed concentrates on travel.

Trover is a beautiful and fun photo-sharing app, but the company faces some of the same challenges that most startups confront: How do you scale the business so users know you exist? With an additional $2.5 million in funding from Concur, and with other well-connected backers involved, little Trover can hang around for awhile.

The study points to the positive aspects of Airbnb's live-like-a-local positioning and the sense of community the brand can offer its hosts and renters, but also highlights the challenges of making that happen in its most popular markets.

News of the other acquisition this morning was a relief for anyone struggling to get good information from their iPhone using Apple's maps. The addition of fan favorite HopSpot should improve matters even more.

Boat sharing avoids many of the regulations that make the sharing economy especially difficult to disrupt in the housing and auto industries, leaving quality and safety as the predominant determinants of success.

Twitter is slowly building additional features into the main service, and this new acquisition means it will make its formal entry into a local-travel and discovery sector, and may give a run for the money to other larger startups like Foursquare.

UberX’s greatest competitors might not be peer-to-peer ridesharing startups; they’re the taxi e-hailing apps that are gaining legitimacy and providing users a cheaper, faster way to access a transit option they already know and trust.

FlightCar likens itself to other sharing economy companies by arguing that there are no regulations for its new business model. But it really isn't complicated at all: It is a business, and there are rules about businesses operating at airports.