Peer sharing economy.
The Future of Business is here.
When someone reads the words - ' peer to peer', if this someone has been born in the internet era, the first thing that will go through his/her mind will be : Torrents. Torrents are the file names of programs that have the metadata of a particular file in a computer along with the url of the tracker. These words are euphemistic, to the general, to hackers ; and people who illegally download movies, songs and so forth.
Peer-peer in rudimentary terms is nothing more than connecting two individuals, who have a common end goal. In the age of Facebook, peer-peer relationship is the norm,
But how can a practice that is in cohorts with hackers and people who want to bring chaos be used in a standardized business practice. More so, How can people trust such a practice.
Business over time has evolved from basic barter system to the over blown principles of demand and supply. Things have come to such a point that, artificial demand has been created in order to bolster the supply of a particular product and conversely supply has been reduced in order to create an increased supply of another product. Large corporations have started to indulge in malpractice's and illegal business models for securing the market place.
It is in such troubled times that our answers comes in the form of the most basic business model of them all.
In the pre-industrialized society, before the advent of the renaissance, the basic form of trading was - the barter system. Where commodities had individual values against each other. Where one could get a cow for a dozen chickens and so forth.
This is the principle of the peer sharing economy that has taken the world and the financial world by storm.
The companies leading this charge into the wild unknown are, in no particular order of significance : AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, Lending club.
AirBnB is, in their own words, " Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions.". Simply put, AirBnB allows individual house owners to rent out an extra room of their apartment to travelers, The company vets the prospective houses and deems it to be safe before listing it on their website. Seeing as the New York state commission is pulling all the stops in order to stop the company from opening their doors in the city of New York, we can only postulate that ' business be a boomin'. '
Lyft is a taxi service which enables car owners to rent out the back seat of their car like a traditional taxi, working on the same principles of carpooling only, with a dedicated app that lets users know where a lyft - taxi is and also intimidate the driver that taxi has been hailed for hire. The company just like AirBnB vets all the cars that have registered to their service to make sure that the customers do not have to step into the car with a psycho.
Lending Club, Is the one enterprise from this entire list that can really set the cash registers tingling. in the purest of terms, Lending club does what its name suggest it does. It facilitates the meeting of a person 'x' who needs money and person 'y' who has money to lend out to. The service only handles cash till the tune of $4500. Micro-finance in all its glory. The company has created an algorithm that matches perspective people who need a loan to those who are willing to lend, by the basis of their social network, as they feel that the chance of a person reneging on the loan will be that much lower if they share a mutual friend-circle.
If you are looking to rent out your house, your car or simply lend money to a fellow human in distress, you will have to wait a little bit longer as these companies have still not established their bases of operation in india. But, the time is not far when you will be crashing in a strangers apartment than a ridiculously over-priced hotel.
