Peer-to-peer renting services focus on specific stuff and commodities. TakeSpinlister, a fresh initiative from Los Angeles that enables people to earn a little extra money by renting out their bicycle. Besides offering cheap bicycle renting opportunities in any city in the world, Spinlister also connects the worldwide bicycle riders community. Even for renting luxury recreational vehicles such as boats, sport cars and even planes there is an online peer-to-peer marketplace called Qraft. In addition, Campinmygarden offers private gardens as micro campsites. Parkcirca does the same for parking spaces in crowded cities.
Mmm camp in my garden sounds nice. :)
Wifis.org is a start-up that aims to be a “contact form for your Wi-Fi network”. The new company, founded by Mathias Nitzsche, provides a free service that enables its users to be contacted by others through their wireless networks. How? People register a unique ID with the site (for instance wifis.org/example) and then rename their wireless network into that URL. People who spot your network can easily leave you a message by using the contact form on your personal page. Why would you use it? The company suggests that their service could appeal to “friendly neighbors might invite you to a beer, or ask if you want to share your Wi-Fi for a monthly payment”. What makes Wifis.org interesting is that it is a digital communication channel attached to place. Furthermore, it enables users to get contacted by others without revealing their personal details — the existence of a Wi-Fi network is enough to receive messages.
ooo geography. :)
Seems like a response to my musings from earlier.
The Connected States of America (by senseablecitylab)
I think of this on a city scale; what is a community? if it is based on who connects to whom, what is the modern definition of neighborhood?
When I first moved to this city, I joined a livejournal community for it, and met irl many cool people, geeky people (who for me does not preclude being cool), socially charming people, socially challenged people… But while I was meeting individuals, they were also meeting each other, and there was a major overlap of real life friend groups that emerged out of the virtual community.
So far I haven’t seen an effective method of working the other direction: creating a virtual connection for people who already share physical proximity in what was called “neighborhood”.
I looove it. Making transit miles trackable allows a competitive element (if you are predisposed to such things). The stats that Bixi collects and makes available on your account makes it seem like biking is one big video game (possibly one of Frogger lineage)
The Atlantic reports on a great idea for promoting public transport from a guy called Balaji Prabhakar, professor at Stanford University!
His big idea is to create “frequent commuter programs” in which people who travel on public transit would be rewarded for patronizing the system varying amounts depending on when and how far they travel. Prabhakar thinks the system could help create greater public transit usage and simultaneously decrease congestion. And he’s deploying behavioral economics to transform the small monetary rewards a city could offer into something more.
Drinking fountains in Vancouver mapped with open data mashup
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide
If people put data on the Web – government data, scientific data, community data – whatever it is, it will be used by other people to do wonderful things in ways they never could have imagined.
A new application being developed by a team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation gathers info from a database of thousands of images to enable you to properly identify a tree or shrub by using a photo taken from a mobile device.
Oh dear God, this is amazing. Could I even begin to tell you how awesome this is?
Still in development : (
