 So thank you very much for that welcome and it's really a great pleasure to be here in Sweden and speaking to you at this conference. I think it's probably one of the best conferences I've been to, I think it's only been an hour but I'm really really impressed with both the caliber of the speakers, the engagement of the audience and I hope that this session gives a lot back to you as well so looking forward to having this discussion. So I'm here to talk to you today about a rising culture and economy and a socioeconomic shift that we call collaborative consumption and I've been working with an author, Rachel Botsman, who wrote the book What's Mine is Yours, The Rise of Collaborative Consumption over the last few years and essentially what we've been doing is documenting this rising trend and following the examples all around the world and connecting with the entrepreneurs who are driving this movement on the ground and we can truly see that this movement is going to be as important as the industrial revolution. But before I get into the detail of what is collaborative consumption and what some of the examples that you might be familiar with are, I want to tell you a short story that really harks back to the beginning of this movement and shows you why collaborative consumption really is so amazing. So there's a popular Silicon Valley myth that Pierre Omidyar started eBay because he wanted to help his girlfriend collect Pez dispensers but this in fact was a myth that was invented by a PR consultant who was trying to drive interest in this new auction platform and in fact the real story is that Pierre started what was called AuctionWeb as an experiment to see if people would really trade in exchange with each other online and one of the first things that he listed on eBay or AuctionWeb as it was called was a broken laser pointer. Now this was really just an experiment to sort of see what kind of traction he could get but to his surprise he sold this broken laser pointer for 15 US dollars and he just thought he'd better check with the buyer to make sure that he knew that this didn't work and the response that he got back was I'm a collector of broken laser pointers. So I think this story really harks back to the fact that somebody's trash really can become somebody's treasure in this new culture and economy of collaborative consumption and of course it's not just about broken laser pointers anymore but eBay actually estimates that the market for secondary goods is a 500 billion dollar market so this is a serious global trade between peers which is quite amazing and eBay we refer to as one of the grandfathers of this shift called collaborative consumption which we define as actually the reinvention of very old market behaviors such as bartering swapping lending renting sharing and gifting but the thing that's different about these behaviors this time around is the technology that's enabling us to connect in exchange in ways that have never actually been possible before and where eBay actually changed our relationship from passive consumers to active participants in this kind of two-way peer-to-peer marketplace we're now being exposed to opportunities across all different verticals from being able to be a B&B host or a tour guide or a teacher on a site like Skillshare or perhaps you can rent out your car on a site like whip car so we're really seeing the possibilities are endless when we get into this peer-to-peer revolution and as I mentioned we've seen hundreds of companies emerging around the world across all sorts of verticals and new ones appearing every day which you couldn't even imagine yesterday such as car sharing skill sharing co-working errand and favour networks peer-to-peer travel and the latest which is causing quite a stir dog sharing so perhaps if you can't quite commit to a dog you could actually borrow your neighbour's dog for the weekend to see how it feels so what does collaborative consumption look like and how do these services operate in real time well we define collaborative consumption into three clear systems and the first of these systems we call redistribution markets so of course eBay is one of the grandfathers of redistribution markets which allow people to take something that they don't want anymore and and pass it on to someone or somewhere where it's needed using the efficiency of the internet because what we can see is this convergence of of social mobile and location-based technologies are allowing us to to do two key things which haven't been possible before this time the first is to achieve the same level of efficiency that we might expect when we go to the shops to buy something new we can now actually jump online and find exactly what we're looking for in a location that's convenient all using the internet and the second key thing which is a big driver throughout collaborative consumption is this ability to actually form trust between strangers online which is the social glue that actually holds these systems together and makes us believe that when we pay for something online we'll get it in the post the next day so the interesting thing about redistribution markets is we've actually now shifted from these big marketplaces that sell anything and everything towards more of a niche redistribution market area where people are gathering around a particular interest and trading and exchanging which actually boosts the critical mass of that particular item and guarantees that you'll find what you're looking for so we see websites like ThreadUp in the US which is actually a clothing exchange for gently worn children's clothing so parents can package up a box of two-year-old girls clothing and pass that on for a box of three-year-old girls clothing because we know that children grow so fast that often the clothing hasn't been worn out by the time they're finished with them or there's electronics redistribution which is actually a massive global business where you can actually sell on your old electronic second hand marketplace or in fact broken down and recycled components and gazelle is one of the market leaders in the US of this and it's estimated that the global electronics recycling market will be worth 14.7 billion dollars by 2015 so it's it's big business and another example is actually a Swedish example which I'm going to try to pronounce and you can all laugh at me and correct me but it's actually a clothing marketplace so when you've worn an item of clothing once or twice and you can't possibly be seen in it again you can actually pass that on and sell it to somebody else or perhaps even trade for another item so these niche redistribution markets are really giving us back the power to extend the life cycle of the things we own and passing on things to a better home now the second system of collaborative consumption is called product service systems which is actually a fairly old idea where you pay to use something rather than owning it outright so laundromats libraries have all given us access to a complete inventory of things that we can sort of pay to use on a day by day basis rather than having to own a full library of books in our own house but the interesting thing about product service systems in this new generation is the way that technology is really opening up the possibilities