Entrepreneurs in the crowdsourced-services niche must be feeling a lot like the knights battling the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail these days. San Francisco service-networking site TaskRabbit, fresh off a $17.8 million funding round, is eating up the competition.

According to an e-mail received Tuesday night from TaskRabbit marketing staffer Johnny Brackett, the startup plans to announce Wednesday that it has acquired SkillSlate, a New York startup similar to TaskRabbit in some respects. The financial terms of the acquisition aren’t being disclosed. SkillSlate, co-founded by former UBS investment banker Bartek Ringwelski and former Yahoo Real Estate product manager Brian Rothenberg, is a services marketplace that closed a $1.2 million round of angel and venture funding in August 2010, according to a regulatory filing.

SkillSlate’s specialty is matching service professionals such as movers, handymen, and programmers with consumers who post service requests. Like TaskRabbit, it does the matching online. But in contrast with TaskRabbit’s workers, many of whom handle less-skilled jobs like grocery pickup or office cleaning, SkillSlate workers focus on “skill-based and artistic tasks,” in the words of a TaskRabbit blog post shared with Xconomy. “By integrating SkillSlate’s platform with TaskRabbit’s, we will be able to provide an even more enhanced service—one where folks can get help with practically anything,” the post says.

TaskRabbit, which was born in Boston in 2009 under the name RunMyErrand, has raised more than $23 million in funding and has expanded to seven regions, including New York City. Ringwelski will become TaskRabbit’s's director of financial planning and analysis and Rothenberg will become director of online marketing, according to the post. SkillsSlate chief technology officer Mike Nelson will join TaskRabbit’s engineering team.

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TaskRabbit—known until this April as RunMyErrand—was one of the darlings of the Bay Area investing community when it emerged from the inaugural session of Facebook’s fbFund incubator program last summer. Founding CEO Leah Busque headed out to Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters in June 2009, and by October her Boston-born startup had picked up checks totaling $1 million from Menlo Park, CA-based Maples Investments and San Francisco-based Baseline Ventures.

Now the company is formally kicking off its service in San Francisco, which is also its new corporate home. That means overworked professionals, in a city that’s full of them, can go online and hire TaskRabbit “runners” to do whatever needs to be done—walking the dog, going grocery shopping, picking up the dry cleaning. It’s an idea Busque (pronounced “buss-key”) calls “service networking”: using the power of online social networking to get things done in the real world. And the startup’s expansion to the City by the Bay after more than a year of operations in Boston is a sign that TaskRabbit’s investors think it could be the next big thing for busy urbanites.

At the same time, TaskRabbit is expanding beyond downtown Boston into the suburbs of Greater Boston, including the South Shore, the North Shore, and the Metro West area. The startup’s network of trusted runners in Massachusetts—all of whom have been subjected to background checks—now numbers more than 300, Busque says.

TaskRabbit actually began matching customers (“senders”) with runners in the Boston suburbs this spring, but hasn’t officially promoted the service until now. “The timing for the experiment was good because we had all of these requests coming in from the suburbs, and we also knew that in the coming weeks we would be looking ahead toward San Francisco,” Busque says. “So we thought this would be a great way to get the platform and the technology ready for the bigger market launch here in San Francisco, and allow us to work out some tweaks as we go along in the Boston ‘burbs.”

To make the service work well for Boston’s suburban residents, Busque says, TaskRabbit had to add functions such as the ability to filter available jobs and available runners by city. That feature will come in handy as the company pursues plans to expand to Bay Area communities outside of San Francisco.

After a couple of weeks of testing in San Francisco with an invitation-only group of about 50 beta users, Busque says San Franciscans seem to be using the service in pretty much the same way as Bostonians. “One of the most popular tasks in Boston—and it seems to be the case in San Francisco as well—is the idea of personal shopping, just being able to … Next Page »

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After a national competition, RunMyErrand was one of 25 companies invited to be part of Facebook’s fbFund Rev 2009 incubator program this summer in Palo Alto, CA. The program will last 10 weeks, and RunMyErrand team members from the engineering and business realm will be participating. We arrived into SFO late the night of Tuesday, June 16, drove to Palo Alto Wednesday morning, and, still on East coast time, eagerly waited outside the Facebook office on Hamilton Avenue for the 1:30 p.m. kickoff event.

I was over dressed in my typical east coast business attire, but quickly settled into the casual and creative style of the other attendees. The event started with an inspiring, off-the-cuff speech by Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook. This is the first year Facebook has run the Rev incubator program. So, he explained, the 25 companies involved are the founding members, and using our feedback and suggestions, Facebook plans to mold the effort into something very special. Dave was genuinely humbled looking at the companies in the room, thinking back to a time when Facebook staffers thought they might have a few thousand developers loosely creating on the platform. Here he was standing before us, looking at all our exciting business models, standing on our own two feet, with the central point of our focus being Facebook. Pretty cool.

Just as a summer camp might start, we also began with a fun icebreaker, called, “Two truths and a lie.” It was fun getting to know the other people and companies in the room, and the goal of the game was to guess which was the lie out of three statements a person made. Mine went something like 1) I am a marketing professional, 2) My favorite food is sushi, and 3) My favorite mode of transportation is a little green Vespa. Can you guess my lie? They could not, although here’s a hint: I was a math and computer science major in college.

On more of a business note, part of the program includes having access to mentors assigned to each company. RunMyErrand received four mentors, and I had the pleasure of meeting one of them during the week—Rob Fan. Rob is the CTO of 750 Industries and hugely impressive. After an intense 45-minute power session, I am absolutely a fan (pun intended). Having access to seasoned entrepreneurs and investors who understand and are excited about this social space is fantastic.

