THE TECH-INSPIRED TRANSFORMATION
OF AN INDUSTRYThese days, when you want to quickly travel
from one place to another but lack your own
car, there’s a good chance that you opt not
to hail a yellow taxicab, but instead to call
upon the services of a regular driver through
the Uber app on your iPhone. Similarly, when
perusing accommodation options for your
next getaway, you might do so through your
device’s Airbnb app, which gives you the
option of booking a stay in someone’s home
rather than a traditional hotel.
However, why are services like Uber and Airbnb
proving so successful in upending the taxi and
hotel industries respectively? On that whole
subject, we could write a thesis. However, put
simply, the main contributing factors behind
these upheavals are the relatively low cost and
high convenience that these services offer – and
the advent of the iPhone itself that has helped to
make it all possible.
THE GENESIS OF THE
‘SHARING ECONOMY’
Companies like Airbnb, Uber and the latter’s
best-known competitor, Lyft, are all products
of the ‘sharing economy’, in which sharing,
swapping and renting items and resources is a
way of life – not that the term ‘sharing economy’
itself was often used when both Uber and
Airbnb were first conceived over a decade ago.
“When we started, no-one had heard the term
y e t ,” Joe Gebbia, one of Airbnb’s founders,
told British newspaper The Telegraph in 2012.
“We were just living it.”