The company, a sort of Yelp for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), allows instructors to upload information about classes. Users can look for available classes, and read and write reviews on the course and the instructor.

For now the site will be advertising supported. in the future TeachStreet may charge instructors for premium services. They will become particularly good at promoting quality services to users over time, Schappell says, and they can charge for that. They will also be able to direct highly targeted advertising at users – a book on dog training, for example, to users looking for dog obediance classes.

The service is launching first in the Seattle area and has 25,000 courses in 8 primary categories and 70 subcategories. Most search and browsing, however, is done through tags, which allow for the creation of literally any category of classes.

Dutch startup Libersy,which is creating a distribubted booking system for real world services, is indirectly competitive. For now, Schappell says, TeachStreet will not directly provide booking and calendaring services, but it’s a feature they’ll add in the future.

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Libersy, along with competitor Genbook, provide an easy, embeddable booking solution for small service providers. It allows small businesses like doctors, dentists, hair salons, plumbers, etc. to take bookings online instead of just over the phone. Libersy takes a small cut of every transaction, and will also launch a services portal to generate new customer leads for participating businesses.

It’s a bottom up approach to a huge potential market. But it could take years to build a decent customer base. Meanwhile, Google or others could jump in and grab significant market share.

In some ways the business model is similar to the massively funded, IPO-track Rearden Commerce from Silicon Valley. However, Rearded is aggregative major services for business travelers under a single portal. They are beginning to spread out to other services as well, and eventually they will converge with services like Libersy.

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But no one has created a distributed bookings platform that can easily be plugged into individual businesses’ websites (without any programming knowledge), as well as yellow page and other local business sites. Once this platform exists, consumers will have a much easier way of booking everyday services (think tennis lessons, dentist appointments, hairdresser appointments, massages, cooking course, etc.). The potential market is millions of daily transactions.

At least two companies are racing to be the first startup to do exactly that, and help businesses integrate their services online.

Genbook

San Francisco/Australia based Genbook, founded by Rody Moore, raised $2.2 million from Neo Technology Ventures last year to build its product.

There is little information about Genbook on the site, but a press release on the funding mentioned above says they are building a “pay-per-booking” product to allow local businesses to capture online bookings in real-time. The product will be distributed through online directories and local search engines, and businesses will pay a fee per booking.

Libersy

There is much more information available about Amsterdam-based Libersy. The company, which is relocating to silicon valley, has been in stealth mode for the last year and will launch a pilot beta in Europe in May. The target public launch is Q3 2007. They’ve raised $500,000 in angel funding to date.

Founder and CEO Karin Loeffen let me poke around on their development site this afternoon and gave me an overview of the service. Libersy is building a central portal for businesses to create a profile and enter relevant information about their service (category, description, pricing, keywords/tags, etc.). The design is still raw but they’ve nailed the functionality, which includes good use of Ajax to minimize page views. Once they are in the Libersy system, they can add a “book this” button to their website (see screen shot) which links to a mini-booking page. The company will also give an embeddable code to service providers and allow bookings to be made directly from their websites.

The service will also be distributed through search engines and local business directories, and via the main Libersy services portal. Users will be able to search for service providers by location and pricing. Libersy will also encourage user ratings and feedback of service providers, creating an “ebay feedback” type of system (this is also a good potential partnership for Rapleaf).

Libersy will also assist providers in taking credit card and paypal payments for services. They plan to charge a small monthly fee to providers, and/or take a cut of transactions booked through their service.

The company is preparing to close a Series A round of funding.

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