Pretend to be Jay-Z and Beyonce, if only for a day. (Photo: We Got This Covered)

Not all of us can afford luxurious yachts on which to sunbathe and drink Moet and count our jewels, no matter how hard we wish to be Captain Larry Ellison. But a new startup in Athens, Greece wants to help everyone feel like a glamorous seafarer, if only for a day.

Wired reports that next month two Greek businessmen are planning to launch Incrediblue, a boat rental marketplace for yachtmasters and wannabes alike. Rich people can list their boats for curious vacationers hoping to get their fix of the open sea to rent hourly, daily or weekly. Incrediblue plans to charge 15 percent for its services, undercutting most traditional boat brokers (because that is a thing, apparently).

It's basically Airbnb, but for motherfucking yachts.

Writes Wired:

Tourists or others who wish to rent out a boat can choose from Incrediblue’s listings based on type of boat, cost, availability, and user reviews. Once you pick a boat, you send a reservation request to the owner and pay for your voyage once the request gets approved. If you can’t sail a boat or yacht, you can even hire a skipper on the site to do the driving while you sit back and sip cocktails on deck. For now, you can rent a boat in Greece, Croatia, Turkey, and Portugal, but Incrediblue has plans to launch in Spain and France by early next year.

Sadly, once you turn the yacht keys in at the end of your rental, you'll be forced to confront the stark, devastating reality that you are still not Jay-Z.

No way do we want Mr. Met in our bedroom. (Photo: Amazon)

Amazon's marketplace for third-party sellers can provide a major distribution boost for small retailers. But, as the Wall Street Journal outlines today, selling through the ecommerce goliath comes with a cost. Some retailers are claiming that Amazon basically uses the platform as means of figuring out what to sell and how much it should cost.

Shocker: The Internet's very own Wal-Mart isn't wholly a friend to the little guy. Color us dumbfounded.

For example, one small retailer started selling plush NFL mascots (adorably dubbed "Pillow Pets") in the marketplace. They were doing a pretty good business, until Amazon started stocking them at the same price, and as a featured product.

"I tried lowering the prices, but Amazon would always match my price or go lower until I eventually gave up" competing on price, says the owner. Yeah, out-cost-cutting Amazon probably isn't going to work. 

Amazon "declined to discuss pricing or purchasing strategies" with the Journal, but the marketplace VP told the paper that, "All of our focus is on helping making sellers successful," while another exec reported that sellers average a 50 percent sales bump when they use both the marketplace and Amazon fulfillment. Nor are retailers universally miffed with the company. One Georgia-based sandal-maker attributes 10 percent of his $3 million in annual online sales to the site and says, "It transformed our business to be on Amazon."

Still, it's probably best to assume that Amazon's motives are business and not community oriented.

Mr. Kieran (linkedin.com)

For designers who have ever spent hours trying to tweak a tiny button or icon on a time crunch, salvation is nigh: Folio, a new startup based out of General Assembly, has created a marketplace where top-notch design talent can market and sell their digital content.

The Irish-run but New York-based startup, which launched its beta site last Friday, is helmed by global digital agency CKSK cofounders Cillian Kieran and Simon Keane. Unlike other online marketplaces for independent goods like Etsy, Folio is purely for digital content. Think of it this way: how many old Photoshop or Illustrator files do you have lingering on your hard drive? Why not sell them?

"Folio is a lightweight marketplace for digital content, like an app store for digital goods," Mr. Kieran told Betabeat via phone. "We're looking for people to share and trade digital assets. Designers are regularly creating a lot of digital content--like Illustrator files or Photoshop documents--that go unused and they don’t monetize. In Folio, you can literally [have something like that] up for sale within 30 seconds."

Mr. Kieran took a break from CKSK, which has worked with big clients like Heineken and Sony, eight months ago to focus on Folio. His background is entirely technical, so he's been working with a host of designers and devs out of the General Assembly headquarters to get Folio up and running. The team sent out 500 beta invites on Friday, and plans to send out more in a sort of test and iterate process, culling direct user feedback on how to optimize the platform to best serve designers' needs.

The platform can be used either within your browser, or by downloading the client to your computer. Since it's still in beta, Folio is currently focused on showcasing work from top designers, as well as collecting interested beta testers to give the new platform a trial run. In the short term, Folio is providing talented designers with the platform for free for a year to incentivize using the system, Mr. Kieran said. In the long term, Folio will take a 30 percent cut of each sale, like the iTunes store.

But what of the rampant copyright issues that have plagued other, larger sharing sites like Pinterest and Megaupload? Mr. Kieran says he's provided appropriate safeguards to avoid copyright infringement. "The system is completely moderated and curated, so the quality of content is very high," he said. "Every piece of content is vetted by industry professionals for quality and is monitored to make sure nothing else in the system is similar or copied. We also will comply with MPAA rules and remove content immediately if [it wasn't posted by] the original person, and anybody who uses or buys copyrighted content will be refunded."

Folio is currently funded entirely by Mr. Kieran and Mr. Keane. "I think we will reach out to [venture capitalists], but what we want to do first of all is demonstrate there’s a massive market," said Mr. Kieran. Building out your business plan before accepting funding? In our current bubble economy, that's a novel concept.

The service hopes to revolutionize commerce by building a mobile marketplace for real-time, local transactions. Say it's raining out and you've got to leave the office for an interview, but you forgot your umbrella at home. Zaarly lets you make an offer to pay for an umbrella delivery.

In a lot of ways this makes it similar to Craigslist, except that it is the buyers who are priming the pump and the sellers who are responding to posts.

The service has had a heady, nine week run to date. Co-founder Bo Fishback was President of the Kaufmann Foundation which he describes as, "Pretty much the best job on earth. I gave away $100 million a year to start-ups."

A five-time founder himself, Fishback pitched the concept for Zaarly at LA start-up weekend, thinking it would make a fun, 48-hour project. Instead it took off after receiving celebrity endorsements, $1 million in funding and a ton of press at SXSW, where it handled $10,000 worth of transactions in 24 hours.

Now the service is gearing up to launch, probably within the next couple weeks, and New York will be its biggest market. "Wall Street is full of bankers who have a lot of money and a shortage of time," says Fishback. "For a city full of part-time hustlers, this is going to change everything."

Success during the tech orgy of SXSW is no guarantee Zaarly will find mainstream traction, but the buzz amongst local VCs  is that Zaarly will nab at least eight figures for its next round. For now the focus is identifying communities within the starter cities with a wealth of buyers and sellers to match. Early A/B testing is also helping Zaarly to find its price point, somewhere between 5-10 percent of each transaction.

The kind of transactions that occur on Zaarly is a top concern. The full time team of nine will be supported by hundreds of outsourced staffers who can manually review postings for offending offers. "This would be an amazing tool if we allowed people to sell sex and drugs, but having learned from Craigslist," says Fishback. "We are planning to be very aggressive in keeping illicit activity off our platform."