Search results for: “sharing economy”

  • Speed of trust and the sharing economy

    ‘At the speed of trust’ was part of the title to an article in on SiliconAngle the other day. The language was loaded with symbolism for me. Speed of trust reminded me of the dot.com era. The internet was going to change everything – and it has been changing a lot of things with time. There was also a sense of urgency with its origin in the Netscape funding and IPO that it was important to find an audience first and a profitable business model later. People you meant talked about moving at ‘internet speed’; usually as an excuse for a poor product or lack of business plan.

    Amazon still uses a variant of this principle to use its profits to enter new business areas  and has managed to successfully position itself as a growth stock rather than a value stock – which most of the rest of the tech sector now is according to Wall Street.

    In 2000, I used to interview clients to see whether we wanted to take them on as a business. Online advertising was fine for building awareness at the time, Google hadn’t got into search advertising yet and venture capital partners forced their investments to get a PR agency on board.

    I saw a procession of start-ups and incubators who came in with an idea that they were implementing but not even a fig leaf of a business plan because they were trying to go at ‘internet speed’.

    Things are different now, the average spend by a client hasn’t grown much in the intervening years and digital marketing is easily heading past 20 per cent of advertising spend. Though how much of that spend is actually effective is another matter all together

    Businesses usually have identikit business plans with spread sheets and predicted revenues. But the sense of urgency is very similar to the dot.com days. Uber’s financial data reveals a plan to scale massively to achieve profitability from current losses. The revolution this time isn’t technological per se, but process. Employment is being thrown away, along with associated costs and benefits to the employee.
    Library workers on the first day of their strike picket the Forum, Norwich
    Practices that would have been in the black economy, are now in a mobile application.

    Assets such as homes are in competition are put in competition with regulated services such as hotels.

    The hard edges that these businesses will bump against aren’t slower than desired bandwidth, but legal, regulatory and social disruption. Uber is already finding out the hard way in terms of legal action around the world to curb its business. Other start-ups are fighting against their operators gaining employment status. Homejoy was apparently shut down for this very reason, though there were also rumours of a dotcomesque tale of being unable to recoup the cost of customer acquisition let alone make a profit.

    Mark Twain is widely attributed to have coined the saying ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme’, I am a bit concerned by the kind of poetry we could end up with. More innovation related posts here.

    More information
    The Sharing Economy market is exploding “at the speed of trust” | SiliconANGLE
    What Really Killed Homejoy? It Couldn’t Hold On To Its Customers | Forbes
    Homejoy, on-demand home cleaning startup, shuts down in face of lawsuits | Ars Technica
    Homejoy Shuts Down After Battling Worker Classification Lawsuits | Re/code
    Uber’s numbers seem ugly either way you look at them | Business Insider
    California Court Gets One Step Closer to Deciding Uber’s Fate | TIME – important because California tends to lead legal trends

  • Sharing economy & more

    Leo Burnett on sharing economy

    Leo Burnett put together this great presentation on the state of the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc.) The presentation on the sharing economy is well thought out and handy to keep one side as a reference. More related content here.

    The Sharing Economy: Where We Go From Here from Leo Burnett

    Code Rush

    Code Rush – an amazing documentary on Netscape and its Communicator product: a mix of email client and web browser. Netscape Communicator was the first desktop email client that I used. I remember that we had it at work and then were put through the trauma of moving to Lotus Notes at work. Communicator had been the first email client to support HTML, so going to text only on Lotus Notes as a culture shock.

    At home I switched to Eudora until I eventually moved to mail.app when I set up an Apple services based email account.

    The Hundreds x Reebok

    The Hundreds X Reebok collaboration movie is a great trip back to the early 1990s and some serious sneaker love. The Hundreds may not be the hippest brand, or the one with the most hype. But they don’t just do clothing, instead the publish content that captures the culture of streetwear. Observers as well as originators and creators in the streetwear scene.

    Alan Watts

    The creators of South Park put together some great animation to accompany recordings by the philosopher and buddhist Alan Watts. Don’t worry it isn’t done a South Park style and Alan Watts voice is very soothing. Watts’ work was very influential from the 1950s and again in the 1990s as the interest was rekindled in Zen buddhist philosophy and practice.

    Video game music origins

    Finally, Red Bull put this great documentary together on the origins of video game music. The process that they used to compose the music is amazing. It shows how limitations can enhance creativity.

  • The split economy

    Split economy

    The split economy is used a term differentiate from the sharing economy. I first heard of it on the Robin Hood Snacks Daily podcast. The sharing economy has been discussed ad infinitum and is very popular. It encompasses high growth businesses like AirBnB, Uber and DoorDash.

