In short, Shiroube helps you to “find your local guide” and is aimed at travellers who want experiences only local folk can show you. It also allows people to sign up as guides and gives them up to three free ads to list their services.

Co-founder Tatsuo Sato, a native Japanese living in Paris, calls it an “online micro tour guide marketplace that connects local residents and travelers”. Currently, the site covers 3,000 cities but he has ambitions to grow the network to 10,000 by year end.

He came up with the idea of Shiroube, based on his personal experience as a frequent traveller. The idea first took root when he was travelling to an eastern European country.“For the trip, I had arranged a language lesson for a local student who was learning Japanese and I had asked him a micro tour in his local neighborhood in exchange.

“He agreed to my proposal. The arrangement was successful. I gave him Japanese lessons and he guided me throughthe neighborhood.

“Although the city had some tourist places of historical interest, the tour he gave me was far beyond what I had expected. We visited his elementary school, a restaurant his friend was working for, his university class, and clubs and neighborhoods only local people knew.The tour was, in fact, like a scene in a movie.

“Even If I travelled with some help from travel guide books or mobile apps, I would not have had these kind of experiences.  In addition, I was really happy because the barter arrangement worked well for both sides– I got a free tour and he got free Japanese lessons.”

Based on that experience, he called a former colleague Takuya to share the idea and both agreed to start up the business. Today, Tatsuo runs business development and marketing from Paris while Takuya runs the technology side of things from Tokyo.

Tatsuo said his 10 years working in international business development in mobile web and entertainment have given him good grounding to run Shiroube.

Response has been positive so far, he said. “For example, a savvy and frequent visitor to Singapore became a keen user of my service as he found actual people and micro tours on our site.”

Tatsuo gives a nod to the comparison with Couchsurfing “except we don’t ask users to host visitors”.

“We run a pure marketplace and classifieds service to boost interaction between locals and visitors in various forms not only limited to tours. For example, a Spanish artist subscriber used my service to get traction for his exhibition in Barcelona and he was successful in getting a number of foreign visitors to visit his art gallery.

“People use the service to make friends or to boost business, organize workshops and so on.”

Initially, the plan had been to charge users as well but now Shiroube has moved to a travel affiliation model, charging fees from travel businesses such as airport transfer services, and making it free for individual users. It does not take fees from any transaction that might happen between locals and travellers.

“I believe this model will work well – we have used mainly social media to market the service and we are seeing strong growth.”

As with any P2P models, legal issues abound and security concerns are always there. Uber’s run into regulatory problems in the US – it’s banned in New York and is facing law suits in San Francisco and Chicago – and recently in San Francisco, a group of driversprotested for better pay and treatment.

AirBnB continues to fend off legal issues across the US and now spreading to Europe, the latest being a threat by local authorities to hunt down “illegal hotels” and shut down the site.

Tatsuo is cognizant of security issues – after all, who’s to stop anyone from posing as “guides” to fleece travellers?

He said, “We do check the quality of ads subscribers put. But since we don’t ask people to host guests, the risks are naturally reduced and we are developing a rating system which will allow users to check the quality, in alternative and effective ways. We are also in talks with travel insurance companies to attach their insurance products into our system to give visitors additional security.”

As for legal issues, well, we hear for example that the local authorities in Singapore are already cracking down on tour guides who act as “personal” guides to their repeat clients, as officially they have to go through the travel agent channel. And you have to be registered to be a tour guide.

But with the lines blurring all over the place, who’s to stop anyone from being a “friend” and showing your mates your hometown? Yes, now everyone can be a guide.