sharing economy
-
Crunch Network
The new collaboration economy
Technology is creating a new generation of companies that increasingly choose to collaborate as a coordinated ecosystem, even if they have overlapping or competitive offerings. This transparent way of doing business is transforming the way services are delivered and products are developed. Read More
-
Food-sharing startup Josephine doesn’t want to be like the rest of the gig economy
Silicon Valley’s gig economy isn’t known for being very supportive of its core workers — the ones working on the ground, making deliveries and picking up and dropping off passengers. The “best” cases in point are Uber and Lyft, two on-demand ride companies that have been resistant to allow drivers to access their fair share of wealth. Josephine, the startup… Read More
-
You’re a travel agent! You’re a travel agent! Everyone’s a travel agent!
Amsterdam-based TRVL is aiming to shake up the travel industry by turning you (and that guy, and the lady over there and that chap over there, too) into a travel agent. The platform is a sharing-economy approach to booking travel for your friends and complete and utter strangers. Read More
-
Turo doubles its inventory, lets you search by color
Sharing-economy-powered car rental competitor Turo is taking its battle with the incumbents to places few have dared venture. The company used computer vision to determine the color of all the cars in its inventory and is making it possible to select the car for your next adventure based on your favorite color. The company also announced it has doubled the number of cars available on the platform. Read More
-
Crunch Network
Tesla’s best-laid plans will have a challenge in convergence
Driverless cars and ridesharing are poised to bring about the next big tectonic movement that technology provides for the human experience. In much the same way that the mobile phone has transformed the way we live, autonomous vehicles and transportation sharing promise to change the way we move. Read More
-
Tesla and Uber have more in common than you might think
Elon Musk’s new master plan catapults Tesla into a new market; car-sharing. While the idea of Tesla car-sharing seems new, it is not the first time the company’s cars, coupled with autonomous technology, have come up in discussions about the sharing economy. Back in 2015, Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Uber investor DFJ, told an audience that Uber’s Travis Kalanick had… Read More
-
Car sharing leads to reduced car ownership and emissions in cities, study finds
Cars are one of the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions globally, and cars in cities can be especially heavy with their contributions, owing to traffic and population density. And while encouraging everyone to bike or use public transit probably isn’t going to convince everyone to ditch car ownership, car sharing services seem to be winning more city denizens over, and a new… Read More
-
Getaround for camera gear ShareGrid raises $1M
Even if you’re an active photo or video creative, chances are that your gear will be gathering dust on a shelf at least part of the time. At the same time, other photographers and filmmakers are in need of equipment. If that sounds like a business opportunity, ShareGrid is way ahead of you, raising $1 million from Archer Gray and MHS Capital to grow beyond its test markets and open… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
-
Crunch Network
How Hardware-as-a-Service will save IoT
Here’s the dirty little secret about the Internet of Things: The things might not work, and you might not use them. As a consumer, many of your gadgets will collect dust tucked away in a drawer. As a business, many of your devices will not perform as well as expected, turning into maintenance-heavy money pits. Read More
-
Flybridge adds a General Partner in NYC, WeWork Labs cofounder Jesse Middleton
A Boston-based venture fund, Flybridge Capital Partners, is ramping up its presence in New York City, bringing on WeWork Labs’ cofounder Jesse Middleton as a full-time General Partner. Known for its bullish view on Boston’s tech scene, Flybridge’s portfolio includes 21 Boston-area startups out of 52 total, and just 9 in New York. The firm, which has done mostly… Read More
-
Trooly is using machine learning to judge trustworthiness from digital footprints
Trust greases the wheels of the sharing economy, paving the way for transactions to take place between total strangers. But figuring out who is trustworthy and who is not remains a sticky bottleneck for digital businesses wanting to scale faster. Meanwhile the consequences for customers when startups screw up these risk calculations can be very unpleasant indeed. Read More
-
EU backs light-touch regulation for on-demand companies like Uber and Airbnb
On-demand companies like Uber and Airbnb may be coming under scrutiny in some European countries for allegedly contravening local laws, but today the European Commission threw them a line of support. The EC today published guidance that favors light-touch regulation of companies like these, noting that they should not require licenses to operate; that they do not necessarily have to… Read More
-
Pew study finds younger adults driving growth of ride-hailing apps
If you’re wondering which demographic is driving usage of ride hailing apps in the U.S., new research by Pew suggests it’s very much young people who have their foot on the gas here. Read More
-
Crunch Network
The future of digital lead generation
Lead generation has come a long way. The way in which leads were developed during Roman times was through word of mouth. As technology advances, the way in which leads are acquired also changes. Before understanding how far we’ve come today, and where we’re going, we must understand where lead generation started. Read More
-
Crunch Network
The future is the trust economy
As we get into cars with complete strangers, sleep in the beds of people we’ve never met and lend money to others on the other side of the world, a powerful new currency is emerging — and it’s based on trust. What’s striking about the shared economy is not the technology that has made it possible, but the vast changes it has triggered in society. Read More
-
UK’s Onfido raises $25M as it brings its background checking platform to the US
The rise of on-demand startups and other fast-growing businesses like online marketplaces has created a need for reliable ways to verify new hires and customers to make sure they are cut out for the task. Onfido, one of the group of startups building software-based solutions to do just that, has raised $25 million to meet that need. The Series B round was led by Idinvest Partners… Read More
-
Airbnb’s VP of engineering on the sharing economy
The sharing economy, which is sometimes referred to as collaborative consumption, has become a household term — at least in the tech industry — that signifies peer-to-peer exchanges through technology. “The fact that there are so many terms going around these things is almost a function of the fact the industry is so new,” Airbnb VP of Engineering Mike Curtis told me… Read More
-
Crunch Network
Embracing the sharing economy for growth in China
China’s track record for economic growth has been impressive in the last several decades, with China accounting for up to one-third of global growth in recent years. However, China is slowly transitioning from a manufacturing-reliant economy to one focused more on services. And, the sharing economy has become a large part of the service sector. Read More
-
BMW just jumped into the U.S. car-sharing biz, with the help of YC alum RideCell
BMW just launched a new car-sharing service called ReachNow that will enable Seattle residents to access 400 cars that they can pick up and drop off pretty much wherever they like, as long as that’s not on the outskirts of town. Eventually, the idea is to expand into cities nationwide. BMW’s isn’t a revolutionary concept at this point. Daimler has a similar service… Read More
Message Us