Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Map of New England mapping companies
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Tech companies may have to wait for stimulus funds
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: How social networking is changing business
Boston startup RunMyErrand is running to Palo Alto.
The consumer web company, which provides an online marketplace for odd jobs and errands, has won a spot in Facebook Inc.’s fbFund REV incubator program. The 10-week program starts in June, but founder and CEO Leah Busque said her company will run back in a hurry.
“We’re still very focused in Boston,” she said.
The Facebook incubator, co-sponsored by West Coast venture capital firms Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, is designed to create incentives for development of Facebook applications. The program will invest on average about $25,000 in each of the 20 firms participating, and will take a 1 percent to 5 percent stake in each, according to a TechCrunch report this morning .
Facebook announced the winners in a blog post yesterday.
Busque said RunMyErrand’s Facebook Connect integration, recently launched in a soft implementation, is important to building trust in the company’s online social network. For example, she said, an errand posted by a user gets pushed to his or her Facebook profile, where friends can see it and also see the name of the runner who’s doing the errand. “In turn, they’re more likely to trust that runner because you trusted them,” Busque said.
RunMyErrand recently hired its second employee, Rylan Hamilton, who is graduating from Harvard Business School this year, and moved from its offices at Busque’s Charlestown home, to a borrowed space at Zipcar Inc. in Cambridge. Zipcar chairman and CEO Scott Griffith is an advisor to the company, Busque said. The company secured an undisclosed round of seed funding in March and currently has 100 errand runners and close to 400 senders using its site, Busque reports.
Possible future steps for outside integration include Twitter and OpenID, she said. Twitter applications may include an auto-tweet feature that runners can use to alert each other where they are going and share errands.
Editor’s note: An earlier online version of this story misidentified Griffith’s role with RunMyErrand. He is an advisor to the company.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
