Who will win in the trust tool stakes?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Forget your credit rating – it’s your reputation capital that’s going to matter in future, delegates at the London Online Information conference heard earlier this week. And first movers with the technology required to scale it up needed to seize the opportunity now.

The prediction comes from Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine is Yours: the Rise of Collaborative Consumption. She’s also an adviser to Fortune 500 companies, venture capitalists and the British Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street.

Giving a virtual keynote speech, she introduced the idea of a society where the business-to-consumer model is turned on its head, ownership is replaced by experiences, services displace goods and trust rather than creditworthiness drives commerce. Promotional videos from three embryonic services illustrated her premise.

TaskRabbit gives under-employed people the opportunity to make money offering local domestic or office services – pick-up and delivery, data entry, plumbing. A quarter of all existing Rabbits are retired, and the claim is that the average Rabbit can earn up to $5,000 a month.

Whipcar allows a neighbour to rent the car sitting under-used on your drive, perhaps just for an hour or so. When the online deal is done, Whipcar automatically makes all the necessary temporary adjustments to the insurance policies.

AirBnB lets people offer space for rent in houses and flats all over the world, whether to holidaymakers or lodgers. People may balk at letting strangers into their homes – but there are apparently only two known examples of theft from an AirBnB property.

Community self-help activity like this is scarcely new, but Ms Botsman’s premise is that technology is now allowing it to become scalable. And in a live phone link following the presentation, she dealt courteously but firmly with doubts raised by the London audience.

Collaborative consumption represented an opportunity rather than a threat to the business-to-consumer sector, she maintained. Yes, it could present problems for tax authorities, but wasn’t it better for people to be earning informally than on benefits? It would certainly need to meet privacy regulations that varied from country to country – but because it was “high touch” as well as high tech, ventures were more likely to be franchised nationally than run by half a dozen people in Silicon Valley.

Above all, people behaved better in consumer-to-consumer transactions, she claimed – and not just for altruistic reasons. Personal reputation becomes crucial if you are to benefit from such services; so people’s behaviour will increasingly become influenced by what she terms “the shadow of the future”.

But the “trust tools” required to oil this kind of commerce don’t really exist yet; they’re having to be invented from scratch. And that, Ms Botsman suggests, is where some of the greatest opportunities lie.

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