Monday, September 30, 2013

"'Sharing economy' is here to stay, so get used to it"

From the Los Angeles Times:
Add these personality quirks to the qualities that mark you as a social dinosaur:

You're not comfortable renting out a room in your house or turning over the keys to your car for hours or days at a time to total strangers. When you travel you prefer to stay at a hotel with a predictable level of guest service rather than racking out on someone's couch.

When you rent a car, you prefer that you're dealing with a company that has a corporate reputation to protect, rather than a person who may or may not have had the brakes checked sometime in the last decade.
What Paul likes most about the PUC regulations is that they don't try to shoehorn ride-sharing services into a format of traditional transportation businesses like taxis, but focus instead on making sure that the new companies meet reasonable safety standards.

Ride-sharing services such as Sidecar and Lyft enable passengers seeking a ride to plug in their needs to a mobile phone app. They're matched with drivers who are planning or willing to go their way. Driver and passenger meet and work out a price. At the end of the trip the rider pays the ride-share service, which takes out its fee and passes the balance on to the driver....MORE
HT: The Big Picture

I'm pretty sure the various manifestations have not yet reached their final form, see for example Google and Uber Could Change the World (if only we get taxi regulation right).