    The split economy is used to differentiate itself from the sharing economy. They have some elements in common. Like the sharing economy, the split economy focuses on maximising the utilisation of assets. The difference is that the consumer isn’t paying for a just a service, but also fractional ownership of an underlying asset.

    An example would be fractional ownership of sports cars via ‘clubs’ :

    • Curvy Road
    • AutoXotica
    • Exotic Car Share

    Fractional ownership of art:

    • Feral Horses
    • Masterworks
    • ArtSquare.io

    None of these are necessarily ‘new’ business ideas, but they are now starting to get heat behind them.

    Pacaso

    Snacks Daily discusses a company called Pacaso. Pacaso buys high end properties and then divides it up into fractional ownership. They then charge a management fee to configure the home with personal pictures, a full fridge, fresh laundry and extensively cleaned. Its a sophisticated boutique experience, that is cheaper than full ownership, but with all the practical benefits.

    Pacaso

    Back in the day, Pacaso would have been described as a timeshare business. However the reputation of timeshares has been tainted by high pressure selling and criminality. Split ownership allows Pacaso to put distance between the timeshare sector and itself. It allows the business to ride the coat tails of valuations enjoyed by sharing economy companies.

    More similar posts here.

  • The digital economy bill

    I recently wrote a guest blog post with my colleague Nick Osborne for progressive (Nick tells me that means left-of-centre, politically speaking) blog Left Foot Forward: The Digital Economy Bill is legislatively flawed.

    digital economy bill

    Nick was particularly concerned about inconsistencies in the legislation and constitutional issues. I thought about different issues regarding media economics and technological progress, so I thought I would share my thinking with the notes I made before I contributed to the post. Enjoy.

    And here’s the copy that we submitted:

    Left Foot Forward published an article last week, Unravelling the Digital Economy Bill, but the fact is that the legislation is flawed. We say this for a number of reasons but the most concerning is the Secondary Legislation included within the Bill.

    Without getting into the details of Parliamentary legislative rules, this Bill will give the power to Lord Mandelson, or any future Secretary of State whose remit includes this legislation, to introduce new laws, without extensive Parliamentary scrutiny.

    Apparently, Lord Mandelson has also written to the Leader of the House, Harriet Harman MP, to amend the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, also, most likely through secondary legislation. This is all part of the Government’s crack-down on media piracy.

    However, the Guardian has been reporting the potential for this Bill to open the door for the Tories to help Rupert Murdoch and stop news aggregators such as Google publishing any NewsCorp or News International owned news, which would be a dangerous precedent and a concerning outcome for everyone – including bloggers such as ourselves.

    Attempts by Murdoch to pair with Microsoft to block out Google seem to be underway if the Dow Jones Newswire is accurate. This potential lack of consultation, scrutiny and openness is concerning in any Bill, however in a medium and industry that is as fluid as the digital and online sector, there is large potential for this legislation to have some very damaging effects.

    Whilst these controversial legislative methods are apparently designed to future-proof the bill technologically, it also raises a few questions about the government’s vision of the future. Moore’s Law talks about the number of transistors on a given piece of silicon doubling every 18 months; this is the reason why computers and networks have sped up and why storage on mobile phones have increased over the years.

    It is also the reason why the minimum standards for future broadband aim way too low. With Moore’s Law in mind, it is important to look at the actual technological advances being triumphed in this Bill. The UK government had a chance to spur innovation and be visionary like it did with the motorway system in the 1950s, instead we will have set a miserably low benchmark.

    The UK is relatively densely populated, yet Australia under the leadership of Kevin Rudd has set access speeds of 100MBps for 90 per cent of homes. Hong Kong residents already enjoy 100Mbps broadband and similar speeds are available in Japan and South Korea. Simply put, the digital economy won’t be able to grow under these circumstances.

    Furthermore, there is no reference to the digital tax, a necessary evil, to pay for these upgrades. Although it has been stated that it will be in the Finance Bill which will be outlined in the near future, what happens if this Bill doesn’t get through prior to the election and the Finance Bill does? Where is this money supposed to go?

    The next concern is the “three strikes and you’re out” policy, which opens up a whole new area of discussion. Every home will be sent three warning letters every time their ISP finds them downloading illegal content. Users can have their accounts blocked or fined, as can ISPs who do not comply, despite the fact that the ISPA has said most of the Bill will be unworkable and costly.

    Ironically, there is some research to indicate that piracy is closer to trialling, like a test drive at a car dealership and plays an active role in word-of-mouthmarketing boosting media content sales.

    The Bill tries to protect the media industries against digital innovation. Yet this is as misguided as the nationalisation of failing businesses in the UK up to the late 1970s. Much of the media industries’ problems are due to chronic mismanagement.

