SEATTLE - Real estate and technology blogs are on fire with speculation about Seattle-based Zillow.com, an upcoming online real estate service created by the high-tech dream team of Richard Barton, who founded the online travel site Expedia while at Microsoft, and Lloyd Frink, former SVP of Expedia and also a Microsoft veteran.

Company officials are staying mum about exactly what Zillow will be and when it will be up and running, though they recently have begun taking sign-ups to preview its beta launch and they’ve tripled their staff in the past several months.

Zillow's Director of Public Relations, Amy Bohutinsky, said the company is remaining pretty stealth prior to launch.

"At this point no one knows what we’re doing, and that’s intentional," she said. "When you have a great idea you want to keep it under wraps until you're ready to show it off."

On Tuesday, the company announced it received its first round of venture capital from Silicon Valley firms Technology Crossover Ventures and Benchmark Capital, where Barton is a venture partner. Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark, and Jay Hoag, founding general partner at TCV, will join Zillow.com’s board of directors. Terms were not disclosed. The company raised $6 million from employees earlier this year.

There is speculation that Zillow will focus on the for-sale-by-owner market, but Bohutinsky would give few details.

“There’s really going to be a consumer focus. In this industry there aren’t a lot of companies that focus on making the process easier for consumers,” she said.

Bohutinsky said Zillow will not depend on information from Multiple Listing Services, nationwide databases where real estate brokers share listing agreements, but she said, “It’s a service everyone involved in the real estate industry will be able to use in some way.”

While Bohutinsky would give only scant information about Zillow.com, she did say the site will be launched in “a matter of months, not years.”

“We’re working feverishly to put this together,” she said.