Yesterday an interesting set of announcements hit the tech world that highlighted some of the early successes start-ups are seeing in helping businesses maximize revenue opportunities and service utilization.

• Overnight, Uber, a provider of high-quality, on-demand car service officially announced the availability of is service in a second city- New York.
• Then Gigwalk, which turns iPhone users into an instance mobile workforce announced that it had exited its beta period and raised $1.7 million in seed money in the process from an all-star list of early-stage investors.
• Finally TaskRabbit, which offers a marketplace for people to outsource their errands announced its own $5 million Series A funding round to help expand its service beyond Boston and San Francisco.

Each of these companies is attempting to apply the same concept behind peer-to-peer computing projects, such as the search for alien life forms, in utilizing available bandwidth. But instead of leveraging unused computing power, these start-ups are leveraging excess capacity in service-oriented businesses. For any type of service business, time not allocated or used to generate revenues are opportunities that are lost forever, just like when an airplane takes off with empty seats on it. In the case of Uber, the company is trying to alleviate this problem by matching professionally licensed drivers who have idle time while at work with new, short-term, fare opportunities. Meanwhile Gigwalk is pairing people with availability in a specific location with large corporations that need specific, once again short-term, tasks completed in that area. In the case of TaskRabbit, it’s allowing consumers who have free time on their hands to run errands on behalf of other consumers who don’t.

The opportunity to provide a service and generate revenues in a given period of time isn’t limited to these types of jobs though as other capacity-based service industries are benefiting from real-time yield maximization as well. Daily deal service LivingSocial has already tested its Instant Deals in D.C. offering lunch at participating restaurants for $1.00, while industry leader Groupon is developing a similar service called Groupon Now that enables restaurants, spas, and other retailers to drive business to their establishments through the use of real-time incentives. This makes perfect sense when these service businesses are not operating at full capacity. Taking the same concept of driving utilization through discounts, Hotel Tonight has launched a mobile app for booking same-day hotel rooms in a number of cities across the U.S.

The underlying enabler of all of these start-up services is the smartphone. Without the ability for consumers and service providers to communicate in real-time based on one or both parties’ location and availability, the opportunity to match the two entities wouldn’t exist. This would leave service providers without a way to generate additional revenues or complete certain projects in real-time and consumers without a way to benefit financially- either through service discounts or by generating additional income for themselves. The economic potential for retail and capacity-based services will only grow as smartphones and tablets become more ubiquitous and enable new business opportunities and economics to be created around simple, short-term, service-oriented tasks.

I’m excited to see what other service industries (airlines, data collection in the real world, movie theaters, tourist attractions, etc.) will benefit from start-ups that can help bridge the gap between existing sales opportunities and maximizing a service providers revenue potential by creating what are essentially real-time exchanges for specific services. For established service industries, there will always be a market for start-ups that can bring new revenue opportunities to the table. For entities willing to pay consumers to perform services on their behalf, the key will be to make the task short and easy to complete to attract the widest applicant pool for these jobs.