As the winner of the last Startup Weekend Beijing, Betty Tong, founder of Duanzumi was awarded a fast pass through to the Launchpad Competition. Duanzumi simply put is a Chinese-AirBNB, a website to list rooms for short-term rental.

Although there are more prominent clones in China, namely Airizu, Duanzumi has been established since November 2010 and appears to already have some decent traction and a good amount of room inventory.

The short-term rental space is starting to get competitive with existing property portals such as Youtx.com from Soufan.com and Mayi.com from Ganji.com, a Chinese classifieds site. Of course, this occurred after AirBNB became one of the hottest start-ups from the Silicon Valley and has been valued at over US$1bn. However many of these sites have been criticized for simply taking existing property from their parent sites and simply listing them on a per night basis without the landlords knowledge.

Similar to Airbnb, Duanzumi charges a transaction fee to the room owner and it is only collected after the guest has arrived.

Duanzumi is also focused on holiday destination locations such as Sanya, Xiamen, Beijing, Xiโ€™an and Qinhuangdao.

Jason is an Australian born Chinese living in Beijing, specializing in entrepreneurship, start-ups and the investment eco-system in China, especially in the tech and social area.

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