Press Articles

Kim Komando is America's Digital Goddess. Kim is always on the lookout for useful and profitable resources on the Internet, and brings with a daily newsletter her coolest find everyday.

We're very happy to have been selected this sunday as the Cool Site of the Day, and hope that Kim's readers will enjoy and take full advantage of Zilok to save and make money by renting the stuff the need and already have!

You can read the full article on Kim's site.

Kim's helping people discovering and making the best out of the Internet and new technologies, through radio shows, colums and newsletter available all around America. You can find it all on Kim's site.

This morning Zilok was in the airwaves in the California Central Coast. Did you feel it? Mark Carbonaro has a great morning show on KION 46, and he went over in great depth how Zilok can give people some relief amidst the crisis.

Now, if you've heard the show and want to start your rental community in the Monterey Bay, you're in the right place!

Last friday we had the pleasure to see a great story about Zilok in the ABC 7 evening news by Leslie Brinkley. If you missed it we have the video right here for you!

Hit by the credit crunch and by soaring prices, people are looking for new ways to save and make money. Zilok provides both, and is becoming more and more newsworthy.

Here's an excerpt from the story, which you can read in full on ABC 7 site, and of course you can watch the video below.

"One innovative Bay Area company is helping people save money and make money, in this economy. The website Zilok connects users with neighbors who want to rent their barely-used household appliances or tools.
Need a fan during a heat wave? You can borrow one for $5 a day. Need a printer? That will be $10 a day. If you want to loan out your iPhone, you could stand to make $25 a day.
Current hot rentals include baby strollers and car seats for out of town guests, digital cameras and video games, and sporting gear like kayaks and bicycles.
In the year since its inception, Zilok is offering more than 100,000 items in many major cities. Those items include everything from blenders and spatulas to a Ferrari Spider for $3,000 a day."

Thanks to Josh for accepting to be interviewed by ABC 7 to tell about his Zilok experience. If you too would like to be part of future stories featuring our community, please send us a quick message so we can reach out to you if a reporter asks for a testimonial in your area.

Last year ABC 7 had broadcasted another story about us, it's fun to see how Zilok has changed while staying useful to people.

Zilok has been selected by PC World as one of the most useful sites for buying, selling or renting almost anything. We would like to welcome all PC World readers and hope that they will take the opportunity to rent their gear!

The Web is becoming everyday a more useful resource for every aspect of our lives. But as the number of services increases, it's hard to keep track of the ones that matter, the ones that will have a real impact on our lives.

PC World wants to help you discovering and keeping track of the latest and most useful services, and issued this week a guide of the 100 Incredibly Useful and Interesting Web Sites.

We're very happy to be featured in this list, as part of the 7 most useful services for Buying, Selling and Renting Almost Anything, right next to Craigslist!

Here's how PC World describes us: "The site hosts rental listings from people in your community for things you might need to use only once--a power tool, a picnic table, a warehouse space, a van--things you'd usually be far better off renting than buying outright.". That's right, most of the things we own we barely use, so it makes lots of sense renting them to other people. On the flip side, next time you need something for a short use, save some money and the environment renting them from a neighbor on Zilok!

This month, the Reader's Digest gives us a goldmine of tips and tricks to get the best deals and save the most money online. Our favorite trick? Save and make money renting anything on Zilok.com!

Here is an excerpt of the article:"Need a trombone, power saw, or bow and arrows? Rent an amazing assortment of stuff-you name it, it's available-from individuals at zilok.com, which covers 50 cities in 17 states. Type in what you're looking for, where you live, and how long you'll need it, then make arrangements with the owner for pickup. Mason Carroll, a software professional in San Francisco, rented a kayak for $40 a day. He enjoyed paddling around Shasta Lake for far less than if he'd purchased the same kayak for $350. You can rent your stuff to others too."

Thanks Mason for sharing your experience of Zilok with the Reader's Digest! If you want to share your own experience, contact us and submit us a testimonial telling how much money you saved or made with Zilok. Your testimonial may be featured on our home page, and you could be featured in future articles about Zilok!

Zilok is a great way to save money. But what's even more exciting is the money making part of it. How much money? Renting what? Figure it out with our new Rental Income Simulator!

PC Magazine published yesterday its 2008 Top 100 Websites list, and we're glad to be in it. The Top 100 list is a goldmine to find sites that are useful, trendy and have a great potential to be widely adopted by everyone. Good to be here!

Zilok was listed in the shopping category along with Catalog Choice, Gazelle.com, The Impulsive Buy, SomethingStore, Typo Buddy and Wigix. Congrats and best of luck to all, we share with you the drive to help the customer save money, spare the environment and have fun in the process.

Here's how Zilok is described by PC Mag: Is your wallet too thin to buy that sports car, D-SLR, or set of golf clubs? Got a sports car, D-SLR, or set of clubs that you aren't using? Zilok connects users who have stuff to rent with users who need to rent stuff. So instead of buying a Nikon D80, you can rent one to use on your vacation for a few bucks a day.