even further and in fact one of the the biggest examples of product service systems in this new generation is car sharing so companies like Sunfleet and Zipcar which actually enable you to get rid of your own car and then have access to a full fleet of cars parked around your city that you can access through a membership card and swiping it on the on the windscreen which is quite an amazing experience and the reason why car sharing actually makes so much sense in this day and age is because our cars are something that has high idling capacity which is the untapped social or economic or environmental value of our underutilized or idle assets so it's actually the fact that cars sit idle on average 23 hours a day in a car park or in a garage and we only use them to get to and from places and when you think about how much cars cost it actually doesn't make a lot of sense which is where car sharing comes into its own but perhaps you're not quite ready to give up your own car yet but you want to think about different ways to actually make money off your car while it's sitting idle you can actually join a peer-to-peer car sharing service like drive my car rentals relay rides or whip car and you'll hear from Vinay a little bit later about his experience with whip car this actually enables neighbors to share their cars with other people in their neighborhood who might not have a car and actually earn a bit of money to offset the cost of running that car so why is this actually possible and why people actually interested to perhaps give up their own assets and actually share from a pool of resources we're actually dematerializing our relationship to the things around us we don't want piles of CDs we want access to 15 million songs instantly on Spotify we don't want physical videotapes or DVDs but we want to be able to watch whatever movie we feel like watching at any given moment through Netflix we don't want clunky physical objects but we want access to the information that they hold we don't want stuff but we want the needs or experiences it fulfills and this is what product service systems enable because we're entering an age where access Trump's ownership which is of course the title of today's session now the third system of collaborative consumption is probably my favorite it's collaborative lifestyles and the reason I love it so much is the possibilities are truly endless and it's enabling people to tap into assets that they didn't even realize that they had whether it's their time their skills their space or even money it's taking these less tangible assets and creating a market for them so companies like Airbnb which is a peer-to-peer travel marketplace enabling you to to rent your spare room or your spare house out to travelers around the world and other marketplaces that are enabling people to to share and exchange their skills such as Skillshare and Dany will talk a bit about that in a minute as well but I want to share an example of one of my favorite uh collaborative consumption companies which is TaskRabbit so TaskRabbit was actually started by Leah Buske back in 2008 she was waiting to go out to dinner with her husband Kevin they were living in Boston it was very cold and they realized that they'd run out of food for their 100 pound Labrador Kobe and while they were debating who was going to run out and get the food and maybe they were going to be late for dinner Leah really started wondering whether at that exact moment was there somebody in her neighborhood who was at the shops who could pick up the food and perhaps even come around and actually feed and a few months later she actually quit her job at IBM and started what is now called TaskRabbit because what Leah had hit upon was this concept that she now calls service networking which is tapping into the power of your social network to actually get things done in the real world so the way TaskRabbit works is that you might not have the time or the skills or the energy to do a particular task so you post it online and then a group of vetted and background checked runners or rabbits will actually task and tell you how much they'll be able to do it for you can investigate them and their ratings and past tasks that they've done to make sure they're qualified to help you out and then choose the best rabbit for the job now all sorts of things are actually being done on TaskRabbit from household chores to grocery shopping to laundry but can anybody in this room tell me what the top most posted task on TaskRabbit is I'll take three guesses and then I'll reveal the secret anybody pick up the kids no not the top organize your closet that'd be a good one I'm sure there's high premium on that but no one more walk your dog it's definitely up there but it's not the top it actually is assembling IKEA furniture so I mean the allen key is great but not everybody can properly so there's a whole host of people on TaskRabbit who are actually making this their specialty and they're going around and assembling billy bookcases and all sorts of things to actually help people out whether they have and don't have the time or the experience perhaps to do it and TaskRabbit really is amazing because people are making up to $5,000 a month running these kind of odd jobs and it isn't quite a full-time job but they're becoming micro entrepreneurs so they're actually choosing the tasks that suit them building the experience that that they want to build and creating a full reputation for themselves in this space and the good news is that you can actually join a Swedish version of TaskRabbit called Hinnadu and maybe be an here in Sweden as well so this kind of idea of how we can actually share our skills and our time is becoming a real worldwide phenomenon and the other thing that's amazing about these these platforms all sorts of collaborative consumption platforms is that they're actually helping us to use the internet to get off the internet so you know like Ben said earlier we may all be cyborgs but at least this kind of opportunity is allowing us to meet and collaborate in the real world as well so what we're seeing is that we're shifting away from this 20th century that's become characterized by hyperconsumption you know the last few decades of the 20th century were really about spending on credit buying more than we could actually afford being sucked in by advertising messages from big big brands and individual ownership actually adding up to who we are as a person and and equating to some kind of status but we're moving away from all of that because we've realized that you know community is more important we've experienced a global financial crisis that's really shocked consumer behaviors and we also have massive environmental concerns that are causing us to rethink what we consume how we consume and and the resource dependency that we have so this is ushering in this 21st century of collaborative consumption which we believe will be defined by our reputation as individuals in these communities by the community that we actually form within these these companies and by having shared access to things rather than individual ownership and I hope that one day in the future I hear some young kid talking about you know old school ownership and just what a retro idea that really is thank you