Airbnb Adds Sublets, Offers to Pay $200 of Your Monthly Rent

Airbnb, which has focused on short-term room and housing rentals, has extended its service to include long-term stay options and sublets in major cities worldwide.

Those who book before Sept. 8 receive $200 toward their rent for each month up to six months [ with its recent $112M investment, Airbnb can afford such generous incentives ].

 Airbnb has more than 30K available sublets in 5K cities -- 20% of them in the New York City area -- that range from two weeks to six months. Renters can pay for their sublet with a credit card, another convenience. The sublet service could easily become the best way to find...

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Love Playing Games on Your Tablet and Phone? Joystickers Designs Hardware to Make Them More Fun

Editor's Note: See all our Excelerate Labs coverage here.

WHAT: Designs game-related hardware for interacting with touchscreen devices and licenses those designs to manufacturers. Joystickers continues to make three of its own devices including arcade-style buttons that suction-cup to your device and a paintbrush for tablets.

LAUNCHERS: Anthony Cerra, Russ Hakimiyan

WHY: There's more money in licensing hardware designs than manufacturing and selling hardware. People with touchscreen devices are willing to spend money on things that make those devices more fun. A range of products could work with touchscreen devices -- even a jump rope, which Joystickers debuted at Excelerate Labs demo day. 

WHEN/WHERE: July 2010 / Chicago. 

BACKSTORY: "One day, Anthony was playing a first person shooter game on his iPad and in the heat of battle, he lost the position of his finger and he got shot in the face...

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Latest Google Redesign: Gmail Sign in Gets New Look

As part of its design efforts, Google has finally updated the ugly Gmail sign in screen. 

Like the Docs changes [ see our story ], this feels cleaner and lighter. A gray bar stretches across the top of the page with a Google logo in the top left-hand corner -- no more Gmail logo with the envelope in the "m." The "Create an Account" button is now red and has been moved from below the sign in box to the top-right hand corner. The blue sign-in box has been converted to gray as well.

To get the new sign-in page, look for a yellow box...

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Four Years after Apple Was Supposed to Kill Them, Sonos Hits 1M Rooms

Wireless hifi system maker Sonos, best known for streaming music in multiple rooms, has hit 1M rooms worldwide, six years after shipping its first wireless music system and four years since the debut of the AppleTV -- which some called a Sonos-killer. In fact, except for AppleTV, Sonos plays well with pretty much every Apple product.

Sonos spokesperson Thomas Meyer tells LAUNCH that 55% of registrations are outside the United States. The number of Sonos households grew...

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Spotify and Rdio Deny Partnership with Reported Facebook Music Platform

[ Our very basic mock-up of what the Facebook Music landing page could look like. ]

Rumors of a Facebook Music platform announcement at its upcoming f8 developer conference in San Francisco gained even more momentum following a CNBC report. However, Spotify and Rdio -- among Facebook's most likely partners, since it appears Facebook isn't licensing music itself -- are maintaining their silence about any possible deal that could involve them. (No surprise there.)

"I'm afraid we don't comment on rumour or speculation...

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