Here's how PC Mag editors, bloggers and analysts built the list:

Each year, a team of PC Magazine editors, bloggers, and analysts assembles to find the best Web sites of the year. We pore over thousands of submissions [...] and then painstakingly whittle the list of nominations down to 100 Undiscovered Web Sites. For our Undiscovered Web Sites list, we pick those that capture the best of the trends and memes swirling around the Web. Some of these "undiscovered" Web sites are surely known to you, and may even have large Internet followings within their particular niche, but the list's broad range of sites and categories means there's plenty of new stuff here for everyone to discover.

Sean Adams' mission is to find the best bargains and money savers for people of the New York Tri-State area. The show airs on WCBS every week, and last week the focus was Zilok and how you can make money AND save money with it.

With the economy in its current state, every penny counts, and Zilok can help you save and make more than pennies, lots of dollars.

Sean Adams spotted and contacted us for an interview. Welcome listeners from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut!

You can find the show and more bargains in the Tri-State area on WCBS website

Today's Daily Candy is Zilok. We hope you find it sweet and delicio.us! The quickest ones to list rental items will be rewarded with a free feature on the home page!

It's time we make a change about the way we consume. Do we really need to buy and accumulate all this new stuff? Seriously, how often do you use this fancy purse, this ice-cream maker, this bike... well most of your things really? Some things we use all the time, some we just occasionally need to have access to. That's where Zilok can help, connecting you with other people in the community to support a green lifestyle with peer-to-peer renting.

And if you don't do it for the environment, do it for the money! Zilok is a great and easy way to make an extra buck using what you already have. In return people will save money when they'll find out they can rent your things instead of buying them new.

So if you like this candy, please help jumpstart a Zilok community around you by listing some of your things online and telling neighbors and friends about it. Creating an account and listing rental items is free!

Who's going to be first? If you are the first one to post an item (with a picture) in your city and in a category, send us a message and we'll feature your item on the home page for free!

Special thanks to Jasmine and Lauren at Daily Candy for discovering and featuring us in this post.

This morning Zilok made news in "Today in LA" on KNBC. Welcome Los Angeles people to our community of happy renters! To get started, create your free account, and start listing your objects online, people around will need them soon!

And don't forget to tell your friends about it, the more we are and the more objects we can rent, the more money you'll be able to make and save while supporting a green and community-driven lifestyle.

We would like to send warm thanks to Kestrin who kindly volunteered for the story, to the KNBC team in Los Angeles and to the KNTV team in San Francisco. You guys made an amazing job!

Hopefully we'll soon be able to show you the video, so stay tuned on this one.

Update:
Here is the video, enjoy!

We were honored six months ago to be awarded Site of the Week by PC Magazine. PC Mag takes a closer look at our new version and features. It's official now, to rent on the net, Zilok is the way to go!

A few good quotes from the PCMag article, that was also published on Appscout.com

"Zilok, the world's largest peer-to-peer renting platform, might be exactly what you need to make money from the things you have and save money on the things you need only temporarily."

"The cool thing about Zilok is that it lets you rent all sorts of items you might not easily find otherwise, whether you need a digital SLR camera for the weekend, are looking for an inflatable fun-house for a birthday party, or just want to borrow someone else's MacBook Air to try before you buy your own."

Welcome back PC Magazine readers, thanks Errol for the insightful coverage.

Here is also the orginial Site of the Week review.

When Zilok launched its public beta in the US six months ago, Mashable! was among the first give us a review and to get excited about peer-to-peer renting. For our US official launch, Mashable! covers the green benefits of renting stuff to other people.

Along with the article, you can see a video interview of our General Manager, Jeff Boudier, that was recorded during the web 2.0 expo in San Francisco a month ago.

Kristen Nicole pinpointed the definite benefits of using Zilok: "create an additional stream of income by offering up items for rental to others" and "pushing a green lifestyle", thanks again!

It was a pleasure and a lot of fun being live on air for "Talk of the Town" on WVLY today. Thank you Scott Shalaway for inviting me on the show. And a warm welcome to listeners who are stepping by our site.

So, now, friends from West Virginia and Ohio, you know what to do: create a free account and start listing your vacation rentals, digital cameras, strollers, projectors and all you have that can be helpful to people around. Believe me, someone will need it at some point! And for all this to work, don't forget to tell your friends, families and neighbors about it, so they know where to look for stuff to rent.

Best regards, and I hope you'll enjoy Zilok,

Jeff Boudier

Vator.tv is a social network for innovators and entrepreneurs. We were glad to be invited to give a short video pitch explaining what Zilok is all about. Watch the video in this post.

You can see the full profile of Zilok on Vator.tv, where you can add your comments on the video.

Thanks to the folks at Intruders.TV, you can now meet Gary Cige, one of our founders, presenting Zilok and peer-to-peer renting to people in the UK.

What items people put for rent on Zilok? How do you make sure it comes back? What is the response in the countries Zilok is offering its services? Gary answers all that in this video interview:

The video is available in full HD on the Intruders.tv website.