    Looking at newspapers firstly, they have little to differentiate themselves, like British Leyland of old they produce the type of content no one wants to buy and have historically been making cuts in all the wrong places of their businesses. An analysis found that newspapers were spending 70 per cent of their money in areas that were not value-creating.

    The music industry’s issues extend back way before the internet and have been well documented by the industry insiders like Simon Napier-Bell. In fact it was only the rise of the CD and back catalogue sales of older artists which helped it grow meaningfully throughout the 80s and early 90s.

    Music labels have a fundamental lack of understanding of online economics, in a time when they should be looking how they can rationalise processes and sign increased rosters to take account of the ‘long tail’ of consumer demand they have reduced artist rosters. They cease to add value for established artists who instead have gone for ‘360’ deals with events companies which provide them with more money.

    So basically, there are a lot of holes in this Bill. It could all be moot as it may not even get through prior to the election, but there is no doubt that it needs many more amendments before it creates anything truly useful. Hopefully, the secondary legislation will be used to make these improvements, because if this Bill is sped through without proper consultation, the digital economy may take a long time to recover. More related content here.

  • Cloudflare + more news

    Cloudflare

    How Cloudflare Helps Serve Up Hate on the Web – ProPublicacomplaints filed against the site go to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare then sends me an email telling me someone said I was doing something bad and that it is my responsibility to figure out if I am doing that. – Is it just me finding anonymous complaints would also be worrying and a bit sinister? This solution by Cloudflare feels like the worst of both worlds

    Business

    One of Macau’s biggest casinos is expanding into West Africa | Quartz

    Culture

    50 Years Of Colin Curtis – The UK’s Mancuso? – great piece by Greg Wilson

    Ethics

    Facebook ads targeting Australian teenagers: Predatory advertising sparks outrage | news.com.au – not that surprising or horrifying to me. Brands tend to look for emotional voids

    Social media firms must face heavy fines over extremist content – MPs | Media | The Guardian – expect mass censorship soon

    Korea

    The Dangerous Mission To Undermine North Korea With Flash Drives | Fast Company – interesting, if optimistic article

    Legal

    EU could legislate to make it easier to move data between cloud providers – this makes things interesting

    Digital Economy Act: Illegal Kodi streams could now land users in prison for 10 years | The Independent – people could now face ten-year prison sentences for illegally streaming copyrighted content. Not exactly proportionate

    Marketing

    How To Catch Lightning In A Bottle – Wieden+Kennedy – Medium – I think part of the battle here is performance versus brand advertising

    Media

    Liberty Global Sees European Operating Income Down 18% in Q1 | Variety – yet another reason why Vodafone was right not to do a deal with them

    We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #351 – We Are Social UK – interesting ARPU numbers for Facebook

    How Deadheads Sped Ahead – WSJ – really interesting read by Andy Kessler that hits on a number of factors. How their show on May 8, 1977 at Cornell University was their best concert. How the Grateful Dead developed a new music model and the sharing economy, when bootlegging is still frowned upon by the rest of the industry. How countercultural Dead heads became the establishment (Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Steve Bannon). (paywall)

    How A Small Group Of Pro-Corbyn Websites Built Enormous Audiences On Facebook – alt left UK media – what’s to stop them having the effect of the US alt right? Interesting read

    Digital Advertising Takes a Hit – MIT Technology Review – a good read

    Analyst Predicts Dish, T-Mobile & Amazon Super Union | DSLReports, ISP Information – not sure why?

    Forrester Sees Advertiser Revolt as Beginning of the End | Digital – AdAge – interesting analysis, even if I don’t entirely agree with the outcomes

    Security

    Jam The Russians: Army Electronic Warfare Kit Comes To Europe « Breaking Defense

    Software

    Microsoft Is Surprisingly Comfy With Its New Place In A Mobile, Apple, And Android World | Fast Company – interesting move

    ★ Apple’s China Problem: WeChat | Daring Fireball – ‘no easy fix’

    IBM Accidentally Shipped Malware to its Business Customers – ExtremeTech – face palm

    Major apps abandoning Apple Watch, including Google Maps, Amazon & eBay [u] – adds weight to the problem of use cases for wearables. More related content here.

    Technology

    Mac Pro: Failure and Future – Monday Note – interesting breakdown of Microsoft Surface numbers

    Web of no web

    NTT Docomo Develops Flying Spherical Display Using Drone – Nikkei Technology Online – proper Blade Runner type feel to this technology – love it

    Oculus Story Studio: Facebook Is Closing Its VR Storytelling Unit | Variety – its hard but not in the technical way that Facebook is used to dealing with