As a campervan owner, I’d like a kind of backwards weather-forecasting website.
Instead of saying, “I’m here, what’s the weather going to be like at the weekend?”, I’d like to say, “Where do I need to go to get the best weather this weekend?” (within a certain radius).
Does anybody offer such a service?
You never truly appreciate the wisdom of older people…
Until you are one of them.
I have a Ring video doorbell. When there’s movement in front of my door, or when someone rings the bell, it captures a brief video clip and saves it to the cloud.
It occurs to me that:
In the U.S.A, cars with manual transmissions were just 1.1% of car sales last year.
Cars with electric motors were 1.6%.
Slowly but surely, the revolution is happening…
I’ve only stayed twice in AirBnB rooms.
The first time was in Sausalito, California, many years ago, when AirBnB was still a fairly new phenomenon. (I tried out another new service called “Uber” on the same evening.) Because I was only staying one night, the room was a bit pricey, but it was otherwise fine and still a lot cheaper than a hotel just across the water in San Francisco.
The second time was a few weeks ago, when I stayed for a few days over the New Year with a delightful family on the Isle of Lewis. A really lovely spot.
So my experience with the service, however limited, has been good, and I have many friends and family members who use it a great deal more than I do.
But it’s not the same for everyone, and James Temperton’s interesting article in Wired exposes the fact that some rather dubious people have found the success of AirBnB to be an irresistable temptation…
Thanks to John Naughton for the link.
I remember when my parents got their first credit cards. This new method of paying for things materialised in the UK in the mid-60s, shortly before I did, but they only became widespread in the 70s and 80s, and my childhood was filled with advertisements for them. Anyone else here old enough to remember “Access – your flexible friend”?
American Express was also desperately promoting its alternative charge-card model with advertisements promising the earth. These were nicely satirised by the brilliant team from Not the Nine O’Clock News.
For some reason, it was a very memorable sketch for a young teenage boy, not used to seeing anything like that on British TV at the time!
Two other things, though, made a lasting impression on me at that age:
The first was a presenter on a humorous BBC radio programme starting a new section with these words: “Credit, of course, is a nice new word for the nasty old situation we used to call debt”.
The second was a speaker at a youth camp who gave some exceedingly good advice, which I have followed ever since, and strongly recommend to the youth of today: “Never borrow money for anything smaller than a house.” Seriously, I recommend it.
Debt, however, is not always bad. If you’re a business with reasonably predictable future revenues, debt-based financing can be attractive when compared with the alternatives, but in the tech industry of the last couple of decades, it has very seldom been a viable option for small companies and we’ve had to resort to venture capital instead.
But in a fascinating article entitled ‘Debt is coming’, Alex Danco suggests that this may be about to change, and that the trend for technology products and services to move to subscription-based models opens up new ways of financing startups, that may not depend on selling your company’s soul to the VCs.
Here is a widely believed cause-and-effect relationship I bet you’ve never thought to invert before: because most startups fail, therefore equity is the best way to finance them. Have you ever considered: because equity is how we finance startups, therefore most startups fail?
The article’s worth reading in full if you’re at all interested in this area.
Maybe, if I can get over my dislike of subscriptions, I’ll also be able to get over my dislike of debt!
Thanks to Pilgrim Beart and Tim O’Reilly for the link to Alex’s article.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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