The office space Facebook provided is pretty neat, too. It’s three stories (plus a roof deck) right in the heart of downtown Palo Alto. It is the original Facebook office; the company had just moved out a mere three weeks before we arrived, and impressions of the original group linger in wall graffiti like hieroglyphics written on cave walls, not to mention the whips of Ethernet and power cords descending from the ceiling. We’re told everything is within walking distance, including all the major VC firms on the West Coast. We were also told to be careful of what we said in public, as we never knew who would be listening, or if we would be pitching the same people the following week. Wow, what a mind shift, as I wondered how many people before me suffered through a “foot in my mouth” moment. The energy and buzz in the downtown area is intoxicating and inspiring. It feels like a melting pot of creativity, intensity, and hard work, with a splash of genius.

Besides the amazing space, the mentoring program, and the all access we have to the Facebook team, the most exciting part of the time here is being able to meet, live, and breathe with the 24 other companies participating in the program. I am so impressed by the other teams, and know that we can learn a lot from each of them. There are engineers, designers, artists, and business minds, and what joins us all is the passion we share for what we do, and a vision for taking it to the next level. For me, getting to meet these other incubatees, and hearing about their experiences, trials, and tribulations, is truly inspiring. From iPhone Apps to pure Facebook Platform plays, the variety of companies taking part in the program is impressive. Teams range from one-man-bands to many members, but under the fbFund umbrella we can all act as resources for each other.

Who knows what the summer will hold? There will be engineering help, marketing professionals, and business minds at our disposal. What’s clear is the program is structured with the flexibility to ensure that each team gains the most possible value from being here. The people who put this together are so smart. For us, we are most looking forward to developing our Facebook Connect roadmap and strategy, while continuing to focus on scaling our business of service networking. The West Coast location is exciting for us, and fits in well with our big picture goals. We are absolutely thrilled being here, and this kick-off week has been amazing.

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Yesterday social networking giant Facebook unveiled the winners of its first fbFund Rev competition, a contest to pick 20 organizations building Facebook-related social media applications for a 10-week company-building incubator program at the company’s Palo Alto, CA, offices. Among the winners was RunMyErrand, a Charlestown, MA-based startup we profiled in February.

RunMyErrand.com is a “service networking” website where people in local communities can post odd jobs that they need done—walking the dog, picking up a package—and “runners” can sign up to do them, with payments handled electronically. Founder and CEO Leah Busque says the service appeals to people like busy parents or professionals who are willing to pay someone else a few dollars to take care of a simple tasks if it frees them up to do something more important or more lucrative.

Busque’s startup built connecting software that allows Facebook users to log into RunMyErrand.com from their Facebook accounts, and see which of their errands have been picked up by runners. Their friends can also see this activity, which helps RunMyErrand by spreading viral awareness of the service.

The companies selected for fbFund Rev summer session will receive investments of up to $100,000 from Facebook, although they aren’t allowed to say how much they’ll get. I caught up with Busque by e-mail this morning; here’s our brief interview:

Xconomy: Congratulations on your selection! When will you be going to Palo Alto?

Leah Busque: Thanks so much!! [We're] not sure yet. I think the program starts June 15, so we are looking forward to heading out sometime in June.

X: What do you hope or expect to get out of your time there?

LB: We are really excited to be working side by side with the Facebook experts and engineers, and are hoping to learn as much as possible about the Facebook platform, and new ways we can utilize the social graph to enhance RuyMyErrand.

X: What does the RunMyErrand Facebook app actually do? How does it draw on the power of the Facebook social graph—which is obviously something they look for when they’re handing out these awards?

LB: Currently we have a soft implementation of Facebook Connect integrated into RunMyErrand. If you are a RunMyErrand user, you can use your Facebook credentials to login to runmyerrand.com. Whenever you post or run errands, they can be aggregated to your Facebook profile, and to your Facebook news feed. If you post an errand to Facebook, all your friends can see not only that you are using the service, but they can also see which Runner picked up your errand and all their ratings and reviews. Your friends will be more likely to trust that same Runner as well. This is one way we are building trust between people in the service network that we are building. We know there are many other use cases for the Facebook platform to strengthen trust between users on RunMyErrand, and we are looking forward to brainstorming and specing out some new features with the experts this summer.

X: How much money do you expect RunMyErrand will receive? FB said the final 20 winners will get $500,000 altogether; have they explained how it’s going to be divided?

LB: As part of the deal, we are not able to disclose the amount of funding we will receive from FB.

X: How are things going with the company? Any success metrics you can share?

LB: Things are going really great! We’ve brought on a second full time employee, Rylan Hamilton, who will graduate from Harvard Business School next week. With my strong technical and engineering background, and his business savvy, we make a great team! We are also incubating at Zipcar full time now. They have been nice enough to give us a few desks to use, and it is so nice to be surrounded by all the very smart and wonderful people over there. We will also have a couple of interns this summer from Boston College working with us, so we have major plans to continue our growth here in Boston.

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RunMyErrand, a Boston-based “service networking” startup profiled here in February, is among an initial group of 25 finalists announced by Facebook yesterday for the company’s annual fbFund competition. The fbFund program is designed to provide seed funding for Web startups whose applications or services connect to the Facebook platform. As a finalist, RunMyErrand will receive $1,000 as well as a chance at securing an investment of up to $100,000 and an invitation to work directly with Facebook developers in the company’s Palo Alto, CA, headquarters. “We are over-the-moon excited,” said RunMyErrand founder Leah Busque in a press release. Facebook says a second group of 25 finalists will be announced soon.

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