Following up on The Next Web conference, you can read an in-depth interview of one of our founders, Thibaud Elziere, on the innovation and startup focused Europe 2.0 blog.

Thibaud shares some thoughts and advice about starting and developing a web-based business, and his particular experience with Zilok:

"We have enjoyed a very wide press coverage since the beginning, and the main TV channels, radios and newspapers already covered Zilok. It shows that the concept itself is very “communicative”: people are interested, they get involved, and journalists and media professionals have great material to create compelling stories.

Peer-to-peer renting, that is the C2C market, is something new that we would like to support and develop. It is the most fun part of our business model but is also the trickiest. We already get hundreds of rental listings a day posted by individuals, people.

Six months after opening up Zilok in its beta version, we are already operating in four countries with websites in three languages. We were able to do so because we have been aiming and designing internationally since the beginning. Zilok is offering people a new way of consuming, responding to today’s trends and concerns (scarcity of resources, availability of information, cost of storage, environment). These concerns are shared by people all over the world. That’s the rationale: the vision and value proposition for Zilok is valid identically in every country we approach."

You can read here the complete interview on Europe 2.0

At Zilok, we think that face to face is always better and safer than distant communications. That's why every transaction on Zilok is local and directly person to person. Now you can check out one of Zilok's faces on a video interview thanks to Hyve Up.

Meeting people is always useful in understanding what a company is all about. When Xavier Vespa from Hyve Up interviewed Jeff Boudier, our General Manager in the US, they talked about ways we can change our consumption behavior to save natural resources and protect the environment.

Zilok is one of many solutions. Reuse, Recycle and Rent are three ways we can easily help, every day of our lives. And by renting your stuff to the community, you also make money while others save money in the process. This is a great example of how we can change behaviors by giving the right incentives to green and sustainable initiatives, and Jeff Boudier thinks this is why Zilok is getting so popular.

You can read the article "Don't waste it, just rent it!" on Hyve Up's blog

The worldwide Internet scene gathered last week in Amsterdam for The Next Web conference, showcasing the hottest trends and startups in Europe. Zilok was on stage, and in the Herald Tribune columns.

The third edition of The Next Web conference was a unique occasion to bring in one place the VIPs of the Internet from Europe and the United States.

The event was widely covered by the media, you can check the extensive coverage from TechCrunch.com in these posts ( Day 1, Day 2, and wrap-up).

We were also pleased to be the startup that caught the attention of the International Herald Tribune in this article .

Gary, our CEO and founder, gives you a few tips in the article about things you might want to put up for rent: Gary "said the company had expected power tools to be its bread and butter, but was surprised to find that professional-quality photo cameras and baby strollers had turned out to be big hits on the rental market. One guy who happened to have a popcorn machine has rented it out six times and he's paid it off now".

Thanks Gary, now we know what to do with our digital cameras, strollers and pop-corn machines, let's set them free from their closets!

Rent Anything... From the Family Down the Street. With its excellent blog Bits (for Business - Innovation - Technology - Society), the New York Times nailed down the new trend of peer-to-peer renting.

"You can rent a car online. But how about a power drill? Or a disco globe? Or your neighbor’s pool-cleaning equipment?" That's indeed where Zilok comes into play, letting people connect and profit from what's already there, a few doors or blocks away.

Peer-to-peer renting will become stronger and stronger as sustainability, scarcity of resources and limitation of storage space become more important in everybody's daily life. The New York Times post spotted this, and a Wikipedia article provides more background on this new consuming trend. One thing Bits didn't spot, though, is that Zilok.com is operating in 5 countries already, with the United States, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and now the Netherlands!

Our mission statement is to support and foster peer-to-peer renting as a new, sustainable, and community driven way of consuming. So you can imagine we were very interested by this article!

Kristen Nicole greeted Zilok with an enthousiast and deep coverage on Mashable last night. Beautiful review from a most authoritative source!

http://mashable.com/2007/11/06/zilok/

We were very pleased that Kristen spotted and appreciated Zilok features allowing peer to peer renting to be convenient and stressfree: "Zilok is set up in a pretty useful manner, with the ability to add items to favorites, check the verification status of a renter, set prices and terms, and choose a length of time for rental. The two most useful aspects of Zilok are probably the PayPal deposit option, which curbs the renter from having items stolen, and a shared calendar for seeing when the item will be available for rent, and selecting the time you’d like to rent the item. I really like the self-regulation for Zilok that these options present."

Thanks Kristen and the Mashable team!

Webware is giving a beautiful, positive and very personal review of Zilok. The guys are web 2.0 experts with a long track record of great insight, so really the compliments. Check out what Josh Lowensohn says!

CNET's Webware blog has always had great insight in the Web 2.0 arena.

Today they are talking about Zilok and give us a nice review:

http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9811859-2.html

Webware narrowed down why renting the items you occasionnaly use makes huge sense: "For folks who have something like a $500 Dyson vacuum that you bought and use once every six months, this service could theoretically help take a chunk out of the original purchase price by letting you rent it out to people who live near you."

Thanks Josh Lowensohn for this most relevant post!