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"Southeast Asia-based Travelmob, a three-month-old travel-themed social marketplace, has made a good start to life after it landed $1 million in seeding funding, led by Singapore's\u00A0Jungle Ventures.\r\n\r\nFounded by former Skype Asia MD Turochas Fuad and ex-Yahoo exec\u00A0Prashant\u00A0Kirtane, the fledgling service allows visitors\u00A0to find and book short-term rented\u00A0accommodation\u00A0across Southeast Asia, using an Airbnb-meets-Hotels Tonight-type approach.\r\n\r\nThe fresh capital will be used to scale up the service's presence and number of rentals in the region, as it seeks to capitalize on a market that is not yet covered by some of the online booking sector's biggest names.\r\n\r\n\u201COur mission is to lead the social stay market in Asia Pacific and since launch, we\u2019ve been making tremendous progress towards that goal. Travelmob intends to use the capital from this seed round of funding to help drive further growth and expansion across the region,\u201D Fuad said in an announcement [via\u00A0e27].\r\n\r\nThe service currently has a balanced mix of customers, half of which are based outside of Asia Pacific, Fuad explained.\r\n\r\n\u201CApproximately 50 percent of these visitors are currently coming from within the Asia Pacific region and the remaining 50 percent from markets like the US, Europe and even Middle East. However, we are increasingly getting more intra-APAC travellers given the rise of middle income groups in India and China.\u201D\r\n\r\nTravelmob has also revealed that it has improved search and discovery on the site by adding 'experience tags.' Explained in the video below, the feature allows travellers to better locate the kind of holiday experience they seek while, likewise, hosts can highlight their listings to reach target audiences with great effect.\r\n\r\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=355o4Sr01Ew&amp;amp;amp;feature=player_embedded\r\n\r\n\u27A4\u00A0Travelmob\r\n\r\nImage via Flickr / edwin.11"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/09/25/asian-social-marketplace-travelmob-lands-1m-seed-funding/?fromcat=all>