By Jeremiah Owyang

Yesterday, Lyft raised $250m tallying over $310m. Prior, Airbnb has raised over $300m, Uber raised over $250, LendingClub raised over $100m, that’s nearly a billion raised in four companies in a few short years.

On the maker side, which is also part of the collaborative economy, Etsy has raised over $90m. There’s also been significant acquisition events, Paypal purchased mobile payments platform that Uber/Airbnb uses called Braintree for $800m, Avis bough zipcar, and Airbnb has made at least 6 acquisitions.

Why are VCs, entrepreneurs and corporations so hot on this space? Will it pop like the dot com or greentech frothy bubbles, or will it replicate the highly lucrative social media movement?

A few months ago, I wrote a post that aggregates all the money movement, and just updated it yesterday with the news from Lyft, I give reasons why VCs are running to this market, the post is more relevant that ever:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2013/09/30/the-money-flows-in-the-collaborative-economy/