Peer2Politics

What makes Capital Bikeshare, the largest such program in the U.S. with nearly 2000 bikes, a success? What are its shortcomings? Mohana Ravindranath investigates.

May hasn’t gone so hot for some of the sharing economy’s most promising entrepreneurs. 2012 might have hinted of challenges to come, but so far 2013 has overdelivered. In the last two weeks, New York regulators and courts have essentially shut three of these companies down, at least temporarily.

Ask a business owner 20 years ago how big their company was and, like the pharaohs, he or she would soon tell you how many people they employed. Full-time staff numbers denoted personal achievement and the business’s (and owner’s) social value.

We are all on a global stage and our impact is being measured. We now have Klout, Kred and TrustCloud! as predominant platforms just beginning to measure your impact. While these are still in development and are incomplete in what they measure -- a conversation has begun about how a person's online presence can be measured. I am terrified of this trajectory, however, I believe that it is catching on so quickly that it cannot be ignored. Already we are hearing about people getting jobs based on analytics and the concept of you being more an algorithm than flesh is gaining momentum.

I recently had the unique experience of seeing both ends of the innovation spectrum come together. On the one side, I was watching Team Canada-ISEF 2013 head to Phoenix, to compete at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). ISEF is the world's largest high school science research competition and this year 18 Canadian high school students will compete against 1,500 peers in this annual competition. As I stated in aprevious blog, these bright young minds have both inspired and awed me as their ideas show a complex understanding of the world around us.

The maker movement took center stage at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The coveted opening keynote was delivered by Bre Pettis, CEO of 3-D-printer manufacturer MakerBot Industries, who used the occasion to unveil the Digitizer, a desktop device capable of scanning objects up to 8 inches in height using lasers and a webcam, streamlining the printing infrastructure from end to end. "You can fill the world with garden gnomes if you want," Pettis joked.

 

The evolution of collaborative consumption continues, with several startups serving up different takes on monetizing shared meals in North America.

There is a place where you can make (almost) anything. Actually, there are many places like this. One of such places is FabLab Manchester, launched in March 2010, based on the digital fabrication laboratories model (hence FabLab) conceived by Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT.

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. Sounds obvious today. But in 1968, a full year before ARPANET made its first connection? It was downright clairvoyant.

Is social media lowering our desire for face time?

Revolutionary innovation is easy to spot: it can be disruptive, it can make us uncomfortable while at the same time open our minds to new possibilities, and it can change the way we think of a product category, a method, or an industry. Revolutionary innovation can create entirely new ecosystems of products and services to surround and support the new paradigm. On the other hand, evolutionary innovation is not so easy to identify, with most advances happening in such tiny and incremental steps as to go completely unnoticed by the masses. And yet the span of time can help us look back and provide perspective on what would otherwise be an equally dramatic impact on society through ecosystem creation and expansion.