Berlin City Breaks Include a Local Guide

Taking an overseas city break is a great experience, but somehow it always seems like the locals are having all the fun. If you’ve visited Berlin, Germany, and wished you knew where to find the best entertainment or the “in” places to eat, you can relax. Plus One Berlin has launched the city break with a difference – you not only stay in a modern studio apartment in Berlin’s trendy Kreuzkölln district, you get the company of a local resident who can show you where it’s all happening.

Plus One Berlin visitors have a choice of accommodation and a selection of local hand-picked guides who are chosen for their knowledge and passion of the city. When a guest makes their reservation, guests are given a login to enable them to browse and select their guide. Once they pick a local guide, they indicate if they wish to experience the local area by going to a restaurant or be taken to popular local hangouts.

Plus One Berlin is a great example of exceeding expectation by thinking outside the box. Hospitality entrepreneurs from around the world, here is a value add service idea to add to your offering!

Bridal Brokerage: Market-Maker for Unwanted Wedding Ceremonies

It’s a sad-but-true fact – every year, thousands of brides-to-be change or cancel wedding plans, many ending up out of pocket because they can’t recover money spent on advance bookings for the big day. “Not any more,” says Bridal Brokerage, an online start-up, featured in The New York Times, that finds buyers for unwanted wedding ceremonies, receptions and wedding parties.

Couples who need to tie the knot in a hurry, or those for whom cost is a big factor, are the target market. Bridal Brokerage identifies cancelled ceremonies that match the required date, location and number of guests, and acts as a go-between, negotiating a price acceptable to both parties.

Bridal Brokerage claims that anything from wedding photographers to catering services can be reassigned. Once the deal is done, it utilises an in-house graphic designer to produce invitations and orders of service for the new couple – all in double-quick time.

The new service helps disappointed couples to minimise the financial impact of changing their plans, while allowing lucky brides and bridegrooms to enjoy wedding days that might otherwise have been unaffordable.

If you’re involved with events or bookings, is this an idea that you could apply in your niche segment of the market?

eBay For Digital Music

We all have goods and items around the home that only appear to collect dust and loose there value hence we flog them on eBay. Well it now appears that digital content is not safe from the second hand resale market.

This month, Boston startup ReDigi launched the world's first online eMarketplace that allows users to sell and buy legally purchased pre-owned MP3's and digital music tracks. It's launch this month attracted more than 130,000 users to the site in the first week.

Users select songs and albums they wish to sell on the site's music platform, which are offered at fraction of the price available on competitor sites Eg iTunes. The site manages and monitors the source of the tracks. Once the track is sold, the asset is removed from the sellers music library and any device synched.

Is this legal I here you ask? According to Redigi CEO John Ossenmacher the answer is yes. Ossenmacher claims that while we take for granted that we can sell and buy books, CDs and DVDs, our digital cousins don't enjoy the same rights. They are digital bits just stored on a different media, the digital bits are the same.

It will be interesting to see how the music labels react to this new eMarketplace for unwanted digital music.

Video Hired the Star Employee

We've moved into the age of the internet, streaming this and connectivity that. There's barely an internet user that doesn't have access to a Skype or VOIP account. And every now and then we meet people who we've never met in the offline life whom request a Skype interview or two. Mostly it's a prospective work opportunity, someone trying to get a better understanding of who you are from the other end of the ethernet cable.

But what if you didn't have to swap those Skype names, or spend time trying to wrestle your way out of a dud candidate?

In comes the likes of Ovia and VidCruiter, online based startups that take the pain out of a recruiting process by screening ALL potential candidates for you.

An online HR department fully dedicated to getting the hiring process down efficiently. It's their specialty, and the only thing they work on.

Huge clients are already on board, Philip Morris International, AT&T Interactive, Best Buy and Hard Rock are some.

At the end of the process the companies leave you with only the most qualified candidates. A process of screening from a team of operational management experts, human resources specialists, serial-entrepreneurs, business development consultants and an information technology team.

Ticketometer

Ticketometer is taking the risk out of the concert business.

Introducing a platform where bands, promoters and venues can create concerts that only happen if the minimum number of invitees are reached.

At the moment still in beta, the platform has yet to flex it's full features but at the moment still offers a basic set of features that allow organisation and target setting for cities in the US.

Web 2.0 has been offering a legion of startups that are working towards a more efficient existence online and offline. And Ticketometer certainly seems like one that could potentially enhance the quality of life for a music industry that has been slowly heaving itself into new technologies and mediums.

Could this also pose a direction in thinking in regards to potential overheads? We've seen the pop-up store happen for retail, now Ticketometer for venues and artists, Airbnb for the renters, and what next?

As well as an overhead saving grace for venues and artists, Ticketometer has the potential to encourage the fan-artist relationship. …Really want to see that band in your third tier city? Rally your friends, and your friend's friends and they may just make it.