From Fred Wilson’s post reflecting on 2014:
3/ the “sharing economy†was outed as the “rental economy.†nobody is sharing anything. people are making money, plain and simple. technology has made renting things (even in real time) as simple as it made buying things a decade ago. Uber and Airbnb are the big winners in this category but there are and will be others.
See also Steve Sailer’s post (from a year ago) cynically predicting the dark side of this trend:
Similarly, airBnB enables you to turn your home into a boarding house. But, while you are scrubbing the toilet after your latest paying guest has departed, you can console yourself that some guys in Silicon Valley have made a fortune off this, so it’s actually much more glamorous and buzzworthy than it might appear at the moment from your perspective (on your knees in front of your second bathroom’s toilet bowl).
and
So, what are some moneymaking opportunities for 2014? The basic idea of the 21st Century is to take the most dismal economic modes of the past and put them on the latest technology
Truth.
