Zilok Blog

We were happy not long ago to find a great article about Zilok and peer to peer renting in the Washington Post. Welcome to our new Members who learned about Zilok there!

Nancy Trejos tells the tale of Zilok and how the idea came about:

In the fall of 2007, a couple of friends in France were trying to hang something on a wall and didn't have a drill. They thought about buying one but somehow calculated that a drill is used only an average of 12 minutes in a lifetime. It made no sense to buy one.

You can read the whole story here. The story was also published in Detroit News

Thanks Nancy for spreading the word!

.

Zilok introduced this Monday a Very Cool Feature that allows our Members to create simple, standard listings in a couple clicks for the most popular rentals on Zilok. Looking at the numbers, it's been a Slam Dunk!

Since the CBS Evening News story aired, also last Monday, thousands of Zilok Members have used the Express Listing Creation feature to create thousands of new listings.

Here's how it works:

• Select the things you have at home from a short list of popular rental items
• Edit (if you want to) the standard listing title and price*

And... that's it. You now have a listing for each item you selected, complete with title, price and picture. Later down the road, you can edit these simple listings and add more details, change the picture, add weekly prices, anything you want.

So yes, creating a simple listing on Zilok is now really a slam dunk. Want to try it out? Go ahead!

* The suggested price is an observed average of the daily rental price for similar items.

Today CBS Evening News with Katie Couric is broadcasting a national story about Zilok and peer-to-peer renting. From the East Coast to the West Coast, Zilok users have shared their experience renting their belongings to one another.

Welcome to all CBS Evening News viewers!
With Zilok, YOU can rent! Make money renting out your electronics, tools, vehicles, costumes, baby equipment... just about anything! Zilok is the home of all things rentable. Join our community and take advantage of more than 110,000 rentals already available in the US, rented by people like you and professionals.

We would like to thank our Members who volunteered to be interviewed, and all the great people at CBS who put together this great story. If you would like to be interviewed sometime about your experience using Zilok, please let us know as we often have urgent requests from TV, print, and web media.

You can watch the video below or on CBS website, and here's the full story.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Today's edition of the Chicago Sun-Times features a great story about Zilok. From the origin of Zilok to the story of our user Antoine in Chicago, the case is made for peer-to-peer renting as a useful resource for a more sustainable way of consuming.

Welcome to all Chicagoans who are joining us after reading the story! And a big thanks to our user Antoine for playing the interview game. If you would like to be interviewed sometime about your experience using Zilok, please let us know as we often have requests from print, web and TV media.

If you are curious about the origin of Zilok, the article tells the story:

The company was founded in Paris in 2007 after a couple of friends bought an expensive drill to hang a mirror and, looking up and down the street, mused that dozens of drills probably were resting quietly in nearby closets and garages. A bit of research turned up the fact that the average drill's total working life is 12 minutes long. Zut alors! A new business for the 21st century was born.

You can read the full story on the Chicago Sun-Times website.

We're very proud to be featured as a great resource to save money in WiseBread's new book: 10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget. To celebrate this with our community, we will give away 15 copies of the book to Zilok Members!

WiseBread's new book is a goldmine of useful tips and tricks to save money in your everyday life. Incredibly useful and practical, it will have answers to every situation in life, like:

• 15 Ways to Make Your Clothes Last Longer
• 7 Beauty Secrets that Cost Almost Nothing
• How to Sound More Confident in One Simple Step
• 20 Tips for Getting Your Security Deposit Back
• How to Get Rid of Your Junk
• 4 Tips for Cutting Out Cable TV Without Missing Your Favorite Shows

You can learn more about the book here, and here's the amazon link.

We want to celebrate the good news with our community, and will ship 15 copies of the book to the fastest Zilok Members to send us a message! Here are the conditions to receive the book:

• Have an account with Completed or Verified Status
• Send us the message before Monday, May 18th 2PM PST
• Include your alias/username and the US address you would like the book to be shipped to.

That's it, happy frugal reading!

Live today, Zilok's new search engine is bringing results from your rental searches faster than ever. After the recent makeover of our booking system, today we turned another important page in Zilok's development.

We asked our community how they would improve the searching experience on Zilok. The responses were less map (sometimes confusing), more speed (to make more searches), and more filtering options. That's pretty much what you get today when you make a search on Zilok.

The filtering options allow you to:

• narrow down your search very quickly by selecting the exact category of rentals you are looking for,
• select only rentals with pictures, or rentals from individual members, or from rental businesses,
• select a daily rental price range that fits your budget
• zoom in or zoom out instantly by choosing how far you are willing to go.

As you filter your search, results will update instantly.

The number of rentals available on Zilok has been increasing very quickly in the last few months, somewhat slowing down the system. The added speed comes very handy to help our users finding what they need in a couple seconds.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the redesign, we are very proud of this new search engine that makes searching for rentals on Zilok faster and more convenient than ever. Let us know what you think!

Members have been asking for a simpler reservation process on Zilok, today we're happy to announce it's up and running! Now in a few clicks you have access to the rental owner contact information so you can call right away and finalize the transaction.

Here's how it works when you want to rent something on Zilok, starting today:

• Select the dates for your reservation
• Confirm with the retainer system
• Contact the owner

Simple as 1, 2, 3!

Now, if the owner tells you the item is not available for these dates, you have 3 days to report to us that the transaction has been canceled and make sure you don't get charged the retainer fee.

We hope this will make it much easier for people to get in touch and arrange the details of the transaction. We've learned that every rental transaction is different, so we want to let our users benefit from a very flexible system. This new system will make last minute reservation much less stressful.

And that's not all. To make communications between rental owners and renters more effective, we've added new features to the community messaging system so you can attach prospective reservation dates to rental owner inquiries. This way if you're satisfied with the owner's response, you can finalize your reservation in a few clicks.

Please let us know what you like or don't like about the new system, we'd love to hear from you (comments below, or click here). Enjoy!

Welcome to all of you who read about us in the April issue of Men's Health. The MALEGRAMS_TIME OFF section of the magazine is a monthly selection of the best things to do, see, hear, play and go to. This month for Men's Health, Zilok is the tool of choice.

Here's Men's Health take on Zilok:

So your jerk neighbor won't let you borrow his chain saw and tax day left you too poor to buy one? Hit this site and rent one from a stranger.
Then recoup the expense by renting out your own stuff.
Sharing can be profitable.

It's good to be there! Thanks to the Men's Health editors for putting Zilok on men's radar.

You can see the article here, and if you're browsing the magazine look for page 70.

Why buy when you can rent? That's the question Jennifer DeLeo asked PC Magazine readers. Whether it is to try before you buy or to save money, renting makes a lot of sense!

Renting has always been around but is now becoming part of our consuming culture, as more things become available as rentals. The Internet makes it all available from the comfort of your home.

This article showcases 8 useful websites to look for rentals, and when you're looking to rent beyond books and textbooks (BookSwim), DVDs (Netflix, Amazon), or an apartment (Rent.com), Zilok is of course the tool of choice!

The story was picked up by the free daily Worldwide newspaper Metro (see page 13), so you may also have seen Zilok on your commute to work!

You can also check out on PCMag.com the Site of the Week review of Zilok back in November 2007, and this article from May 2008: Want to Rent Stuff from the Net? Try Zilok

Sean Gourley of YouNoodle predicted, mathematically, that Zilok will become the next Google. The numbers do not lie. Neither does Sean... Watch the interview on NBC!

Sean's webiste, YouNoodle, uses savvy technology and takes over 24 factors to calculate an online start-up's potential to become the next big thing.

Watch the Interview on NBC's Press-Here: