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Spot Sell?: Two Room Apartment, Olympics

So you’ve got a spare room and the Olympics is coming up? How much is it worth?

The tools to realistically frame this question on the fly; the ease at linking buyers, sellers and settling transactions; the role of social networks in providing sufficient levels of trust to move from what-if question to it’s-worth-having-the-conversation levels of commitment; the wide spread availability of buy and sell data – and the platforms to settle transactions.

The speed at which it’s possible to turn a “I wonder how much a room would go for during the Olympics” into a “I’m going to rent my apartment out for the Olympics”. The speed at which your favourite search engine/advertising broker turns this into reality through: real time data mining contextual information - including spoken conversations (that's Android leveraging a nigh quality microphone - just one of the many perks of your heavily subsidized data plan) and of course the questions that other people are asking. In the big scheme of things humans. are. predictable. If enough people asking the same question creates a viable market place, then we've reached the end-game of a knowledge society.

Writing from Beijing | July 18, 2008 | Permalink