Wishing our pal’s, their families and friends a great weekend as they observe the holiday.

- The Tradepal Team

(Source: tradepal.com)

The JBJ Soul Kitchen redefines community by offering healthy restaurant fare and a unique way to pay it forward. In an effort to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty, last October the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation launched its’ community kitchen concept. Focusing on volunteerism with a “pay-what-you-can” option, the unique non-profit community program offers a menu devoid of prices. 

The Red Bank, New Jersey restaurant is inspired by chefs and volunteers who prepare healthy three-course meals while helping out neighbors who are less fortunate. The stigma-free kitchen expands on the sharing economy by offering a dining experience where patrons don’t owe anything, but if they can contribute, the Soul Kitchen will accept cash donations or volunteering in exchange for a meal.

For as little as $10 per meal, the non-profit can cover the cost of a meal, while anything extra will help cover someone else’s meal. Volunteer options include cooking, cleaning, serving others, busing tables and even stocking shelves at the restaurant. Now in its fifth year as a non-profit, in addition to the community kitchen, the foundation partners with local charities and churches to provide support, job skills and housing for those in need.

Kitchen 2 from JBJ Soul Kitchen on Vimeo.

(Source: tradepal.com)

(Source: tradepal.com)

This past January, Brian Chesky Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb presented his views on the sharing economy and his future vision for Airbnb during his keynote at DLD 2012 in Munich. A native New Yorker, he gave many comparisons of peoples’ natural tendency to share. Dating as far back as 45,000 years ago, people were ‘hardwired to share’ and this was how tribes survived, according to Chesky. 

“Before World War II, people shared. Following that timeframe, Americans were told to spend and to help stimulate the economy…and eventually people stopped sharing. Over the last 50 years we have consumed more than in the entire human history before that period.”

Now 60 years in the future, the ‘new’ movement is coined the sharing economy. In his keynote, Brian Chesky states, “the average person uses one-third of every paycheck to cover their housing, and another $8,000 annually for car expenses”. 

The sharing economy enables people to make extra money with the assets they aren’t using. Chesky asserts that in 1995, the first wave of the Internet brought consumers online while the second wave connected them together through social networks. He refers to the new wave, the ‘third wave of the Internet’ as the convergence of online with the offline world; people become more social and share offline experiences.

Examples found in the sharing economy: 

Space Share - Airbnb, Loosecubes, Coworking spaces

Car Share - RelayRides, Zipcar, Getaround

Task Share - Taskrabbit

Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces - Farmers Markets, Tradepal, ThredUP

Experience Share - GuideHop

In view of the revitalization of sharing, Chesky stated,

“We used to try to keep up with the Jones’ and now we are sharing with the Jones’.” 

Chesky shared his company’s vision to stimulate local businesses by enabling access to spaces. He hopes Airbnb will be the “protagonist” in helping expand the sharing economy by allowing people to ultimately gain access to any city, and be able to share any asset, any space within the next two years.

In contrast to the green movement of the early 2000s, the sharing economy is not evangelizing that we must sacrifice in order to save the world, but Chesky suggests, 

“What if it was actually better for us. We could save more money, have a more social life, share more and make the environment better.”

In closing, Chesky asserted that with a broader currency of trust, where we all have online reputations, we all could have access to more. In 2011, 5 million nights were booked on Airbnb. Access is more powerful than ownership. 

(Source: tradepal.com)

Trust is the building block of any peer-to-peer relationship. The emergence of a universal online reputation index will be instrumental in the growth of collaborative consumption. 

The excellent piece “Aggregation Not Algorithms Is The Key To Establishing Trust Online” by @kusti raises a key debate. 

The Internet is winner-take-all: this debate almost reminds us of FBConnect vs. OpenID in the online identity war of 2009.

It’s not about aggregation vs. algorithms, it’s about aggregation within the algorithm of choice.

It’s not about transparency, it’s about whose algorithm is dominating.

It’s not about the risk of gaming an algorithm, it’s about the ability of the keeper of the index to be constantly engineering the algorithm while everyone is trying to game it.

It’s all about PeopleRank.

Does the general public argue about the semantics of credit scores? They actually follow suit and work to better their scores as it impacts their financial well-being. Their “social score” will impact their online reputation and allow them to participate in the sharing economy.

When it comes down to building an index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a good example. It’s a price-weighted average index of the 30 largest publicly traded companies in the United States. The reputation index that will win it all, is the one that will be able to select the most relevant types of actions in the social web, and weigh them in a secret algorithm reflecting their relative importance.

That’s serious big data engineering, and this exercise cannot be done in a collaborative way by multiple players: one dedicated startup, whose core business is to build that complex algorithm will dominate the space. 

Blog entry by @karimguessous

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/suteki/475093875/

(Source: tradepal.com)

“We cannot run a linear system in a finite planet indefinitely!”, Annie Leonard bluntly states in The Story of Stuff. She even goes further by stating that recycling is not a permanent solution as it does not reduce the waste generated by the production cycle. The materials economy has impacted our wallets while our wasteful behaviors have devastated the environment. Her video compels viewers to evaluate their habits and to make a conscious shift in their consumption choices. 

Is our system in a crisis due to our old school throw-away mindset or are we transitioning into a new era of mindfulness where we make more conscious decisions as we evaluate their future impact?

Formerly reluctant consumers are now adopting the latest trend of selling seldom used items to offset the cost of being fashionable, pay bills or to giveaway rather than dump in landfills.The attributes we were raised on such as thrift, trust and goodwill are definitely making a comeback as the foundation of our communities. Consumers are increasingly adopting new services that allow peer-to-peer sharing, renting, and swapping. 

One intangible benefit from these peer-to-peer startups is they strengthen our communities while minimizing some of the negative impact on the environment. There is a lot of buzz happening around Collaborative Consumption, and 2012 seems to be the year where it might go mainstream, as evidenced by the NBC Nightly News segment ”In a down economy, sharing takes off”, as aired on Jan 15th, 2012. 

We consider “The Story of Stuff” video to be a founding block in the emergence of the Sharing Economy. It has been an inspiration in building our people-centric marketplace at Tradepal. 

(Source: storyofstuff.org)

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

(Source: kplu.org)