Matt Goes Green

Second Rotation, the startup that will give you cash for your outdated gizmos, has rebranded and relaunched its buyback site under the new name “Gazelle.” This change doesn’t mean a lot when it comes to the service, as Gazelle will still pay you cash for your janky gadgets and sell them on eBay or recycle them for you. But the change probably means the ‘Second Rotation’ brand wasn’t bringing in the amount of visitors the company wanted.

Gazelle does has a few new features including expanded offerings and now accepts laptops, satellite radios and portable hard drives. The service operates in the same fashion, but a redesigned website speeds you through the process of identifying, rating and selling your old tech toys with fewer kinks. Once you agree to sell, Gazelle will send you a Netflix-style prepaid envelope with which you can send in your gadgets. And as soon as it clears their verification system, you get paid and the item goes up for sale on eBay.

Founded in 2006, Gazelle raised $4.4 million earlier this year from Venrock. While Gazelle does have an edge with VC funds, there’s actually a lot of competitors out there like BuyMyTronics.com, FlipSwap and TechForward that all offer similar buyback programs. There’s also FixYa, which is a crowdsourced tech support site focused on repairing broken gizmos, and recently raised $6 million. The potential market is huge and could support multiple players. According to the EPA, in 2005, the US generated a total of 2.63 million tons of electronic waste, only 12.5% of which was “recovered” for recycling.