Week in CollCons
Great week in the #collcons space. Two of the most buzzed about startups disrupting traditional businesses made big announcements.
- Zaarly: the local peer-to-peer marketplace that allows anyone to buy and sell products and services announced a new $14M financing round led Kleiner Perkins. They also welcomed Meg Whitman to their board (Zaarly being dubbed by many as the next eBay, this appointment makes sense…)
- Skillshare; the new darling of NYC tech scene that helps you “to learn anything from anyone”, announced yesterday that they were now open and available in every major US city. This is clearly a big step forward in their journey to transform every city in a campus, every street in a classroom and every neighbor in a teacher.
La revolution est en marche…
Be prepared for the Collaborative Revolution
If you want to understand the current state of the collaborative consumption movement; you should watch Rachel Botsman’s talk at Wired 2011.
The video will also likely get you very excited about the possibilities that the movement offers.
Rachel Botsman, who is leading the movement, makes a bold prediction:
“We are at the beginning of a collaborative revolution that will be as big as the industrial revolution”.
Wow! Is that true? Nobody knows for sure. But we strongly believe it and looking at the current economic situation, this is one of the safest bet we can make.
The most exciting part of the movement is not the amount of VC funding that #collcons startups are receiving. (even if this is great news because it will help the movement go mainstream). No, the most exciting part is that it bring us back to old values and old ways of living: collaboration, sharing, trust, efficiency, trading, lending, swapping,… These are all keywords of the collaborative consumption movement.
As Rachel says in her talk: “In the world of collaborative consumption, people are investing in meaning, they are investing in industries becoming human again”.
Indeed, just look at the occupy movement. People are literally living in streets to protest against a industry that has become disconnected from real world’s problems. New ways of collaboration are emerging from this movement.
With technology and innovation thriving, collaboration is reaching unprecedented scale.
So get prepared to host a traveller in your spare bedroom; get ready to share your car*, lend real money to real people, rent your unused items and learn a new skill from a neighbour.
Really, get prepared for the Collaborative Revolution. And if you don’t, your kids will.
Watch the video here
*On average a car remains unused 22hours per day. This is called “idling capacity”. We will detail this in a later post.
When is #collcons going too far?
Who knows? Seriously.
It makes a lot of sense that developed countries are in front of a massive structural change in our economic model and technology will allow us to create a new kind of economic system based on sharing, re-using and trusting.
The latter being certainly the biggest personal asset we can build and already monetize. Transparency will be omnipresent, and that’s great news for collaborative consumption’s trends. It will be its best partner.
But can we trust the Cloo app? That’s the real question ;)
Beginner’s guide
The objective of this blog is to highlight great initiatives that use the internet to impact our real offline life. Technology is never as great as when it transforms the way we meet, exchange, interact, collaborate,…in real!
If you want to start somewhere: you should read the book “What’s mine is yours”. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers did an amazing job at conceptualizing the “collaborative consumption” movement.
“Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before”
Examples include: eBay, Airbnb, Zipcar, etc
You can buy the book here
